The winter of 1914 was not a happy one for the British and German troops manning the trenches outside Ypres, Belgium. World War I was in full swing, and their only breaks from exchanging gunfire were when they would venture carefully into the no-man’s-land between their camps to retrieve the dead. It was cold. It was dark. It was violent. And the British High Command was intent on keeping it that way. They had very deliberately conditioned their soldiers to regard the Germans as bloodlusting psychopaths—the “evil Huns”—to ensure they’d have no qualms about taking as many lives as possible. And so, as Christmas approached, the opposing sides fought ferociously. But on Christmas Eve, something strange began to happen. As members of Britain’s Berkshire Regiment peered across the fields, they started seeing small lights appear near the position of the Nineteenth Corps of the German army. At first they must have been frightened. Then they realized: the lights were candles the Germans had placed on small conifer trees in celebration of the holiday. Next the air began to ring with the sounds of German Christmas carols, to which the Brits replied by singing a chorus of their own.
Soon some of the men ventured into the space separating the armies and began to fraternize. Gifts of food and other small items were exchanged. It was hardly believable, even to those who were there. “If I had seen it on a cinematograph film I should have sworn that it was faked,” wrote Lieutenant Sir Edward Hulse. Corporal John Ferguson was equally incredulous: “What a sight; little groups of Germans and British extending along the length of our front.… Where they couldn’t talk the language, they made themselves understood by signs, and everyone seemed to be getting on nicely. Here we were laughing and chatting to men whom only a few hours before we were trying to kill.”1
Upon hearing of this bizarre Christmas Eve détente, the British High Command was irate. How were they going to win a war if their soldiers suddenly became peaceniks? Accordingly, General Sir Horace Smith-Dorrien issued orders to forbid all friendly communication with opposing troops. He then instituted a policy of rotating troops so no one battalion could become too familiar or too friendly with their counterparts.
But they needn’t have worried. The day after Christmas, the shooting resumed in earnest. Somehow, the soldiers suddenly had no problem whatsoever firing at the men with whom they had exchanged gifts and broken bread just a few hours earlier. What was going on here? How did these soldiers go from being mortal enemies to peaceful neighbors and then back to indifferent killers in less than twenty-four hours? It’s difficult to understand. Imagine the cognitive gymnastics required by such a drastic turn of events. One moment you are willing to viciously take the life of another human being; the next you’re sharing a beer and exchanging presents. You might chalk this up to the discipline of trained soldiers. Maybe the years they’d spent developing a stoic indifference to acts of physical harm enabled them to turn their aggression on and off at will. In other words, they’re the exception, abnormal. No civilians would be able to engage in such violent aggression toward someone with whom they had recently forged a human connection, could they? Indeed, we might be wary of those who are able to turn their compassion on and off seemingly at the flip of a switch. We might question their character.
But the more we look around, the less anomalous this kind of behavior seems. Take the Ivory Coast, for example. In 2002, civil war broke out as the government lost control of the north to a rebel uprising. The violence between north and south continued for the next five years, with one brief interruption. In the early months of 2006, fighting between the rebel-held north and the government-controlled south was put aside as both sides rallied behind the national soccer team, which had just qualified for the World Cup. Incredibly, protests became celebrations as the team was held up as a symbol of national unity—that is, until the tournament was over. As soon as the final whistle of the final game blew, the two sides were back to killing one another. It was as though nothing had changed.
Similarly, in 1969, during one of the bloodiest civil wars in Africa’s history, Nigerians agreed to a three-day cease-fire while Brazilian soccer legend Pele visited the country to play against local teams. For a window of time, hostilities were held at bay as all involved seemed suddenly able to shift their focus from the things that divided them to those that united them. Again, you might quibble about whether people are really able to turn their cruel instincts (or their compassionate ones, for that matter) on and off. Did the tension between these individuals really subside when the players took the field? Or were they just temporarily squelching their instinct to stand up and slaughter their cross-border rivals so as not to miss a moment of the game?
Humans’ capacity for compassion and kindness is often underestimated (understandable, given the violence in the world). But consider the outpouring of caring and support in the days, weeks, and months after the attacks of September 11, Hurricane Katrina, or the earthquake in Haiti. People across the globe rallied together to offer the victims relief and prayer. Governments and individuals from warring nations temporarily put aside their differences to join in the relief effort, waving banners declaring “We’re all Americans now.” Yet after the initial shock of the disasters subsided and the photos of burning buildings, mangled limbs, and people trapped in rubble vanished from the headlines, it didn’t take long for these same individuals to forget about the New York firefighters, the newly homeless of New Orleans, or the orphans in Haiti and go back to business as usual, even when there were still thousands of victims in need. How could all these people have displayed such compassion one minute, then be so cruelly indifferent the next?
That ordinary people—not just hardened soldiers—can shift so easily from cruelty to compassion and back suggests that these traits are more fluid than they seem. In fact, anyone who has ever lashed out at someone they care about in the heat of an argument knows the phenomenon we are describing. In your anger, you say something deliberately cruel or hurtful, but then the moment you see the pain register on the person’s face or the tears well in his or her eyes, it’s as if a switch flips, and your anger and frustration melt immediately into compassion and guilt. When we consider these situations, a soldier’s ability to perform horrific acts of violence one moment and to shake hands with his enemy the next seems less like a disturbing character flaw than a fundamental property of the human mind. As we’re about to see, the line between the psychological states that drive these drastically different behaviors does not appear to be particularly thick; we are equally capable of both types of responses, not just in times of war but in our everyday lives.
So what is it that determines whether we will be indifferent or caring, peaceful or violent, cruel or compassionate? As with other aspects of character, the potential for each lurks in all of us. Which one emerges at any give moment is, of course, decided by the struggle between our dueling systems. As we’ve noted before, both short- and long-term focused systems are absolutely essential for adaptive social functioning. Planning for the long term won’t get you too far if you can’t see the threat that’s standing in front of you, and living only for the moment often won’t do much for you past that moment. But when it comes to cruelty and compassion, exactly what is it that tips the scales from one to the other? What decides which side wins?
A growing body of evidence suggests that an important factor underlying whether we show someone compassion or cruelty is the person’s perceived similarity to us. It should take little introspection to realize that we feel the pain of those with whom we seem to share some commonalities. Countless studies have demonstrated that we not only consistently show more compassion to those we deem “like us,” but that the mind makes judgments of similarity quite rapidly and spontaneously.2 You can see how this plays out in a setting such as a battlefield, where the opposing sides hail from different nations or tribes, speak different languages, wear different uniforms, and stand on opposite sides of clearly drawn (both physically and ideologically) lines. Such differences are likely why it was so easy for the British soldiers in our example to bludgeon and shoot their German counterparts in the first place. Those dastardly Huns, the British reasoned, were nothing like them. Yet, in the light of the Christmas candles, this “like us”/ “not like us” distinction got a little more muddled. Suddenly these enemies seemed more similar; they were fellow Christians who celebrated the same traditions and sang the same songs. And once they got to talking to one another, their differences receded even further. They weren’t just “dastardly Huns”; they were husbands and fathers, just like the British soldiers were.
These same psychological mechanisms were at work in the case of the warring factions of the Ivory Coast, for whom it took the unifying force of World Cup soccer to allow them to see their reflection in each other. Same goes for the people who came out in droves to help the victims of 9/11, Katrina, and the Haitian earthquake—the crises shifted their focus away from all their squabbles and differences and onto their shared identity as human beings. But once the worst was over and they slipped back into their “us/them” mentality, their compassion swiftly abated. It only takes a quick glance at the headlines to see that most conflicts—be they national, political, religious, or personal—often come down to this very simple and automatic “like us”/ “not like us” split.
How can such a basic distinction flip the switch between our most noble impulses and our most vicious ones? One answer lies in our evolutionary wiring. In the middle of the twentieth century, scientists were having a few problems explaining certain acts of altruism and compassion. After all, wasn’t evolution all about selfishness and one’s own survival? Once natural selection was understood to operate at the level of the gene, meaning that evolution not only favored behaviors that ensured we’d survive but also those that ensured we’d pass our genes to future generations, altruism toward family members was easy enough to explain. But what about the preponderance of evidence suggesting that we would also act altruistically toward perfect strangers? It was puzzling until the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers proposed a theory for what he called reciprocal altruism.3 According to Trivers, the motivation to act altruistically toward people with whom one shares no genes can be adaptive as long as there is a high enough probability that at some point in the future, these others will act altruistically in return. That is, if I scratch your back today, you’ll scratch mine tomorrow, and then we’ll both do better in the long run than we otherwise would have alone. The idea has since been used to explain how, over thousands of years of evolution, humans have become equipped with the capacity to care about the plight of and look out for the well-being of those around us. These tendencies have passed the test of time because they serve the adaptive function of helping us build those lasting social relationships that are ultimately critical to our survival.
But there’s a tiny wrinkle in this logic. How can we identify who we can expect to scratch our back in return for us scratching theirs? After all, it’s likely that not everyone would reciprocate our aid to the same degree. Plus, our resources are limited; if we were wired to be equally compassionate and giving toward everyone, we would have nothing left for ourselves. It isn’t optimal—or even possible—to help everyone in need. So some psychological mechanism for picking and choosing is necessary. Enter our dueling systems. The ant (looking out for our well-being over time by building relationships) and the grasshopper (providing immediate protection from threats to our self-interest) together determine whom we help or hurt.
This is where the “us/them” distinction comes in. Similarity seems to function as this selective mechanism, signaling to us whether a person is someone we can rely on to reciprocate our kindness. In other words, similarity acts as a cue telling us that helping another person will likely lead to our own benefit down the line. It helps us answer the question of whether it’s in our interest to exert efforts to help. Of course, like all other psychological mechanisms underlying character, this judgment is very flexible, and sensitive to association and context. It would need to be in order to explain how seeming enemies can go from fighting to socializing and back again in such a short time.
To see how flexible similarity is, consider the following example, often cited by the psychologists Gregory Murphy and Douglas Medin. Do you think a gray cloud is more similar to a black cloud or a white cloud?4 If you’re like most people, you’ll answer black. Now, let’s change the context. Do you think gray hair is more similar to white hair or black hair? Here most people answer white. Why? It all depends on the framework. For clouds, black and gray both imply dark skies and rain. For hair, white and gray both imply advanced age. What this means for our purposes is that perceptions of whether two things are similar can be quite dynamic. Gray is more similar to black, except when it’s more similar to white. In essence, the similarity of objects can change at a moment’s notice without our even intending it.
Though you may think impressions of another’s character are quite different from judging the color of a cloud, they’re really not. They, too, are formed immediately and are sensitive to changing environs. For Germans at war, the Brits were either men from a different country, in which case they were to be bludgeoned, stabbed, or shot, or they were fellow Christians, in which case it was fine to share some holiday cheer with them. For the rebels of the Ivory Coast, the soccer-loving southerners could be seen either as compatriots or as bitter political enemies. And after 9/11, the gun-toting Bible thumpers and the latte-slurping Ivy League elitists could turn to one another and see only their shared characteristics instead of their differences. When it comes to matters of compassion or cruelty, the weights tipping the scale shift more quickly than you’d think.
We are constantly sizing up the people in our social environment. What type of person are we looking at? What kind of information about this person’s character can we glean from what they say, how they look, their clothes, their gestures, their expressions? That we use all these cues when deciding what kind of person is in front of our eyes should seem obvious. What may be less obvious is that for strangers, at least, we often make up our mind with a single glance. Think first impressions don’t matter? Think again, because a host of psychological research conducted over the past decade has discovered that they do matter, very much.
As in the case of love and lust, it seems that we are very willing to make assumptions about people based on physical cues. Interestingly, studies have shown that not only do we make character judgments based on literally split-second exposures to people’s faces, but these first impressions can actually be quite accurate. For example, a recent study at Tufts University found that we are surprisingly accurate at guessing an individual’s sexual orientation after seeing a picture of their face for just 50 ms, while another study by the same researchers has shown that people are able to correctly predict the level of a CEO’s success (as quantified by company profits) from brief exposures to their faces.5 Similarly, judgments of politicians’ competence based on nothing more than brief exposures to their faces can quite accurately predict their electoral success.6 And split-second judgments about whether or not a soldier looks “dominant” can quite accurately predict the military rank he or she attains.7 Taken together, these findings and countless others like them demonstrate not just how quickly we can size up other people but also the wide range of traits and qualities we can infer from a quick look. But what does this mean for how we decide who is worthy of our compassion? We might be able to quickly guess who’s gay or straight, hardworking or lazy, a follower or a leader, but that doesn’t tell us much about who is worth helping and who to avoid. For that we need to be able to make spontaneous and rapid judgments of another’s value to us.
Jeremy Bailenson at Stanford University believes that such judgments may hinge strongly on whether we “see ourselves” in the other person—whether we believe they’re similar to us. To examine whether or not this is the case, he and his colleagues decided to conduct a clever real-world experiment to see whether rapid intuitive judgments about similarity would affect people’s voting behavior—in this case their votes for the governor of Florida. When Charlie Crist and Jim Davis announced their candidacy in the 2006 Florida gubernatorial campaign, they probably thought their chances of winning had something to do with their political savvy. Florida had recently been in the national spotlight due to the Terri Schiavo case, in which Crist, as the state’s attorney general, had played a very public role when he decided not to allow the federal government to intervene in the decision to take Schiavo off life support. Could he use this publicity and his hard-line reputation to his advantage? Or could Davis spin Crist’s efforts negatively, or perhaps highlight his own accomplishments in Florida’s house of representatives, to wrest the governorship from Crist, who was somewhat more well known? Turns out none of these things would make much of a difference. In fact, according to Bailenson’s findings, even the huge amounts of money spent on advertising and the hundreds of hours spent strategizing, campaigning, and kissing babies may have been a whole big waste of time, money, and energy.8
In the weeks leading up to the 2006 election, the researchers selected a random sample of people from all over the country to participate in a computer-based study. First, they were asked to upload a recent photograph of themselves (you’ll see why in a minute). Then, the week of the election, they were shown a picture of each candidate and asked to complete a questionnaire asking them to indicate how they felt about the candidate on a host of measures. Now, they weren’t given any other information about the candidates besides their pictures, yet they were asked to make judgments about how dishonest, moral, and kind the candidates appeared, as well as how the candidates made them feel, how likely they would be to vote for them, and the like. But here’s the twist. Unbeknownst to the participants, the experimenters had used photoimaging software to morph participants’ own photographs with the candidates’ faces, using a ratio of 60 percent candidate to 40 percent participant, which was just subtle enough that the participants wouldn’t be able to consciously detect the manipulation. So each participant had actually seen a real photo for one candidate and a hybrid of the candidate’s face and their own for the other. What was the point? Bailenson and his colleagues wanted to know if making the candidates look more like the participants would be enough to change their judgments and preferences.
It was. Results showed that across the board, people had a stronger preference for the candidate whose photo was blended with theirs. No matter who the candidate was or what he stood for, the people rated the candidate whose picture had been morphed with their own as being more honest, moral, kind, and so forth—and they indicated they’d be more likely to vote for him. Now, you might think that since these people weren’t all living in Florida and weren’t going to be influenced by the outcome of the election, they simply didn’t care about who won. That is, if they cared more about the outcomes or had more information about the candidate’s respective positions, then maybe they wouldn’t have been so influenced by trivial things such as facial similarities. After all, people should vote on substance, not appearance, when it really matters, right? Bailenson and his team wondered what would happen if the stakes were higher, as in a presidential election. A national sample might not know or care anything about the political differences between Charlie Crist and Jim Davis, but surely they’d know something about, say, the differences between George Bush and John Kerry.
So the researchers ran a separate study, this time blending people’s faces with George Bush’s or John Kerry’s. Sure enough, the manipulation again had a significant effect on people’s preferences. Those who were strongly partisan one way or the other didn’t budge from their opinions of the candidates from the previously held election, but independents and undecideds (those whose votes, let’s not forget, tend to swing presidential elections one way or the other) showed a significant preference for the candidate whose photo had been morphed with their own.9
The extent, then, to which we see individuals as similar to ourselves, even on a superficial physical level, can have a huge impact on our attitude toward them. But while attitudes are one thing, actions are quite another. Yes, similarity leads us to value someone more, and maybe even vote for him or her, but does it really translate to going all out to help that person? We thought it would. To our minds, perception of similarity might be the key to explaining how an individual can go from being a compassionate altruist one moment to a callous aggressor the next. And we suspected that the age-old battle between the ant and the grasshopper was behind it.
After Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, much was made of the systemic failure of the institutions responsible for providing aid to the city’s victims. Citizens across the country began not only to condemn the quality of the response to the catastrophe at the local and federal levels but also to question both the care with which various federal agencies (such as the Army Corps of Engineers, which was responsible for the upkeep of the levees) had prepared New Orleans for a possible storm. Some more radical voices suggested that perhaps certain demographic characteristics of the victims contributed to the lack of preparation, as well as the lack of effort and urgency behind the emergency response. In other words, some speculated that maybe if the victims of Katrina hadn’t been predominantly African American, the president and the Federal Emergency Management Agency would have done more to help. The singer Kanye West may have been going a bit far when he infamously claimed during a charity event that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” but his bold claim does raise an interesting question. When disaster strikes, do the subtle differences we perceive between victims and ourselves influence how much compassion we feel for them and, correspondingly, how much we are willing to help them?
There are few character traits thought to be more admirable than compassion. This makes some sense, as caring about someone else’s welfare—being motivated to help other people when they are in need—is a crucial component in fostering the long-term bonds we need to thrive. At the same time, feeling compassion for every victim, as we noted, can quickly lead to less than optimal results. Not only would you quickly exhaust your resources, but you also would be incapable of being aggressive when it might well be needed. What tips the scales, then, to determine how we decide to use our limited resource of compassion? It’s tempting to assume we base these decisions on relative need; that is, the more dire a person’s situation, the more likely we are to come to his or her aid. But as researchers, we didn’t think so. As you’ve probably gathered by now, we had to believe that it’s not the nature of the problem that befalls others that determines how much compassion we will feel, but whether we see ourselves in them and their pain.
How were we going to test this idea? We’d need a way not only to present a situation where someone was in need but also to manipulate the similarity of this person to those in the position to help. If we really wanted to show that compassion is not a stable trait but rather fluctuates according to the competition unfolding between the ant and the grasshopper, we had to find a way to demonstrate just how sensitive our bleeding heart is to context.
As we thought about how to accomplish this, we realized that we had part of the answer already. Remember the experiments on moral hypocrisy from Chapter 2, where we had people observe our confederate, Alex, commit a moral transgression so we could see if they would judge him more harshly for it than they would judge themselves? Well, we decided to do something very similar, except this time we didn’t care what the people thought of Alex. No, this time we were interested in what they thought of the victim, and whether perceived similarity would be enough to make people more willing to help him.
Steve and Phil strolled into the lab. Steve was an undergraduate participating in the experiment for course credit, and as far as he knew, so was Phil. But—surprise—Phil was actually a research assistant playing the role of a participant. The experimenter entered the room and told Steve and Phil that the first thing they would have to do was fill out a questionnaire that would categorize them as one of two personality types: someone who habitually overestimates or someone who habitually underestimates things. But in fact the questions we asked them had little to do with their personality, and we weren’t interested in their answers to the questions at all. Who would be? We purposely asked them to estimate trivial things like the length in miles of the Massachusetts Turnpike, the number of black bears that lived in Massachusetts forests, and the height of the John Hancock building in downtown Boston. The goal was simply to create a sense of similarity or difference—“us” and “them”—based on a completely new and meaningless criterion. After answering the questions, Steve and Phil waited as their respective computers “calculated” the results (in reality they were random). Half the unwitting participants were told that Phil was an over- or underestimator just like them, while the other half were told that Phil was the opposite type of person. Nothing more. No “You two have the same taste in music” or “You both have a passion for American history.” In fact, no personal information whatsoever was given. This was on purpose. We wanted to ensure that our manipulation of similarity was as trivial as possible.
The idea, of course, was to see if perceptions of similarity about something that didn’t have any preexisting significance attached to it would have an effect on how much compassion participants would feel for a victim and how much they would be willing to help that victim. More specifically, how would Steve react if he witnessed a transgression against Phil? Would his actions vary depending on this arbitrary measure of similarity?
To find out, we brought back our bad guy, Alex (he was just so good at it), and had our real participant, Steve, play the role of the “secret watcher” described in Chapter 2. In other words, Steve secretly observed Alex as he assigned poor Phil to a long and difficult task while keeping the easy and fun task for himself. As in the earlier experiment, Alex had the option to flip a virtual coin to decide fairly who got what, but he didn’t even try. Now came the important part. How much compassion would Steve feel for Phil, and how willing would he be to help Phil with his distasteful (and unfairly assigned) task? While Phil began working, Steve responded to a series of questions tapping his sympathies for Phil’s predicament. Then, just as Steve was about to leave the experiment, the following message popped up on his computer screen:
You have now completed the experiment. Please go to the experimenter to receive your credit. As you know, one of the other participants in the experiment has a long and difficult task to complete. It’s not important to the experimenters who complete this task, it is just a quantity of material that needs to get done. So, if you’d like to help out in any way, indicate as much to the experimenter on your way out.
At this point, Steve could either hightail it out of the lab and go about his day or find the experimenter and offer to help. There was no social pressure since no one asked Steve to help—not Phil and not us. If Steve wanted to help, he had to take the initiative; otherwise, he could be on his merry way.
Now, if any of our participants did seek out the experimenter and tell him they’d like to take some of Phil’s burden, they would be escorted down a long hallway and around a corner and placed at a desk, where they would be presented with a stack of about thirty math GRE problems. The experimenter would then tell them to do just as many as they wanted—whatever they didn’t finish, Phil would complete later. Furthermore, once they were done, they were just to leave everything on the desk and take off. In other words, it was made clear that they would never again interact with the experimenter or with the person they were helping. So, in the case of people like Steve, any help that they did lend would have to be motivated by a legitimate desire to relieve Phil’s suffering, as opposed to an attempt to gain any social rewards from the experimenter or Phil for the actions. At this point, the experimenter left them to their good deed, but secretly timed how long they spent working on this difficult task.
What did we find? Were our participants more likely to help Phil with the problems when they believed Phil shared this meaningless label as a fellow over- or underestimator? Not only was our suspicion correct, but correct to a larger degree than we ever imagined. A mere 16 percent chose to come to Phil’s aid when he was dissimilar to them, but 58 percent—more than three times as many—chose to help him in the exact same situation when he was perceived as more similar. What’s more, not only did many more people choose to help when Phil’s “estimating type” matched theirs, they also spent significantly longer periods of time doing so than did the 16 percent who believed Phil was different from them but agreed to help anyway.10
It may seem a bit disconcerting that we were able to manufacture compassion and altruism in the lab with no more than a silly little tale about whether people tend to make similar types of guessing errors. But if this is all it takes to tip the scale of character one way or the other, it certainly goes a long way toward explaining how acts of beneficence or cruel indifference can fluctuate, even in the same person, in the blink of an eye. Still, one might argue that this experiment wasn’t a perfect replica of a real-life situation. After all, the manipulation we used, though subtle, was explicitly defined. We told people who was in their group and who wasn’t. Given how many social norms there are surrounding group membership (such as “take care of your own”), people might have just been responding in the way they thought they were supposed to act (“This guy is like me, so I’m supposed to feel bad for him and help him more”). We thought this unlikely, but just to be sure, we decided to rule out this possibility in our next experiment. To do this, however, we needed a way to make people perceive similarity on their own, without us applying artificial labels, and then show that this perception affected how much compassion they would feel and how much altruism they would display.
In describing his experience in basic training after being drafted into the army in 1941, historian William McNeill writes of the long, grueling hours he and his fellow soldiers spent marching single file about the dusty plains of Texas.11 Such drills might seem idiotic to the onlooker. After all, if a group of soldiers were to march in unison during battle, a machine gun would quite easily mow them down. So why were drill sergeants so keen on having their soldiers practice day after day, until they were moving perfectly in sync with one another? It wasn’t until later in life that McNeill began to see a possible reason for such an exercise. In hindsight, despite the heat and the fatigue, his recollection of the marching drills was one of pure enjoyment and camaraderie. The act of moving in time with others, he recalled, led to a “strange sense of personal enlargement”—a feeling of connectedness with those around him. Lest you think perhaps McNeill had been out in the desert sun too long, research has begun to suggest that moving in synchrony can actually make people feel closer together. It acts as a kind of social glue, binding individuals into a larger whole.12
This was just the feeling we wanted to create in our experiment. We thought the reason being physically in sync with another person forges a bond is because it makes people feel more similar to each other. If this were the case, then we should be able to make people actually feel more similar to another person (rather than us just telling them they were similar) simply by having them mirror the person’s movements. No questions about black bears and no explicit labels would be needed. The mind’s attention to synchrony would be enough.
Given this theory, we conducted more or less the same experiment as before, but this time we simply told people that the first part of the experiment involved rhythm perception. The idea was that we would make some participants tap their hands in sync with Phil, the “victim,” while others would tap to a different rhythm. We suspected, of course, that the synchronous tapping would create enough of a sense of similarity to make participants feel more compassion and offer more assistance to Phil.
And indeed it did. First of all, those who tapped in sync with Phil readily reported feeling significantly more similar in personality to him on a survey than did those who tapped to the different beat. For reasons that they couldn’t possibly articulate, simply moving their hands in unison was making our participants feel more connected. Next came the big question. Would this be enough to change the level of compassion people felt toward Phil? It was. Forty-nine percent of those who tapped in sync with Phil volunteered to come to his aid, compared to only 18 percent of the asynchronous tappers.13 Plus, the more similar they felt, the more compassion they experienced, the more willing they were to help, and the longer they spent helping him with the onerous task.
The implications couldn’t have been clearer. Feeling similar to another person appears to trigger our humanity. It signals to us that these are the people who likely will be there for us in the future, tagging a person as someone we should care about—someone we need to care about in order to ensure our long-term success. It says that this is someone the ant should be particularly interested in interacting with, and for whom it should fight hard against the grasshopper, which is urging us to avoid the short-term costs associated with helping. This seems a highly adaptive system all around, right? Our future success is optimized and the other person reaps the benefit of our compassion. But it raises an interesting question. What happens when the switch gets flipped the other way?
So far, we’ve looked at what happens when we perceive someone as being “like us.” But what happens when we judge another person to be “unlike us”? According to our theory, dissimilarity signals that a person is someone you need not go out of your way for, at least from an evolutionary perspective. It’s an ancient signal that your efforts and care might well be wasted upon this individual, who is unlikely to reciprocate your help or compassion in the future. Enter the grasshopper. But in protecting us from wasting our compassion on those unlikely to return the favor (which can be a good thing), the grasshopper occasionally renders us capable of committing callous or horrific acts of aggression or cruelty.
The tools the grasshopper has at its disposal are powerful. It will go to great lengths to convince you that all that matters is your immediate well-being; that any cost of caring for or helping others is to be avoided. You know that voice. It’s the one telling you that those few dollars you were about to put in the homeless person’s cup could buy you a latte. But how does the grasshopper switch off that nagging voice in our heads (i.e., our conscience) telling us that the homeless man probably needs food more than we need our morning Starbucks fix? By convincing us that the person in need of our help is not like us, or not even a human at all. Dehumanizing someone, stripping them of their identity as being capable of thinking and feeling and reacting as we do, makes it particularly easy to ignore and transgress against them. It seems almost unconscionably cruel, but there’s a growing body of research suggesting that when we perceive another person as “not like us,” this is exactly what we do.
History is rife with examples of this. The writers of the U.S. Constitution defined slaves as three-fifths of a person. The Nazis described Jews as “vermin,” and the Rwandan Hutus described the Tutsi as “cockroaches.”14 Almost every time one group has treated another horribly, they’ve found some way of dehumanizing their victims. And while these examples might seem so extreme to suggest that dehumanization is confined to the realm of madmen and sociopaths, that assumption would be incorrect. On smaller scales, any of us are capable of it. Consider the following story.
On a cold December night in 2005, patrons were waiting in line at the Starbucks near Nineteenth and Cambie Streets in Vancouver, Canada. As the scent of smoke began to overwhelm the powerful aroma of ground coffee beans, most people inside kept chatting, quite indifferently. Outside the coffee shop, it was much the same, with several customers calmly shivering over their lattes and chatting on their cell phones as black smoke began to billow above their heads. Just one customer, concerned about the blaze, peered around the corner and noticed an unconscious homeless man wrapped in a comforter that had somehow caught fire. As the flames crept higher and higher toward the man’s face, another customer, who happened to be a nurse from nearby St. Paul’s Hospital, tried to wake him, to no avail. The nurse then tried to recruit others to help her get the man to a hospital, but no one seemed to care enough to interrupt their conversation or their newspaper. One woman turned to the nurse and said with disdain, “Just leave him alone, he’s a homeless person. Forget it.” Another said, “Don’t call the hospital. They don’t want him.”15
Certainly this is a particularly egregious display of cruelty, and it’s tempting to assume that these callous folks are exceptions, rather than the rule. But is their cruel indifference to the well-being of the homeless really that abnormal? Consider what you feel when you pass a homeless person in the street. Do you always give cash? Or do you assume that giving won’t matter, or that your money will probably go to feed a drug habit anyway, and so you walk right past? What if that homeless person was seriously hurt or looked unconscious? Do you call the police, or do you keep on walking, knowing that you’ll likely be late to work if you wait for an officer to arrive? Most of us have done both—sometimes we helped, but other times we didn’t. How could we be expected to never do the latter? If you walk down a city block wanting to help every needy person you see, you wouldn’t make it very far and your bank account would quickly dwindle. By the same token, it simply isn’t possible to contribute to every charity, join every cause, or even expend mental energy feeling compassion for everyone who needs it.
Given this fact, we need some sort of mechanism that turns these feelings of compassion off, lest they completely overcome our lives. Dehumanization seems to do this. In order for us to absolve ourselves for our callousness, our inner grasshopper, in looking out for our pleasure and resources in the moment, tricks us (albeit subconsciously) into seeing dissimilar others as objects instead of human beings. The callous woman in that Starbucks most likely didn’t consider the homeless person to be much different in kind from the comforter in which he was wrapped. When we see others as objects instead of fellow humans capable of feeling and experiencing the world as we do, their welfare becomes inconsequential. And if you think this phenomenon is limited to some coldhearted scrooges, we’ve got some bad news for you. The tendency to dehumanize seems to be a fundamental part of our psychology, and a necessary one at that.
In one particularly compelling study, Lasana Harris and Susan Fiske at Princeton University used brain scanning technology to investigate how people would respond to different kinds of social groups.16 Interestingly, there are distinct areas of the brain that are activated when evaluating humans, and others that are activated when evaluating objects. While in the fMRI machine, participants were shown pictures of people from a variety of different groups: the elderly, the disabled, Olympic athletes, the homeless, drug addicts, the rich, the middle class, and so on. The researchers were interested not only in how people described their emotional responses to these groups but also in whether the subjects’ brains would process images of certain individuals differently.
What Harris and Fiske found was somewhat shocking. When people saw images of those who belonged to what sociologists consider extreme out-groups (such as drug addicts and homeless people—those who we think are most unlike us), the social categorization areas of their brains (the ones that are involved in making judgments about humans) were quiet, while the areas involved in processing objects lit up like fireflies. Their minds, in essence, responded to these people not as if they were people but rather as if they were things. Even more surprising, this wasn’t just an intuitive response. People actually reported strong feelings of disgust upon viewing the images of these outgroups, and, when asked to pick objects that best represented how they felt about the drug addicts and the homeless, they chose images like vomit and overflowing toilets. Moreover, the same areas of the brain that responded to the pictures of vomit and overflowing toilets responded to the pictures of the homeless and drug addicts. Given this, it’s no wonder that many people, even those who at times seem the most caring, don’t always feel the pain of and help those who may need it the most. When we perceive others to be so dissimilar from us, the parts of our brain that are responsible for treating others with humanity can turn off, allowing us, for better or worse, to numb ourselves to their plight.
Again, the evolutionary calculus behind this is simple. The less similar another person is to you, the less likely he or she is to care about your well-being and thus the less likely to reciprocate your kindness. The less likely the person is to reciprocate, the more appealing the urgings of the grasshopper become.
Consider the following vignette:
Two days ago I broke up with my (girlfriend) boyfriend. We’ve been going together since our junior year in high school and have been really close, and it’s been great being at FSU together. I thought (s)he felt the same, but things have changed. Now, (s)he wants to date other people. (S)he says (s)he still cares a lot about me, but (s)he doesn’t want to be tied down to just one person. I’ve been real down. It’s all I think about. My friends all tell me that I’ll meet other (girls) guys and they say that all I need is for something good to happen to cheer me up. I guess they’re right, but so far that hasn’t happened.
When people read this kind of story they tend to express some feelings of compassion or sympathy for the person. But in one interesting study, a group of researchers led by Roy Baumeister at Florida State University found that if you made people feel socially isolated before exposing them to the story, it would decrease their sensitivity to the plight of those around them. To demonstrate this, they created a clever (though somewhat harsh) experiment. They had participants complete a bogus personality questionnaire and then told some of them that, based on the results, they were the type of person who most likely would not be able to develop any meaningful relationships later in life and thus would end up alone. Ouch.
Turned out that the people led to believe that they would become socially isolated did indeed care less about the plight of the girl in the story. Not only that, it also made them less likely to engage in any prosocial behavior in general, and even made them less sensitive to emotional and physical pain.17 In short, it numbed them. It seems that when the possibility of developing beneficial long-term relationships is removed, either because the person in need doesn’t appear to be the type of person who is worth your efforts (i.e., is dissimilar to you) or because you have reason to believe that you are unlovable and so your efforts would be fruitless, the scales tip toward the grasshopper and your impulse to care about the suffering of others switches off. If you can’t count on anyone besides yourself, you might as well live only for yourself, right?
Again, this may seem as if the ant governs what’s “good” (compassion) and the grasshopper governs what’s “bad” (indifference), but remember, nothing is that cut-and-dried, and both classes of responses are absolutely essential to a successful social life. There are instances when seeing others as different may be necessary, such as when it protects us from being taken advantage of by others who would bleed us dry, from feeling others’ pain so intensely that we are sad all the time, or from being unable to aggress in an armed conflict when much is at stake. By the same token, unfettered compassion can lead us astray; indiscriminately feeling for and helping all those around us is a one-way ticket to being the biggest sucker on the block and is simply not a tenable strategy over time. What’s important to remember, though, is that your conscious mind isn’t always the one that is making the decision of who is worthy of your compassion or of your disdain. The ability to turn our noble feelings on and off is a fundamental property of the human mind. All it takes is a lightning-fast assessment of another person to determine whether we’ll care deeply about him or her or be callously indifferent to the person’s misfortune—an assessment that can be guided by all sorts of seemingly meaningless contextual variables, with our character hanging in the balance.