1pa1G7k_#BT4N0Professor Paul Bloom: Let me begin by just reminding us wherewe are in this course, reminding us of what we've done and what we haveyet to do. We started by talking about the brain, the physical basis ofthought. And then we moved to some general introductions to somefoundational ideas in the study of psychology, Freud and Skinner. Wespent a bit of time on more cognitive stuff: development, language,vision, memory. Then we took a little break and the dean told us aboutlove. Then we dealt with the emotions, rationality, and evolution, anda lot of that. What we learned particularly regarding the evolution ofthe mind provided supporting material for what follows. We learnedabout cognitive neuroscience using the study of face recognition as animportant case study--human differences, behavioral genetics, natureand nurture, sex and food. My lecture was on sex. Dr. Brownell came andspoke to us about food. Today, morality. Next week, social thought andsocial behavior, mysteries; basically, a series of topics that don'tfit anywhere in the course and really make psychologists scratch theirheads. These topics are sleep, laughter, and religion, mental illness,two lectures on madness, what can go wrong in your minds, and a lastlecture on happiness. And then you're just done. You know a lot ofpsychology and a lot of stuff and you're well prepared for yourultimate major in psychology, ultimately graduate training at a goodschool.心理学空间D+F,BS!L.o%Z{
How many people here are either psych majors or expect to becomepsych majors or cognitive science as though you could raise your handto? Okay. Good. It's nowhere near enough [laughter] and so I'll ask thequestion again. Once you deal with happiness and then mysteries, you'rereally not going to want to--What is there? Chemistry? Anthropology?[laughter] Pre-med? Give me a break. [laughter]心理学空间KFln\
:Y? Y0NH7vw0f z0Okay. We're going to deal with three facets of morality. I'm goingto talk about moral feelings, moral judgments, and then moral actionwith particular focus on why good people do bad things, which will leadus to review and discuss the Milgram study, which was presented in themovie on Monday. Now, moral feeling is what we'll start off with andwe've already discussed this in a different context. The question is,'How could moral feelings evolve?" So, moral feelings we could view asfeelings of condemnation, shame, emotions like that--shame,condemnation, pride, righteous anger, but also simple affection, caringfor other people, wanting to do well by them, being upset if aninjustice is to be done by them. And you might think that the existenceof these feelings is a mystery from an evolutionary point of view. Ifevolution is survival of the fittest, nature red in tooth and claw, howcould animals evolve moral feelings? But in fact, we know the answer tothis. And there are two answers to this.
One answer is kin selection. So, evolution works at a level of thegenes and because of that it could give rise to animals that arethemselves altruistic. And they're altruistic because they act topreserve other animals that share the same genes. And so, I'm not goingto spend any time on this because we've discussed it in detail, but weknow from previous lectures that people will be generous to others. Andthere's an evolutionary explanation for your generosity towards kin. Itcould be mathematically worked out. Your caring, your moral feelingstowards other creatures to the extent of the proportion of genes thatyou share with them. The most altruistic behavior of all, giving yourlife to help another, can be explained in cold-blooded evolutionaryterms. Animals that are altruistic even to the point of dying to helpanother, those genes will, under some circumstances, be preserved overthe genes of people who are less caring. And that is one force towardskindness.
.Ys3@p,}A0A second force towards kindness is cooperation. Even if animals areunrelated, they are nice to one another. Animals will give warningcries, they will groom one another, they will exchange food, and thereason for this is that animals have evolved, our minds have evolved,to enter into sort of cooperative situations with other people and tosurmount prisoner's dilemmas, to surmount deception and cheating. Thisgives rise to some emotion including emotions that could be viewed asmoral emotions, like guilt and anger, and again, grounds altruisticbehavior in an evolutionary perspective.
-D^|"b'RSt0This is all by means of review but the question you can now ask is,"Fine. That's why moral feelings might evolve, but what do we know aspsychologists about the emergence in nature of moral feelings inindividuals? What's the psychology of moral feeling?" And this is anissue I'm going to talk about now but I'm going to return to next weekwhen we deal with issues such as liking and disliking, racial prejudiceand other things. But I want to deal now with a couple of interestingcase studies about moral feelings from a psychological point ofview.
The first one I want to deal with is empathy. And empathy hasdifferent definitions but we can simply view it as the feeling thatyour pain matters to me. If you are hurt, that is, in some sense,painful for me. If you are sad, that affects my own mood. I am not aselfish creature. I am built, I am hard wired, to be attuned to yourpain. This is an old observation. Adam Smith, who is often falselyviewed as a proponent of selfishness and hardheadedness, was quiteexplicit about the pull this has. He notes:
When we see a stroke aimed and just ready to fall upon theleg or arm of another person, we naturally shrink and draw back our ownleg or arm and when it does fall we feel it in some measure and arehurt by it as well as the sufferer. If you see somebody being kicked inthe groin in a movie, you might yourself tense up. If you see somebodybang their thumb with a hammer, you might cringe.
&^+pFC2f8yo&WP_+[ Z,d0Here is a good illustration of somebody in anticipatory pain.[laughter] Now--It's a very British face actually. [laughter] Now, weknow certain things about this empathy, some which might be surprising.The pain of others is aversive even for babies. We know this because ifbabies hear other babies crying they will get upset. The crying ofbabies is aversive to babies.
Now, some of you may be sufficiently cynical to say, "That could beexplained in other ways. For one thing, one theory is that babies hearother babies cry, because babies are so stupid they think theythemselves are crying; if they're crying they must be in some sort ofpain so they cry some more." But clever psychologists have ruled thisout. What they did was a study where they exposed babies totape-recorded sounds of other babies crying and tape recorded sounds ofthemselves crying. Babies cry more to this pain of other babies thanthey do to their own pain, suggesting that their response is to someextent a response to the "otherness" of the characters.心理学空间_;c;UN Zr$M
We know pain is--of others is aversive for chimpanzees and we knowthis in certain ways. But we know this, in particular, from a series ofstudies that would be unethical if they were to be done today. In thesestudies, they put a chimpanzee in a room and there's a lever. And whenthe chimpanzee slaps the lever, it gets some food. Trivial, smartanimal, piece of cake. But the room has a window leading to anotherroom. And in the other room another chimpanzee is placed. This secondchimpanzee is not a relative of the first chimpanzee and they've neverseen each other before. Now, when the first chimpanzee hits the leverthe second chimpanzee gets a painful electric shock, putting the firstchimpanzee in a horrible dilemma. In order to feed himself, he has totorture another animal. Chimpanzees do not starve themselves to death.It's very unlikely any of you would either but they go a long timewithout food, suggesting they do not want to cause this otherchimpanzee pain. It only works within species. So, in anotherexperiment they put a rabbit in the other room and the chimpanzee wouldslap the lever repeatedly to make the rabbit scream in pain [laughter]and jump.心理学空间S |.UK$L[
Now, we've known for a long time that empathetic feeling is notlogically linked to morality. This is a point made by Aristotle. Icould see you writhing in pain. That could cause me pain but it doesn'tmean I'm going to be nice to you. I could run away from you. I couldturn my head or I could blame you for causing me this misery. But itdoes happen that emotional--that this sort of empathy does lead tomoral concern and action. If we do an experiment and we induce you tofeel empathetic to somebody, we get you to feel what they're feeling,you're more likely to be nice to them. And people differ in the extentto which they feel empathy. People differ to the extent it will hurtthem to watch me slam my thumb with a hammer. If you are high empathy,you're more likely to be a nice person than if you're low empathy,suggesting there is some connection between empathetic feeling andliking.心理学空间_~6@6Y0q
q1?3\c4z3@{0Now, empathetic feeling, like any other human capacity, differsacross people. Some of us have a lot of it. Some of us don't have muchof it. There is some reason to believe that in the population known as"psychopaths," a population we'll return to later on when we discussmental illness, this sort of instinctive empathy is broken and the painof others just doesn't bother them very much. I have some illustrativequotes here. In Damon's book, a wonderful book on psychopathy, he talksabout a thirteen-year-old mugger who specialized in mugging blindpeople. And when asked about the pain he caused his victims heresponded, "What do I care? I'm not her," which is logically correctbut, in a sense, inhuman. The fact that it's another person should makeyou care.心理学空间sQ)b7dKU
%c uNSg7SMY"?0The serial killer Gary Gilmore basically said the pain of othersgratified him and caused him no unhappiness at all. "I was alwayscapable of murder. I can become totally devoid of feelings of others,unemotional. I know I'm doing something grossly--" and here is a verybad word "--wrong. I can still go ahead and do it." And Ted Bundy, wheninterviewed at one point, said he was astonished that people made sucha fuss about all of his murders because he said, "I mean, there are somany people." And if any of you here are nodding in agreement at thesesentiments, [laughter] that's not such a good sign. These areparticularly callous and cold-blooded statements suggesting that thisinstinctive empathy, this aspect of moral thought, is not--is presentin most of us but not in all of us.
.ix,p&P2V0The second case study of moral feeling is "in-group" and"out-group." In our affections, in our caring, who we like, who we feelclose to, whose pain bothers us, we are not indiscriminate. I care alot more about my children than I do about my friends and I care moreabout my friends than I care about strangers. We're all like that. Wealso favor our group over others in every possible way. You are amember of many groups. You are men. You are women. You're Yalestudents. You're young. You're white, you're black, you're Asian.You're a member of these groups and, as we will discuss repeatedly whenwe talk about social cognition and social behavior, this membershipmatters a lot to you. What's particularly interesting is even groupsthat are formed, that you were not born with, that are formed on thefly, exert a huge amount of control over your moral feelings and moralattitudes. And the best example of this is discussed in detail in thetextbook. And this is the Robber's Cave study. And this Robber's Cavestudy serves as a nice illustration of morality in everyday life.心理学空间b UJ Jgs ]Qn
The study was, eleven- and 12-year-old boys at a camping program.These were well-adjusted, pretty rich kids, racially homogeneous, andthey were put into separate cabins. And the cabins were given leadersand they gave themselves names. Being unimaginative boys, they calledthemselves "The Eagles" and "The Rattlers" but as--what happened was,being separated they developed distinctive cultures. And when thesegroups were set in competition against each other, the Eagles versusthe Rattlers, the within-group intensity grew. The Eaglersbegan--Eagles began to care a lot more about other Eagles than aboutanybody else.心理学空间 Dq*C!D*YS?
b(l/Eg&^IB'EDF0So, there's within-group solidarity. And then there were negativestereotypes. So, these groups developed different cultures. It was arandomly cut apart--kind of like Yale College is actually, where youget a random assortment of people. But despite the fact that theassortment is random, the division is random, cultures begin to emerge.The Eagles prided themselves on being clean living, not using cusswords and treating each other with respect. They viewed the Rattlers asdirty and tough and kind of slovenly slobs. The Rattlers viewed theEagles as goody-goody kids. It's cruel.
7w m8Np tE"uyV!eD!D0Finally, [laughter] it all evolved into hostilities, raids andviolence. The Eagles burnt a Rattlers banner, cuss words wereoccasionally used, and so Sherif, the psychologist designing all ofthis, went, "Excellent," [laughter] and then the problem--He then says,"Now we've created two different warring cultures. That was fun.[laughter] What do we do to make them friends again? And then we figureout how to--now we've done that and this'll solve all sorts ofproblems." So they started off. They wanted to have--They set up peacetalks where a representative of the Eagle and a representative of theRattler were set to meet and plan ways so that they could disarm andstop using cuss words and everything like that. This failed. The kidswho engaged in the peace talks were ostracized by their own groups astreasonists. That failed. They decided to set up individualcompetitions like the Olympics where they--where people wouldn'tcompete as Eagles or Rattlers but rather they would compete asindividuals. That failed too. Like the Olympics, people--the teams tooktheir--they took their individual accomplishments as reflecting on thegroup and it evolved into Eagles versus The Rattlers.心理学空间'|0Ox1y(J7Z.ur,~&~ Q
They shared meals, they turned--which turned into food fights andmore cuss words. They shared movies, more fights, more cuss words. Theyshared fun with firecrackers, [laughter] which was a disastrous thingwhich nearly brought the experiment to an end. [laughter] They broughtin a religious figure to give them sermons on brotherly love.[laughter] The sermons were entirely unsuccessful. What's interestingis they--the Eagle--they took them to heart. These were good kids. Theywere respectful of religious authority but the lessons they took fromthem is "I should learn to love my neighbor." If I'm a Rattler, Ishould learn to love my fellow Rattler and appreciate him as a fellow,as a person. "I love him. It's love, not like those scummy Eagles."[laughter] They all failed.心理学空间]WEn~cm^
Here's what worked. Sherif told the kids--all of the kids--that thewater line to the camp was cut and they all had to defend the camp.What this did was it established a super ordinate goal, that is a goalthat everybody shared, and perhaps more important a common enemy. Thisis where the solution, by the way, to bringing together--and you couldwrite this down--to bringing together all the warring countries andreligions of this planet is an alien attack. [laughter] By the logic ofthe Sherif it will bring us all together as a group.