Category Archives: Morality

Who’s Blaming The Victim?

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One phrase – or some variant of it – that seems to crop up in discussions of sexual assault more frequently than almost all others is “blaming the victim” (though I imagine “rape culture” and “patriarchy” are probably in the running for most commonly-used term as well). Coined in the early 1970s, the phrase has been nothing but gaining in popularity if Google’s N-gram viewer is any indication. The way I’ve seen the term used, “blaming the victim” appeared to amount to any suggestion that sexual assault might be reduced through any behavioral modifications on the part of victims of the act; in other words, any suggestion that people bear some responsibility for ensuring their own safety. Now, of course, sexual assault victims are no more at moral fault for the crime they suffer than robbery victims are at fault for being robbed (which is to say not morally at fault at all). The responsibility for the criminal act lies at the feet of the criminal. Nevertheless, one might also responsibly suggest that precautions might be taken to minimize the frequency of such acts, in much the same way that criminals are at fault for stealing bikes, but one might suggest that people lock their bikes up so as to make theft more difficult.

“Good idea, but your execution of it leaves something to be desired.”

The recent Slutwalks were one of the more notable outcomes of such a suggestion: specifically, the suggestion that women might be able to minimize their risks of being sexually assaulted by dressing less provocatively. While I have no data on hand bearing on the plausibility of such a suggestion, I happen to have some other interesting research on the topic of victim blaming in the case of sexual assault. What’s unique about the current study by Perilloux et al (2014) is the examination of how different parties assign responsibility for a sexual assault: more precisely, how victims of a completed or attempted sexual assault assign responsibility, relative to third parties who were not assaulted themselves, but know a friend that was. The questions of interest here were (a) whether these three groups differ in terms of how much responsibility they assign to various parties, and (b) whether these groups also perceive the motivations of the attacker differently as well.

The sample included 49 women who self-reported experiencing a completed sexual assault after puberty, 91 women who reported an attempted sexual assault, and 152 women who reported knowing someone who was the victim of an assault. The participants were asked to assign blame (totaling 100%) for the assault to six potential sources: the perpetrator, the victim, the situation, the victim’s family, friends, or other categories. They were then asked to response in an open-ended fashion as to why they had assigned blame the way they did. The participants were also asked what they thought the perpetrators hoped to gain from the assault.

The results found some interesting disconnects between the perceptions of these groups. For the most part, the three groups – completed, attempted, and third parties – were in agreement over how much blame the situation, friends, family members, and other factors shared for the assault (approximately 7%, 2%, 1%, and 1%, respectively; so about 10% of the overall blame). Where these groups differed primarily was with respect to how much blame the victim of the assault and perpetrator share. Those women who were the victims of a completed or attempted assault suggested the perpetrator bore about 70% of the blame while they – the victim – were about 19% responsible. Third parties – those women who were not assaulted but knew someone who said they were – reported a different pattern: the third parties suggested the victim (their friends) was only about 9% responsible, while the perpetrator was 82% responsible. In other words, the victims themselves seemed to be doing about twice as much of the victim blaming than their friends were.

Or remember to always make accusations with all five fingers. Problem solved.

That wasn’t the only avenue along which these perceptions diverged, though: the three groups also differed in terms of how they perceived the attacker’s motivation (i.e. why the assaulter did what they did). In the completed assault group, 65% of women nominated “sex” as the primary motivation for the assault, while 22% suggested power was the motivation. These percentages were similar to the attempted group (71% and 18%, respectively). However, the third party women saw things rather differently: only 48% suggested sex was the motivation for the action, while 27% suggested power was driving the act. So the friends of the assault victims appeared to feel the assault was less about sex, relative to the women who were actually assaulted.

Finally, the analysis turned to only the perceptions of the completed and attempted groups. Perilloux et al (2014) examined the most common reasons listed for self-blame: (1) putting oneself in a bad situation, (2) being intoxicated, (3) not resisting enough, (4) sending mixed messages, and (5) being too trusting. Perhaps unsurprisingly, completed assault victims were more likely to list “not resisting enough” (25%) relative to attempted victims (11%), owing to the probability that resistance likely serves as a deterrent, and how much resistance is “enough” is assessed by whether or not the assault was stopped, or when it was. More completed victims (29%) also listed their own intoxication as a reason for their blame, relative to attempted victims (19%), and the completed group also reported more intoxication at the time of the assault. Again, this is might well be related to the resistance factor: intoxicated people could be less capable or willing to resist.

So, the good news from this research should be that, by in large, people seem to overwhelming place the blame for sexual assault on the perpetrator rather than the victim. The blame given to the perpetrator tended to be three- to nine-times that of the blame assigned to the victim. This appears to be true regardless of whether it’s the victim or the victim’s friend. The most interesting finding seems to be the disconnect between the responses of third parties and victims, however: most of the victim blame came from the victims themselves, and these victims tended to see the motivation for sex on the part of perpetrator as playing a more primary role than third parties did. There is, of course, the possibility that other, more socially-distant, third parties would assign more blame to the victims, relative to current groups, but that much remains to be seen. In any case, the question to consider is why these perceptions differ.

*Warning: point of view might not match well to reality.

One possibility is that the victims might have greater insight to what factors increased their risks for the assault, relative to third parties, owing to the fact that they were direct witnesses to the event. This certainly seems like a reasonable suggestion, and should give pause to those who claim that rape is primarily and act of violence or domination, rather than sex. Another, not mutually-exclusive suggestion, that I would advance would be to consider what signals these perceptions of victim blame might be sending. Since there’s no objective truth to the question, “how much blame does party X deserve”, these perceptions are likely to be reflecting something else.

Here are two possible alternatives as to what that something else might be: the first is that “who deserves how much blame?” might be interpreted as “whose side would you take in a dispute between the victim and the perpetrator?” In placing very little blame on the victim, third parties could be signaling a strong willingness to take their friend’s side on the matter. Another (also non-mutually exclusive) potential is that the question about who deserves blame might be interpreted as, “how much did the behavior of this individual increase their probability of being assaulted?” In this case, victims, through their self-blame, might be signaling that they recognize some potential for minimizing their future risk of being assaulted. This recognition could, in turn, make the victim look like a better social ally. Friends who consistently expose themselves to costly risks are, all else being equal, more costly to consistently support and side with than friends who suffer fewer costs. Accordingly, a friend who suggests they will behave more cautiously next time might appear to be at a lower risk for suffering costs, and a better social investment.

If third parties and victims interpret the notion of “blame” somewhat differently, then, this would lead to the following prediction: when rating one’s own blame for sexual assault, victims should rate their own blame higher, relative to third parties, as they did in the current study. However, there’s another prediction we could make: when rape victims are rating another victim’s blame for their sexual assault, the former group should not differ from non-victimized third parties. That is, victims of sexual assault should not both blame themselves and other victims equally; how much blame they assign to themselves or others should vary strategically.

References: Perilloux, C., Duntley, J., & Buss, D. (2014). Blame attribution in sexual victimization. Personality and Individual Differences, 63, 81-86.

What Does Online Dating Tell Us About Racial Views?

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Preferences can be funny things, or at least our judgments of them. If I were to state that, “I have no interest in hiring a black person to do this job”, I would receive more than a little condemnation for that view. If I were to state instead that, “I have have no interesting in dating a black woman”, I would likely still receive some condemnation, but probably less than for the first statement. Finally, if I were to state that, “I have no interest in dating a man”, I would receive very little, if any, condemnation for it, even from those who advocate strongly for gay rights. As one of my colleagues recently posed the question, “Why is discrimination based on reproductive / sexual preferences OK, but other forms of discrimination are not?” The issue of discrimination is one I’ve discussed before, considering why discrimination on the basis of standardized test scores is deemed to be appropriate, whereas discrimination of the basis of obesity is often not. So let’s turn our attention towards discrimination in the sexual realm today.

“Free?! I’d have to be an idiot not to find the Asian of my dreams!”

A recent post by Jenny Davis over at the Pacific Standard suggests that “Online dating shows us the cold, hard facts about race in America“. In her article, Jenny discusses some data released from a Facebook-based dating app that figures out which people are interested in which other people on some sexual or romantic level. The data is labeled “unfortunate” in some respects, because there appear to be winners and losers, and those winners and losers seem to break down along racial lines. When it comes to mating, it seems that everyone doesn’t get to join hands and cross the finish line at the same time so that we all end up with equally-high self-esteem (I know; I was shocked too).  To give you a sense for the data (and so you don’t have to click back and forth between links), here’s the breakdown of the response rates for people who are interested.

As anyone can clearly see, there are favorites. When it comes to the highest positive response rate, most women, regardless of their race, appear to favor white men, whereas most men, again, regardless of their race, tend to favor Asian women. In terms of the lowest response rate, women appeared to shun black men, whereas men tended to shun black women. Ouch. Jenny, using what I can only assume is that same “high-powered sociological lens” I’ve encountered before, concludes that this clearly demonstrates that race matters, and serves to counter accusations that we are living in a color-blind, post-racial world. As Jenny puts it we “fetishize Asian women while devaluing blacks”. Now tone doesn’t come across well through text-based communications at time, but neither “fetishize” nor “devalue” sound as if they have a particularly positive connotation to me. It sounds as if she’s condemning other people for their sexual preferences in that respect.

There are many comments to make about this, but let’s start with this one: apparently, there’s something of a no-win situation being erected from the get go. When one group is preferred, it’s a “fetish”, whereas when they’re not preferred, they’re “devalued”. Well, sort of, anyway; if she were being consistent (and who is?) Jenny would also say that women “fetishize” white males. Strangely, she does not. One can only guess as to why she does not, because Jenny makes no apparent attempt to understand the data in question. By that, I mean that Jenny offers no potential alternative explanations through which we might understand the data. In fact, she doesn’t seem to offer any explanation whatsoever for these patterns of responses. If I had to, I would guess that her explanation, if simplified somewhat, would reduce to “racism did it”, but it’s hard to tell.

“But are they the Black singles of my dreams, like the Asians?”

I would like to try and pick up some of that explanatory slack. Despite initial appearances, it is possible that this data has very little, if anything, to do with race per se. Now I happen to think that race likely does matter to some extent when it comes to dating preferences, but the degree of that extent is anyone’s guess. To see why I would say this only requires that one understands a very basic statistical concept: correlation does not equal causation. This is something that I imagine Jenny understands, but it likely slipped her mind in the midst of trying to make a point. There are few examples to consider, but the first is by far the simplest. Most men, if you polled them, would overwhelming respond to women on dating websites, and not other men; women would likely do the reserve. This does not mean, however, that men (or women) “devalue” other men (or women). Similarly, just because people on these dating sites might respond to black people at the lowest rates, it does not mean they “devalue” black people more generally.

But maybe we do devalue certain racial groups, at least when it comes to dating them. This brings us to the second issue: mating decisions are often complex. There are dozens of potential variables that people assess when choosing a mate – such as how much money they have, how much they weigh, how tall they are, their age, their relatedness to us, etc – and the importance of these qualities also varies somewhat depending on the nature of the relationship (whether it is more short- or long-term, for instance). The important point here is that even if people are picking mates on the basis of these other characteristics alone and not race, we might still see racial differences in outcomes. Let’s say, for instance, that men tend to prefer women shorter than themselves as dating partners (the reasons for this preference or it’s actual existence need not necessarily concern us). If that were the case, provided there are any average differences in height among the races, we would still see different response rates to and from each racial group, even though no one was selecting on the basis of race.

Rather than just considering the direction the preferences in the data above, then, let’s consider some of the actual numbers: when it came to response rates, regardless of whether we were considering men or women, and regardless of whether we’re considering the highest or lowest response rates, black individuals seem to respond more often than any other group; sometimes around twice as often. This could be indicative of a number of different factors, though I won’t speculate as to which ones on the basis of the numbers alone. The only point is that those factors might show up in user’s profiles in some way. If other people pick up on those factors primarily, then race itself might not be the primary, or even a, factor driving these decisions. In fact, in terms of response rates, there was a consistent overall pattern: from lowest to highest, it tended to be Latinos, Whites, Asians, and Blacks, regardless of sex (with only a single exception). Whatever the reasons for this, I would guess that it shows up in other ways in the profiles of these senders and responders.

Strangely, I can’t find a picture of a white dating site. Odd…

As I said, I don’t think that race per se is entirely unrelated to mating choices. However, to determine the extent to which it uniquely predicts anything, you need to control for other relevant factors. Does obesity play a role in these decisions? Probably. Is obesity equally common across racial groups? Nope. How about income; does income matter? In some cases it sure seems to. Is income the same across racial groups? Nope. We would likely find the same for many, many other factors.

In addition to determining the extent of how much race matters, one might also wish to explain why race might matter. Simply noting that there appear to be some racial differences doesn’t tell us a whole lot; the same goes for correlations of match percentages and response rates over at OkCupid, which find a similar pattern with respect to race. In the instance of OkCupid, a match percentage of 10% between two people corresponds to about a 25% reply rate; a 90% match percentage gets you all the way up to… a 37% reply rate. Even at around 100% match, the response rate still only lingers at around 50%. There appears to be a lot more that goes into mating decisions than people typically appreciate or even recognize. For what it’s worth, I would rather work to understand those complexities than pat myself on the back for how bad I think racism is.

What Makes Incest Morally Wrong?

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There are many things that people generally tend to view to be disgusting or otherwise unpleasant. Certain shows, like Fear Factor, capitalize on those aversions, offering people rewards if they can manage to suppress those feelings to a greater degree than their competitors. Of the people who watched the show, many would probably tell you that they would be personally unwilling to engage in such behaviors; what many do not seem to say, however, is that others should not be allowed to engage in those behaviors because they are morally wrong. Fear or disgust-inducing, yes, but not behavior explicitly punishable by others. Well, most of the time, anyway; a stunt involving drinking donkey semen apparently made the network hesitant about airing it, likely owing to the idea that some moral condemnation would follow in its wake. So what might help us differentiate between understanding why some disgusting behaviors – like eating live cockroaches or submerging one’s arm in spiders – are not morally condemned while others – like incest – tend to be?

Emphasis on the “tend to be” in that last sentence.

To begin our exploration of the issue, we could examine some research on some cognitive mechanisms for incest aversion. Now, in theory, incest should be an appealing strategy from a gene’s eye perspective. This is due to the manner in which sexual reproduction works: by mating with a full sibling, your offspring would carry 75% of your genes in common by descent, rather than the 50% you’d expect if you mated with a stranger. If those hyper-related siblings in turn mated with one another, after a few generations you’d have people giving birth to infants that were essentially genetic clones. However, such inbreeding appears to carry a number of potentially harmful consequences. Without going into too much detail, here are two candidate explanations one might consider for why inbreeding isn’t a more popular strategy: first, it increases the chances that two harmful, but otherwise rare, recessive alleles will match up with on another. The result of this frequently involves all sorts of nasty developmental problems that don’t bode well for one’s fitness.

A second potential issue involves what is called the Red Queen hypothesis. The basic idea here is that the asexual parasites that seek to exploit their host’s body reproduce far quicker than their hosts tend to. A bacteria can go through thousands of generations in the time humans go through one. If we were giving birth to genetically-identical clones, then, the parasites would find themselves well-adapted to life inside their host’s offspring, and might quickly end up exploiting said offspring. The genetic variability introduced by sexual reproduction might help larger, longer-lived hosts keep up in the evolutionary race against their parasites. Though there may well be other viable hypotheses concerning why inbreeding is avoided in many species, the take-home point for our current purposes is that organisms often appear as if they are designed to avoid breeding with close relatives. This poses many species with a problem they need to solve, however: how do you know who your close kin are? Barring some effective spatial dispersion, organisms will need some proximate cues that help them differentiate between their kin and non-kin so as to determine which others are their best bets for reproductive success.

We’ll start with perhaps the most well-known of the research on incest avoidance in humans. The Westermarck effect refers to the idea that humans appear to become sexually disinterested in those with whom they spent most of their early life. The logic of this effect goes (roughly) as follows: your mother is likely to be investing heavily in you when you’re an infant, in no small part owing to the fact that she needs to breastfeed you (prior to the advent of alternative technologies). Since those who spend a lot of time around you and your mother are more likely to be kin than those who spend less time in your proximity. That degree of that proximity ought to in turn generate some kinship index with others that would generate disinterest in sexual experiences with such individuals. While such an effect doesn’t lend itself nicely to controlled experiments, there are some natural contexts that can be examined as pseudo-experiments. One of these was the Israeli Kibbutz, where children were predominately raised in similarly-aged, mixed-sex peer groups. Of the approximately 3000 children that were examined from these Kibbutz, there were only 14 cases of marriage between individuals from the same group, and almost all of them were between people introduced to the group after the age of 6 (Shepher, 1971).

Which is probably why this seemed like a good idea.

The effect of being raised in such a context didn’t appear to provide all the cues required to trigger the full suite of incest aversion mechanisms, however, as evidenced by some follow-up research by Shor & Simchai (2009). The pair carried out some interviews with 60 of the members of the Kibbutz to examine the feelings that these members had towards each other. A little more than half of the sample reported having either moderate or strong attractions towards other members of their cohort at some point; almost all the rest reported sexual indifference, as opposed to the typical kind of aversion or disgust people report in response to questions about sexual attraction towards their blood siblings. This finding, while interesting, needs to be considered in light of the fact that almost no sexual interactions occurred between members of the same peer group; it should also be considered in light of the fact that there did not appear to exist any strong moral prohibition against such behavior.

Something like a Westermarck effect might explain why people weren’t terribly inclined to have intercourse with their own kin, but it would not explain why people think that others having sex with close kin is morally wrong. Moral condemnation is not required for guiding one’s own behavior; it appears more suited for attempting to guide the behavior of others. When it comes to incest, a likely other whose behavior one might wish to guide would be their close kin. This is what led Lieberman et al (2003) to deliver some predictions about what factors might drive people’s moral attitudes about incest: the presence of others who are liable to be your close kin, especially if those kin are of the opposite sex. If duration of co-residence during infancy is used a proximate input cue for determining kinship, then that duration might also be used as an input condition for determining one’s moral views about the acceptability of incest. Accordingly, Lieberman et al (2003) surveyed 186 individuals about their history of co-residence with other family members and their attitudes towards how morally unacceptable incest is, along with a few other variables.

What the research uncovered was that duration of co-residence with an opposite-sex sibling predicted the subject’s moral judgments concerning incest. For women, the total years of co-residence with a brother was correlated with judgments of wrongness for incest at about r = 0.23, and that held whether the time period from 0 to 10 or 0 to 18 was under investigation; for men with a sister, a slightly higher correlation emerged from 0 to 10 years (r = 0.29), but an even-larger correlation was observed when the period was expanded to age 18 (r = 0.40). Further, such effects remained largely static even after the number of siblings, parental attitudes, sexual orientation, and the actual degree of relatedness between those individuals was controlled for. None of those factors managed to uniquely predict moral attitudes towards incest once duration of co-residence was controlled for, suggesting that it was the duration of co-residence itself driving these effects of moral judgments. So why did this effect not appear to show up in the case of the Kibbutz?

Perhaps the driving cues were too distracted?

If the cues to kinship are somewhat incomplete – as they likely were in the Kibbutz – then we ought to expect moral condemnation of such relationships to be incomplete as well.  Unfortunately, there doesn’t exist much good data on that point that I am aware of, but, on the basis of Shor & Simchai’s (2009) account, there was no condemnation of such relationships in the Kibbutz that rivaled the kind seen in the case of actual families. What their account does suggest is that more cohesive groups experienced less sexual interest in their peers; a finding that dovetails with the results from Lieberman et al (2003): cohesive groups might well have spent more time together, resulting in less sexual attraction due to greater degrees of co-residence. Despite Shor & Simchai’s suggestion to the contrary, their results appear to be consistent with a Westermarck kind of effect, albeit an incomplete one. Though the duration of co-residence clearly seems to matter, the precise way in which it matters likely involves more than a single cue to kinship. What connection might exist between moral condemnation and active aversion to the idea of intercourse with those one grew up around is a matter I leave to you.

References: Lieberman, D., Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2003). Does morality have a biological basis? An empirical test of the factors governing moral sentiments relating to incest. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, 270, 819-826.

Shepher, J. (1971). Mate Selection Among Second Generation Kibbutz Adolescents and Adults: Incest Avoidance and Negative Imprinting. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 1, 293-307.

Shor, E. & Simchai, D. (2009). Incest Avoidance, the Incest Taboo, and Social Cohesion: Revisiting Westermarck and the Case of the Israeli Kibbutzim. American Journal of Sociology, 114, 1803-1846,

Proximate And Ultimate Moral Culpability

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Back in September, I floated an idea about or moral judgments: that intervening causes between an action and outcome could serve to partially mitigate their severity. This would owe itself to the potential that each intervening cause has for presenting a new potential target of moral responsibility and blame (i.e. “if only the parents had properly locked up their liquor cabinet, then their son wouldn’t have gotten drunk and wrecked their car”). As the number of these intervening causes increases, the potential number of blameable targets increases, which should be expected to diminish the ability of third-party condemners to achieve any kind of coordination their decisions. Without coordination, enacting moral punishment becomes costlier, all else being equal, and thus we might expect people to condemn others less harshly in such situations. Well, as it turns out, there’s some research that has been conducted on this topic a mere four decades ago that I was unaware of at the time. Someone call Cold Stone, because it seems I’ve been scooped again.

To get your mind off that stupid pun, here’s another.

One of these studies comes from Brickman et al (1975), and involved examining how people would assign responsibility for a car accident that had more than one potential cause. Since there are a number of comparisons and causes I’ll be discussing, I’ve labeled them for ease of following along. The first of these causes were  proximate in nature: internal alone (1. a man hit a tree because he wasn’t looking at the road) or external alone (2. a man hit a tree because his steering failed). However, there were also two ultimate causes for these proximate causes, leading to four additional sets: two internal (3. a man hit a tree because he wasn’t looking at the road; he wasn’t looking at the road because he was daydreaming), two external (4. a man hit a tree because his steering failed; his steering failed because the mechanic had assembled it poorly when repairing it), or a mix of the two. The first of these (5) mixes was a man hitting a tree because his steering failed, but his steering failed because he had neglected to get it checked in over a year; the second (6) concerned a man hitting a tree because he wasn’t paying attention to the road due to someone on the side of the road yelling.

After the participants had read about one of these scenarios, they were asked to indicate how responsible the driver was for the accident, how foreseeable the accident was, and how much control the driver had in the situation. Internal causes for the accident resulted in higher scores on all these variables relative to external ones (1 vs. 2). There’s nothing too surprising there: people get blamed less for their steering failing than their not paying attention to the road. The next analysis compared the presence of one type of cause alone to that type of cause with an identical ultimate cause (1 vs. 3, and 2 vs. 4). When both proximate and ultimate causes were internal (1 vs 3), no difference was observed in the judgments of responsibility. However, when both proximate and ultimate causes were external (2 vs. 4), moral condemnation appeared to be softened by the presence of an ultimate explanation. Two internal causes didn’t budge judgments from a single cause, but two external judgments diminished perceptions of responsibility beyond a single one.

Next, Brickman et al (1975) turned to the matter of what happens when the proximate and ultimate causes were of different types (1 vs. 6 and 2 vs. 5). When the proximate cause was internal but the ultimate cause was external (1 vs. 6), there was a drop in judgments of moral responsibility (from 5.4 to 3.7 on a 0 to 6 scale), foreseeability (from 3.7 to 2.4), and control (from 3.4 to 2.7). The exact opposite trend was observed when the proximate cause was external, but the ultimate cause was internal 2 vs. 5). In that case, there was an increase in judgments of responsibility (from 2.3 to 4.1), foreseeability (from 2.3 to 3.4) and control (2.6 to 3.4). As Brickman et al (1975) put it:

“…the nature of prior cause eliminated the effects of the immediate cause on attributions of foreseeability and control, although a main effect of immediate cause remained for attributions of responsibility,”

So that’s some pretty neat stuff and, despite the research not being specifically about the topic, I think these findings might have some broader implications for understanding the opposition to evolutionary psychology more generally.

They’re so broad people with higher BMIs might call the suggestion insensitive.

As a fair warning, this section will contain a fair bit of speculation, since there doesn’t exist much data (that I know of, anyway) bearing on people’s opposition towards evolutionary explanations. That said, let’s talk about what anecdata we do have. The first curious thing that has struck me about the opposition to certain evolutionary hypotheses is that they tend to focus exclusively or nearly-exclusively on topics that have some moral relevance. I’ve seen fairly-common complaints about evolutionary explanations for hypotheses that concern moralized topics like violence, sexual behavior, sexual orientation, and male/female differences. What you don’t tend to see are complaints about research in areas that do not tend to be moralized, like vision, language, or taste preference. That’s not to say that such objections don’t ever crop up, of course; just that complaints about the latter do not appear to be as frequent or protracted as the former. Further, when the latter topics do appear, it’s typically in the middle of some other moral issue surrounding the topic.

This piece of anecdata ties in with another, related piece: one of the more common complaints against evolutionary explanations is that people perceive evolutionary researchers as trying to justify some particular morally-blameworthy behavior. The criticism, misguided as is it, tends to go something like this: “if [Behavior X] is the product of selection, then we can’t hold people accountable for what they do. Further, we can’t hope to do much to change people’s behavior, so why bother?”. As the old saying goes, if some behavior is the product of selection, we might as well just lie back and think of England. Since people don’t want to just accept these behaviors (and because they note, correctly, that behavior is modifiable), they go on to suggest that it’s the ultimate explanation must be wrong, rather than their assessment of its implications.

“Whatever; go ahead and kill people, I guess. I don’t care…”

The similarities between these criticisms of evolutionary hypotheses and the current study are particularly striking: if selection is responsible for people’s behavior, then the people themselves seem to be less responsible and in control of their behavior. Since people want to condemn others for this behavior, they have a strategic interest in downplaying the role of other causes in generating it. The fewer potential causes for a behavior there are the more easily moral condemnation can be targeted, and the more likely others are to join in the punishment. It doesn’t hurt that what ultimate explanations are invoked – patriarchy being the most common, in my experience – are also things that these people are interesting in morally condemning.

What’s interesting – and perhaps ironic – about the whole issue to me is that there are also the parallels to the debates people have about free will and moral responsibility. Let’s grant that the aforementioned criticisms were accurate and evolutionary explanations offer some kind of justification for things like murder, rape, and the like. It would seem, then, that such evolutionary explanations could similarly justify the moral condemnation and punishment of such behaviors just as well. Surely, there are adaptations we possess to avoid outcomes like being killed, and we also possess adaptations capable of condemning such behavior. We wouldn’t need to justify our condemnation of them anymore than people would need to justify their committing the act itself. If murder could be justified, then surely punishing murders could be as well.

References: Brickman, P., Ryan, K., & Wortman, C. (1975). Causal chains: Attribution of responsibility as a function of immediate and prior causes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32, 1060-1067.

Truth And Non-Consequences

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A topic I’ve been giving some thought to lately concerns the following question: are our moral judgments consequentialist or nonconsequentialist? As the words might suggest, the question concerns to what extent our moral judgments are based in the consequences that result from an action or the behavior per se that people engage in. We frequently see a healthy degree of inconsistency around the issue. Today I’d like to highlight a case I came across while rereading The Blank Slate, by Steven Pinker. Here’s part of what Steven had to say about whether any biological differences between groups could justify racism or sexism:

“So could discoveries in biology turn out to justify racism and sexism? Absolutely not! The case against bigotry is not a factual claim that humans are biologically indistinguishable. It is a moral stance that condemns judging an individual according to the average traits of certain groups to which the individual belongs.”

This seems like a reasonable statement, on the face of it. Differences between groups, on the whole, does not necessarily mean any differences on the same trait between any two given individuals. If a job calls for a certain height, in other words, we should not discriminate against women just because men tend to be taller. That average difference does not mean that many men and women are the not same height, or that the reverse relationship never holds.

Even if it generally does…

Nevertheless, there is something not entirely satisfying about Steven’s position, namely that people are not generally content to say “discrimination is just wrong“. People like to try and justify their stance that it is wrong, lest the proposition be taken to simply be an arbitrary statement with no more intrinsic appeal than “trimming your beard is just wrong“. Steven, like the rest us, thus tries to justify his moral stance on the issue of discrimination:

“Regardless of IQ or physical strength or any other trait that can vary, all humans can be assumed to have certain traits in common. No one likes being enslaved. No one likes being humiliated. No one likes being treated unfairly, that is, according to traits that the person cannot control. The revulsion we feel toward discrimination and slavery comes from a conviction that however much people vary on some traits, they do not vary on these.”

Here, Steven seems to be trying to have his nonconsequentialist cake and eat it too*. If the case against bigotry is “absolutely not” based on discoveries in biology or a claim that people are biologically indistinguishable, then it seems peculiar to reference biological facts concerning some universal traits to try and justify one’s stance. Would the discovery that certain people might dislike being treated unfairly to different degrees justify doing so, all else being equal? If it would, the first quoted idea is wrong; if it would not, the second statement doesn’t make much sense. What is also notable about these two quotes is that they are not cherry-picked from difference sections of the book; the second quote comes from the paragraph immediately following the first. I found their juxtaposition is rather striking.

With respect to the consequentialism debate, the fact that people try to justify their moral stances in the first place seems strange from a nonconsequentialist perspective: if a behavior is just wrong, regardless of the consequences, then it needs no explanation. or justification. Stealing, in that view, should be just wrong; it should matter who stole from who, or the value of the stolen goods. A child stealing a piece of candy from a corner store should be just as wrong as an adult stealing a TV from Best Buy; it shouldn’t matter that Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor, because stealing is wrong no matter the consequences and he should be condemned for it. Many people would, I imagine, agree that not all acts of theft are created equal though. On the topic of severity, many people would also agree that murder is generally worse than theft. Again, from a nonconsequentialist perspective, this should only be the case for arbitrary reasons, or at least reasons that have nothing at all to do with the fact that murder and theft have different consequences. I have tried to think of what those other, nonconsequentialist reasons might be, but I appear to suffer from a failure of imagination in that respect.

Might there be some findings that one might ostensibly support the notion that moral judgments are, at least in certain respects, nonconsequentialist? Yes; in fact there are. The first of these are a pair of related dilemmas known as the trolley and footbridge dilemmas. In both contexts one life can be sacrificed so that five lives are saved. In the former dilemma, a train heading towards five hikers can be diverted to a side track where there is only a single hiker; in the latter, a train heading towards five hikers can be stopped by pushing a person in front of it. In both cases the welfare outcomes are identical (one dead; five not), so it seems that if moral judgments only track welfare outcomes, there should be no difference between these scenarios. Yet there are: about 90% of people will support diverting the train, and only 10% tend to support pushing (Mikhail, 2007). This would certainly be a problem for any theory of morality that claimed the function of moral judgments more broadly is to make people better off on the whole. Moral judgments that fail to maximize welfare would be indicative of poor design for such a function.

Like how this bathroom was poorly optimized for personal comfort.

There are concerns with the idea that this finding supports moral nonconsequentialism, however: namely, the judgments of moral wrongness for pushing or redirecting are not definitively nonconsequentialist. People oppose pushing others in front of trains, I would imagine, because of the costs that pushing inflicts on the individual being pushed. If the dilemma was reworded to one in which acting on a person would not harm them but save the lives of others, you’d likely find very little opposition to it (i.e. pushing someone in front a train in order to send a signal to the driver, but with enough time so the pushed individual can exit the track and escape harm safely). This relationship holds in the trolley dilemma: when an empty side track is available, redirection to said track is almost universally preferred, as might be expected (Huebner & Hauser, 2011).  One who favors the nonconsequentialist account might suggest that such a manipulation is missing the point: after all, it’s not that pushing someone in front a train is immoral, but rather that killing someone is immoral. This rejoinder would seem to blur the issue, as it suggests, somewhat confusingly, that people might judge certain consequences non-consequentially. Intentionally shooting someone in the head, in this line of reasoning, would be wrong not because it results in death, but because killing is wrong; death just so happens to be a necessary consequence of killing. Either I’m missing some crucial detail or distinction seems unhelpful, so I won’t spend anymore time on it. 

Another matter of evidence touted as evidence of moral nonconsequentialism is the research done on moral dumbfounding (Haidt et al, 2000). In brief, research has found that when presented with cases where objective harms are absent, many people continue to insist that certain acts are wrong. The most well-known of these involves a bother-sister case of consensual incest on a single occasion. The sister is using birth control and the brother wears a condom; they keep their behavior a secret and feel closer because of it. Many subjects (about 80%) insisted that the act was wrong. When pressed for an explanation, many initially referenced harms that might occur as a result, those these harms were always countered by the context (no pregnancy, no emotional harm, no social stigma, etc). From this, it was concluded that conscious concerns for harm appear to represent post hoc justifications for an intuitive moral intuition.

One needs to be cautious in interpreting these results as evidence of moral nonconsequentialism, though, and a simple example would explain why. Imagine in that experiment what was being asked about was not whether the incest itself was wrong, but instead why the brother and sister pair had sex in the first place. Due to the dual contraceptive use, there was no probability of conception. Therefore, a similar interpretation might say, this shows that people are not consciously motivated to have sex because of children. While true enough that most acts of intercourse might not be motivated by the conscious desire for children, and while the part of the brain that’s talking might not have access to information concerning how other cognitive decision rules are enacted, it doesn’t mean the probability of conception plays no role shaping in the decision to engage in intercourse; despite what others have suggested, sexual pleasure per se is not adaptive. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the moral dumbfounding results are only particularly interesting because, most of the time, harm is expected to play a major role in our moral judgments. Pornography manages to “trick” our evolved sexual motivation systems by providing them with inputs similar to those that reliably correlate with the potential for conception; perhaps certain experimental designs – like the case of brother-sister incest – manage to similarly “trick” our evolved moral systems by providing them with inputs similar to those that reliably correlated with harm.

Or illusions; whatever your preferred term is.

In terms of making progress the consequentialism debate, it seems useful to do away with the idea that moral condemnation functions to increase welfare in general: not only are such claims clearly empirically falsified, they could only even be plausible in the realm of group selection, which is a topic we should have all stopped bothering with long ago. Just because moral judgments fail the test of group welfare improvement, however, it does not suddenly make the nonconsequentialist position tenable. There are more ways of being consequentialist than with respect to the total amount of welfare increase. It would be beneficial to turn our eye towards considering strategic welfare consequences that likely to accrue to actors, second parties, and third parties as a result of these behaviors. In fact, we should be able to use such considerations to predict contexts under which people should flip back and forth from consciously favoring consequentialist and nonconsequentialist kinds of moral reasoning. Evolution is a consequentialist process, and we should expect it to produce consequentialist mechanisms. To the extent we are not finding them, the problem might owe itself more to a failure of our expectations for the shape of these consequences than an actual nonconsequentialist mechanism.

References: Haidt, J., Bjorklund, F., & Murphy, S. (2000). Moral dumbfounding: When intuition finds no reason. Unpublished manuscript.

Huebner, B. & Hauser, M. (2011). Moral judgments about altruistic self-sacrifice: When philosophical and folk intuitions clash. Philosophical Psychology, 24, 73-94.

Mikhail, J. (2007). Universal moral grammar: Theory, evidence, and the future. Trends in Cognitive Science, 11, 143-151.

 

*Later, Steven writes:

“Acknowledging the naturalistic fallacy does not mean that facts about human nature are irrelevant to our choices…Acknowledging the naturalistic fallacy implies only that discoveries about human nature do not, by themselves, dictate our choices…”

I am certainly sympathetic to such arguments and, as usual, Steven’s views on the topic are more nuanced than the these quotes alone are capable of displaying. Steven does, in fact, suggest that all good justifications for moral stances concern harms and benefits. Those two particular quotes are only used to highlight the frequent inconsistencies between people’s stated views.

Towards Understanding The Action-Omission Distinction

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In moral psychology, one of the most well-known methods of parsing the reasons outcomes obtain involves the categories of actions and omissions. Actions are intuitively understandable: they are behaviors which bring about certain consequences directly. By contrast, omissions represent failures to act that result in certain consequences. As a quick example, a man who steals your wallet commits an act; a man who finds your lost wallet, keeps it for himself, and says nothing to you commits an omission. Though actions and omissions might result in precisely the same consequences (in that case, you end up with less money and the man ends up with more), they do not tend to be judged the same way. Specifically, actions tend to be judged as more morally wrong than comparable omissions and more deserving of punishment. While this state of affairs might seem perfectly normal to you or I, a deeper understanding of it requires us to take a step back and consider why it is, in fact, rather strange.

And so long as I omit the intellectual source of that strategy, I sound more creative.

From an evolutionary standpoint this action-omission distinction is strange for a clear reason: evolution is a consequentialist process. If I’m worse off because you stole from me or because you failed to return my wallet when you could have, I’m still worse off. Organisms should be expected to avoid costs, regardless of their origin. Importantly, costs need not only be conceptualized as what one might typically envision them to be, like inflictions of physical damage or stealing resources; they can also be understood as failures to deliver benefits. Consider a new mother: though the mother might not kill the child directly, if she fails to provision the infant with food, the infant will die all the same. From the perspective of the child, the failure of the mother to provide food could well be considered a cost inflicted by negligence. So, if someone could avoid harming me – or could provide me with some benefit -  but does not, why should it matter whether that outcome obtained because of an action or an omission?

The first part of that answer concerns a concept I mentioned in my last post: the welfare tradeoff ratio. Omissions are, generally speaking, less indicative of one’s underlying WTR than acts. Let’s consider the wallet example again: when a wallet is stolen, this act expresses that one is willing to make me suffer a cost so they can benefit; when the wallet is found and not returned, this represents a failure of an individual to deliver a benefit to me at some cost to themselves (the time required to track me down and forgoing the money in my wallet). While the former expresses a negative WTR, the latter simply fails to express an overtly-positive one. To the extent that moral punishment is designed to recalibrate WTRs, then, acts provide us with more accurate estimates of WTRs, and might subsequently tend to recruit those cognitive moral systems to a greater degree. Unfortunately, this explanation is not entirely fulfilling yet, owing to the consequentialist facts of the matter: it can be as good, from my perspective, to increase the WTR of the thief towards me as it is for me to increase the omitter’s WTR. Doing either means I would have more money than if I had not, which is a useful outcome. Costs and benefits, in this world, are tallied on the same score board.

The second part of the answer, then, needs to invoke the costs inherent in enacting this modification of WTRs through moral punishment. Just as it’s good for me if others hold a high WTR with respect me, it’s similarly good for others if I held a high WTR with respect to them. This means that people, unsurprisingly, are often less-than-accommodating when it comes to giving up their welfare for another without the proper persuasion; persuasion which happens to take time and energy to enact, and comes with certain risks of retaliation. Accordingly, we ought to expect mechanisms that function to enact moral condemnation strategically: when the costs of doing so are sufficiently low or the benefits to doing so are sufficiently high. After all, it’s the case that every living person right now could, in principle, increase their WTR towards you, but trying to morally condemn every living person for not doing so is unlikely to be a productive strategy. Not only would such a strategy result in the condemner undertaking many endeavors that are unlikely to be successful relative to the invested effort, but someone increasing their WTR towards you requires they lower their WTR towards someone else, and those someone elses would typically not be tickled by the prospect.

“You want my friend’s investment? Then come and take it, tough guy”

Given the costs involved in indiscriminate moral condemnation on non-maximal WTRs, we can focus the considerations of the action-omission distinction down to the following question: what is it about punishing omissions that tends to be less-productive than punishing actions? One possible explanation comes from DeScioli, Bruening, & Kurzban (2011). The trio posit that omissions are judged less harshly than actions because omissions tend to leave less overt evidence of wrongdoing. As punishment costs tend to decrease as the number of punishers increases, if third party punishers make use of evidence in deciding whether or not to become involved, then material evidence should make punishment easier to enact. Unfortunately, the design that the researchers used in their experiments does not appear to definitively speak to their hypothesis. Specifically, they found the effect they were looking for – namely, the reduction of the action-omission effect – but they only managed to do so via reframing an omission (failing to turn a train or stop a demolition) into an action (pressing a button that failed to turn a train or stop a demolition). It is not clear that such a manipulation solely varied the evidence available without fundamentally altering other morally-relevant factors.

There is another experiment that did manage to substantially reduce the action-omission effect without introducing such a confound, however: Haidt & Baron (1996). In this paper, the authors presented subjects with a story about a person selling his car. The seller knows that there is a 1/3 chance the car contains a manufacturing defect that will cause it to fall apart soon; a potential defect specific to the year the car was made. When a buyer inquires about the year of the manufacturing defect the seller either (a) lies about it or (b) doesn’t correct the buyer, who had suddenly exclaimed that they remember which year it was, though they were incorrect. When asked how wrong it was for the seller to do (or fail to do) what they did, the action-omission effect was observed when the buyer was not personally known to the seller. However, if the seller happened to be good friends with the buyer, the degree of the effect was reduced by almost half. In other words, when the buyer and seller were good friends, it mattered less whether the seller cheated the buyer through action or omission; both were deemed to be relatively unacceptable (and, interestingly, both were deemed to be more wrong overall as well). However, when the buyer and the seller were all but strangers, people rated the cheat via omission to be relatively less wrong than the action. Moral judgments in close relationships appeared to generally become more consequentialist.

If evidence was the deciding factor in the action-omission distinction, then the closeness of the relationship between the actor or omitted and the target should not be expected to have any effect on moral judgments (as the nature of the relationship does not itself generate any additional observable evidence). While this finding does not rule out the role of evidence in the action-omission distinction altogether, it does suggest that evidence concerns alone are insufficient for understanding the distinction. The nature of the relationship between the actor and victim is, however, predicted to have an effect when considering the WTR model. We expect our friends, especially our close friends, to have relatively high WTRs with respect to us; we might even expect them to go out of their way to suffer costs to help us if necessary. Indications that they are unwilling to do so – whether through action or omission – represent betrayals of that friendship. Further, when a friend behaves in a manner indicating a negative WTR towards us, the gulf between the expected (highly positive) and actual (negative) WTR is far greater than if a stranger behaved comparably (as we might expect a neutral starting point for strangers).

“I hate when girls lie online about having a torso!”

Though this analysis does not provide a complete explanation of the action/omission distinction by any means, it does point us in the right direction. It would seem that actions actively advertise WTRs, whereas omissions do not necessarily do likewise. Morally condemning all those who do not display positive WTRs per se does not make much sense, as the costs involved in doing so are so high as to preclude efficiency. Further, those who simply fail to express a positive WTR towards you might be less liable to inflict future costs, relative to those who express a negative one (i.e. the man who fails to return your wallet is not necessarily as liable to hurt you in the future as the one who directly steals from you). Selectively directing that condemnation at those who display negative appreciably low or negative WTRs, then, appears to be a more viable strategy: it could help direct condemnation towards where it’s liable to do the most good. This basic premise should hold especially given a close relationship with the perpetrator: such relationships entail more frequent contact and, accordingly, more opportunities for one’s WTR towards you to matter.

References: DeScioli, P., Bruening, R., & Kurzban. R. (2011). The omission effect in moral cognition: Toward a functional explanation. Evolution and Human Behavior, 32, 204-215.

Haidt, J. & Baron, J. (1996). Social roles and the moral judgment of acts and omissions. European Journal of Social Psychology, 26, 201-218.

When Giving To Disaster Victims Is Morally Wrong

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Here’s a curious story: Kim Kardashian recently decided to sell some personal items on eBay. She also mentioned that 10% of the proceeds would be donated to typhoon relief in the Philippines. On the face of it, there doesn’t appear to be anything morally objectionable going on here: Kim is selling items on eBay (not an immoral behavior) and then giving some of her money freely to charity (not immoral). Further, she made this information publicly available, so she’s not lying or being deceitful about how much money she intends to keep and how much she intends to give (also not immoral). If the coverage of the story and the comments about it are any indication, however, Kim has done something morally condemnable. To select a few choice quotes, Kim is, apparently “the centre of all evil in the universe“, is “insulting” and “degrading” people, is “greedy” and “vile“. She’s also a “horrible bitch” and anyone who takes part in the auction is “retarded“. One of the authors expressed the hope that ”…[the disaster victims] give you back your insulting “portion of the proceeds” which is a measly 10% back to you so you can choke on it“. Yikes.

Just shred the money, add some chicken and ranch, and you’re good to go.

Now one could wonder whether the victims of this disaster would actually care that some of the money being used to help them came from someone who only donated 10% of her eBay sales. Sure; I’d bet the victims would likely prefer to have more money donated from every donor (and non-donor), but I think just about everyone in the world would rather have more money than they currently do. Though I might be mistaken, I don’t think there are many victims who would insist that the money be sent back because there wasn’t enough of it. I would also guess that, in terms of the actual dollar amount provided, Kim’s auctions probably resulted in more giving than many or most other actual donors, and definitely more than anyone lambasting Kim who did not personally give (of which I assume there are many). Besides the elements of hypocrisy that are typical to disputes on this nature, there is one facet of this condemnation that really caught my attention: people are saying Kim is a bad person for doing this not because she did anything immoral per se, but because she failed to do something laudable to a great-enough degree. This is akin to suggesting someone should be punished for only holding a door open for five people, despite them not being required to hold it open for anyone.

Now one might suggest that what Kim did wasn’t actually praiseworthy because she made money off of it: Kim is self-interested and is using this tragedy to advance her personal interests, or so the argument goes. Perhaps Kim was banking on the idea that giving 10% to charity would result in people paying more for the items themselves and offsetting the cost. Even if that was the case, however, it still wouldn’t make what she was doing wrong for two reasons: first, people profit from selling good or services continuously, and, most of the time, people don’t deem those acts as morally wrong. For instance, I just bought groceries, but I didn’t feel a moral outrage that the store I bought them from profited off me. Secondly, it would seem that even if Kim did benefit by doing this, it’s a win-win situation for her and the typhoon victims. While mutual benefit make make gauging Kim’s altruistic intentions difficult, it would not make the act immoral per se. Furthermore, it’s not as if Kim’s charity auction coerced anyone into paying more than they otherwise would have; how much to pay would be the decision of the buyers, whom Kim could not directly control. If Kim ended up making more money off those than she otherwise would have, it’s only because other people willingly gave her more. So why are people attempting to morally condemn her? She wasn’t dishonest, she didn’t do anyone direct harm, she didn’t engage in any behavior that is typically deemed “immoral”, and the result of her actions were that people were better off. If one wants to locate the focal point of people’s moral outrage about Kim’s auction, then, it will involve digging a little deeper psychologically.

One promising avenue to begin our exploration of the matter is a chapter by Petersen, Sell, Tooby, & Cosmides (2010) that discussed our evolved intuitions about criminal justice. In it, they discuss the concept of a welfare tradeoff ratio (WTR). A WTR is, essentially, one person’s willingness to give up some amount of personal welfare to deliver some amount of welfare to another. For instance, if you were given the choice between $6 for yourself and $1 for someone else or $5 for both of you, choosing the latter would represent a higher WTR: you would be willing to forgo $1 so that another individual could have an additional $4. Obviously, it would be good for you if other people maintained a high WTR towards you, but others are not so willing to give up their own welfare without some persuasion. One way (among many) of persuading someone to put more stock in your welfare is to make yourself look like a good social investment. If benefiting you will benefit the giver in the long run – perhaps because you are currently experiencing the bad luck of a typhoon destroying your home, but you can return to being a productive associate in the future if you get help – then we should expect people to up-regulate their WTR towards you.

Some other pleas for assistance are less liable to net good payoffs.

The intuition that Kim’s moral detractors appear to be expressing, then, is not that Kim is wrong for displaying a mildly positive WTR per se, but that the WTR she displayed was not sufficiently high, given her relative wealth and the disaster victim’s relative need. This makes her appear to be a potentially-poor social investment, as she is relatively-unwilling to give up much of her own welfare to help others, even when they are in desperate need. Framing the discussion in this light is useful insomuch as it points us in the right direction, but it only gets us so far. We are left with the matter of figuring out why, for instance, most other people who were giving to charity were not condemned for not giving as much as they realistically could have, even if it meant them foregoing or giving up some personal items or pleasurable experiences themselves (i.e. “if you ate out less this week, or sold some of your clothing, you too could have contributed more to the aid efforts; you’re a greedy bitch for not doing so”).

It also doesn’t explain why anyone would suggest that it would have been better for Kim to have given nothing at all instead of what she did give. Though we see that kind of rejection of low offers in bargaining contexts – like ultimatum games – we typically don’t see as much of it in altruistic ones. This is because rejecting the money in bargaining contexts has an effect on the proposer’s payoff; in altruistic contexts, rejection has no negative effect on the giver and should effect their behavior far less. Even more curious, though: if the function of such moral condemnation is to increase one’s WTR towards others more generally, suggesting that Kim giving no amount would have been somehow better than what she did give is exceedingly counterproductive. If increasing WTRs was the primary function of moral condemnation, it seems like the more appropriate strategy would be to start with condemning those people – rich or not – who contributed nothing, rather than something (as those who give nothing, arguably, displayed a lower WTR towards the typhoon victims than Kim did). Despite that, I have yet to come across any articles berating specific individuals or groups for not giving at all; they might be out there, but they generated much less publicity if they were. We need something else to complete the account of why people seem to hate Kim Kardashian for not giving more.

Perhaps that something more is that the other people who did not donate were also not trying to suggest they were behaving altruistically; that is, they were not trying to reap the benefits of being known as an altruist, whereas Kim was, but only halfheartedly. This would mean Kim was sending a less-than-honest signal. A major complication with that account, however, is that Kim was, for all intents and purposes, acting altruistically; she could have been praised very little for what she did, rather than condemned. Thankfully, the condemnation towards Kim is not the only example of this we have to draw upon. These kinds of claims have been advanced before: when Tucker Max tried to donate $500,000 to planned parenthood, only to be rejected because some people didn’t want to associate with him. The arguments being made against accepting that sizable donation centered around (a) the notion that he was giving for selfish reasons and (b) that others would stop supporting planned parenthood if Tucker became associated with them. My guess is that something similar is at play here. Celebrities can be polarizing figures (for reasons which I won’t speculate about here), drawing overly hostile or positive reactions from people who are not affected by them personally. For whatever reason, there are many people who dislike Kim and would like to either avoid being associated with her altogether and/or see her fall from her current position in society. This no doubt has an effect on how they view her behavior. If Kim wasn’t Kim, there’s a good chance no one would care about this kind of charity-involving auction.

Much better; now giving only 10% is laudable.

As I mentioned in my last post, children appear to condone harming others with whom they do not share a common interest. The same behavior – in this case, giving 10% of your sales to help others – is likely to be judged substantially differently contingent on who precisely is enacting the behavior. Understanding why people express moral outrage at welfare-increasing behaviors requires a deeper examination of their personal strategic interests in the matter. We should expect that state of affairs for a simple reason: benefiting others more generally is not universally useful, in the evolutionary sense of the word. Sometimes it’s good for you if certain other people are worse off (though this argument is seldom made explicitly). Now, of course, that does mean that people will, at times, ostensibly advocate for helping a group of needy people, but then shun help, even substantial amounts of help, when it comes from the “wrong” sources. They likely do what they do because such condemnation will either harm those “wrong” sources directly or because allowing the association could harm the condemner in some way. Yes; that does mean the behavior of these condemners has a self-interested component; the very thing they criticized Kim for. Without considerations of these strategic, self-interested motivations, we’d be at a loss for understanding why giving to typhoon victims is sometimes morally wrong.

References: Petersen, M.B., Sell, A., Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2010). Evolutionary psychology and criminal justice: A recalibration theory of punishment and reconciliation. In Human Morality & Sociality: Evolutionary & Comparative Perspectives, edited by Hogh-Oleson, H., Palgrace MacMillian, New York.

What Predicts Religiosity: Cooperation Or Sex?

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When trying to explain the evolutionary function of religious belief, there’s a popular story that goes something like this: individuals who believe in a deity that monitors our behavior and punishes or rewards us accordingly might be less likely transgress against others. In other words, religious beliefs function to makes people unusually cooperative. There are two big conceptual problems with such a suggestion: the first is that, to the extent that these rewards and punishments occur after death (heaven, hell, or some form of reincarnation as a “lower” animal, for instance), they would have no impact on reproductive fitness in the current world. With no impact on reproduction, no selection for such beliefs would be possible, even were they true. The second major problem is that in the event that such beliefs are false, they would not lead to better fitness outcomes. This is due to the simple fact that incorrect representations of our world do not generally tend to lead to better decisions and outcomes than accurate representations. For example, if you believe, incorrectly, that you can win a fight you actually cannot, you’re liable to suffer the costs of being beaten up; conversely, if you incorrectly believe you cannot win a fight you actually can, you might back down too soon and miss out on some resource. False beliefs don’t often help you make good decisions.

“I don’t care what you believe, R. Kelly; there’s no way this will end well”

So if one believes they being constantly observed by an agent that will punish them for behaving selfishly and that belief happens to be wrong, they will tend to make worse decisions, from a reproductive fitness standpoint, than an individual without such beliefs. On top of those conceptual problems, there is now an even larger problem for the religion-encouraging-cooperation idea: a massive data set doesn’t really support it. When I say massive, I do mean massive: the data set examined by Weeden & Kurzban (2013) comprised approximately 300,000 people from all across of the globe. Of interest from the data set were 14 questions relating to religious behavior (such as the belief in God and frequency of attendance at religious services), 13 questions relating to cooperative morals (like avoiding paying a fare on public transport and lying in one’s own interests), and 7 questions relating to sexual morals (such as the acceptability of causal sex or prostitution). The analysis concerned how well the latter two variable sets uniquely predicted the former one.

When considered in isolation in a regression analysis, the cooperative morals were slightly predictive of the variability in religious beliefs: the standardized beta values for the cooperative variables ranged from a low of 0.034 to a high of 0.104. So a one standard deviation increase in cooperative morals predicted, approximately, one-twentieth of a standard deviation increase in religious behave. On the other hand, the sexual morality questions did substantially better: the standardized betas there ranged from a low of 0.143 to a high of 0.38. Considering these variables in isolation only gives us so much of the picture, however, and the case got even bleaker for the cooperative variables once they were entered into the regression model at the same time as the sexual ones. While the betas on the sexual variables remained relatively unchanged (if anything, they got a little higher, ranging from 0.144 to 0.392) the betas on the cooperative variables dropped substantially, often into the negatives (ranging from -0.045 to 0.13). In non-statistical terms, this means that the more one endorsed more conservative sexual morals, the more religious one tended to be; the more one endorsed cooperative morals, the less religious one tended to be, though this latter tendency was very slight.

This evidence appears to directly contradict the cooperative account: religious beliefs don’t seem to result in more cooperative behaviors or moral stances (if anything, it results slightly fewer of them once you take sex into account). Rather than dealing with loving their neighbor, religious beliefs appeared to deal more with who and how their neighbor loved. This connection between religious beliefs and sexual morals, while consistently positive across all regions sampled, did vary in strength from place to place, being about four-times stronger in wealthy areas, compared to poorer ones. The reasons for this are not discussed at any length within the paper itself and I don’t feel I have anything to add on that point which wouldn’t be purely speculative.

“My stance on speculation stated, let’s speculate about something else…”

This leaves open the question of why religious beliefs would be associated with a more-monogamous mating style in particular. After all, it seem plausible that a community of people relatively interested in promoting a more long-term mating strategy and condemning short-term strategies need not come with the prerequisite of believing in a deity. People apparently don’t need a deity to condemn people for lying, stealing, or killing, so what would make sexual strategy any different? Perhaps the fact that sexual morals show substantially more variation that morals regarding, say, killing. Here’s what Weeden & Kurzban (2013) suggest:

We view expressed religious beliefs as potentially serving a number of functions, including not just the guidance of believers’ own behaviors, but as markers of group affiliation or as part of self-presentational efforts to claim higher authority or deflect the attribution of self-interested motives when it comes to imposing contested moral restrictions on those outside of the religious group. (p.2, emphasis mine)

As for whether or not belief in a deity might serve as a group marker, well, it certainly seems to be a potential candidate. Of course, so is pretty much anything else, from style of dress, to musical taste, to tattoos or other ornaments. In terms of displaying group membership, belief in God doesn’t seem particularly special compared to any other candidate. Perhaps belief in God simply ended up being the most common ornament of choice for groups of people who, among other things, wanted to restrict the sexuality of others. Such an argument would need to account for the fact that belief in God and sexual morals seem to correlate in groups all over the world, meaning they all stumbled upon that marker independently time and again (unlikely), that such a marker has a common origin in a time before humans began to migrate over the globe (possible, but hard to confirm), or posit some third option. In any case, while belief in God might serve such a group-marking function, it doesn’t seem to explain the connection with sexuality per se.

The other posited function – of involving a higher moral authority – raises some additional questions: First, if the long-term maters are adopting beliefs in God so as to try and speak from a position of higher (or impartial) authority, this raises the question of why other parties, presumably ones who don’t share such a belief, would be persuaded by that claim in anyway. Were I to advance the claim that I was speaking on behalf of God, I get the distinct sense that other people would dismiss my claims in most cases. Though I might be benefited if they believed me, I would also be benefited if people just started handing me money; that there doesn’t seem to be a benefit for other parties in doing these things, however, suggests to me that I shouldn’t expect such treatment. Unless people already believe in said higher power, claiming impartiality in its name doesn’t seem like it should tread much persuasive water.

Second, even were we to grant that such statements would be believed and have the desired effect, why wouldn’t the more promiscuous maters also adopt a belief in a deity that just so happens to smile on, or at least not care about, promiscuous mating? Even if we grant the more promiscuous individuals were not trying to condemn people for being monogamous (and so have no self-interested motives to deflect), having a deity on your side seems like a pretty reasonable way to strengthen your defense against people trying to condemn your mating style. At the very least, it would seem to weaken the moralizer’s offensive abilities. Now perhaps that’s along the lines of what atheism represents; rather than suggesting that there is a separate deity that likes what one prefers, people might simply suggest there is no deity in order to remove some of the moral force from the argument. Without a deity, one could not deflect the self-interest argument as readily. This, however, again returns us to the previous point: unless there’s some reason to assume that third parties would impressed by the claims of a God initially, it’s questionable as to whether such claims would carry any force that needed to be undermined.

Some gods are a bit more lax about the whole “infidelity” thing.

Of course, it is possible that such beliefs are just byproducts of something else that ties in with sexual strategy. Unfortunately, byproduct claims don’t tend to make much in the way of textured predictions as for what design features we ought to expect to find, so that suggestion, while plausible, doesn’t appear to lend itself to much empirical analysis. Though this leaves us without a great of satisfaction in explaining why religious belief and regulation of sexuality appear to be linked, it does provide us with the knowledge that religious belief does not primarily seem to concern itself with cooperation more generally. Whatever the function, or lack thereof, of religious belief, it is unlikely to be in promoting morality in general.

References: Weeden, J., & Kurzban, R. (2013). What predict religiosity? A multinational analysis of reproductive and cooperative morals. Evolution and Human Behavior (34), 440-445

A Curious Case Of Vegan Moral Hypocrisy

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I’ve decided to take one of my always-fun breaks from discussing strictly academic matters to instead examine a case of moral hypocrisy I came across recently involving a vegan: one Piper Hoffman, over at Our Hen House. Piper, as you can no doubt guess, frowns upon at least certain aspects of the lifestyles of almost every American (and probably most people in the world as well). In her words, most of us are, “arrogant flesh eaters“, who are condemnable moral hypocrites for both tending to do things like love our pets and eat other animals. There are so many interesting ideas found in that sentence that it’s hard to know where to start. First is the matter of why people tend to nurture members of other species in a manner resembling the way we nurture our own children. There’s also the matter of why someone like Piper would adopt a moral stance that involves protecting non-human animals. Sure; such a motivation might be intuitively understood when it happens to be people doing it, but the same cannot be said of non-human species. That is, it would appear to be particularly strange if you found, say, a lion that simply refused to eat meat on moral grounds.

She might be a flesh-eater, but at least she’s not all arrogant about it.

The third thing I find interesting about Piper’s particular moral stance is that it’s severely unpopular: less than 1% of the US population would identify as being a vegan and, in practice, even self-reported vegetarians were more likely to have eaten meat in the last 24 hours than to have not done so. Now while diet might often be the primary focus when people think of the word ‘vegan’, Piper assures us that’s there’s more to being a vegan than what you put in your mouth. Here is Piper’s preferred definition:

“Veganism is a way of living which excludes all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, the animal kingdom, and includes a reverence for life. It applies to the practice of living on the products of the plant kingdom to the exclusion of flesh, fish, fowl, eggs, honey, animal milk and its derivatives, and encourages the use of alternatives for all commodities derived wholly or in part from animals.”

Accordingly, not only should vegans avoid eating animal-related foods, they also should also not do things like wear fur, leather, wool or silk, as all involve the suffering or exploitation of the animal kingdom. Bear the word “silk” in mind, as we’ll be returning to it shortly.

Taken together, what emerges is the following picture: a member of species X has begun to adopt all sorts of personally-costly behaviors (like avoiding certain types of food or tools) in order to attempt to avoid reducing the welfare of pretty much any other living organisms, irrespective of their identity. Further still, that member of species X is not content with just personally behaving in such a manner: she has also taken it upon herself to attempt to try and regulate the behavior of others around her to do similarly, morally condemning them if they do not. That latter factor is especially curious, given that most other members of her species are not so inclined. This means her moral stance could potentially threaten otherwise-valuable social ties, and is unlikely to receive the broad social support capable of reducing the costs inherent in moral condemnation. I would like to stress again how absolutely bizarre such behavior would seem to be if we observed it in pretty much any other species.

Without venturing a tentative explanation for what cognitive systems might be generating such stances at the present time, I would like to consider another post Piper made on October 21st of this year. While in her apartment, Piper heard some strange sounds and, upon investigation, discovered that a colony of ants had taken over her bedroom. Being a vegan who avoids all form of cruelty and exploitation of animals, Piper did what one might expect from one who displays a reverence for life: she bought some canisters of insect poison, personally gassed thousands of the ants herself, then called in professionals to finish the job and kill the rest of them that were living in the walls. Now one might, as Piper did, suggest that it’s unclear as to whether insects feel pain; perhaps they do, and perhaps they don’t. What is clear, however, is that Piper previously stated a moral rule against wearing products made from silk. Apparently the silk production is exploitative in a way mass murder is not. In any case, the comments on Piper’s blog are what one might expect from a vegan crowd who condemns cruelty and reveres life: unanimous agreement that mass killing was an appropriate response because, after all, people, even vegans, aren’t perfect.

“If it’s any consolation, I felt bad afterwards. I mean, c’mon; no one’s perfect”

This situation raises plenty of debatable and valuable questions. One is the matter of the hypocrisy itself: why didn’t Piper’s conscience stop her from acting? Another is the matter of those who commented on the article: why was Piper supported by other (presumed) vegans, rather than condemned for a clear act of selfish cruelty? A third is that it is clear Piper did not reduce or prevent animal suffering in anyway in the story, so is she, and the vegan code of conduct for generally, truly designed/attempting to reduce suffering per se? If the answer to the last question is “yes”, then one might ask whether or not the vegan lifestyle encourages people to engage in the proper behaviors capable of doing more to reduce suffering. While these are worthwhile questions that can shed light on all sorts of curious aspects of human psychology, I would like to focus on the last point.

Consider the following proposition: humans should exterminate all carnivorous species. This act might seem reasonable from a standpoint of reducing suffering. Why? By their very nature, carnivorous species require that other animals suffer and die so the carnivore can continue living. Since these murder-hungry species are unlikely to respond affirmatively to our polite requests that they kindly stop killing things, we could stop them from doing so, now and forever. Provided one wishes to reduce the suffering in the world, then, there are really only three answers to the question regarding whether we should exterminate all meat-eating species: “Yes”, because they cause more suffering than they offset (however that’s measured); “No”, because they offset more suffering than they cause; or “I don’t know” because we can’t calculate such things for sure.

Though I would find either of the first two answers acceptable from a consistency perspective, I have yet to find anyone who advocated for either of those options. What I have come across are people who posit the third answer with some frequency. I will of course grant that such things are incredibly difficult to calculate, especially with a high degree of accurately, but this clearly do not pose a problem in all cases. Refusing to wear silk clothes, for instance, seemed to be easy enough for Piper to calculate; it’s morally wrong because it involved animal suffering and/or exploitation. Similarly, I imagine most of us would not refrain from judging someone who slowly tortured our pet dog because we can’t be 100% sure that their actions were, on the whole, causing more suffering than they offset. If we cannot calculate welfare tradeoffs in situations like these with some certainty, then any argument for veganism built on the foundation of reducing animal suffering crumbles, as such a goal would be completely ineffective in guiding our actions.

Still having trouble calculating welfare impacts?

All the previous examples do is make people confront a simple fact: they’re often not all that interested in actually “minimizing suffering“. While it sounds like a noble goal – since most people don’t like suffering in the abstract – it’s too broadly phrased to be of any use. This should be expected for a number of reasons, namely that “reducing suffering per se” is a biologically-implausible function for any cognitive mechanism and, even if reducing suffering is the proximate goal in question, there’s pretty much always something else one could do to reduce it. Despite the latter fact, many people, like Piper, effectively give up on the idea once it becomes too much of a personal burden; they’re interested in reducing suffering, just so long as it’s not terribly inconvenient. But if people are not interested in minimizing suffering per se, what is actually motivating that stated interest? Presumably, it has something to do with the signal one sends by taking such moral a stance. I won’t discuss the precise nature of that signal at the present time, but feel free to offer speculations in the comments section.

Having Their Cake And Eating It Too

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Humans are a remarkably cooperative bunch of organisms. This is a remarkable fact because cooperation can open the door wide to all manner of costly exploitation. While it can be a profitable strategy for all involved parties, cooperation requires a certain degree of vigilance and, at times, the credible threat of punishment in order to maintain its existence. Figuring out how people manage to solve these cooperative problems has provided us with no shortage of research and theorizing, some of which is altogether more plausible than the rest. Though I haven’t quite figured out the appeal yet, there are many thoughtful people who favor the group selection accounts for explaining why people cooperate. They suggest that people will often cooperate in spite of its personal fitness costs because it serves to better the overall condition of the group to which they belong. While there haven’t been any useful predictions that appear to have fallen out of such a model, there are those who are fairly certain it can at least account for some known, but ostensibly strange findings.

That is a rather strange finding you got there. Thanks, Goodwill.

One human trait purported to require a group selection explanation is altruistic punishment and cooperation, especially in one-shot anonymous economic games. The basic logic goes as follows: in a prisoner’s dilemma game, so long as that game is a non-repeated event, there is really only one strategy, and that’s defection. This is because if you defect when your partner defects, you’re better off than if you cooperated; if you partner cooperated, on the other hand, you’re still better off if you defect. Economists might thus call the strategy of “always defect” to be a “rational” one. Further, punishing a defector in such conditions is similarly considered irrational behavior, as it only results in a lower payment for the punisher than they would have otherwise had. As we know from decades of research using these games, however, people don’t always behave “rationally”: sometimes they’ll cooperate with other people they’re playing with, and sometimes they’ll give up some of their own payment in order to punish someone who has either wronged them or, more importantly, wronged stranger. This pattern of behavior – paying to be nice to people who are nice, and paying to punish those who are not – has been dubbed “strong reciprocity”. (Fehr, Fischbacher, & Gachter, 2002)

The general raison d’etre of strong reciprocity seems to be that groups of people which had lots of individuals playing that strategy managed to out-compete other groups of people without them. Even though strong reciprocity is costly on the individual level, the society at large reaps larger overall benefits, as cooperation has the highest overall payoff, relative to any kind of defection. Strong reciprocity, then, helps to force cooperation by altering the costs and benefits to cooperation and defection on the individual level. There is a certain kind of unfairness inherent in this argument, though; a conceptual hypocrisy that can be summed up by the ever-popular phrase, “having one’s cake and eating it too”. To consider why, we need to understand the reason people engage in punishment in the first place. The likely, possibly-obvious candidate explanation just advanced is that punishment serves a deterrence function: by inflicting costs on those who engage in the punished behavior, those who engage in the behavior fail to benefit from it and thus stop behaving in that manner. This function, however, rests on a seemingly innocuous assumption: actors estimate the costs and benefits to acting, and only act when the expected benefits are sufficiently large, relative to the costs.

The conceptual hypocrisy is that this kind of cost-benefit estimation is something that strong reciprocators are thought to not to engage in. Specifically, they are punishing and cooperating regardless of the personal costs involved. We might say that a strong reciprocator’s behavior is inflexible with respect to their own payments. This example is a bit like playing the game of “chicken”, where two cars face each other from a distance and start driving at one another in a straight line. The first drive to turn away loses the match. However, if both cars continue on their path, the end result is a much greater cost to both drivers than is suffered if either one turns. If a player in this game was to adopt an inflexible strategy, then, by doing something like disabling their car’s ability to steer, they can force the other player to make a certain choice. Faced with a driver who cannot turn, you really only have one choice to make: continue going straight and suffer a huge cost, or turn and suffer a smaller one. If you’re a “rational” being, then, you can be beaten by an “irrational” strategy.

Flawless victory. Fatality.

So what would be the outcome if other individuals started playing the ever-present “always defect” strategy in a similarly inflexible fashion? We’ll call those people “strong defectors” for the sake of contrast. No matter what their partner does in these interactions, the strong defectors will always play defect, regardless of the personal costs and benefits. By doing so, these strong defectors might manage to place themselves beyond the reach of punishment from strong reciprocators. Why? Well, any amount of costly punishment directed towards a strong defector would be a net fitness loss from the group’s perspective, as costly punishment is a fitness-reducing behavior: it reduces the fitness of the person engaging in it (in the form of whatever cost they suffer to deliver the punishment) and it reduces the fitness of the target of the punishment. Further, the costs to punishing the defectors could have been directed towards benefiting other people instead – which are net fitness gains for the group – so there are opportunity costs to engaging in punishment as well. These fitness costs would need to be made up for elsewhere, from the group selection perspective.

The problem is that, because the strong defectors are playing an inflexible strategy, the costs cannot be made up for elsewhere; no behavioral change can be affected. Extending this game of chicken analogy to the group level, let’s say that turning away is the “cooperative” option, and dilemmas like these were at least fairly regular. They might not have involved cars, but they did involve a similar kind of payoff matrix: there’s only one benefit available, but there are potential costs in attempting to achieve it. Keeping in line with the metaphor, it would be in the interests of the larger population if no one crashed. It follows that between-group selective pressures favor turning every time, since the costs are guaranteed to be smaller for the wider population, but the sum of the benefits don’t change; only who achieves them does. In order to force the cooperative option, a strong reciprocator might disable their ability to turn so as it alters the cost and benefits to others.

The strong reciprocators shouldn’t be expected to be unaffected by costs and benefits, however; they ought to be affected by such considerations, just on the group level, rather than the individual one. Their strategy should be just as “rational” as any others, just with regard to a different variable. Accordingly, it can be beaten by other seemingly irrational strategies – like strong defection – that can’t be affected by the threats of costs. Strong defectors which refuse to turn will either force a behavioral change in the strong reciprocators or result in many serious crashes. In either case, the strong reciprocator strategy doesn’t seem to lead to benefits in that regard.

Now perhaps this example sounds a bit flawed. Specifically, one might wonder how appreciable portions of the population might come to develop an inflexible “always defect” strategy in the first place. This is because the strategy appears to be costly to maintain at times: there are benefits to cooperation and being able to alter one’s behavior in response to costs imposed through punishment, and people would be expected to be selected to achieve and avoid them, respectively. On top of that, there is also the distinct concern that repeated attempts at defection or exploitation can result in punishment severe enough to kill the defector. In other words, it seems that there are certain contexts in which strong defectors would be at a selective disadvantage, becoming less prevalent in the population over time. Indeed, such a criticism would be very reasonable, and that’s precisely the because the always defect population behaves without regard to their personal payoff. Of course, such a criticism applies in just as much force to the strong reciprocators, and that’s the entire point: using a limited budget to affect the lives of others regardless of its effects on you isn’t the best way to make the most money.

The interest on “making it rain” doesn’t compete with an IRA.

The idea of strong defectors seems perverse precisely because they act without regard to what we might consider their own rational interests. Were we to replace “rational” with “fitness”, the evolutionary disadvantage to a strategy that functions as if behaving in such a manner seems remarkably clear. The point is that the idea of a strong reciprocator type of strategy should be just as perverse. Those who attempt to put forth a strong reciprocator type of strategy as plausible account for cooperation and punishment attempt to create a context that allows them to have their irrational-agent cake and eat it as well: strong reciprocators need not behave within their fitness interests, but all the other agents are expected to. This assumption needs to be at least implicit within the models, or else they make no sense. They don’t seem to make very much sense in general, though, so perhaps that assumption is the least of their problems.

References: Fehr, E., Fischbacher, U., & Gachter, S. (2002). Strong reciprocity, human cooperation, and the enforcement of social norms. Human Nature, 13, 1-25 DOI: 10.1007/s12110-002-1012-7