Sapolsky

We are not the only species that kills in an organized way. These are chimpanzees carrying out what is called a “border patrol.” They are all from the same group. They have gotten in a very agitated state and they are off patrolling the border of their territory. And if they encounter a male from the neighboring group, they will kill him. This is planned, organized violence and has been documented a number of times now. The males of one group of chimps have eradicated every single male member of the neighboring group and expanded their territory. This is virtually the definition, by UN standards, of genocide: killing somebody not for who they are, but simply for what group they belong to. We are not the only species that does that. We are not the only species that is capable of deep unconscious aggressive bias against thems. Fascinating example of this: if you ever want to take a totally terrifying test, take something called “The Implicit Association Test”. It is this brilliant psychological test that reveals every unspoken prejudice and bias that you have going for you, because it is impossible to fool this test. Here is how the test works. Suppose you have a horrible, ugly, vicious prejudice against trolls. You just have something in for trolls and you think they are simply inferior to humans. So, you are given this task computer screen where up flash a bunch of pictures of either humans or trolls and you are instructed: “If it is a human, press this button on the right. If it is a troll, press this button on the left.” Or a series of words with either very positive or negative connotations: “If it is positive press this button; negative, press.” And then it comes in a combination. You have to see, “If it is a troll on the right or this kind of word, press this button; if it is a human on the left.” And what you see is, when the category of human and troll fits with the word, it is an easy association. Flash up a human with the word “trustworthy” and that makes perfect sense. Flash up malodorous with troll, that makes perfect sense. Your reaction time for hitting the correct button is very short. But now, switch it around the other way and for a minuscule amount of time, you pause and say, “Wait a second. Trolls are not kindhearted. That is right, hit this button.” “Wait a second. Humans are not bad, hit this button.” There is a minuscule-on-the-scale-of milliseconds delay. And you do enough of these and you can tell if somebody gets a delay coming in there—the scale of like a tenth-of-a-second delay—they are feeling the cognitive dissonance, “I do not associate these positive values with this group.” It is incredible. Then, recently a group—a Yale group—showed the exact same thing in rhesus monkeys. They took either pictures of monkeys from the same group as the individual they were testing—the male on the left—or someone from the next group over—a them—a very menacing them. So, either flashing up pictures of somebody of their own group or someone from the out-group; or flashing up pictures of wonderful positive things for monkeys, like tropical fruit, or negative things—spiders. And then you gave them the task that they would have to process pairs and you would see the exact same thing. When you would have discordant categories, it took slightly longer. The monkey was sitting there saying, “Wait a second. We are the ones that make me think of luscious tropical fruit and they’re like yucky spiders; not the other way around.” Other species can even think in terms of categories of prejudice. So, in what ways are we special when it comes to aggression? We are just like any other primate, in terms of our capacity to cudgel somebody over the head to death. We are perfectly capable of doing that, but we could be violent in all sorts of ways. We can exert no more effort than it takes to pull a trigger or release a bomb from thirty thousand feet or operate a drone on the other side of the planet. We can be aggressive by looking the other way and pretending we do not see or damning with faint praise or this concept utterly foreign to any other primate—we can be passive-aggressive. We can do it in all sorts of ways. Let me show you just how bizarre human violence can be. In the mid-1960s, there was a coup in Indonesia that overthrew the government there and instituted a rightwing dictatorship for the next 30 years that came to be known as The New Order. And in the aftermath of this coup, every vendetta, every bit of revenge was carried out against every ethnic minority group; against every sort of left leaning group out there. Death squads killed an estimated half a million people in Indonesia over the subsequent years. Entire villages of people would be burned to death in their huts, when death squads would come. So the writer V.S. Naipaul was traveling through Indonesia some decades afterward and was learning about the history of this whole period—the troubles during that time—and he kept hearing this story. Which was sometimes when these death squads would come to destroy a village, they would bring along a traditional Indonesian Gamelan orchestra. What the hell is with that? Totally bizarre. He kept hearing rumors about it. And one day, he encountered some grizzled old veteran of one of these death squads—unrepentant because he had just spent thirty years as a national hero— and Naipaul said, “I heard this rumor. Is this true?” And the guy said, “Oh, yes, yes. Whenever we would go to kill everyone in the village, we would bring along a Gamelan orchestra. It was great. We would bring along the flutists and the drummers, and the singers and all of that.” And Naipaul said, “Why would you do that?” And the man looked at him, puzzled, and said, “To make it more beautiful, of course.” There is no other primate out there that could begin to make sense of the ways in which we damage each other, if we can do something like that.

Robert Sapolsky