The Monthly is pleased to introduce Dr. Samar Zebian who is an assistant professor of cognitive science at the Lebanese American University and who will be contributing regularly to The Monthly under the title of The Amazing Brain. In this series, the latest developments in Brain Science research are presented to provide a fresh perspective on issues of public interest and issues which concern brain health and growth.
Dr. Samar Zebian
- A scorpion comes along and says to the turtle, ‘How about taking me across this lake?’
- The turtle says, ‘Do you think I am a nut. We are going to get out in the middle there, you are going to sting me and we are going to drown’.
- ‘Why would I do that?’ says the scorpion, ‘We will both drown’.
- So the turtle says, ‘You are right, we will both drown, get up on my back.’
- So they get out into the middle and the scorpion stings the turtle and he says, ‘What did you do that for?’, and the scorpion says ‘That’s my nature’.
The scorpion’s sting is a biologically based conditioned survival response and the sting might be likened to a fear response in humans. The question for this article is whether people are more like the scorpion, bound by overpowering survival instincts which are hard to suppress even in situations where they are maladaptive, or are we more like the turtle, trusting and willing to lend a hand when we are needed. We can also ask whether we even have some sort of thing call “nature”- a biologically based character which is more or less immutable. After all, the way we evolve, as individuals and species, is also dependent on the environment.
The evidence that our prosociality is genetically driven was first gained from studies of primates, our closest genetic relatives. Chimps don’t teach their offspring how to be nice, yet De Waal has demonstrated in experimental settings that chimpanzees preferentially share food with animals that have recently groomed them and tended to share food with those who recently shared food with them. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany also found that chimps opened a cage of food for unfamiliar chimps without expecting a reward. Soon after these primate studies it was discovered that human infants as young as 18 months help adults reach objects or open cabinet doors. This body of work, suggests that humans and our closest genetic relatives are born, or at least very early on acquire, the propensity to lend a helping hand in the absence of self interest.
Given the pervasiveness of self-interest in older children and adult human relations one might question whether this early genetically supported prosociality (reverence, helpfulness, selflessness) is malleable? A landmark study associated with the Binghamton Neighborhood Project examined this question (http://bnp.binghamton.edu/). The project is a collaboration between researchers and community partners which aims to improve the quality of life of people by improving how people relate to one another in the family, at work and at school. In a longitudinal study, researchers surveyed children living in prosocial neighborhoods. The prosociality of the neighborhood was assessed in several ways. First they asked children about their attitude towards the welfare of others (“I think it is important to help other people”, “I am helping to make my community a better place”). The students’ answers were validated by door-to-door surveys of adults in the same neighborhood and an experimental economics games played for money which assessed how generous students are with strangers. A final validation test involved dropping a stamped addressed envelopes on the sidewalks of the various neighborhoods to see if the students in different neighborhoods were kind enough to mail the lost letter. They used each of these means to establish the “prosociality” of the neighborhood. Three years after the original survey, the same children, now teenagers, were surveyed again. Some of the original children had moved down out of a prosocial neighborhood and into a less prosocial neighborhood and some moved up into a prosocial neighborhood. Results showed that the prosociality of teenagers, which many have assume to be biologically driven, changed as a function of the new neighborhood. Other studies have also found that the influence of family environment on altruistic behaviors changes over time. For example younger children are more altruistic if they live in a family which has a supportive belief system, whereas biological factors have more influence on altruism among teenagers.
The parable of the scorpion and the turtle suggests that our degree of prosociality is fixed and hard to change. The psychological research on the topic suggests that it is more or less malleable during different stages of childhood and adolescence. Based on this research I would guess that the turtle and the scorpions are in fact adults who have come to have fixed and hardened views about what is good for the self and what can be done for other.
