The mental qualities that make a society workable

 

A questionnaire survey found very low levels of altruism in Czechs and very high levels in Moroccans, Egyptians, and Bangladeshis. Do these results show differences in actual behavior or differences in socially desired response? (GPS 2020)

 

Emil Kirkegaard and Anatoly Karlin have written a paper on the relative importance of intelligence versus other mental traits in determining national well-being. Their conclusion? Intelligence contributes a lot more to national well-being than do time preference, reciprocity, altruism, and trust.

 

We find that overall, national IQ is a better predictor of outcomes than (low) time preference as well as the five other non-cognitive traits measured by the Global Preference Survey (risk-taking, positive reciprocity, negative reciprocity, altruism, and trust). We find this result across hundreds of regression models that include variation in the inclusion of controls, different measures of time preference, and different outcomes. Thus, our results appear quite robust. Our results do show some evidence of time preference's positive validity, but it is fairly marginal, sometimes having a small p value in one model but not in the next. (Kirkegaard and Karlin 2020)

 

The two authors especially focus on time preference, i.e., the willingness to defer gratification in exchange for long-term gains. While acknowledging previous studies, which show that time preference has a strong effect on national well-being, they argue that this effect is only apparent. If a society has low time preference (i.e., a strong orientation toward the future), it almost always has a high mean IQ. So the relationship between national well-being and time preference is largely spurious.

 

If true, this is a significant finding. But is it true?

 

I see one big problem: the paper compares datasets with very different levels of error. Intelligence was measured by IQ tests under controlled conditions. On an IQ test you cannot make yourself seem more intelligent than you really are, unless someone has provided you with the right answers.

 

This is not the case with the method for measuring the other mental traits: a questionnaire, on which the "right answer" is whatever the respondent chooses to write down. The difference between the two methods is thus the difference between direct measurement and self-report. The level of error is much higher with the latter, and this difference can explain the findings by Kirkegaard and Karlin, specifically why national well-being correlates more with intelligence than with time preference:

 

The median ß across the indicators was 0.11 for time preference but 0.39 for national IQ. We replicated these results using six economic indicators, again with similar results: median ßs of 0.15 and 0.52 for time preference and national IQ, respectively. Across all our results, we found that national IQ has 2-4 times the predictive validity of time preference.

 

What will happen to the same correlations if intelligence is measured by a questionnaire? Let's survey a thousand people and ask them: "How smart do you think you are?" The result will correlate with their performance on an IQ test, but far from perfectly. So the correlation between self-reported intelligence and national well-being will be lower than the correlation between IQ and national well-being. Instead of getting the correlation of 0.39 that Emil and Anatoly found, we now have something closer to 0.11, i.e., the correlation they found between time preference and national well-being.

 

The problems with questionnaire data are especially apparent if we look at the results of the Global Preference Survey for altruism (see map at the top of this post). We see considerable differences even between neighboring countries that are culturally similar. For some reason, Czechs are at the low end of human variation in altruism, whereas Moroccans, Egyptians, and Bangladeshis are at the high end.

 

What’s going on here? The results are based on the following two questions of the Global Preference Survey:

 

1. (Hypothetical situation:) Imagine the following situation: Today you unexpectedly received 1,000 Euro. How much of this amount would you donate to a good cause? (Values between 0 and 1000 are allowed.)

 

2. (Willingness to act:) How willing are you to give to good causes without expecting anything in return? (Falk et al. 2016, p. 15)

 

The first problem is that the respondents will answer the above questions in a way that is viewed favorably by others and by their own conscience. This is called “social desirability bias,” and it’s stronger in a society with a high level of religious belief, like Morocco, than in one with a low level, like the Czech Republic.

 

Second problem: the term “good cause” has different connotations in different places. In the Western world, it generally refers to a non-religious organization that may endorse controversial views on political or social issues. As a result, many Westerners have mixed feelings about donating to “good” causes. This is not the case in the Muslim world, where “good causes” are explicitly Islamic or at least compliant with Islamic teachings. There is a similar problem with the term “donate.” It usually means the act of giving money to an organization, whereas the corresponding word in another language may simply mean “give.”

 

I wrote to Emil Kirkegaard about my criticisms:

 

In my opinion, you're comparing apples and oranges. Cognitive ability is difficult to fake on an IQ test - unless somebody has provided the participant with the right answers. On a questionnaire, anyone can give the "right" answer. It's entirely self-report. It's like measuring intelligence by asking people how smart they think they are.

 

His reply:

 

Your stance on this seems to imply you are unhappy with any kind of comparison of self-rated data vs. objectively scored cognitive data. One difficulty for you here is that people can also cheat on cognitive tests, namely by scoring low on purpose. Furthermore, while you may disapprove, such comparisons are the norm everywhere. I don't know any other person who refuses to do this comparison. There are also other-rated personality data, and these show even more validity than self-rate ones. https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/?p=6457  There is a lot of research on faking good on personality tests, generally showing that subjects are not very good at this, presumably owing to lack of understanding of how the tests work.

 

I checked out the link he provided. This is what I found:

 

Self-rating measures of personality suffer from not just regular, random measurement error, but also have systematic measurement error (bias): people are not able to rate their own personality as well as other people who know them can. They introduce self-rating method variance into the data, and this variance is not so heritable. There is a twin study that used other-ratings of personality and when they used them or combined them with self-ratings, the heritabilities went up:

 

So with self-report they found H 42-56%, mean = 51%. Other-report: 57-81, mean = 66%, combined: 66-79, mean = 71%. (I used the AE models' results when possible.) In fact, these analyses did not correct for regular measurement error either, so the heritabilities are higher still according to these data, likely into the 80%s area. This is the same territory as cognitive ability. (Kirkegaard 2017)

 

 

Parting thoughts

 

Emil and Anatoly are right when they argue that intelligence is confounded with other mental traits. If, on average, a human population is high in intelligence, it is almost always low in time preference and high in altruism. This doesn't mean, however, that the latter are secondary expressions of intelligence. Many individuals are high in intelligence but low in altruism, sometimes pathologically low. They're called "sociopaths."

 

Few, if any, populations are both sociopathic and highly intelligent because such a combination can succeed only at the level of individuals, and not at the level of an entire population. The same pressures of selection that increase the mean intelligence of a population will also increase the average level of altruism and the average future time orientation. Consequently, all of these traits correlate with each other at the population level.

 

Will we ever be able to parcel out the relative importance of each mental trait in determining national well-being? In others words, will we ever find out how much of national well-being is due to intelligence, how much to time preference, and how much to altruism?

 

Not for a while. First, because these traits correlate with each other at the population level, it would be difficult to separate them and measure the relative importance of each one. They’re confounded. Second, they probably interact with each other. Altruism, for instance, is not a successful group strategy unless other mental or behavioral mechanisms are in place, in particular mechanisms to exclude non-altruists, i.e., the “free rider problem.” Intelligence, likewise, does not exist in a vacuum.

 

 

References

 

Falk, A., A. Becker, T. Dohmen, B. Enke, D. Huffman, and U. Sunde. (2016). Online Appendix: Global Evidence on Economic Preferences.

https://oup.silverchair-cdn.com/oup/backfile/Content_public/Journal/qje/133/4/10.1093_qje_qjy013/5/qjy013_supplemental_file.pdf?Expires=1611916150&Signature=Bc-zlE8jYXQUPteS3fbcNvbEI60jZ0VRXsPC0xkiG3G-5xgW9K2N4hn0LUJ2i-2oxn1BIE9wLMSNdf5-nlMTHf4Hf78TZcsUV-7yGui72UCFz-e7OrcCyiZpzhy-P6LIKXaAqWhIMva5ZKi0Rcf2wuIt195WSSWE7Y2hq9ilWKMuR~xqjHlkMkiq9Exq9D2xS4EIQX3O96IpRm-oMYpEbaCDaehxRA4BinqbuGhWcUcK9i3ocb5kxe2ZjF7OqDDiVZuaRAtDRYezLe8oQciZf4skXuLTfM5aSkNarWkOh617x0kcc1jOBgzrVUZYZ9FeWZY0r9OvHsDQNs6Z2CDp-A__&Key-Pair-Id=APKAIE5G5CRDK6RD3PGA

Global Preferences Survey (2020). https://www.briq-institute.org/global-preferences/about  

Kirkegaard, E.O.W. (2017). Getting personality right. Clear Language, Clear Mind.

https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/2017/02/getting-personality-right/

 

Kirkegaard, E.O.W., and A. Karlin. (2020). National Intelligence Is More Important for Explaining Country Well-Being than Time Preference and Other Measured Non-Cognitive Traits. Mankind Quarterly 61(2): 339-370. http://doi.org/10.46469/mq.2020.61.2.11

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/347563852_National_Intelligence_Is_More_Important_for_Explaining_Country_Well-Being_than_Time_Preference_and_Other_Measured_Non-Cognitive_Traits

 

Religion as a force for natural selection

Buddhist temple, Singapore (Wikicommons – Cattan2011). In Buddhism, family is valued over self, but not strangers over family. Christianity goes farther: strangers are valued over self and family.

Originally, and even today in much of the world, social and economic activity is organized mostly by small groups of related individuals. As a result, a society cannot realize its full potential as it grows larger and encompasses people who are less related to each other. This is the “large society problem.” It has been alleviated by making kinship less important and, conversely, by encouraging forms of sociality that include everyone, and not just close kin. Northwest Europeans and East Asians have gone the farthest down that path.

In a large society, a social norm is less situational and more universal; it transcends the situation and its actors. The same applies to norm-breaking. To break a norm is to offend not only a particular person but also a general principle. In time, the principle may be sanctified, thus becoming even more inviolable. Offenders incur the wrath of the entire community, and not just the victim's family (Berman, 1974). Eventually, these reified norms coalesce into "religion."

Religion is key to the cultural environment of large societies and forces humans to adapt to it, just as they had to adapt to the natural environment of small societies. Unlike the natural environment, however, religion is a human creation. We have conceived an idealized vision of what humans should do, and this vision has rewarded those who do right and punished those who do wrong. In short, we have given religion the powers of natural selection. 

This point is made by the authors of a recent study:

Cultural evolution research on religion has highlighted the role religions play in enforcing large-scale cooperation [...]. Religious beliefs that expand what gods know and care about beyond local concerns and the local group, and increase gods' ability to punish rule breakers, may have contributed to sustaining cooperation at larger scales [...]. These beliefs create the perception that one's bad actions will be punished supernaturally, even if undetected by others, and can expand the circle of cooperation to anonymous strangers. Religions that lay out rules for cooperative behavior, and systems to enforce that cooperation, may create more stable and successful groups [...], perhaps increasing the ability of these groups and their religious beliefs to survive and spread. (Willard et al. 2020)

Thus, over time, there has thus been selection for individuals who respond to religion and willingly comply with its norms. Twin studies show that religiosity is 25 to 45% heritable. As is always the case, the non-heritable component includes everything else, like errors in understanding the question and collecting the data. We therefore have a substantial propensity to learn and obey social norms.

This propensity doesn't act alone. A growing child will develop it to a greater extent in a religious environment than in a non-religious one. The kind of religion also makes a difference.

Christianity encourages altruism

Gene-religion interaction has been shown at the gene DRD4. People are made more susceptible to social norms by the 2R allele or the 7R allele and less susceptible by the 4R allele (Sasaki et al., 2013). Furthermore, this susceptibility interacts with religion in the development of altruism. Using American and East Asian participants, Sasaki et al. (2013) found that 2R and 7R carriers were more altruistic than non-carriers if previously primed by the task of making a sentence from religious-sounding words. Priming had no effect on non-carriers.

These findings were partially replicated by Jiang et al. (2015). Among Singaporeans of Chinese descent, 2R carriers were more altruistic than non-carriers among male Christians, while being the same as non-carriers among women, Taoists, and Buddhists. The authors argue that men have more room for improvement because women start off caring more about others. The authors further suggest that Christianity better supports altruism by offering fellowship, comprehensible texts, and regular activities. Thus, if people are already more susceptible to social norms, they will become more altruistic if their environment is Christian. If, however, their environment is non-Christian, they will be no more altruistic than anyone else.

Because Christianity is better at developing this innate potential, and because this potential differs from one individual to another, altruism will vary much more among Christians than among non-Christians. A Christian society will have far more "super altruists" as a proportion of its population. This can be advantageous. Such people were once priests, pastors, nuns, philanthropists and the like. Before the rise of the welfare state, they provided valuable "collective goods," like education, moral guidance, and care for the sick and elderly. But what happens when a Christian society becomes post-Christian? For a while, there will still be lots of super altruists, but they will no longer be priests or pastors. They will become social justice warriors.

Taoism and Buddhism encourages veneration of ancestors and support for one’s in-group

Willard et al. (2020) studied how different religions affect prosocial behavior among Singaporeans of Chinese descent. Certain religious beliefs seemed to be key:

A moral afterlife

Buddhism, Taoism, and Christianity all share a belief that good deeds will be rewarded and evil deeds punished in an afterlife. When cued to think about the afterlife, participants from all three religions expressed a greater willingness to assist strangers.

Veneration of ancestors

Veneration of ancestors is an older stage of religious belief. It began in small societies but can be used to make large societies more workable, as long as everyone shares some common ancestry—or at least a belief in common ancestry.

Participants from all three religions believed that ancestors should be venerated, but this belief was supported much more by Buddhism and Taoism than by Christianity. When participants were cued to think about ancestor veneration, the Buddhists and Taoists expressed a greater willingness to assist their family and their in-group than did participants in the control condition. This effect was absent in the Christians: in fact, they became more willing to assist strangers:

When cued to think about moralized afterlife beliefs, Buddhists showed larger increases across almost all questions than Christians in what they believed was the normative amount to give. This effect is driven by Buddhists claiming weaker norms of giving than Christians in the neutral conditions on many of the questions. Though the moralized afterlife prime produced a greater change here, it brings both groups up to relatively similar normative amounts [...]. The ancestor condition generated weaker prosocial effects for Buddhists and Taoists on allocations to strangers than for Christians. In fact, the Christians showed a stronger effect here than anticipated, and the effects of the ancestor condition were stronger than those of the moralized afterlife condition on all questions. (Willard et al. 2020)

Conclusion

Religion encourages selflessness, but to varying degrees and to varying levels. In Buddhism and Taoism, family is valued over self, but not strangers over family. Christianity goes farther; strangers are valued over self and family. The Christian religion is thus more useful in large societies whose members don’t even pretend to share common ancestry.

References

Berman, H. J. (1974). The Interaction of Law and Religion. Nashville, Abingdon Press.

http://www.socialtheology.com/docs/berman-law-and-religion-000074.pdf

Bouchard, T.J. Jr., (2004). Genetic influence on human psychological traits: A survey. Current Directions in Psychological Science 13: 148-151.

http://www.stafforini.com/docs/bouchard_-_genetic_influence_on_human_psychological_traits.pdf

Jiang, Y., R. Bachner-Melman, S.H. Chew, and R.P. Ebstein. (2015). Dopamine D4 receptor gene and religious affiliation correlate with dictator game altruism in males and not females: evidence for gender-sensitive gene × culture interaction. Frontiers in Neuroscience 24 September.

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fnins.2015.00338/full

Lewis, G.J. and T.C. Bates. (2013). Common genetic influences underpin religiosity, community integration, and existential uncertainty. Journal of Research in Personality 47: 398-405.

http://timbates.wdfiles.com/local--files/cv/Lewis%20%26%20Bates%202013%20%28JRP%29%20Common%20genetic%20influencesunderpin%20religiosity%2Ccommunity%20integration%2Cand%20existential%20uncertainty.pdf

Sasaki, J.Y., H.S. Kim, T. Mojaverian, L.D.S Kelley, I.Y. Park, and S. Janušonis. (2013). Religion priming differentially increases prosocial behavior among variants of the dopamine D4 receptor (DRD4) gene. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 8(2): 209-215.

https://labs.psych.ucsb.edu/kim/heejung/sasakietalscan.pdf

Willard, A.K., A. Baimel, H. Turpin, J. Jong, and H. Whitehouse. (2020). Rewarding the good and punishing the bad: The role of karma and afterlife beliefs in shaping moral norms. Evolution and Human Behavior in press.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1090513820300805?dgcid=raven_sd_aip_email 

Are liberals and conservatives differently wired?

 

Anti-UKIP protest in Edinburgh (source: Brian McNeil, Wikicommons). "Conservative" increasingly means pro-white.

 

Are liberals and conservatives differently wired? It would seem so. When brain MRIs were done on 90 young adults from University College London, it was found that self-described liberals tended to have more grey matter in the anterior cingulate cortex, whereas self-described conservatives tended to have a larger right amygdala. These results were replicated in a second sample of young adults (Kanai et al., 2011).

The amygdala is used to recognize fearful facial expressions, whereas the anterior cingulate cortex serves to monitor uncertainty and conflict (Adolphs et al., 1995; Botvinick et al., 1999; Critchley et al., 2001; Kennerley et al., 2006). Perhaps unsurprisingly, these findings were changed somewhat in the popular press. "Conservatives Big on Fear, Brain Study Finds," ran a headline in Psychology Today. The same article assured its readers that the anterior cingulate cortex "helps people cope with complexity" (Barber, 2011).

A study on 82 young American adults came to a similar conclusion. Republicans showed more activity in the right amygdala, and Democrats more activity in the left insula. Unlike the English study, the anterior cingulate cortex didn't differ between the two groups (Schreiber et al., 2013).

It would seem, then, that conservatives and liberals are neurologically different. Perhaps certain political beliefs will alter your mental makeup. Or perhaps your mental makeup will lead you to certain political beliefs. But how can that be when conservatism and liberalism have changed so much in recent times, not only ideologically but also electorate-wise? A century ago, English "conservatives" came from the upper class, the middle class, and outlying rural areas. Today, Britain's leading "conservative" party, the UKIP, is drawing more and more of its members from the urban working class—the sort of folks who routinely voted Labour not so long ago. Similar changes have taken place in the U.S. Until the 1950s, white southerners were overwhelmingly Democrats. Now, they're overwhelmingly Republicans.

Of course, the above studies are only a few years old. When we use terms like "conservative" and "liberal" we refer to what they mean today. Increasingly, both terms have an implicitly ethnic meaning. The UKIP is becoming the native British party, in opposition to a growing Afro-Asian population that votes en bloc for Labour. Meanwhile, the Republicans are becoming the party of White Americans, particularly old-stock ones, in opposition to a Democrat coalition of African, Hispanic, and Asian Americans, plus a dwindling core of ethnic whites.

So are these brain differences really ethnic differences? Neither study touches the question. The English study assures us that the participants were homogeneous:

We deliberately used a homogenous sample of the UCL student population to minimize differences in social and educational environment. The UK Higher Education Statistics Agency reports that 21.1% of UCL students come from a working-class background. This rate is relatively low compared to the national average of 34.8%. This suggests that the UCL students from which we recruited our participants disproportionately have a middle-class to upper-class background. (Kanai et al., 2011)

Yes, the students were largely middle-class, but how did they break down ethnically? Wikipedia provides a partial answer:

In 2013/14, 12,330 UCL students were from outside the UK (43% of the total number of students in that year), of whom 5,504 were from Asia, 3,679 from the European Union ex. the United Kingdom, 1,195 from North America, 516 from the Middle East, 398 from Africa, 254 from Central and South America, and 166 from Australasia (University College London, 2014)

These figures were for citizenship only. We should remember that many of the UK students would have been of non-European origin.

 

We know more about the participants in the American study. They came from the University of California, San Diego, whose student body at the time was 44% Asian, 26% Caucasian, 10% Mexican American, 10% unknown, 4% Filipino, 3% Latino/Other Spanish, and 2% African American (Anon, 2010). This ethnic breakdown mirrors the party breakdown of the participants: 60 Democrats (72.5%) and 22 Republicans (27.5%).

Affective empathy and ethnicity

In my last post, I cited a study showing that the amygdala is larger in extraordinary altruists—people who have donated one of their kidneys to a stranger. In that study, we were told that a larger amygdala is associated with greater responsiveness to fearful facial expressions, i.e., a greater willingness to help people in distress. Conversely, psychopaths have a smaller amygdala and are less responsive to fearful faces (Marsh et al., 2014).

Hmm ... That's a tad different from the spin in Psychology Today. Are liberals the ones who don't care about others? Are they ... psychopaths?

It would be more accurate to say that "liberals" come from populations whose capacity for affective empathy is lower on average and who tend to view any stranger as a potential enemy. That's most people in this world, and that's how most of the world works. I suspect the greater ability to monitor uncertainty and conflict reflects adaptation to an environment that has long been socially fragmented into clans, castes, religions, etc. This may explain why a larger anterior cingulate cortex correlated with "liberalism" in the British study (high proportion of South Asian students) but not in the American study (high proportion of East Asian students).

As for "conservatives," they largely come from Northwest Europe, where a greater capacity for affective empathy seems to reflect an environment of relatively high individualism, relatively weak kinship, and relatively frequent interactions with nonkin. This environment has prevailed west of the Hajnal Line since at least the 12th century, as shown by the longstanding characteristics of the Western European Marriage Pattern: late age of marriage for both sexes; high rate of celibacy; strong tendency of children to form new households; and high circulation of non-kin among families. This zone of weaker kinship, with greater reliance on internal means of behavior control, may also explain why Northwest Europeans are more predisposed to guilt than to shame, whereas the reverse is generally the case elsewhere in the world (Frost, 2014).

All of this may sound counterintuitive. Doesn't the political left currently stand for autonomy theory and individualism? Doesn't it reject traditional values like kinship? In theory it does. The reality is a bit different, though. When Muslims vote Labour, it's not because they want gay marriage and teaching of gender theory in the schools. They expect something else.

The same goes for the political right. When former Labourites vote UKIP, it's not because they want lower taxes for the rich and offshoring of manufacturing jobs. They expect something else. Are they being delusional? Perhaps. But, then, are the Muslims being delusional?

 

Perhaps neither group is. Perhaps both understand what politics is really about.

 

References

 

Adolphs, R., D. Tranel, H. Damasio, and A.R. Damasio. (1995). Fear and the human amygdala, The Journal of Neuroscience, 15, 5879-5891.

http://www.emotion.caltech.edu/papers/AdolphsTranel1995Fear.pdf

 

Anon (2010). Racial breakdown of the largest California public colleges, The Huffington Post, May 4

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/03/04/racial-breakdown-of-the-l_n_485577.html

 

Barber, N. (2011). Conservatives big on fear, study finds, Psychology Today, April 19

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-human-beast/201104/conservatives-big-fear-brain-study-finds

Botvinick, M., Nystrom, L.E., Fissell, K., Carter, C.S., and Cohen, J.D. (1999). Conflict monitoring versus selection-for-action in anterior cingulate cortex, Nature, 402, 179-181.

Critchley, H.D., Mathias, C.J., and Dolan, R.J. (2001). Neural activity in the human brain relating to uncertainty and arousal during anticipation, Neuron, 29, 537-545.

 

Frost, P. (2014). We are not equally empathic, Evo and Proud, November 15

http://www.evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2014/11/we-are-not-equally-empathic.html

 

Kanai, R., T. Feilden, C. Firth, and G. Rees. (2011). Political orientations are correlated with brain structure in young adults, Current Biology, 21, 677 - 680.

http://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(11)00289-2

Kennerley, S.W., Walton, M.E., Behrens, T.E., Buckley, M.J., and Rushworth, M.F. (2006). Optimal decision making and the anterior cingulate cortex. Nat. Neurosci. 9, 940-947.

Marsh, A.A., S.A. Stoycos, K.M. Brethel-Haurwitz, P. Robinson, J.W. VanMeter, and E.M. Cardinale. (2014). Neural and cognitive characteristics of extraordinary altruists, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111, 15036-15041.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15036.short

Schreiber, D., Fonzo, G., Simmons, A.N., Dawes, C.T., Flagan, T., et al. (2013). Red Brain, Blue Brain: Evaluative Processes Differ in Democrats and Republicans. PLoS ONE 8(2): e52970.

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0052970

 

University College London. (2014). Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_College_London#Student_body

We are not equally empathic

 

The Child at Your Door (c. 1917-1919). We're not equally empathic toward strangers. This largely heritable trait varies continuously from psychopathy to extraordinary altruism (source: Wikicommons)

 

In a previous post, I discussed why the capacity for affective empathy varies not only between individuals but also between populations. First, its heritability is high: 68% (Chakrabarti and Baron-Cohen, 2013). So natural selection has had something to grab hold of. Second, its usefulness varies from one culture to another. It matters less where kinship matters more, i.e., where people interact mainly with close kin and where non-kin are likely to be enemies. The threat of retaliation from kin is sufficient to ensure correct behavior.

Affective empathy matters more where kinship matters less. This is a situation that Northwest Europeans have long known. Historian Alan Macfarlane argues that kinship has been weaker among the English—and individualism correspondingly stronger—since at least the 12th century and perhaps since Anglo-Saxon times (Macfarlane, 2012; Macfarlane, 1992, pp. 173-174). A weaker sense of kinship seems to underlie the Western European Marriage Pattern (WEMP), as seen by its defining characteristics: late age of marriage for both sexes; high rate of celibacy; strong tendency of children to form new households; and high circulation of non-kin among families. The WEMP has prevailed since at least the 12th century west of the Hajnal Line, a line running approximately from Trieste to St. Petersburg (Hallam, 1985; Seccombe, 1992, p. 94).

Can natural selection specifically target affective empathy?

So if affective empathy helps people to survive and reproduce, there will be more and more of it in succeeding generations. If not, there will be less and less.

But what exactly is being passed on or not passed on? A specific capacity? Or something more general, like pro-social behavior? If it's too general, natural selection could not easily make some populations more altruistic than others. There would be too many nasty side-effects.

Although pro-social behavior superficially looks like affective empathy, the underlying mental processes are different. Pro-social behavior is a willingness to help others through low-cost assistance: advice, conversation, a helping hand, etc. The logic is simple: give some help now and perhaps you'll receive a lot later from the grateful beneficiary. By the same logic, you may stop helping someone who seldom reciprocates.

Affective empathy is less conscious. It seems to have developed out of cognitive empathy: the ability to simulate what is going on in other people's minds, but not necessarily for the purpose of helping them. Con artists have plenty of cognitive empathy. Empathy is affective when you not only simulate how other people feel but also experience their feelings (Chakrabarti and Baron-Cohen,2013). Their wellbeing comes to matter as much as your own.

 

Empathy of either sort relies on unconscious mimicry: "empathic individuals exhibit nonconscious mimicry of the postures, mannerisms, and facial expressions of others (the chameleon effect) to a greater extent than nonempathic individuals" (Carr et al., 2003). The ability to mimic is key to the empathic process of relaying information from one brain area to another via "mirror neurons":

- The superior temporal cortex codes an early visual description of another person's action and sends this information to posterior parietal mirror neurons.

- The posterior parietal cortex codes the precise kinesthetic aspect of the action and sends the information to inferior frontal mirror neurons.

- The inferior frontal cortex codes the purpose of the action.

- Parietal and frontal mirror areas send copies of motor plans back to the superior temporal cortex in order to match the visual description of the person's action to the predicted sensory consequences for that person.

- The mental simulation is complete when the visual description has been matched to the predicted sensory consequences (Carr et al., 2003).

By simulating the sensory consequences of what someone does or intends to do, we gain an understanding of that person that goes beyond what our senses immediately tell us.

 

[...] we understand the feelings of others via a mechanism of action representation shaping emotional content, such that we ground our empathic resonance in the experience of our acting body and the emotions associated with specific movements. As Lipps noted, ''When I observe a circus performer on a hanging wire, I feel I am inside him.'' To empathize, we need to invoke the representation of the actions associated with the emotions we are witnessing. (Carr et al., 2003)

Affective empathy exists when this mental representation is fed into our own emotional state. We feel what the other person feels and we act appropriately. This is much more than pro-social behavior.

From psychopaths to extraordinary altruists

The capacity for affective empathy varies from one person to the next. It is least developed in psychopaths:

Psychopathy is a heritable developmental disorder characterized by an uncaring nature, antisocial and aggressive behavior, and deficient prosocial emotions such as empathy, guilt, and remorse. Psychopaths exhibit consistent patterns of neuroanatomical and functional impairments, such as reductions in the volume of the amygdala and in the responsiveness of this structure to fear-relevant stimuli. These deficits may underlie the perceptual insensitivity to fearful facial expressions and other fear-relevant stimuli observed in this population. (Marsh et al., 2014)

Mainstream opinion accepts that psychopaths are heritably different because they are "sick." Heritable differences are thus thought to be unusual and even pathological. "Normal" individuals may vary in their capacity for affective empathy, but surely that sort of variability is due to their environment, isn't it?

No it isn't. That variability, too, is largely genetic. Affective empathy varies over a largely heritable continuum, and an arbitrary line is all that separates psychopaths from "normal" individuals. There may be many psychopaths or there may be few; it depends on where you set the cut-off point.

At the other end of this continuum is another interesting group: extraordinary altruists. A research team has recently looked at the brains of such people, specifically individuals who had donated one of their kidneys to a stranger:

Given emerging consensus that psychopathy is a continuously distributed variable within the general population and that psychopaths represent one extreme end of a caring continuum, we hypothesized that extraordinary altruism may represent the opposite end of this continuum and be supported by neural and cognitive mechanisms that represent the inverse of psychopathy; in particular, increased amygdala volume and responsiveness to fearful facial expressions. (Marsh etal., 2014)

In extraordinary altruists, the right amygdala is larger and responds more to fearful facial expressions. This is the inverse of what we see in psychopaths, who have smaller amygdala and are less responsive to fearful facial expressions.

Affective empathy is thus a specific mental trait, like psychopathy. It is not a form of pro-social behavior any more than psychopathy is a form of antisociality:

[...] it is important to distinguish between antisociality that results from psychopathy, which is specifically associated with reduced empathy and concern for others, as well as with reduced sensitivity to others' fear and distress, and antisociality that results from any of a variety of other factors, such as impulsivity or trauma exposure, that are not closely related to empathy. (Marshet al., 2014)

Marsh et al. (2014) cite a number of studies to show the relative independence of these two behavioral axes: prosociality / antisociality and affective empathy / psychopathy.

Conclusion

Affective empathy is specific and largely heritable. People differ continuously in their innate capacity for affective empathy, and it is only by setting an arbitrary cut-off point that we classify some as "psychopaths" and others as "normal," including extraordinary altruists who may be a small minority.

Affective empathy is an intricate adaptation that must have evolved for some reason. Initially, it may have served to facilitate the relationship between a mother and her children, this being perhaps why it is stronger in women than in men (Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright, 2004). In some cultures, natural selection may have increased this capacity in both sexes and extended it to a wider range of social interactions. This scenario would especially apply to Northwest Europeans, who have long had relatively weak kinship. They have consequently relied more on internal means of behavior control, like affective empathy (Frost, 2014).

 

References

 

Baron-Cohen, S. and S. Wheelwright. (2004).The Empathy Quotient: An investigation of adults with Asperger Syndrome or high functioning autism, and normal sex differences. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 34, 163-175.

http://ftp.aspires-relationships.com/the_empathy_quotion_of_adults_with_as.pdf

 

Carr, L., M. Iacoboni, M-C. Dubeau, J.C. Mazziotta, and G.L. Lenzi. (2003). Neural mechanisms of empathy in humans: A relay from neural systems for imitation to limbic areas, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (USA), 100, 5497-5502.

http://www.ucp.pt/site/resources/documents/ICS/GNC/ArtigosGNC/AlexandreCastroCaldas/7_CaIaDuMaLe03.pdf

 

Chakrabarti, B. and S. Baron-Cohen. (2013). Understanding the genetics of empathy and the autistic spectrum, in S. Baron-Cohen, H. Tager-Flusberg, M. Lombardo. (eds). Understanding Other Minds: Perspectives from Developmental Social Neuroscience, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

http://books.google.ca/books?hl=fr&lr=&id=eTdLAAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA326&ots=fHpygaxaMQ&sig=_sJsVgdoe0hc-fFbzaW3GMEslZU#v=onepage&q&f=false

 

Frost, P. (2014). Affective empathy. An evolutionary mistake?  Evo and Proud, September 20

http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2014/09/affective-empathy-evolutionary-mistake.html

Hallam, H.E. (1985). Age at first marriage and age at death in the Lincolnshire Fenland, 1252-1478, Population Studies, 39, 55-69.

 

Macfarlane, A. (1992). On individualism, Proceedings of the British Academy, 82, 171-199.

http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/TEXTS/On_Individualism.pdf

 

Macfarlane, A. (2012). The invention of the modern world. Chapter 8: Family, friendship and population, The Fortnightly Review, Spring-Summer serial

http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2012/07/invention-8/

 

Marsh, A.A., S.A. Stoycos, K.M. Brethel-Haurwitz, P. Robinson, J.W. VanMeter, and E.M. Cardinale. (2014). Neural and cognitive characteristics of extraordinary altruists, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111, 15036-15041.

http://www.pnas.org/content/111/42/15036.short

Seccombe, W. (1992). A Millennium of Family Change. Feudalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Europe, London: Verso.

Dear Fred

In a recent post, Fred Reed asks:

Why should I not indulge my hobby of torturing to death the severely genetically retarded? This would seem beneficial. We certainly don't want them to reproduce, they use resources better invested in healthy children, and it makes no evolutionary difference whether they die quietly or screaming.

The short answer is that any killing, for whatever reason, increases the likelihood of killing for other reasons. One exception is self-defence, but that's not done for pleasure. Another exception is capital punishment, but that, too, is not done for pleasure. More to the point, no single citizen can carry out an execution. It requires a lengthy judicial process. The same reasoning applies to the final exception of war. No single citizen can declare war.

It's not for nothing that killing is so taboo, especially recreational killing. Several things have contributed to the success of Western societies, but a leading one is the relatively peaceful nature of social relations. When people can go about their business without fearing for their lives, much becomes possible that otherwise would not be. This taboo is so crucial that we even extend it to nonhumans. Cats and dogs have no inherent right to life, yet it is a serious offence to torture them to death.

 

That's society. What about biology?

At this point, Fred may speak up: "But those are social reasons against killing of any sort. What are the biological reasons?"

The immediate biological reason is empathy. If I try to hurt someone, I feel the pain I inflict. Truth be told, the only life forms I enjoy killing are flies and mosquitoes. If a moth flies into our home, I'll go to some length to capture it and set it free outside, and I know others who do similar things. Just think of all the car drivers who come to a screeching halt to avoid running over some poor animal.

It's empathy that makes me and others act that way. And I cannot easily turn it off. It shuts down only when feelings of contempt enter my mind, as with those contemptible flies and mosquitoes.

Empathy is hardwired. It's 68% heritable in the case of affective empathy, i.e., the capacity to respond with the appropriate emotion to another person's mental state (Chakrabarti and Baron-Cohen, 2013). To date, studies have focused on disorders caused by too much empathy or too little. Psychopaths may have intact cognitive empathy, but impaired affective empathy. They keenly understand how others feel without actually experiencing those feelings. The reverse impairment may affect autists. As for depressives, they may suffer from being too sensitive to the distress of others and to guilt over not helping them enough.

 

These disorders exist at the tail ends of a normal distribution. By focusing on these extremes, we forget the variability among healthy individuals. We all vary in our capacity for empathy, just as we do for almost any mental capacity.

 

How can evolution explain empathy?

Why do we feel empathy? How could natural selection favor such selflessness? This is of course the point that Fred is trying to make. Empathy keeps us from doing things that supposedly make evolutionary sense. Therefore, it could not have evolved. It must have been given to us by a Great Designer.

But why did this Great Designer give more of it to some people than to others? We're talking about a heritable trait. It's not as if everyone starts off the same way, with some later falling behind through their own wrongdoing.

And how has the Great Designer preserved this selfless behavior? Unless something is done, empathic people will eventually be overwhelmed by a tidal wave of cheaters, free riders, and people shouting "Gimme! Gimme! Gimme!" This is as much a mystery for creationists as it is for evolutionists. It's one thing to explain how altruism came to be. It's another to explain how it manages to survive in this cynical world.

These questions passed through my mind when I was going through my late mother's effects. I discovered she had for years been donating money for various projects in the Third World, at a time when she was a widow with no pension. Meanwhile, as a teenager, I had to take on all kinds of odd jobs to help us make ends meet. Looking over those donor receipts I shook my head and felt some resentment. How do good Christians like her manage to survive?

Yet she did, like others before her. For one thing, she was suspicious of strangers, and this suspicion extended to some ethnic groups more than to others. She was prejudiced and "postjudiced." If someone acted dishonestly with her once too often, she would have no more to do with him or her. Such people were "contemptible."

Today, that sort of behavior might seem un-Christian. But her Christianity was of an older, judgmental sort, being inspired more by the punitive Old Testament than by the forgiving New Testament. She would judge people, and her judgment could be harsh, very harsh.

 

Over space and time

Just as the capacity for empathy varies from one individual to another, it also varies statistically from one human population to another, being strongest in the "guilt cultures" of Northwest Europe. Guilt is the twin sister of empathy. Both flow from a simulation of how another person thinks or feels (an imaginary witness to a wrongdoing, a person in distress) and both ensure correct behavior by inducing the appropriate feelings (anguish, pity).

Why are guilt and empathy so strong in Northwest Europeans? Other societies ensure good behavior by relying on close kin to step in and enforce social rules. This policing mechanism has been less effective west of the Hajnal line (which runs roughly from Trieste to St. Petersburg) because kinship ties have been correspondingly weaker. There has thus been stronger selection for internal means of behavior control, like guilt and empathy.

This zone of relatively weak kinship is associated with unusual demographic tendencies, called the Western European Marriage Pattern:

- relatively late marriage for men and women

- many people who never marry

- neolocality (children leave the family household to form new households)

- high circulation of non-kin among different households (Hajnal, 1964; ICA, 2013)

The Western European Marriage Pattern was thought to have arisen after the Black Death of the 14th century. There is now good evidence for its existence before the Black Death and fragmentary evidence going back to 9th century France and earlier (Hallam, 1985; Seccombe, 1992, p. 94). Historian Alan Macfarlane likewise sees an English tendency toward weaker kinship ties before the 13th century and even during Anglo-Saxon times (Macfarlane, 2012; Macfarlane, 1992, pp. 173-174). I have argued that this tendency probably goes still farther back (Frost, 2013a; Frost, 2013b).

 

Whatever the ultimate cause, Northwest Europeans seem to have been pre-adapted for later shifts away from kinship and toward alternate means of organizing social relations (i.e., ideology, codified law, commerce). This tendency has taken various forms: the intense guilt-driven Christianity of the Anglo-Saxon penitential tradition and, later, Protestantism; the medieval alliance between Church and State to pacify social relations; and the post-medieval rise of the market economy. This cultural evolution has been described by the historical economist Gregory Clark for the English population between the 12th and 19th centuries. As England became a settled society, success went to those who could resolve disputes amiably and profit from thinking ahead—in short, those who had middle-class values of thrift, foresight, self-control, nonviolence, and sobriety. This English middle class, initially tiny, grew in numbers until its lineages accounted for most of its country’s gene pool (Clark, 2007; Clark, 2009a; Clark, 2009b).

 

But what does that have to do with evolution???

 

At this point, Fred may again speak up, with more than a touch of exasperation: "You're ducking my question! You're talking about culture, society, and religion! What does that have to do with evolution???"

Everything, Fred. Everything. Unlike other animals, humans have to adapt not only to their physical environment but also to their cultural environment. In short, we've become participants in our own evolution. We have domesticated ourselves.

Let me return to your initial question. What's to stop you from torturing to death the severely retarded? First, your sense of empathy should. If it doesn't, you're the one with a severe mental defect. I wouldn't want you as a fellow citizen, let alone as a neighbor. The law of the jungle may give you the right to torture defenceless people to death, but it also gives me the right to organize a lynch mob and hang you from the nearest tree.

 

References

Chakrabarti, B. and S. Baron-Cohen. (2013). Understanding the genetics of empathy and the autistic spectrum, in S. Baron-Cohen, H. Tager-Flusberg, M. Lombardo. (eds). Understanding Other Minds: Perspectives from Developmental Social Neuroscience, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Clark, G. (2007). A Farewell to Alms. A Brief Economic History of the World, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Clark, G. (2009a). The indicted and the wealthy: Surnames, reproductive success, genetic selection and social class in pre-industrial England.

http://www.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/Farewell%20to%20Alms/Clark%20-Surnames.pdf 

 

Clark, G. (2009b). The domestication of man: The social implications of Darwin. ArtefaCTos, 2, 64-80.

http://campus.usal.es/~revistas_trabajo/index.php/artefactos/article/viewFile/5427/5465

Frost, P. (2013a). The origins of Northwest European guilt culture, Evo and Proud, December 7

http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the-origins-of-northwest-european-guilt.html

 

Frost, P. (2013b). Origins of Northwest European guilt culture, Part II, Evo and Proud, December 14

http://evoandproud.blogspot.ca/2013/12/origins-of-northwest-european-guilt.html

Hajnal, John (1965). European marriage pattern in historical perspective. In D.V. Glass and D.E.C. Eversley (eds). Population in History. Arnold, London.

Hallam, H.E. (1985). Age at first marriage and age at death in the Lincolnshire Fenland, 1252-1478, Population Studies, 39, 55-69.

 

ICA (2013). Research Themes - Marriage Patterns, Institutions for Collective Action

http://www.collective-action.info/_THE_MarriagePatterns_EMP 

 

Macfarlane, A. (1992). On individualism, Proceedings of the British Academy, 82, 171-199.

http://www.alanmacfarlane.com/TEXTS/On_Individualism.pdf 

 

Macfarlane, A. (2012). The invention of the modern world. Chapter 8: Family, friendship and population, The Fortnightly Review, Spring-Summer serial

http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk/2012/07/invention-8/

Seccombe, W. (1992). A Millennium of Family Change. Feudalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Europe, London: Verso.