How can we explain kindness and cruelty? Where does our sense of right and wrong come from? Why do people so often disagree about moral issues? This course explores the psychological foundations of our moral lives.
How Do We Treat Strangers?
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Do curso por Yale University
Moralities of Everyday Life
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Compassion
Where does concern for others come from? How is it related to empathy—and is more empathy necessarily a good thing? And what can we learn from the study of those who seemingly lack normal moral feelings, such as violent psychopaths?
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Paul BloomBrooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University
Psychology
I agree with Adam Smith that we have compassion towards those we are close to.
I think he's right that you don't need any examples to show that.
But when it comes to strangers, the issue is quite a bit more complicated.
And actually the theme of how we think about strangers, and the way our
moral psychology interacts with strangers, is to me so interesting and is important,
that we're going to return to it over and
over and over again, in the lectures that follow.
But I want to to introduce the idea, here.
And I want to sort of, for us to consider how we think about strangers, and,
to, to, to introduce this idea, I'm going to give a lecture in four parts.
So, the first part is an observation, and it's an observation by
the primatologist and anthropologist Sarah Hrdy.
And Hrdy, at the beginning of her wonderful
book, Mothers and Others, describes being on an airplane.
So she had been through security, she had been groped by the
TSA agent, she's kind of crabby, she's sitting in a seat, she's,
and, and, and the food is coming, you could smell the food,
you could hear people in front of you getting it But she's,
but it hasn't got to her yet.
And somewhere on the plane, a baby starts crying.
And people roll their eyes, and they're stuck together.
And to pass the time, Hrdy writes, I cannot help from wondering what
would happen if my fellow human passengers
suddenly morphed into another species of ape.
What if I were traveling with a plane load of chimpanzees.
Any one
of us would be lucky to disembark with all 10 fingers and toes still attached.
With the babies still breathing and un-maimed.
Bloody earlobes and other appendages would litter the aisles.
Compressing so many, highly impulsive strangers into such
a tight space, would be a recipe for mayhem.
Yet millions of us, billions of us, fly each year.
And it's very rare that
the plane lands and then they open up the doors
and it's coated with blood and body parts and everything.
We behave, we sit quietly, we wait our turn.
And this is, this is extraordinary.
This is an unusual response to strangers.
As Hrdy points out, chimpanzees and other primates,
our closest evolutionary relatives, are nowhere near as nice.
The response to dealing
with the seen strangers, if you're a
non-human primate, is often panic, is often aggression.
But not for us.
We are able to cope with strangers, we are able to inhibit our violence,
our aggression, our frustration in the presence
of strangers, and that's the first observation.
The second part of this lecture,
discusses how it's even better than that.
It's not just that we don't want to kill other people who we were not used to.
Rather is that, to some extent, we
resonate to them, and we want to help them.
And I think the, the clearest examples here are the internet.
So any of us who spend a lot of time on the internet, and the fact you're watching
me suggests you spend some time on the
Internet, spends a lot of time dealing with strangers.
Spends a lot of time dealing with
people who aren't your friends, aren't your family.
You never met them before.
Yet we often have these productive, complicated
interactions with strangers that aren't obviously self-serving.
Now admittedly some of these interactions are not necessarily compassionate.
Sometimes they're aggressive.
Many people spend a lot of time on the internet arguing with strangers.
This classic XKCD comic indicates the fact that it is extremely
frustrating to deal with the somebody on the internet who is wrong.
And there's a tremendous impulse to correct them.
And the comment section on blogs refelcts this very human implulse.
I wouldn't want to call that compassion, but there's a
lot of what seems very cleary to be compassion and,
and one example of this is sites with reviews.
I'm thinking of Amazon and TripAdvisor, Travelocity, Yelp.
These are sites that describe things like books, or products or
restaurants, and then people come in and they, and they review them.
And they tell you what they think of them. So I was looking for a bookshelf the other
day, and I went online, and I found this.
And it's a ladder shelf, and I'm going to buy it, because over a thousand
people have commented on it and most of them say nice things about it.
And, now some of these people may be motivated by gratitude in some way.
When there is a negative review, you could say is revenge or vengeance.
But for most part,
people are going on to say, oh, I really like this show and
what they're telling you is, they are, they are doing something for you.
They are doing you a favor, but they don't know you.
And this is altruism for the strangers, and it's
a, it's an extraordinarily interesting fact about human nature.
Now, there's other examples in the real world.
When giving lists of irrational, not self serving behavior people
often describe tipping.
So, it's one thing to tip in a
restaurant you're going to come back to because the size
of your tip could affect your own, how
people think of you, how people respond to you.
But people leave tips in a restaurant they know they'll never going to go back to.
They put money on the table.
and, and even though they'll get no benefit from it.
Or as an even more extreme case, think about, hotel rooms.
And this varies from culture to culture.
But there's, th, th, there's a custom in which I was raised in,
that you're supposed to leave a tip when you leave a hotel room.
So you, you know you pack up and everything and you put some money down.
You maybe write a note that says thank you.
The interesting thing about this is, this cannot conceivably help you in any way.
It's not like the people who clean the
room are going to say what a wonderful guy.
I'll go back and do him a favor one day. They don't
even know who you are. Yet we are compelled to do this.
We might feel embarrassed if we forgot.
We may feel ashamed of ourselves.
We may feel proud of ourselves if we do it.
And this goes to show that our morality is plugged in, in an interesting way, towards
our interactions with people who we don't know,
we will never know, we will never meet again.
There's charity.
People give an enormous amount of money to charity.
Now, some of these charities are self-serving in a way.
If I give money to support a museum that I myself am going to enjoy.
Sometimes, the impulse to give to charity, may be an impulse
to enhance our reputation, to show ourselves off as good people.
Oh, look at, you know, I am donating this amount of money.
I get my name listed in some program and
people say, what a great guy he is. But some of our
charitable acts are none of these. People give money to international
charities to help starving children, and we often do this anonymously?
No feedback, nothing. We do it because we feel it's right.
We are compelled, we do this because we feel it's
right and because we care about other people, again, people we
will never see.
This was this was the topic of a wonderful experiment by Stanley Milgram.
Now, we're going to meet Milgram later on in the course
because Milgram did some very famous experiments looking at human cruelty.
He did a famous set of experiments finding that, based simply
on instructions you're given, your average person will kill another person.
But Milgram was also interested in kindness, so he did this great study.
And he did this study in New Haven, Connecticut, which is the city I'm now in
and the city I teach and the city that Milgram was a professor at back then.
And what he did was, he had letters made up.
They were stamped, addressed letters.
And so he made them up.
And they'd say, with a person's name, I forget the name, you know?
Joe Smith and an address. And he
went through the streets of New Haven, or
had his students do it, and would drop them.
Or he'd put them up on a windowsill.
Or he'd slip them under a door.
None, none of them ended up, he didn't put any of them in a mailbox.
So here's the question.
How many of them would get, would be sent? They knew where they were sending them.
They had to check the mailbox where it's supposed to be sent to.
How many would be sent? In order for
them to be sent, somebody has to pick up the letter, say oh, here's a letter.
Go to a mailbox and drop it in.
That was well over half.
Well over half of these letters arrived at their destination.
And this means that people must have picked up the letter and said, oh
gosh, this is a letter that somehow went astray and put it in a mailbox.
Again, an act which will do, which leads to no self-serving benefit.
But it's simply done in some sense out of the goodness of your heart.
Now if your cynical you might say maybe there's employees
of the city or maybe people just automatically did it.
But Milgram did something clever.
Some of the letters were addressed to a person.
Some of the letters were addressed to
an organization that he felt people wouldn't like.
So some of the letters were addressed to friends of the Nazi party.
When they had that address they didn't arrive at the destination.
So, it's not that they were indiscriminately looking
at it and throwing it in a mailbox.
Rather people were making a decision.
And if it was for something which they
didn't think was good, they wouldn't send it.
There was even another
study done by Dan Festler in California, where he looked at different things.
But one of his conditions was, he did the same study as Milgram,
except he didn't put a stamp on the letter, he just addressed it.
Now most of those letters did not get back.
But about 10 to 20% did.
Which means people picked up a letter said oh,
here's a letter for somebody it has no stamp.
They went, they got a stamp, they put on it, and they mail it.
And I think this is just
extraordinary, I think this says something very interesting with how we work.
So call those two stories the bright side of
things, that's the positive side of our feelings to strangers.
But there's also, as you could
imagine, limitations about our compassion to strangers.
There's, there's limits as to how much we care about
them compared to how much we about the people around us.
And the third case I'll give you is, is
actually part of a comedy routine by Louis C K.
This is unusual because it's the only Louis
C K excerpt in which he doesn't swear.
But he says something very interesting about our relationship to strangers.
>> My life is really evil, like I, there are people
who are starving in the world, and I drive an Infinity.
That's really evil.
There are people who just starved to death, that's all they ever did.
There's people who are like born, and they go, I'm hungry,
and then they just die. >> [LAUGH]
>> And that's all they ever got to do.
And meanwhile I'm in my car, boom, boom like
having a great time and I sleep like a baby.
It's totally my fault because I could, I could trade my Infinity for like
a really good car like a nice Ford Focus with no miles on it.
And I'd get back like $20,000.
And I could
save hundreds of people from dying of starvation with
that money, and every day I don't do it.
Every day I make them die with my car.
[MUSIC]
>> Now Louis C.K. ends by saying, everyday I make them die with my car.
And of course it's a joke.
This isn't literally make them die.
He doesn't literally kill them. He has no malice towards them.
He's not acting to kill them. But in another level, it's not a joke.
Another level, it actually reiterates a
consequentialist argument that we've seen before.
That one should judge actions based on their consequences.
And from that point of view, if its true, that by buying a
car instead sending the money to a charitable organization, if its true that
this leads to the death of some kids, then Louis CK has killed
them just as much as if he ran them all over with his car.
Now this is a radical claim.
It's a strong claim.
It's in part the view of the philosopher Peter Singer who's a who
is a consequentialist and who argues that we should
judge our acts based on our consequences, and because
of that, we should radically change how we how
we treat people and, and, and our charitable giving.
And he has a moving philosophical argument of which the conclusion
is we should do more to help people in far away lands.
And I have a feeling that, that Louie CK in his routine has actually drew upon
the insides of Peter Singer.
I'm going to present the argument right now.
What's interesting is this argument, although it's been presented in
philosophical journals and elsewhere, it's now presented as a Youtube video.
So, this is the fourth and final case of how we think about strangers
and it's expressed in this extremely interesting video.
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That's a political argument, it's a social argument.
And, you may not believe it.
You may object to it.
You may disagree with it.
You may endorse it, think it's very convincing.
That's not the point here.
My point is not to persuade you to do one thing or another.
Those are your own decisions.
But what I like about this video is
that it illustrates certain things, certain psychological truths.
And one truth it illustrates is that there's
a psychological distinction between three categories of people.
One category is the stranger in front of us.
The girl we see, we know we don't know, but the girl we see drowning in the pond.
The second category is an anonymous stranger, the
one we don't see, the girl in Africa
drowning in a pond. And then the third is the family member,
our own daughter, our own mother, father, sister, brother, son um; and these are
three categories of people and um; and we think very differently about them.
And one insight is, when our natural reaction to them,
is that we could care a lot about those in our life.
People we love.
People we, we interact with.
And we are also driven to care a lot about a stranger,
a drowning girl in front of us, as if seeing her triggers something.
It triggers a sense of obligation.
If I told you that I, I he'd, Singer never tries
to make the argument we should help the girl in the pond.
He just assumes it. And he's right
to assume it.
If I told you, I was rushing to work and there was a girl
drowning, but I was kind of in an hurry, so I let her drown.
You'd think I was a monster, and you'd be right.
So you have on the one hand your feeling
towards family members, your feelings towards people suffering for any.
And then your feelings towards anonymous strangers.
That's very different.
We don't have the same pull.
If I told you I knew about children in far away lands who
were starving to death, who needed medical care, and I still bought a nice car, well,
you might think I shouldn't be doing this, but you wouldn't think I'm a monster.
In fact, most of us do stuff like that all the time.
So you have these psychological distinctions.
And this helps explain our moral reaction to a
case we talked about in the very first lecture.
So remember I
told you the story, true story of these two guys who go in to the casino and one
of them molests and kills the child, and the second one doesn't do anything.
He just observes it, but he doesn't stop it.
And later on he's interviewed on this, because they don't
press charges, not a crime to just not help a stranger.
If I walk past that drowning girl in the pond, I might end up
saying morally wrong, but I haven't done anything legally wrong.
And then he's asked, so what was up with that?
And he says, the simple fact remains I don't know this little girl.
I don't know people in Panama or Africa who are
killed every day, so I can't feel remorse for them.
And, you know, he's missing something. So
he's actually right in his second claim. The people in far away lands if
you're not in Panama, if you're not in Africa,
you're not typically going to care about people who suffer there.
It's okay not to do anything to help them.
But that girl in front of you, the person
in your vicinity, that person you should care about.
Now, Peter Singer uses these psychological facts to make a moral argument.
So he starts by saying he would
help the little girl whose in front of you,
and people watching you and say, yeah of course.
Well, isn't that just the same, as if she was drowning in, in, in Africa?
And then later on he says, oh, well maybe you think
the girl in Africa is just a drop in a bucket.
But what if she were your daughter?
Isn't that the same? She's somebody's daughter.
And so what you see here is an appreciation of our gut instincts.
Singer is well aware that you don't normally think of
the girl in Africa as we're saving, as we're sacrificing for.
But he tries to argue
through analogy that there's no real difference Between her case and the
case, the cases where you do think you'd be right to intervene.
And, among other things, this shows us the limits and
the scope of compassion but it also illustrates moral argument.
It illustrates how people could try to use reason, to try to use arguments,
analogies, examples to change the way you think about the world.
And I think this is deeply significant and it's another topic which
we're going to continue to discuss, as these lectures develop.
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