How Many Friends Does One Person Need? (19 page)

But the real issue is how he compared against his main rival, the Democrat Stephen Douglas. We don’t know how symmetrical Douglas was compared to Lincoln – he could hardly have been less symmetrical, one imagines. But the one thing we can say is that Lincoln was much the taller
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of the two. Douglas, who was known to everyone as the ‘Little Giant’, was only five foot four, and a good twelve inches shorter than Lincoln who, at six foot four, was unusually tall for the time. With such a height advantage, symmetry was probably irrelevant. So, on the present hypothesis, Lincoln won fair and square. Case proven?

The link between Lincoln and Douglas reminds me, rather serendipitously, of something else in similar vein. A recent study by Douglas Johnson and his colleagues at the University of Nebraska (which just happens to be in the small American Midwest town of Lincoln) sampled a group of people who had relatively strong political views – both right and left – for their emotional responses to threatening pictures. These included pictures of a massive spider on a very frightened person’s face, a dazed bloody face and a wound covered in maggots.

They first divided their subjects into two groups: those who scored high or low on protecting the interests of their community from external threats – high scorers said they strongly supported military spending, searches without need of warrants, the death penalty, obedience, patriotism, the second Iraq war, school assembly prayers and the literal truth of the Bible, and opposed premarital sex, immigration, pacifism, gun control, gay marriage, abortion and pornography. Then, while they were looking at the pictures, they measured their subjects’ physiological responses using both the galvanic skin response (the sweatiness of the palms) and the amplitude of the eye blink to a loud noise (an instinctive startle response). Those
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who scored high on the social-disciplinarian scale had a much stronger physiological reaction to these threatening pictures than to neutral pictures, compared to those with more liberal views.

In short, those who supported more extreme positions, especially on the political right, were more emotionally responsive kinds of people – in effect, more likely to panic when something untoward or unusual happened, more likely to react with a flight-or-fight response than a considered, rational one. Politics, it seems, is just an emotional response – as every demagogue from long before to long after Adolf Hitler has probably known only too well.

Perhaps not surprisingly, there was also an effect of education on these results. How long people had stayed at school correlated negatively with socially protective political views: the less schooling a subject had had, the more supportive he or she was likely to be of right-wing politics. But this effect was independent of the physiological response, serving merely to reinforce the physiological effect, not to explain it.

These particular physiological responses are probably associated with the activity of the amygdala, a relatively small, quite ancient part of the brain that processes responses to emotional cues in all mammals. Of course, it’s perhaps not so much how your amygdala is tuned that makes you politically extreme, but that your intrinsic nervousness makes you more responsive to things that might seem to threaten your particular social world. Education probably plays an important role in dampening that response, by allowing the frontal lobes (where much of the brain’s conscious work goes on) to counteract the emotional responses with a more considered
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view, so explaining why education is invariably the friend of liberal politics.

One of the linchpins of British democracy has, of course, always been the jury system. Since medieval times, ‘twelve good men and true’ sit down and sift the evidence to decide the guilt or innocence of those hauled before the courts. So it may be no surprise that when the British government recently proposed to abolish juries in certain types of trials, the House of Lords – ever the guardian of ancient tradition, moral rectitude and privilege – roundly defeated the proposed bill. This set me wondering about the psychology of juries. For seven hundred years, the jury system – the right to be tried by your peers – has been sacrosanct under English law and all its derivatives around the world. But, given the number of cases whose verdicts have been overturned in recent years, I wonder whether you might prefer not to be tried by a jury next time the state has you in its sights.

The jury system was introduced, initially, purely for the benefit of their lordships. The deal (enshrined in Magna Carta, enacted at Runnymede in 1215) that the English nobles struck with the euphemistically named Good King John entitled them to be tried by their fellow peers rather than face summary judgement at the hands of the king and his rather dodgy henchmen. It was only centuries later that this right was extended to all and sundry (that’s to say, the rest of us peasants).

So far so good. But think of the context in which such trials occurred. The population was tiny, and the twelve
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good men and true of the jury were drawn mostly from those with whom one lived. For most practical purposes, you really were being judged by your peers. In effect, when they were asked to decide whether you really did steal Old Mother Hubbard’s shoe, they relied on their personal knowledge of you: were you
really
the sort of person who would do that? They probably didn’t even need a trial to come to the right conclusion. OK... so sometimes they made value judgements and took personal sides, but you really were being judged by your community and what they found acceptable behaviour.

Today, however, it is all rather different. First, it’s very unlikely the jury knows anything at all about you. Indeed, the lawyers insist on this, and will ask the court to reject jurors who have any personal knowledge of the defendants or the case. As the defendant, you might consider that an advantage, of course: better to have people who have no preconceptions deciding your guilt. But I wonder whether the community’s interests are being so well served by this when mistrials mean hefty payouts from your taxes to people who have been wrongly convicted. And of course, hefty payouts to lawyers who get paid whether they win or lose, or even do a half decent job with the evidence...

A second problem is that forensic science is so much more technical now. Indeed, lawyers are often forced to simplify the evidence so that the jury can grasp its significance, creating yet more opportunities for confusion. This has turned out to be a particular problem in fraud cases, which often involve immensely complex financial trans-actions that need someone with the IQ of Einstein to understand.
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Third, even cases of quite modest length become very taxing for the jury. In the world of the three-second attention span of television, the concentration required to keep track of convoluted legal arguments, complex evidence and the many strands of inference and innuendo that might be deployed by a good lawyer will inevitably tax most normal individuals far beyond their natural abilities. They simply cannot remember all the details. The reason is rather simple: decades of research in psychology has shown that memory for our experiences is not like a video tape. Instead, we remember a few salient features of what happened. When we are asked to recall what happened, we fill in the details and gaps on the basis of plausibility –what seems most likely to have been the case, given our everyday experiences – which is why witnesses commonly disagree about what they saw.

One last problem is the way lawyers work. The blunt truth is that lawyers do not exist to get at the truth, but rather to get the best deal possible for their clients, right or wrong. That means that they will always want to be as economical with the truth as they can. They are story-tellers out to convince the jury to see the world from their point of view. In our legal system, the jury is passive and simply has to listen: they can’t test the evidence for themselves, or question the lawyers’ interpretations of the facts (perish the very thought, m’lud... ). In my view, this is why mistrials are, relatively speaking, so common.

The last problem is the jury itself. Even once it is in the jury room, it is not twelve independently minded people trying to evaluate all the facts. Most juries are in fact juries of one or two people. One or two very forceful or highly educated individuals can often sway a jury by force
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of personality or their own competence in arguing cases. It’s our evolutionarily well-honed psychology once again: the best thing for communities out on the plains is if everyone does the same thing, so a few good leaders and a lot of sheep is the perfect solution. There is no scope for bol-shie individualists who ask too many questions. It’s a real problem.

What’s the answer? My suggestion would be professional juries: men and women who are qualified to understand the complexities of modern forensic science and complex arguments, paid to sit on juries as a job. The lawyers won’t like it, that’s for sure: they won’t be able to bamboozle them so easily. But we may get fewer mistrials.
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The question of what distinguishes us from other animals has probably exercised us for as long as we have been around as a species. It is not an easy question to answer, especially given that modern molecular genetics has been narrowing the gap with scant concern for human self-esteem. The one domain in which we still seem to stand apart, however, has been our minds. Human culture stands as one of the greatest of all evolutionary achievements. Our capacity for culture rests in part on our all but unique ability to introspect, to reflect on our own feelings and beliefs, and in particular those of others.

This ability to reflect on others’ mind states is a capacity that children develop at around the age of four or five years, when, in psychologist-speak, they acquire theory of mind. A child aged three to four is a skilled ethologist: it knows how to manipulate others. Asked who has eaten the chocolate in the fridge, it knows that if it says in a very convincing way that it was the little green goblin from down the lane who hopped over the window sill,
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there is every chance an adult will believe it. But it does not really understand why this ruse works, and it certainly doesn’t appreciate that the chocolate smeared around its face gives the game away. But with theory of mind in its mental toolkit, it knows how to manipulate others’ beliefs about the world. Now, it can lie effectively. Suddenly, it has become a psychologist – it can read the mind behind the behaviour.

This capacity for theory of mind has been the great Rubicon that stands between us and the rest of the animal kingdom. Animals are stuck in the mental world of the three-year-old. But the question of whether other species share this capacity with us has continued to intrigue those who study the behaviour of animals. Do apes, genetically our nearest and dearest, share this unique trait with us? How about dolphins, or elephants? The problem that has bedevilled this area has always been how to design an experiment that unequivocally tells us whether animals share this trait with us. It is not as easy as it might seem.

However, a novel approach to this problem has been developed by two psychologists at the University of St Andrews. Erica Cartmill and Dick Byrne decided to let apes tell it their way. Instead of asking the apes to do experiments that required unnatural behaviour by the animals, such as pointing to where a reward might be hidden, they wondered whether apes could show that they understood mind states well enough to signal it in their behaviour. They used frustration from a thwarted outcome to trigger a response in orang utans.

The experiment was elegantly simple. They offered orangs the opportunity to beg for food from an experimenter holding two dishes, one containing a desirable
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food such as bananas, the other an undesirable food such as leeks. When the orang begged for food, it was given all the preferred food on one occasion, all the non-pre-ferred food on another and half of the preferred food on a third. Then the experimenters waited to see what the orangs would do. They reasoned that if the orang thought that the experimenter had misunderstood their request, they would try a range of new gestures in an attempt to make the experimenter understand, but if they got half the desirable food they would repeat the same gestures on the grounds that what had worked partially first time ought to work again to get them the rest. And this is exactly what they found.

This is about as close as we have got to showing that apes can understand someone else’s mind. If we must draw a Rubicon, then it puts the great apes on our side of the boundary fence. They are still not in the same league as adult humans, so they won’t be writing works of fiction.

But nonetheless, like us, they could imagine that the world could be other than it is. And asking that question, after all, is the basis of science. Everyone else has their nose pressed so hard up against the grindstone of life that they could not even entertain the thought.

We humans are naturally predisposed to attribute minds to other animals. It is simply a consequence of the fact that mind-speak is so deeply embedded in our everyday thinking. The philosopher Daniel Dennett referred to this as the ‘intentional stance’ – the tendency to assume that other individuals have minds like our own, ones that allow
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us to reflect (intuitively, even if not explicitly) on the contents of our own mind states. But what kinds of minds do animals have, and how do they compare with ours?

Psychologists have spent the past century or so exploring the mind in some considerable detail. In the course of this, we have learned a great deal about memory and learning, how animals solve problems or find their way around mazes. And the burden of all this effort seems to be that most animals are pretty much of a muchness in terms of these basic cognitive processes.