Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris has made a career of trafficking in moral ambiguity and complexity. Evolutionary psychologist Marc Hauser has pioneered research into the idea of a universal morality grounded in biology. Hauser believes humans possess a moral grammar; Morris isn’t so sure. The two met when Morris asked Hauser to be part of his short film for the 2007 Oscars. They kept in touch, exchanged ideas, and Hauser attended an early screening of Standard Operating Procedure, Morris’s film about the abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib. Recently in Boston they debated game theory, Stanley Milgram, and whether science can make us better people.
Click on the image to watch highlights from the Salon.
Errol Morris: I’m not sure that I have any real grasp on morality at all, much less some universal idea of morality. I’ve thought a lot about what happened at Abu Ghraib, and maybe this shows just a fundamental deficiency on my part, but I’ve come away even more confused than when I started and more convinced that social science really hasn’t grappled with these issues in a way that I find satisfactory.
It’s fascinating that whenever we come up against something that is really complex, there is this very deep human need to find a simple explanation that can account for it. If it’s something that’s really bad, really wrong, people feel uneasy and want to figure out how to distance themselves from it; to tell themselves, “This doesn’t concern me. This isn’t about me. This is about somebody else, or some other group I don’t belong to.”
Marc Hauser: Okay, but you left out a huge question: How do you know it’s wrong?
EM: Yeah.
MH: How do you even know? How does the human mind know that something is wrong? And once it does, what does it do with that information? Those are deep questions. I mean they’ve occupied people for centuries.
EM: Right. One of the stories that I tell in S.O.P. is about a suspected insurgent who’s brought in by Navy SEALs, interrogated by the CIA, enters Abu Ghraib under his own power, leaves as a corpse on a gurney. So, who is responsible? Who should be blamed? And if they haven’t been blamed and are responsible, why haven’t they been blamed?
MH: Right.
EM: All of that really interests me.
MH: Well, so, what science is doing is trying to distinguish two aspects of the question of how we think about the world. Because even this kind of violence, depending on whose side you’re on, will be evaluated differently, right?
EM: Yes.
MH: So, when the Nazis got together to exterminate the Jews, from their perspective, wanton killing of Jews was not wrong. It was perfectly right because Jews were “the other.” You map a distinction by recruiting the most powerful and violent emotions you can—disgust, hate. You call the other parasitic vermin to recruit the most incredible imagery. Once you do that, the emotions wreak havoc and you feel perfectly justified exterminating the other.
So this is where I think some the universality comes in. Say I tell a story about a violent episode but I don’t say who’s involved. I think you’ll get everybody to agree what, or who, is wrong. If you create a moral dilemma and give no identifying information—you strip away any in-group, out-group distinction—you’ll get lots of consensus on what’s right or wrong. This is what we’re finding. But, once you plug in the partiality of my group and your group, the entire dynamic changes. And that shows a powerful aspect of the mind.
EM: Well, take the example of the Nazis.
MH: Yes.
EM: This is a question that I still wonder about. They said it’s okay to kill Jews: Jews represent a threat to our way of life, to our gene pool, to our values, and so on. They’ve justified their behavior completely. But, if you think it’s okay, then why try to cover it up? Why try to conceal the fact that you’re doing it? That becomes the really complex question. You quickly enter this hall of mirrors. You can say, well, they thought it was the right thing to do, but they knew others might not view their behavior that way and that they should therefore cover their tracks. But isn’t that tantamount to saying that they knew it was wrong? It’s a real question.
MH: It is a real question. But ultimately, I think it comes back to having a sense of your place in the world. You have a sense of what others will respond to in terms of your actions and, ultimately, that feeds back into your behavior. So I think you’re right, both the covering up and the ability to go forward are two parts of the story.
Errol Morris Credit: Julian Dufort
EM: There’s a document that I’ve been really interested in. When the Russians entered Auschwitz in January 1945, the Germans attempted to destroy their records. But Auschwitz was so large that there was actually a building archive separate from the main Auschwitz archive that housed their construction documents. They forgot to destroy it. It was left completely intact.
There is a document in this archive. And written on it with red pencil are notations chastising the writer of the document for using a word for “gas chamber”—vergasungskeller. Essentially, the added notations tell the writer of the document: Don’t use that word. You’re not supposed to use that word. Don’t use it ever again.
So, it tells me that there is an investment in hiding, in covering one’s tracks.
MH: You seem surprised by that. What’s surprising?
EM: I wouldn’t say that I’m exactly surprised by it but it made me think that morality is the combination of two things: “I’m sorry,” and “I’m sorry I got caught.” There are two things always operating. There’s you, and then there’s what the world thinks of you.
MH: Yeah.
EM: If I do X, do I feel comfortable doing it? Do I feel comfortable doing X even though I know people will look at me with extreme disapproval?
MH: I mean that’s the categorical imperative, right? If you want to work through the world of rights and wrongs, imagine would you feel comfortable doing it yourself. And now imagine a world in which everybody would do what you just did and would you feel comfortable there? You universalize it.
EM: It’s a little different. It’s not the categorical imperative. It’s saying that when I do anything, I have a picture of other people looking at me and possibly disapproving of my actions. Maybe I just want to be liked by people. I don’t want people to think that I’m a bad person, or an evil person.
MH: Right.
EM: I do things that may have nothing to do with who I am but a lot to do with how I want to be perceived by others.
MH: Right. And there’s the selfish gene view of this, which is that we evolved minds that always take into account the other because it’s self-serving, right? I think about what others are going to respond to in terms of my actions because I want to make sure that I’m maximizing my own self-good. And then there’s the group selection view, the idea that we act altruistically because it benefits our group.
There are these interesting experiential games that have been developed by economists, and the typical economics view is we’re self maximizing, we’re selfish, rational players.
EM: Yeah.
MH: So you play these games, such as the ultimatum, where one individual starts off with a pot of money and can offer some proportion of this pot to an anonymous other. For example, let’s say I start out with a pot of $10 and I’m told that if I make an offer to someone who I’ll never see again, they’ll get what I offer and I get what’s left over. But if they reject my offer, no one gets anything.
EM: Okay.
Marc Hauser Credit: Julian Dufort
MH: This is a one-shot game. On the rational economics view, I should be giving you the smallest proportion of the pot possible. You should accept anything because something’s better than nothing, right? But it turns out that most people offer about half, so about $5. And for people who offer less, usually in the range of $1 to $3, the recipient rejects. So there’s some notion of fairness, which overrides the selfishness we expect. What would we think of ourselves if we offered so little? How would the recipient perceive that kind of offer? So this all plays into the view that the mind evolved with these regulatory mechanisms that counterbalance complete self-interest.
EM: Yes. I’ve never been terribly interested in zero-sum games, non-zero-sum games, the game theoretic analysis of human behavior.
MH: What’s the intuition, though?
EM: The intuition? To make a crude generalization: In game theory you make a series of calculations. I need to appear generous or fair to ensure that the people around me will be more generous or fair. And so on and so forth. It assumes that people effectively communicate with each other.
MH: Say more about that.
EM: Well, very often it seems to me that in trying to analyze human behavior, people create these simplistic games or models that they feel will teach them something. But in real life, you’re plunged into the middle of a confusing, uncertain nightmare.
MH: Yeah.
EM: I’ll give you an example from Abu Ghraib. One of the soldiers, Sabrina Harman, took pictures of a corpse of al-Jamadi, who was, for all intents and purposes, killed by the CIA. She took pictures of the corpse and pictures were taken of her next to the corpse.
MH: Yeah.
EM: And in one of the pictures, she has her thumb up. People can’t get beyond the thumb. Why? They think it tells us she is responsible for al-Jamadi’s death. But she’s not. The thumb hides the murder.
People look at the picture and make assumptions about what’s going on in her head. And they’re wrong. They’ve got it all wrong. And then they express various kinds of disapproval.
MH: Right.
EM: Anger, annoyance, horror. I don’t think all of this can be easily analyzed in some kind of psychological model. I get caught up in how people interpret behavior to suit their own interests. How there’s this very strange discontinuity between what actually goes on in the world and how the world is perceived; how we’re endlessly misperceived by others and ourselves.
MH: Right.
EM: People look at this and they want to know, “How can I explain these pictures? How can I put them into some model of human behavior? How can I square them with my understanding about how human beings act?”
MH: Yeah.
EM: And then they truck out various psychological theories. Theories which I suppose are based on experiment. And it seems to me that the experiments are both misunderstood and don’t have the great generality attributed to them. The most obvious example is Philip Zimbardo. Another candidate for this kind of thing is Stanley Milgram. The experiments tell us: People do this bad stuff because people always do bad stuff in such circumstances. It has a kind of circularity.
I’m not sure what these experiments actually show. I’m not sure that they have any application to Abu Ghraib or any other bad situation I can imagine. They often seem to me to be an excuse for not thinking about stuff, for creating a set of blinders around the complexity of the human experience so that one doesn’t have to look at it, rather than the other way around.
MH: Right. So I think you’ve now hit on a true fact about human nature, which is that scientists are always trying to come up with experiments that can account for some significant proportion of variation. Unfortunately along the way we often have a tendency to think we’re explaining more of the variation. What I often find happens—and it’s happening right here, right now!—is that often when an account of some type of human behavior is brought forth to people not in the sciences, they’ll come back and say but here’s an example of where that doesn’t work. And that’s not playing the game quite fairly because the sciences are never going to give a complete explanation of every aspect of human behavior. But the hope is to find some common universal principle that accounts for a significant aspect of our behavior.
EM: Sure.
SHOT IN THE ARM
MH: Now take the Milgram experiments. About a year ago, there was a study done that replicated Milgram’s experiment. So you may think how is that possible? Aren’t those now deemed unethical?
Well they are but we can do them if they’re in virtual reality space. This group in London—led by Mel Slater—created the Milgram experiments in virtual reality. So you’re the subject and while you’re in the experiment, you’re hooked up to skin conductance gizmos, which look at the sweatiness of your palms and heart rate and track how revved up you’re getting.
EM: Right.
MH: And what you find is that all of the factors that Milgram uncovered in his original experiment—how close you are to the individual, how much you’ve interacted with him before, how dominant the experimenter is in pushing you forward—all of those get mapped onto the physiological response of the subject in exactly the same way as they did in the original experiment. And they know it’s not real. It’s like, why do men look at Playboy or Penthouse? It’s just a magazine. But the mind goes on automatic pilot in some cases, blind to reality.
So the interesting thing is that, of course, people know they’re in a completely fake environment, it’s virtual reality. And yet there are parts of the brain that don’t get it. To use a term from cognitive science, there’s a sense of encapsulation or insularity, so even though I know this is a visual illusion, I don’t give a hoot.
EM: I don’t care.
MH: Right. And that says something very important about the moral domain because there are parts of the brain that are just going to see the world in a particular way independently of rich belief systems.
EM: Right, but wait a second. Tell me what was immoral about the original Milgram experiments.
MH: Oh, well, one thing that has changed since those early experiments is the kind of information that you owe to your subjects when you test them in an experimental setting. That is, there is now a much greater burden to inform subjects of what is likely to happen in the experiment, and some of the negative consequences that might ensue. In the Milgram experiments, the issue was that some people might experience considerable trauma from engaging with the shock device. Thus, there is a burden of informing subjects, right?
EM: What specifically was immoral about the experiments for the subjects, though?
MH: Well, like in many psychological experiments, there was dishonesty. They didn’t know that they were not shocking the individual. They were also, in some sense, coerced because the relationship between the experimenter and the subject was asymmetric. And those are the situations, which now, human subject committees are very sensitive to. You don’t want to put people in a situation that forces them to do things that they knowingly don’t want to do. You want people to have knowledge of both what they’re going to do and the possible consequences of it.
EM: I look at it differently.
MH: Yeah.
EM: For whatever reason. I always thought that the big no-no with the Milgram experiments was that the people who “failed” the experiments, the person who came in and gave the “supposed” heart patient horrifying electric shocks, was going to have to live with that for the rest of his life. You go in there, you take the Milgram test, as it were, and you fail. You flunk.
MH: Right, right.
EM: Instead of saying, “No I won’t do it, that’s wrong, that’s unacceptable,” you administer dreadful shocks to people. Then someone tells you what’s going on. You may feel lied to, of course, betrayed by the experimenter. But you’re still left wondering: Am I a Nazi? Am I a villain? Am I a killer?
I read this book about great experiments in psychology. It was written by Lauren Slater—and very controversial actually.
MH: Oh yes. Right.
EM: And one of them, of course, was the Milgram experiment. They had sealed the records so you couldn’t find out who passed, who failed; who eagerly administered electric shocks, who said, “No, I don’t want to.” She was able to locate the people who had failed the Milgram experiment and interview them. I thought it was really, really interesting. Did you read any of this stuff?
MH: I didn’t read it, no.
EM: One person who had failed said, “This was a really valuable experience. Now I see what I’m capable of.”
MH: Right. Yes.
EM: I’ll be on the lookout. I’ll observe my own behavior more closely, more carefully. He talked about it as though he’d received an inoculation. He’d received the Milgram vaccine against genocide. And so I wondered, could there be the Milgram vaccine?
MH: Well, at some level that’s what Anthony Burgess plays with in A Clockwork Orange, right?
EM: Maybe.
STACKING THE DECK
MH: Some of those behavioral therapies have had success, to varying degrees. You know there was a program on—my great source for knowledge of the world—MTV.
EM: It’s probably a really good source.
MH: Ha—right. It was a good source. It was a program on these intervention studies being done with kids who are juvenile delinquents who have been convicted of some fairly horrible crime and are then put into a prison where some of the more horrible convicts show them about the brutality of what it’s like to be in a prison. Because a lot of these kids don’t have any idea. And apparently these interventions are relatively successful, and with many of these kids they actually have a defeating effect.
EM: Interesting you should mention this because there’s a film called Scared Straight. It’s one of the worst things I’ve ever seen. It may have gotten an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature.
It was the same idea. Kids who had committed various crimes were jailed with hardened criminals in a maximum-security prison. And, they’re “scared straight.”
MH: Right.
EM: Well the movie was really, really bad. On the level of craft, I thought: This is just awful. Then someone wrote an article about it. The kids in this program had come from an upper middle class suburb where the recidivism rate is zero. So, now I thought: bad movie and really bad social science. If the recidivism rate is zero, then it really doesn’t matter whether they are “scared straight” or not, they are going to “go straight” regardless. And then I thought: really bad morality: Is this how you want to ensure compliance in a society? By scaring people?
The Milgram inoculation is a little bit different. It’s scaring people by giving them an example of what they’re capable of. It’s not by saying: I’m going to take a two-by-four to the side of your head. It’s not A Clockwork Orange.
MH: See what was more interesting about the MTV version of the documentary was that they actually talked about the cases that did not work. And those cases—where going to the prisons and scaring the pulp out of the kids had no effect—were cases where macho, violent behavior was part of their culture. And if the kid went back and said, you know, “I’m cured,” the kid had less of a chance of surviving. And so, in the same way that a Milgram-type inoculation will work for some people, a scared straight version will work for other people.
EM: Okay.
MH: There was a study done a couple of years ago with a very, very large sample of boys; something like 500 boys who they’d tracked from a young age into their juvenile years. What they found was a gene with two modes of expression, so to speak. One mode expressed a high concentration of neurochemicals like serotonin and dopamine, chemistry linked to our impulsive behavior. The other mode expressed a low level of these chemicals.
EM: Uh huh.
MH: Now here is the fascinating part. Among the sample of boys observed, there were some who led a wonderful childhood, had caring parents. A second category was subjected to mild levels of violence from their parents. And the third category received high and fairly abnormal levels of parental violence. When you look at the profiles of these children during their juvenile-teen years, you find a striking pattern. The boys with the high expressing form of the gene appeared to be buffered against parental violence, whereas the boys with the low expressing form weren’t, and they showed far higher rates of juvenile delinquency.
EM: Really?
MH: So it’s a beautiful, albeit sad, case of gene-environment interaction. Depending on the cards you get, and the environment you land in, you could either end up fine, because you are genetically buffered from the nasty environment thrown your way, or deeply injured by this environment because there are no genetic defenses. This shows the importance of looking at how genetic systems build bodies and minds that set up opportunities for the environment, opportunities to sculpt outcomes in particular directions.
EM: Okay.
MH: I mean, it’s this kind of genetic view that indicates why we’re having this conversation, but dogs aren’t, you know? After all, dogs are exposed to pretty much the same environment we are, but we chat, gossip, and pontificate, whereas they bark, with a few variants here and there.
EM: Well, as far as we know dogs aren’t having this conversation.
MH: As far as we know, right. As Gary Larson put it, when we listen in on dog conversations, all we hear is “heh, heh, heh.”
EM: Right, exactly.
MH: But this study is a nice example of how developmental factors can greatly influence morally relevant behavior in later life. This kind of story may have important implications for psychopathy where there is increasing evidence for early developmental problems, well before the signature of psychopathy shows itself in early adulthood. It’s now fairly well documented that people who become psychopaths show signs of this disorder early, in the form of violence towards pets. Then later in life, this violence migrates to humans.
EM: From their pets? I’m suspicious of the whole idea of psychopathy.
MH: You can’t go there.
EM: No, no, no. We can go there. Why not?
