Rick Shenkman

Rick Shenkman is the editor of HNN and the author of Political Animals:  How Our Stone-Age Brain Gets in the Way of Smart Politics (Basic Books, January 2016). This article includes a brief excerpt from the book. 

In March 1951, nine months into the Korean War, Freda Kirchwey, a crusading liberal journalist at the Nation, expressed bewilderment at Americans indifference to the fate of Korean civilians killed by our bombs. The destruction was awful.  Nothing, she complained in a column, “excuses the terrible shambles created up and down the Korean peninsula by the American-led forces, by American planes raining down napalm and fire bombs, and by heavy land and naval artillery.” And yet few seemed bothered by it.

Because she was an optimist Kirchwey expressed the hope that Americans would eventually come to share her own moral anguish at what was being done in their name.  But they never did.  If anything, Americans grew less interested in the fate of the victims of our bombing the longer the war ground on.

Why didn’t Americans show empathy for the victims?  Social scientists say it’s because empathy is actually very hard for human beings operating in a modern setting.  It’s hard because in many circumstances an empathic response is an unnatural act. It is not natural for humans to feel empathy for people who look different and speak a different language.  It is not natural for us to feel empathy for those who are invisible to us as the bombing victims were.  Nor is it natural for us to feel empathy for people who are of low status as were the Korean peasants we were killing.  Recent studies show that when we are faced with a choice of killing a single individual to save the lives of several we are far more apt to do it if the individual we are sacrificing is of low status. When subjects in an experiment are told that the people being saved are of high status the number of people willing to let the low status victim die increases. 

Another social science finding helps us understand why empathy is often in short supply and why Ted Cruz is capable of cavalierly recommending we carpet bomb Syrians living under ISIS control.  Once we have decided on a course of action and convinced ourselves that it’s correct – as Americans became convinced during the Korean War that we had to bomb the hell out of Korea in order to stave off a communist victory and as we are now convinced our war against ISIS is right and just – our brain helps us overcome any hint of guilt we may be inclined to feel over the loss of life by dehumanizing the victim. This is a classic case of cognitive dissonance.  Our brain hates to feel torn between conflicting emotions.  So it rationalizes doing what it wants to do by discounting the feeling giving rise to negative emotion, in this case, guilt. An extreme example is what happened when the Nazis decided to sideline Jews and later wipe them out. From the moment the Nazis began their ruthless anti-Semitic campaigns they used hideous images to convince people that Jews were little different than rats.  It’s far easier to kill someone if you can convince yourself they aren’t really human. Rather than feeling empathy for the downtrodden Jews Nazis felt contempt and disgust.  These strong emotions swamped whatever other feelings they might have felt deep down. In a study a few years ago researchers measured the activity in the brains of subjects looking at pictures of homeless people.  The finding was shocking.  Brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain where empathy is often registered, was significantly lower.  In other words, we literally pay them no mind (or less mind).

This sounds cruel and uncaring.  But as far as biology is concerned it makes perfect sense.  Our genes are selfish, as biologist Richard Dawkins teaches.  That means they are built to enhance their replication.  Replication, in effect, is their biological imperative.  Caring for people who are low in status, particularly those who belong to another tribe, doesn’t serve this imperative. Indeed, it interferes with it by diverting the attention of the host – that’s you and me – from activities that will enhance survival.

We don’t have to make a conscious decision to ignore the fate of people who are low in status.  Our brain does this automatically and seamlessly.  Out of conscious awareness it decides if someone is useful to us.  If the person is, our brain suddenly achieves a state of hyper attentiveness:  our nostrils flare, the eyes widen, the ears tune in relevant sounds.  Think of what happens to you when you’re in the presence of somebody important like Bill Gates and you’ll know what I mean.  And if someone is deemed useless to us?  Unless we are worried that they pose a threat, our brain tells our body to relax.

Because it is in our biological interest to feel empathy for people from our own tribe and family – people in a position to either enhance our survival or perpetuate our genes – we come equipped with mechanisms to help us distinguish our people from outsiders.  From the moment we’re born we focus on the people around us and bond with them.  A mother and child know each other through smell.  Brother and sister recognize in each other’s familiar facial features.  When we hear someone speaking a foreign language we instinctively discount their humanity.  This was shown in a 2014 experiment designed to determine if human beings are more willing to sacrifice someone who speaks a different language in order to save the lives of several others.  The finding was clear-cut.  Only 18 percent of subjects in the experiment were willing to make the cold calculation that saving the lives of several people at the cost of one life was fair when the intended victim shared their native language.  But the percent willing to sacrifice the person more than doubled when it was revealed they spoke a foreign language.  The experiment’s results remained the same whether the subjects spoke Korean, Hebrew, Japanese, English or Spanish.

I want to do two things in this piece while I have you here.  One, I want to convince you that achieving empathy is harder than you may think when the person hurting is not from your tribe.  I hope I have done that.  Two, I want to show you there are ways to achieve empathy and these involve tasks for which the historian is particularly well-suited.

Let’s return for a moment to the Korean War. From the perspective of 2015 Americans’ inhumanity seems appalling. Time gives us an advantage contemporaries lacked.  It gives us distance. In historiography courses in college this distance is often described as a disadvantage.  For it’s always hard to imagine what life was like for people living in a different time and place.  But what appears on the surface to be a disadvantage in understanding a situation that happened in the past is often actually an advantage.  It’s one the historian exploits regularly. It’s the reason historians generally find it easy to spot inhumanity:  We aren’t wearing the blinders that block the vision of people caught up in events.  We ourselves and our children aren’t at risk. As in this case, the Korean War happened to other people, not to us. 

Distance is not alone sufficient, however.  To truly understand what the Korean people were going through we need to get inside their heads.  This is also something historians do as a matter of course.  We mind read.  We plunge into the archives and read everything we can get our hands on:  diaries, oral histories, any and everything that will help us see life as the people we are writing about saw it.  In effect, one of our chief tasks is to be empathetic.

But there’s still one obstacle we need to overcome.  Somehow we have to communicate our knowledge to our readers.  Here we fall back on an ancient art:  storytelling. It is this, more than anything else that gives us the ability to help readers achieve a powerful feeling of empathy for people who lived at a different time and place.  Stories hold the readers’ attention, for one.  For another, they feed our readers’ strong human urge to find meaningful patterns in human behavior. As scientists have now demonstrated in experiments on split brain patients, the human brain is a natural pattern finder.  It wants 1 + 1 = 2.  Mysterious may be the will of God, but here on earth we expect human behavior to be explicable.

Stories connect us to people in a way nothing else can.  It’s the reason politicians tell stories.  Years ago, the distinguished Harvard social scientist Howard Gardner wanted to discover what highly successful leaders have in common. After reviewing the lives of eleven luminaries, from Margaret Thatcher to Martin Luther King Jr., Gardner concluded that their success depended to a great deal on their ability to communicate a compelling story, “narratives that help individuals think about and feel who they are, where they come from, and where they are headed.” These stories, he found, “constitute the single most powerful weapon in the leader’s literary arsenal.”

When people are reduced to numbers—as the civilian victims of bombing during the Korean War were—we don’t feel their pain. We don’t automatically put ourselves in their shoes, which is by definition what you do when you are feeling empathic. We have the bomber pilot’s problem. We don’t feel anything for the victims. But historians can help. Storytelling is in our toolkit.  All we have to do is use it.

Storytelling happens to be in every human’s toolkit.  We are all born storytellers and attentive story listeners.  Biology may incline us to turn a cold eye on the suffering of people we can’t see in person and don’t know, but stories can liberate us.  We aren’t fated to respond favorably to a demagogue’s howling.  Stories change us.  It may not be natural for us to feel empathy for people living thousands of miles away, but we can. 

Aristotle famously said that human beings are political animals.  He was right about this.  We are.  Consider the things that come naturally to us.  We are curious.  We are generally good at reading people.  We highly value the truth.  And we have a tremendous capacity for empathy.  These are important qualities every ideal voter should posses.

But look around.  Everywhere there’s evidence we are actually pretty bad at politics.  Neither politicians nor voters deserve a gold star for the way they fulfill their responsibilities.  Politicians are constantly misbehaving, as evidenced by the debut of the Trump campaign in the spring of 2015.  Just minutes into his announcement Donald Trump, stooping to bigoted demagoguery, demonized immigrants as murderers and rapists.

For their part, voters frequently display stunning ignorance of basic facts. A majority of Americans don’t know which party is in control of Congress.  A majority don’t know we have three branches of government.  A majority don’t know we have a hundred United States senators.  On the eve of the Iraq War, in the face of hard evidence implicating Osama bin Laden, a majority thought Saddam Hussein was behind 9-11.

So the answer to the question – “Are we well suited to politics?” – has to be no, sadly.

Why do you think we fail to measure up? What accounts for the disconnect between our natural abilities and our performance?

It was to answer this question that I wrote Political Animals. 

In my last book, Just How Stupid Are We?  Facing the Truth About the American Voter (Basic Books, 2008), I laid out the damning facts about public opinion. The book comes to the disturbing conclusion that we can’t really trust voters to get things right.  After all, if the ordinary voter couldn’t get the basic facts right about 9-11, the most important event of our time, what hope do we have that they can get much of anything right?

After the book appeared a commenter on the Amazon discussion boards chided me for failing to explain why so many millions of voters are so ignorant. Specifically, he thought I had made a mistake in overlooking research by scientists. I thought this was a fair criticism.  While I had accounted for changes in politics in the last sixty years that explained the marked decline in our political culture, a decline I mostly blamed on television, I didn’t take into account anything science has to say about voters.  Frankly, as a historian it didn’t occur to me to that science could help explain our situation.   

This was a woeful error.  When I began studying up on the subject I found that science gives us an answer. But it took me four years to develop a sufficient understanding of the scientific concepts to be able to write the book.

So what did you discover?

Early in my research, after reading scores of relevant scientific studies, I came across a lecture one day by David Pizarro, a Cornell psychologist.  It was a turning point.  In the course of his talk he noted that we humans are not necessarily designed to excel in the modern world at tasks we were good at in the Pleistocene.  This intrigued me.  It wasn’t something I’d considered, though it’s a familiar trope in evolutionary psychology  (EP, for short).  It embarrasses me to admit this now, but I knew nothing of EP back then. David’s lecture came as a revelation.

But his argument made sense.  Surely our brain evolved to meet the demands of the Stone Age, a critical period in human development that lasted more than three million years.  And if that was the case, it stands to reason that humans naturally wouldn’t be very good at politics today since the demands the modern era makes on us are vastly different from those of hundreds of thousands of years ago.  Cave men, like us, surely played politics.  But politics isn’t the same when you live in a small community of illiterate hunter-gatherers. 

As a historian I was leery at first of the assumptions of evolutionary psychology Historians relish complexity.  Anything that smacks of simplicity is immediately suspect. And EP sounded too simple.  I came to learn that in science explanations like EP are actually considered elegant, assuming they are based in evidence.  In science any explanation is considered elegant if it can parsimoniously account for a significant phenomenon.

As it happens there is no direct evidence backing up EP.  After all, we can’t go back in time to verify how humans actually evolved.  And what physical evidence we have is less than ideal.  What we need is physical evidence of behavior.  But behavior doesn’t leave physical clues.  So it behooves us to be skeptical.  But the more I learned of the indirect evidence scientists have developed for EP the more respect I developed for this new science, which is only a few decades old.

Is the book wholly rooted in the perspective of evolutionary psychology?

What EP provided me was a framework for the book.  It helped me account for our obvious political inadequacies.  We are simply better equipped, to sum up my findings, to deal with the challenges of a small community of a few hundred people than a large one consisting of millions whose leaders we only glimpse fleetingly on television.

But the book rests on the findings of a host of sciences:  political psychology, social psychology, political science, neuroscience, anthropology, behavioral economics, game theory, and on and on.  This is important.  As E. O. Wilson points out, we are more likely to be close to the truth when the findings of a variety of disciplines converge.  This is called consilience and it’s based on the idea of the unity of knowledge.  The more evidence I could find from different disciplines for the claims in the book the more confident I was that I was on the right track.  And this kept happening.

For example, the theory of evolution posits that family members will sacrifice to help one another.  When social scientists examined the records of the Donner Party they discovered that it wasn’t the single young men who fared best even though they appeared to be in a uniquely strong position – they didn’t have to make sacrifices for others, after all.  Rather, it was the members of close-knit families who had the greatest chance of survival.  This confirmed the predictions of EP about family cohesiveness:  families stick together through thick and thin because our brain is wired in such a way as to favor our own kin.  This is known as kin selection.

Researching the book took me far afield from history, my natural home, to worlds I’d never explored.  I often felt like an intergalactic traveller on a mission to distant planets in a strange universe I scarcely knew existed before I began my voyage.

I knew so little about these disciplines when I began that sometimes it would take me several days to get through a single scholarly article.  I know this sounds ridiculous.  But here’s what would happen.  In a typical article I’d encounter jargon that needed to be explained, so I’d have to check dictionaries, textbooks, and online resources.  But that was just the beginning.  Often, to figure out what the author was saying I had to comb the footnotes for supportive material.  This required pausing my reading of the article I’d started with to check out another, whose language was also frequently full of jargon that needed deciphering and footnotes that cried out to be followed.  This pattern would go on for some time, sometimes in such a convoluted way that I’d forget where I began.

But each day was very exciting.  Frankly, I hadn’t felt this kind of intellectual exhilaration since I was seventeen and stumbled one day upon Richard Hofstadter’s The Age of Reform in Trilby’s bookstore in Ridgewood, New Jersey, where I went to high school. That discovery set me on my course to become a historian.  And now, in my late fifties, I was on a new intellectual quest.

Let’s get down to specifics.  Does your research help explain why millions of Americans believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya?

This was one of the questions that drove me.  I really wanted to understand this phenomenon, which sounds crazy to academics and mainstream journalists.  How on earth can intelligent people believe this nonsense?

The broad answer is the one offered by EP.  These folks, knowing little about politics, generally rely on their instincts when political questions arise.  And their instincts (our human instincts) tell them to be wary of people who don’t look like they do.  Obama, as a black man, doesn’t look like them.  So they find it believable when they hear from a friend or some talking head on TV that Obama’s a Muslim from Kenya. 

It’s possible to be educated out of this wrong-headed opinion.  But most Americans aren’t well tutored in politics.  So they go on instinct.  This leads to a lot of mischief. 

What’s the chief lesson of the book?

I want to state this very clearly.  The overriding lesson of the book is that in politics we can’t go on instinct.  Clarity is needed because it’s easy to infer, falsely, that I believe it’s impossible for us to do politics well since we are burdened with a Stone-Age brain.   But I don’t say that and don’t believe it.  We’ve succeeded after all in building stunning skyscrapers, landing a man on the moon, and developing super fast computers, all of which are a testament to the ability of humans to exercise higher order cognition.   What we have not been very good at is overcoming our instincts in politics and our instincts often undermine us.  As I state baldly in the opening pages of the book, “when it comes to politics, the times when we can unquestioningly go with our instincts are almost nil.” And yet we do it all the time. 

Culture, to be sure, can shape our instincts in a constructive way.  It’s because of culture that we no longer take pleasure throwing live cats into open fires, as both kings and peasants once did with relish for entertainment. Were we to witness such a thing I am confident we’d be filled with the feeling of instant revulsion.

But in politics we are frequently thrown back on our human instincts, the ones we are born with, and it is these with which I’m concerned.  They include a deep suspicion of outsiders, blind loyalty to our tribe, and biased thinking in favor of our own opinions.  When we let these instincts drive our politics, as we frequently do, the consequences are often adverse, as I try to demonstrate.

I am hardly a pessimist, however.  As I show science is helping us understand our instincts.  And once you understand them you can take preemptive measures to sidestep dangerous habits of thinking.  We aren’t the prisoners of our instincts, however much we rely on them.

All animals are born with certain instincts.  Other animals have to blindly follow theirs.  We don’t. We alone possess the capacity to think about our behavior and, upon reflection, change it. That is one of the things that make us human.  Sometimes people conclude that our instincts are what is most human about human beings – that that’s who we really are.  But this isn’t the case at all.  What is most human about us is our possession of reason operating in tandem with instinct.  It’s our reasoning abilities that distinguish us from the rest of the animal kingdom.

Paul Krugman frequently expresses bewilderment at the broad ignorance of basic theories about economics.  Can you account for the phenomenon?

I became a devoted reader of Krugman’s New York Times blog while writing the book.  The blog spurred me to think hard about this question.  As he shows on the blog it’s not just ordinary voters who get economics wrong, but elites, too.  Year in and year out Very Serious People (his wonderful, biting phrase) warned that the loose money policies of the Federal Reserve would bring on rampaging inflation and year in and year out inflation failed to rear its ugly head.  Yet almost without exception the Very Serious People failed to change their opinion.

There’s no single explanation.  But one of the most important factors is sheer stubbornness.  People generally dislike changing their mind.  Social psychology explains why.  We like to think well of our opinions and ourselves.  When we hear of evidence that raises doubts about our opinions we naturally try to discount it.  As the ever-useful theory of cognitive dissonance explains, we hate dissonance and will take extreme measures to reduce it. Ignoring evidence contrary to our own ideas is the tried and true method.  People who do often enjoy better physical health! Nature rewards stubbornness.

It’s possible to use higher order cognitive thinking to overcome our instinctive defense of an idea we adore that’s proven unworthy of our affection, but most of the time we don’t make the effort.  As Daniel Kahneman observes, our brain is lazy.  Rather than think hard about an issue we go with the flow and follow instinct.  And our instinct, as I’ve said, is to stick to ideas we have long held.

Have you ever caught yourself going on instinct?

Of course.  No one should indulge the fantasy that they are superior to the mortals who rely on instinct and I certainly don’t.  I am as susceptible as anybody.  As I relate in the book I have been haunted for decades by my decision as a young man to stick with Richard Nixon long after most of the country had abandoned him.  I wanted to understand why I had done this.  It made no sense.  It was particularly disturbing because I was a devoted student of Watergate.  My wrongheadedness wasn’t the result of inattentiveness.  I was a political junkie.  Fortunately, science offers an explanation.

You just admitted that public opinion did change in response to news reporting about Watergate.  Doesn’t that undermine your argument that people generally resist changing their opinions?

Thankfully public opinion does change!  I go on at length to account for the mechanism by which we change our opinions.  It involves the amygdala.  When evidence accumulates that we have gotten something very wrong our amygdala prompts an emotional response.  We become anxious. This feeling, which makes us uncomfortable, helps encourage a reappraisal of our convictions.  On occasion, when the evidence against us is overwhelming, triggering a massive anxiety attack, we actually change our mind. 

But this can take a very long time.  The American people declined to reconsider their opinion about Nixon for eleven months after Watergate.  During that period, despite the weekly disclosure of shocking headlines, they remained steadfast in their support.  That’s disheartening.  It undermines the confidence we have in democracy.  Facts matter less to us than we think – a major theme of the book.

And I was among those least willing to accept the evidence in front of my own eyes.  So I certainly don’t think I am exempt from the same tug of instinct that pulls at other people.  No one is.

Malcolm Gladwell urges us in his bestseller, Blink, to rely more on our instincts.  Is he wrong?  Did you intend your book to be a rebuke of his?

Malcolm Gladwell was one of my inspirations as I was writing Political Animals. I am in awe of his story-telling abilities.  And he influenced me more than anyone else in the way I structured the book.  I followed his example of marrying “stories and studies,” as he puts it.

That said, he has led a lot of people to believe they should follow their instincts.

But I think he has been misinterpreted.  Blink doesn’t say we should go with our instincts under all circumstances.  In the one chapter in his book in which he expressly deals with a political subject – the election of Warren Harding – he goes out of his way to observe that our instincts can’t always be trusted.  It was because of our instincts that we got saddled with a president like Harding.  He looked like a president so we made him one (though there’s more to the story than that, to be sure).

I may be wrong but I think Gladwell would actually like my book.  At least I hope so.  Nothing in it contradicts his main points in Blink.

How did your background as a historian affect the way you wrote the book?

You can take the historian out of the library and put him in the lab but in the end he’s still a historian.  Every page of the book reflects my training. It’s in the stories I tell, of course, which I picked up from years studying the history of politics and the presidency.  And it’s in the emphasis I place on context. 

The most constant refrain of the book is that context is everything.  Our goal as voters should be to make sure that we only go on instinct when the context is right. See a shadowy figure in the distance down a dark alley?  Follow your instincts and run!  That’s an example of a Stone Age instinct working to our advantage.  The context is right.  But if you catch a few sound bites of a politician on television don’t lull yourself into thinking you know him, though your brain will incline you to think that you do.  That’s evolution playing a trick on you.  The context is wrong.  We can only really read people well when we live with them in close surroundings over long periods of time.