EVILICIOUS: Cruelty = Desire + Denial (21 page)

The take home message is that if you are born male, endowed with certain genetic variants such as the low activity form of MAOA, and experience physical and psychological abuse by your parents, the odds of delinquency are frighteningly high. That’s the bad news. The good news is that if you are born male, have the high activity variant of the MAOA gene, and experience physical and psychological abuse by your parents, you are vaccinated by nature against the harms of your unfortunate nurture. The problem, of course, is that you have no say over which endowment you get, nor over the kinds of parents you live with.

One of the reasons I have worked through this case study of genetic constraints and environmental sculpting is to provide an antidote to the often polarized views that have dominated much of the historical and psychological literatures on evil
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. Many of the earliest, and most famous psychological experiments were related in one way or another to the philosopher Hannah Arendt’s thoughts about the Nazi commander Adolf Eichmann and the fact that good people are capable of horrific things: the banality of evil. Based on Arendt’s description, Eichmann was not a maniacal monster who desired the annihilation of all Jews and relished the idea of their extermination. Rather, he was merely a cog in the Nazi machine, following orders. On this view, behind every average Joe is a person equipped with an engine of malice. Banality is the veil of evil. Following this line of thinking, the psychologist Stanley Milgram famously showed that normal people were capable of shocking innocent others when an authority figure told them to do so; of course, there were no shocks, but the subjects believed they were real. Similarly, the psychologists Solomon Asch and Philip Zimbardo showed that normal people followed group attitudes and instructions, no reflection, no critical thinking, no concern about the consequences of their actions. In Zimbardo’s study — the well known Stanford prison experiments — run of the mill undergraduates playing the role of prison guards turned into little dictators without any instruction, mentally and physically abusing other run of the mill undergraduates playing the role of prisoners. Together, these studies seemed to support a blank slate view of the mind, a tablet waiting for inscription by the local culture, with no constraints on the written matter. Add authority to conformity and you have a society that will relish gratuitous cruelty.

A closer look at Eichmann, as well as details of the studies by Milgram and Zimbardo, reveals a different story. Arendt ignored important details of Eichmann’s life and comments. Eichmann actively sought ways to carry out the Final Solution of exterminating the Jews, often by ignoring orders from his superiors. Prior to his trial, he expressed only one regret: that he had not destroyed more Jews. This is hardly the voice of banality. In parallel, and as the psychologists Haslam and Reicher present in several important papers, there was far greater variation in how subjects responded to authority and conformity. Many subjects in both the Milgram and Zimbardo studies refused to follow the orders or rules of the game. Those who refused tended to identify more with the victim and less with the authority figure or ideology. This suggests important individual differences in the capacity to experience empathy and compassion for another. These differences directly impact whether an individual will harm another and what, if anything, they feel while doing it.

Studies by the cognitive neuroscientist Esse Viding provide an insightful entry into the source of these individual differences, showing that by the pre-school years, some children have a diminished capacity for empathy, expressing a deeply callous and unemotional character. These children exhibit severe conduct problems, especially violence. These children lack self-control, remorse and an awareness of others’ distress. They are cold, heartless kids — highly similar to the adult form of psychopathy. If they have a twin, they are more likely to share this callous-unemotional personality than two unrelated children, revealing the trademark of a powerful genetic engine. More boys than girls fall on the high end of this callous-unemotional scale — where high translates to colder and more callous. Those who score highest on the scale engage in more direct physical bullying than those who score lower. High scorers lack the skills to modulate their behavior following direct or anticipated punishment. These individuals also show reduced activity in the amygdala, a part of the brain that is critically involved in regulating emotion, especially the assignment of a positive or negative value on our actions and experiences. These individual differences persist into adulthood. These are the kind of individual differences that can explain why some followed Milgram and Zimbardo’s instructions to perfection, while others resisted, exerting self-control.

The sweetness of control

When humans and other animals travel the road to excess, whether for food consumption, power, sex, or violence, it is often because a history of losing self-control turned into an addictive habit of giving into temptation. What causes us to lose our sense of moderation, allow our mental brakes to slip, and give in to temptation? What causes our preferences to inconsistently and irrationally shift over time, allowing seductive offerings to win? If you are the social psychologist Roy Baumeister who has contributed fundamental insights into the nature of evil, the answer is simple: Sugar. Want it. Love it. Need it.
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When we work hard, focusing on a difficult problem or trying to figure out the best decision, exhaustion strikes. Part of our exhaustion seems to come from depleting a critical resource: sugar, or more precisely, glucose. When the availability of this resource diminishes, we also lose self-control. This is why, as discussed by Baumeister and Tierney in their book
Willpower
, the loss of self-control has a cycle that follows the time of day, with the greatest losses occurring late rather than early: diet breakers are more likely to pig out in the evening than early in the morning; shoppers are more likely to buy impulsively as the day moves on; impulsive crimes and relapses of addiction are evening affairs; judges are more likely to dole out punishment at the end of a day in court than when they start a new day. Dozens of experiments show that if you have to exert self-control in one context it taxes your capacity to exert self-control in another. For example, if you ask subjects to avoid laughing while watching a comedy routine, avoid thinking about a white bear, or avoid eating chocolates now to have radishes later, these same subjects will squeeze a hand grip for a shorter period of time than subjects who never contended with the various self-control tasks. When you deplete your personal resources, you lose your grip, opening yourself up to binge eating, sexual promiscuity, drug relapses, and unnecessary violence.

How do we know that glucose plays this kind of role? If you give people a milkshake with real sugar before they have to take a hard test involving self-control, they do better than if you give them a milkshake with an artificial sweetener. If you first make people take a test that taxes their self-control and causes their glucose to drop, they do worse on a subsequent test, including the hand grip squeezing test. In an extraordinary series of experiments and observations, the psychologist Nathan DeWall found that subjects who drank lemonade with glucose were less likely to respond aggressively to an insult than subjects who drank lemonade with artificial sweetener; individuals with diabetes – who have difficulty regulating blood glucose, and thus have less of it — reported higher levels of aggression on a questionnaire than non-diabetics; within the United States, those states with higher numbers of diabetics showed higher crime rates; and countries with a higher frequency of a genetic disorder that lowers glucose levels showed higher killing rates both in and out of war.

To accept DeWall’s striking results, it is necessary to accept one connection between glucose and self-control and a second between self-control and aggression:

That aggression often follows from a loss of control is backed up by considerable evidence, including clinical studies that link lack of inhibition in psychopaths to extreme violence. Also of interest is the fact that impulsive aggression is more likely to arise when individuals are drunk than sober. Alcohol, as we all know, lowers our inhibitions, but also lowers glucose in both the brain and body. Though scientists such as Baumeister and DeWall have not yet worked out in detail how glucose is used or replenished in the context of self-control
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, there are far too many studies using different methods and subjects to ignore this relationship. Minimally, these studies suggest that we should think about self-control like a resource, something that can be used up and replenished. When it is depleted, actions that are normally suppressed are released, resulting in addictions, over-eating, and violence.

One of the interesting implications of DeWall’s work for understanding the variation in our species’ potential for harm, is that individual differences in glucose availability are coupled with individual differences in self-control which are, as noted, linked to differences in violence. Diabetes shows a high level of heritability, meaning that some individuals are more likely to develop this problem than others simply based on what genes they received from their parents. The prevalence of diabetes is on the rise in many countries, with some estimates suggesting that by 2025, there will be 325,000,000 diabetics world wide, more than double current estimates. The genetic disorder that lowers glucose levels arises because of a deficiency in a key enzyme, glucose-6-phosphate-dehydrogenase. This is one of the most common enzyme deficiencies in the world, affecting over 400,000,000 people, and in many cases, triggered by the consumption of fava beans. As with variation in the frequency of MAOA, so too can variation in this glucose-related gene be subject to selection pressures, especially given its link to violence. Once again, we see nature and nurture contributing to individual variation and cultural differences in our capacity to harm others.

Together, these observations of glucose-related disorders speak to a disconcerting reality: we are born with inherent differences in the availability of key resources guiding self-restraint. Some of us start off life better equipped to control our frustrations, wait for future gains, and moderate our temper. These early differences can have long lasting and disastrous effects later in life, a point supported by a famous study that began forty years ago with children sitting in front of a marshmallow.

The social psychologist Walter Mischel recruited four year old boys and girls to his laboratory and sat them down at a table with only two objects, a marshmallow and a bell. He then told each child that he was going to leave the room. If they wanted to eat the marshmallow, they only had to ring the bell. But, as Mischel informed them, if they waited for his return, he would bring them more marshmallows. Mischel took out his stopwatch and recorded how long each child waited before ringing the bell.

Some children rang the bell almost immediately, leaving Mischel no time to leave the room. Others waited. This isn’t surprising. Some children are impulsive, others are patient, and these personality differences are apparent early in life. What is surprising is that these early appearing personality differences held steadfast, impacting later life decisions and actions. The more impatient types were more likely to be involved in juvenile delinquency, have poor grades, abuse drugs, get divorced, and lose their jobs. For women who developed eating disorders, those who were more patient as children were more likely to develop anorexia, whereas those who were more impulsive were more likely to develop bulimia. When the developmental psychologist B.J. Casey put these now 40-somethings inside a brain scanner, the patient ones showed stronger activation in the prefrontal areas of the brain when viewing happy and fearful faces, revealing stronger self-control over their feelings. In contrast, when the impatient ones viewed the same stimuli, not only was there a weaker response in the prefrontal region but a stronger response in the ventral striatum when viewing happy faces. The striatum, as noted earlier, is involved in the experience of reward. For the impatient types, seeing something positive is like eating candy, something that is hard to ignore. The patient types regulate this feeling, transforming the heat of the moment into a cooler experience. The impatient types are overwhelmed by this feeling, giving into temptation. This work adds to the genetic evidence reviewed earlier, showcasing both the importance of individual differences in self-control, the stability of these differences, and their predictive power in explaining our health, wealth, and proclivities for violence.

Mischel’s work suggests yet another way in which we start out life with different potentials to cause excessive harm. From giving in quickly to a marshmallow, we may also give in quickly to causing excessive pain and suffering.

Individual differences in glucose metabolism, together with relative differences in brain activity, lead to stable differences in self-control. But there’s more, both luck of the draw genetic effects and clinical distortions. Recall that the low expressing form of the MAOA gene results in lower levels of serotonin which, in turn, leverages less control over aggressive impulses. There is another gene — SLC6A4 — that also comes in two forms and regulates the level of serotonin. The short form of this gene gives you less serotonin, is commonly found in pathological gamblers and psychopaths — two heavily male-biased disorders that are associated with impoverished impulse control. Psychopaths also have relatively smaller frontal lobes, especially within a region that has a high density of serotonin neurons. Psychopathy is joined by a family of impulse control disorders that also implicate dysfunction of the serotonin system, including kleptomania (stealing), pyromania (burning), trichotillomania (hair pulling), and oniomania (shopping). Like glucose, serotonin plays a lead role in our capacity for self-control. When serotonin is sidelined from the performance, any number of impulsivity problems may emerge.