I am an anthropologist and primate sociobiologist who seeks to understand, step by Darwinian step, how apes could have evolved to imagine and care about what the lives of others might be like.  I believe that such questing for inter-subjective engagement laid the  foundations for significant later developments such as language and cumulative culture. My focus then is on the prequel to what became the main human feature film, worlds with symbols, words and story-telling, realms beginning to be explored by psychologists like Marc Hauser, ethnographers like Polly Wiessner and literary scholars such as Brian Boyd, Joseph Carroll, Jonathan Gottschall and Lisa Zunshine.  What follows is my take on how humans became such “other-regarding” apes.

“Nature red in tooth and claw”, “selfish genes”, and “rational actors” notwithstanding, humans are a peculiarly other-regarding, “pro-social” species. We routinely share and behave in ways that benefit others and find it pleasurable to do so. Our closest relatives among the other apes, chimpanzees and bonobos, with whom we last shared common ancestors some seven million years ago, and still share nearly 99% of  DNA sequences, also descend from highly social, manipulative ancestors and possess similar cognitive capacities, yet they are far more single-mindedly self-serving. In this respect, other apes are far more nearly “rational actors” than humans are.

Time and again, anthropologists have drawn lines in the sand dividing humans from other apes, only to see new discoveries blur those boundaries. By now every one of the Great Apes has been observed to select, prepare and use tools, crafting natural objects into sponges, umbrellas, nutcrackers, even pointed sticks for jabbing prey. Such traditions are transmitted across generations so that researchers in the new sub-discipline of “Primate Archeology” (Haslam et al. 2009) are excavating stone mortars chimpanzees used thousands of years ago.  Other apes are also born able to scan and imitate the faces of their caretakers, much as human newborns do, and they exhibit rudimentary capacities for attributing mental states to others. Chimpanzees and bonobos who exhibit considerable empathy in some contexts, also sometimes help one another (Warneken and Hare 2007) and may  occasionally share food although, in the wild they usually have to be badgered first (Fruth and Hohmann 2002). Apart from language (no one challenges human exceptionalism on this score) remaining outliers  distinguishing humans from nonhuman Great Apes mostly have to do with how much further along the continuum of other-regarding impulses humans fall.

Glossary
Alloparent – Group member other than genetic parent who helps the mother rear offspring (from Greek allo- for other than).
Allomother – Male or female group member other than the mother who helps rear offspring.  This catch-all term can include the genetic father when in the absence of DNA data no one knows who the father is.
Cooperative Breeding – Cooperative breeding refers to species with alloparental care and provisioning of young, and has evolved in roughly 9% of birds and 3% of mammals.  Shared care (without provisioning), as well as cooperative breeding (alloparental care plus provisioning) occurs in many species of monkeys and prosimians, but humans are the only great apes to rear young this way.  Note that “cooperative breeding” does not mean individuals always cooperate; a lot of competition can go on both within and between cooperatively breeding groups. SBH

Humans are far better than other apes at attributing mental states to others and appear to care much more about what others think and feel. Children as young as two years old who have not yet learned to speak are  already concerned about what others think. They are capable of both pride and embarrassment, eager to know how others perceive them. Right from an early age humans are also eager to share with others.    Every human society ever studied is characterized by food-sharing and carefully considered gift-giving. Furthermore, when a human does something nice for someone else, the  brain centers stimulated are those associated with registering  pleasurable sensations.  So what brought about this striving for inter-subjective engagement?

In retrospect, there are obvious benefits to attributing mental states to others and intention-reading.  No other apes coordinate behavior to achieve common goals the way humans do.  But Natural Selection can not favor traits simply because they might be useful and enhance fitness down the line. So how did individuals in the lineage leading to the genus Homo evolve these peculiarly other-regarding impulses? Traits like mutual tolerance, giving impulses and mental attribution had to already be there before higher levels of cooperation,  social learning, teaching, cumulative culture and above all language could develop. Furthermore, as psychiatrist Peter Hobson and  linguists like Tecumseh Fitch and Tom Givón stress,  questing for intersubjective engagement provide important motivations for developing forms of communication that go beyond the signaling of other animals — “watch out”, “there’s danger on the ground” or “food over here”. If even before they master language, children wonder what others think and feel and are capable of inventing  imaginary friends with emotional lives of their own, it is because — as  poet Daphne Merkin  puts it — we humans “long …to find our singular passions reflected in a larger pond than the selves we swim in.”

So just how on  Darwin’s earth did Natural Selection come to favor individuals incrementally better at monitoring the intentions and feelings of others? How did the peculiarly human quest for inter-subjective engagement get started? An important first step is to break down nonhuman-human ape differences into their component parts so as to better understand exactly what traits are involved.

In the most ambitious comparative study to date undertaken at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, 106 chimpanzees of all ages, 32 orang utans and 105 two and  a half year old children were subjected to a specially designed  battery of tests allowing Michael Tomasello’s team to compare their sociocognitive capacities (Herrmann et al. 2007). In terms of spatial memory and object permanence, or the ability to discriminate quantities or understand causality, chimps and orangs perform in the same range as human toddlers. The big differences are in the social realm where children test significantly better at learning how to solve a problem from watching a demonstrator. Children are also better at understanding communicative cues like pointing, and better at attributing mental states to others so as to understand what they are intending or trying to accomplish – what psychologists call Theory of Mind.  So to explain nonhuman versus human ape differences, we need to identify selection pressures favoring increases in mutual tolerance, social communication and intention-reading.

To my mind, existing explanations for other-regarding impulses –such as the need for in-group solidarity in the interests of defeating out-group enemies — leave unaddressed these initial steps towards prosociality and fail to explain why other apes such as  chimpanzees did not spend the last seven million years becoming more cooperative as well. This is one reason why in Mothers and Others I focus on one of the most obvious, albeit too often overlooked, differences between humans and other apes, the peculiar way that bipedal apes living in small-scale hunter-gatherer societies rear young.

Among chimps, gorillas, bonobos and orangs, mothers are extraordinarily possessive of new babies, in fur-to-fur, body-to-body contact, not out of touch even for a moment, for the first six months or so of life. Infants are suckled for up to seven years. Once weaned however, nonhuman ape  youngsters  provision themselves. By contrast, human babies born in traditional societies are passed around among other group members from the first day of life, and in some groups are held by allomothers (typically kin — fathers, older sibs, aunts, cousins or  grandmothers) for much of the time, even suckled if the allomother holding them is lactating. Within months, long before children are weaned, infants are fed as well by allomothers who deliver soft or pre-masticated  foods,  kiss-feeding the baby by pushing the mash in with their tongues.  Supplementation of children’s diets continues for many years.

Even though human infants are bigger at birth and take nearly two decades to mature, allomaternal provisioning means that mothers can wean babies sooner than other apes. With toddlers buffered from starvation, mothers breed again sooner, potentially increasing lifetime reproductive success but also forcing mothers to become even more dependent on alloparental assistance. In Mother Nature I proposed that increasingly contingent maternal commitment produced the curious combination of passionate maternal love with ambivalence evident in human mothers.  Although rarely seen in primates with exclusive maternal care, high levels of  ambivalence in mothers short on social support is common in other cooperatively breeding primates. Humankind’s deep legacy of cooperative child-rearing also had implications for the cognitive and emotional development of youngsters growing up dependent upon allomothers (the main focus of Mothers and Others) as well as  implications for allomothers (Burkart et al. in press).

None of us has a machine to go back in time and observe how infants in the Pleistocene were reared. But what we do have is a growing body of information about exactly who cares for immatures not only among other primates, but also among humans  living as hunters and gatherers. Furthermore, it is increasingly clear that in traditional societies with high child mortality, alloparental care and provisioning is not only useful, but critical for child survival. Homo sapiens species could not have evolved without it.

Space does not permit here a review of what sociobiologists are learning about the demographic implications of cooperative breeding and the conditions under which it is likely to evolve — particularly in highly social species with helpless young confronting environmental challenges such as unpredictable resources.  Nor does space permit me to review here information from neuroscience, endocrinology and the emerging field of comparative infant development relevant to understanding what the psychological implications of multiple caretakers were likely to be.  But here are a few of the highlights. The presence of a supportive kinswomen like a grandmother is correlated not only with increased child survival, but also with increased maternal sensitivity to infant needs, and infants growing up with nearby grandmothers are more emotionally secure and develop cognitively at a faster pace. Having older siblings around also enhances development of social skills.  As cognitive psychologists quip, “Theory of Mind is contagious” you catch it from older caretakers. Furthermore, forming attachments to multiple caretakers enhances perspective-taking and conditions children to integrate different perspectives.  Even though historians of the family, social workers and psychologists have long known about cognitive and emotional advantages from growing up in an extended family, only recently have evolutionists begun to recognize that such alloparental assistance would have been essential for our ancestors to rear surviving young.

Now consider information from other primates that cooperatively rear young.  Experiments with tamarin monkeys by Marc Hauser’s team at Harvard, and with marmosets by Judith Burkart and Carel van Schaik at the University of Zurich, reveal that these tiny-brained cooperatively breeding monkeys are far readier to pull a rope delivering food to others than are large-brained chimpanzees in comparable tests. These generous “other-regarding” impulses come into play even if the recipient is  unrelated. In the wild as well, cooperatively breeding tamarins and marmosets tend to be mutually  tolerant  and helpful to one another, as well as unusually good at coordinating their behavior in subsistence tasks.  Among these tiny-brained and distant primate relations, relations, the father (or another male the mother mated with) carries the babies (usually twins) much of the time, except when the mother is nursing them.  Allomothers also provision the babies around the time of weaning such that in some species of tamarins, 90% of the infants’ first solid food comes from alloparents. Chronic food-sharing spills over into generosity in other realms as well. Adults routinely vocalize to call the youngsters’ attention to novel, or particularly palatable, food items while intervening to prevent them from eating toxic foods — behavior that comes close to teaching (Rapaport and Brown 2008; Burkart et al. in press).

In Mothers and Others I summarize such evidence and invite readers to join me in a well-documented thought experiment. Take a primate with the cognitive and manipulative potentials and rudimentary empathy and  Theory of Mind typical of all  Great Apes, and rear that creature in a novel developmental context where his  mother’s commitment is contingent on how much social support she has and she and her infant depend on care and provisioning from multiple caretakers. The resulting phenotype will be a youngster adept at perspective-taking, far more so than any other ape under natural conditions would be. Then subject this novel ape phenotype to novel selection pressures such that infants best at monitoring the mental and emotional states and intentions of others, and also best at learning from them, are going to be those best cared for and best fed. This then leads to directional selection favoring traits like enhanced mutual tolerance, social learning, social communication and perspective taking — precisely the traits that comparisons between humans and other apes require us to explain.

No one knows when cooperative breeding got started in the hominin line. Evolutionary anthropologists Kristen Hawkes and James O’Connell have hypothesized that our ancestors began relying on alloparental care and provisioning by the beginning of the Pleistocene, 1.8 million years ago, and I concur with their reading of the paleontological evidence. If correct, this means that long before behaviorally modern humans capable of symbolic thought, art and language emerged, and even before big brained anatomically modern Homo sapiens with fully sapient 1350 cubic centimeter brains in the last 200,000 years,  these cooperatively breeding ancestors would have been well on their way to  “emotional modernity”. Emotionally modern apes would have grown up keeping track of others and  inordinately interested in the feelings and lives of others, even those out of sight, or far away.

Acknowledgements: This essay is based on a lecture originally presented at the Darwin Festival, University of Cambridge, July 5-9, 2009.

Selected References, including recent additions since Mothers and Others

• Burkart, J.; E. Fehr; C. Efferson; and C. van Schaik.  2007.  Other-regarding preferences in a nonhuman primate: Common marmosets provision food altruistically. PNAS 104: 19762-66.
• Burkart, J.; S. Hrdy; and C. van Schaik. 2009 (in press). Cooperative breeding and human cognitive evolution. Evolutionary Anthropology.
• Fruth, B. and G. Hohmann. 2002.  How bonobos handle hunts and harvests: Why share food?  In Behavioural Diversity in Chimpanzees and Bonobos, edited by C. Boesch, G. Hohmann and L. Marchant. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 231-243.
• Haslam, M. et al. 2009. Primate archeology. Nature 460, 339-344.
• Hauser, M.; M.K.Chen; F. Chen and E. Chuang. 2003. Give unto others: Genetically unrelated cotton-top tamarins preferentially give food to those who altruistically give food back. Proc. Roy. Soc. London (Series B) 270:2363-70.
• Hawkes, K.; J.F. O’Connell; N.G. Blurton Jones, et al. 1998 Grandmothering, menopause and the evolution of human life histories.  PNAS 95:1336-39.
• Herrmann, E.; J. Call; M.V. Hernandez-Lloreda J.; B. Hare and M. Tomasello. 2007 Humans have evolved specialized skills of social cognition: The cultural intelligence hypothesis. Science 317:1360-66.
• Hrdy, S.B. 1999.  Mother Nature.  New York: Pantheon.
• Hrdy, S.B. 2005.  Evolutionary context of human development: The cooperative breeding model. In:  Attachment and Bonding, a new synthesis, edited by C.S. Carter et al. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, pp. 9-32.
• Rapaport, L.G.  and G.R. Brown   2008. Social influences on foraging behavior in young primates: learning what, where and how to eat.  Evolutionary Anthropology 17: 189-201.
• Sear, R. and R. Mace. 2008. Who keeps children alive? A review of the effects of kin on child survival.  Evolution and Human Behavior 29:1-18.

While you’re waiting, you can also take a quick look at what’s being said out in the blogosphere about this nascent blog. We are deeply enjoying the conversations that have already taken place in the comments sections of the posts, and we appreciate the feedback we have received so far. If you know of another blog linking to or reviewing this site, feel free to leave a comment with a link.

• Eugene Raikhel, Ian Hacking on commercial genome-reading, Somatosphere, 4/13/09 …an excellent post by Ian Hacking on genome reading services offered by companies like 23andMe, receives commentary from Paul Rabinow, Gisli Palsson, Norton Wise and others. There is also a follow-up post by Hacking. Hacking’s post continues some of the arguments he developed in his 2006 Daedalus article, “Genetics, biosocial groups & the future of identity” (available for free download), chiefly the question of “Are the direct-to-consumer online genome services forging a new technology of the self?”
  
• ckelty, Class, Consumption, Genes and conservative reactionaries, Savage Minds, 4/13/09 …there is a nice little interchange (at the National Humanities Center’s “On the Human” prjoect) on the role of the new direct to consumer genetic testing companies, principally 23andMe and Knome, instigated by Ian Hacking, and attended to by Paul Rabinow, Gisli Palsson, and others who know you. check it out…
  
• Bill Benzon, Across the Disciplines, Get Happy, The Valve, 2/27/09 The National Humanities Center has established a website, On the Human, featuring the work “of university professors who teach courses on humans and their relations to animals and machines.” The site currently includes course materials for 3-credit undergraduate course on this general subject, news items, an explanatory video, and an essay by Geoffrey Harpham, “Science and the Theft of Humanity.” The website has a blog, also entitled On the Human; sure to check out the video of a whistling orangutan. More to come.
  
• Jeffrey J. Cohen, The Multiple Histories of Virtue, In the Middle, 3/19/09 Given that the National Humanities Center is currently concluding its three-year initiative on “Autonomy, Singularity, and Creativity: The Humanities and the Human,” and have also initiated a new, ongoing forum, “On the Human,” on current controversies in the studies of animals, and machines, the time is propitious for collaborative cross-disciplinary alliances …

In Terrence’s Self-Tormentor the old man Chremes proclaims, “I am a human being. I consider nothing human alien to me” (homo sum, humani nil a me alienum puto) – a proclamation of magnanimity that lept out of this 2nd-century B.C. play and took on a proud, expansive life of its own. But alongside the humanistic magnanimity runs a disturbing question – the question of this Forum. Despite all the millennia during which we have been humanizing the world, “that uneasy stare at an alien nature is still haunting us, and the problem of surmounting it is still with us”, as Northrop Frye says in The Educated Imagination (1963: 22). So, reflecting the confrontation back onto ourselves we ask, what is this “human”, beyond whose verge lies something Other?

Ask that, it seems, and tribal, territorial, oppositional metaphors almost immediately come into play: human here, non-human there, with a nervously disputed boundary in between and turf to be won or lost. The same drama enacted among nations and races plays out in the academic world as well, with the less self-confident areas of enquiry put on the defensive. It would be good to know if, as seems, the humanities have found themselves more often than not in that position, defining themselves in terms of what they are not. Is this the humanities’ lot by virtue of their common trajectory toward “the alternativeness of human possibility” (Bruner 1986: 53) rather than utilitarian ends? In the Renaissance, Peter Burke points out, the scholar-revolutionaries nicknamed the humanistae brought the concerns belonging to man (literae humaniores) into focus by distinguishing them from and opposing them to the concerns belonging to God (literae divinae).

Since the mid to late 19th Century, especially in North America, the sciences have taken religion’s place as the privileged force to be reckoned with, in the popular imagination the gold-standard for reliable knowledge and source of public benefit.

The situation between beneficial sciences and problematic humanities continues to be exacerbated by those spatial metaphors that not only oppose ways of thinking but confine thought to a limited number of possibilities, like the Tree of Knowledge with its well-grown branches of learning or the geo-political images of turf and territory. My favourite but by no means unrepresentative example of the latter is from a lecture given by the Göttingen mathematician David Hilbert in neutral Zürich in 1917, as the empires of Europe were destroying each other all around him; apparently without irony he spoke of relations between his field and “the great empires of physics and epistemology” (1996/1918: 1107). We might name the superpowers of academia differently now, but Hilbert’s manner of characterizing them is instantly recognizable.

My concern, however, is not with epistemic warfare or diplomacy but with the deeply engrained way of understanding what one is or where one stands by opposition to an alien nature or place. Let me give substance to this concern by focusing on the specific opposition of Self to Other in computing. I want to do this not in terms of the nervousness, indeed outright fear that rippled through the humanities in the early days of computing – a fascinating historical question that I’m working on at the moment. Nor do I want to take up the question of the human as usually done in the philosophical neighbourhood of AI. The classic statements one finds there – Alan Turing’s imitation game and many subsequent positions for or against a perfect counterfeit (best argued by Hugh Kenner in The Counterfeiters) – seem to me to need considerable revision in the light of the machines we now have. For involvement with computing means not just better ways of doing certain old things and new ways of doing new things; it also hooks humanistic concerns to technological progress and so to an unstoppable force for change, continually modifying the problem to be considered. Unlike the situation Turing had in mind in 1950, our physical machines belong to us; they are intimately present, fast and (I am tempted to say) nearly resonant with us in the cybernetic sense. What’s now Other is not some hulking, room-filling, air-conditioned mainframe behind a partition, with labcoated technicians and engineers attending it, rather an indefinitely malleable scheme vested in increasingly accessible form (despite all the frustrations), by which we humanists are modelling whatever we care about. The Other is no longer plausibly out there but tangibly in here. How many of us now feel unwell when our computers don’t work? I admit to being one such person.

It is true that early hackers knew their machines in this sense, indeed that before them the first architects of programming, such as Herman Goldstine and John von Neumann, understood that instructing the machine “is not a static process of translation, but rather the technique of providing a dynamic background to control the automatic evolution of a meaning” (1947: 2). Here, however, I am concerned with computing as a cultural phenomenon, something that was perceived to be massively out there but is now scholarship’s familiar.

I want to ask questions from the inside of that relationship, in the spirit of Warren McCulloch’s “experimental epistemology” (1960), though certainly not as a neurophysiologist. My experience, as happens, is with works of literature – though any other artefacts of interest in the interpretative disciplines would do as well. Unlike most humanists involved with computing, my concerns nowadays are less with particular artefacts than with what tends to happen when computing becomes part of the interpretative act (which is among the most intimately human things we do). How does the question of the human look from there?

Let me take advantage of George Miller’s article “What is information measurement?” (1953), where he remarks on the contribution information theory might make to experimental psychology:

In the first blush of enthusiasm for this new toy it is easy to overstate the case. When Newton’s mechanics was flowering, the claim was made that animals are nothing but machines, similar to but more complicated than a good clock. Later, during the development of thermodynamics, it was claimed that animals are nothing but complicated heat engines. With the development of information theory we can expect to hear that animals are nothing but communication systems. If we profit from history, we can mistrust the “nothing but” in this claim. But we will also remember that anatomists learned from mechanics and physiologists profited by thermodynamics. Insofar as living organisms perform the functions of a communication system, they must obey the laws that govern all such systems. How much psychology will profit from this obedience remains for the future to show. (p. 3)

Indulge me for a moment in a bit of philology. Note the word “obedience”. In its sense closest to the human this denotes (1) an act of the will, a submission, as when I am obedient to the wishes of an equal or near-equal; then, (2) a yielding to some force or agency stronger than myself, as I would to someone with a massively persuasive argument or coercive weapon; then, (3) simply a manifestation of a force or agency so strong and in control that the very idea of resistance is nonsensical (as it is to say that a tightrope walker “defies” gravity).

In what sense is the human interpreter of a work of literature obedient, and how does the best of techno-science’s most influential invention, computing, compel his or her obedience now, or seems likely to in the future? Like the “nothing but” psychologist, he or she may be doctrinally obedient [1,2] to a school of interpretation, but what about obedience [3]? If we suppose that the interpreter of a text uses a computer persuasively to discover statistically significant regularities that go against some readings but favour others, what then? (Such uses have been impressively successful for some time.) A close look at the relevant research shows, however, that analysis proceeds recursively, in a virtuous, hermeneutic circle in which interpreter and statistical model interact. So intimately resonant are the statistical tools and the scholarly interpreter – indeed, in some cases the interpreter has developed these tools gradually to suit the developing results – that it makes no sense to distinguish “the dancer from the dance” (Yeats, “Among school children”). It would seem, then, that the challenge for the digital humanities is to figure out how more effectively to move in that cybernetic direction, using tools as some say we always have, to leverage the evolutionary processes in our own development.

So is there then no troubling question of the human for the humanities? Is the talk of a “theft of humanity” scare-mongering, or only a theft so long as the disciplines fight over infinite treasures as if they were finite things? Budgets and institutional plans are painfully finite, so there’s one problem. Another is what Langdon Winner in “Technologies as Forms of Life” (1986) calls our “technological somnambulism”, our proceeding as if we were not being culturally remade from the inside. Another is that we really have no idea even how to talk about the challenge with which computing confronts the humanities because we lack the vocabulary with which to bridge critical theory to technological methods. But let me focus attention rather on the question Peter Galison raises at the end of his article on the inheritance of cybernetics, “Ontology of the Enemy” (1994), and again in Image and Logic (1996): as objects and techniques move across cultural boundaries and through time, how goes what he calls their “(incomplete) disencumberance of meaning”? (1996: 435f). After considering the historical origins of Wiener’s cybernetics, Galison concludes,

Cultural meaning is neither aleatory nor eternal. We are not free by fiat alone to dismiss the chain of associations that was forged over decades in the laboratory, on the battlefield, in the social sciences, and in the philosophy of cybernetics. At the same time, it would clearly be erroneous to view cybernetics as a logically impelled set of beliefs…. What we do have to acknowledge is the power of a half-century in which these and other associations have been reinstantiated at every turn, in which opposition is seen to lie at the core of every human contact with the outside world. (1994: 265)

In conclusion let me ask: where, then, do we stand with respect to the computational Other, a human invention with a past as checkered and complicit as cybernetics, for so long viewed as inhumanely rigorous, provoking the fear of absolute enslavement to the cold machine, or itself put (like some of our fellow creatures) so far beyond the human pale as to provoke the thought of conscience-free slavery to support a prosperous leisure for humankind? (In 1971, in a review in the Times Literary Supplement, Sir Geoffrey Vickers noted this temptation as the greatest impediment to realizing computing’s signal contribution to epistemology.) Is this Other (which we have made), as Bruno Schulz wrote about art in 1935, something which connects us to a premoral and precognitive depth at which human values and thoughts are still “in statu nascendi“? Is this Other us? Should we be scared, or welcoming, or what?

Works cited.
Bruner, Jerome. 1986. “Possible Castles”. In Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. 44-54. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.

Burke, Peter. 2000. A Social History of Knowledge from Gutenberg to Diderot. London: Polity.

Frye, Northrop. 1963. The Educated Imagination. The Massey Lectures, Second Series. Toronto: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Galison, Peter. 1994. “The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the Cybernetic Vision”. Critical Inquiry 21.1: 228-66.

—. 1997. Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Goldstine, Herman H. and von Neumann, John. 1947. Planning and Coding of Problems for an Electronic Computing Instrument. Part II, Volume I of Report on the Mathematical and Logical aspects of an Electronic Computing Instrument. Princeton NJ: Institute for Advanced Study. library.ias.edu/hs/digiarchives.php (26/4/09).

Hilbert, David. 1996/1918. “Axiomatic Thought”. In From Kant to Hilbert: A Sourcebook in the Foundations of Mathematics, vol. 2, ed. William Ewald. Oxford Science Publications. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Kenner, Hugh. 2005/1968. The Counterfeiters: An Historical Comedy. Normal IL: Dalkey Archive Press.

McCulloch, Warren S. 1960. “What is a Number, that a Man May Know It, and a Man, that He May Know a Number?” Alfred Korzybski Memorial Lecture. General Semantics Bulletin 26 & 27: 7-18. www.generalsemantics.org/misc/akml/akmls/26-27-mcculloch.pdf (26/4/09).

Miller, George A. 1953. “What is information measurement?” American Psychologist 8: 3-11.

Schulz, Bruno. 1998/1935. “An Essay for S. I. Witkiewicz”. In The Collected Works of Bruno Schulz. Ed. Jerzy Ficowski. 367-70. London: Picador.

Turing, A. M. 1950. “Computing Machinery and Intelligence”. Mind N.S. 59.236: 433-60.

Winner, Langdon. 1986. “Technologies as Forms of Life”. In The Whale and the Reactor. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Vickers, Geoffrey. 1971. “Keepers of rules versus players of roles”. Rev. of The Impact of Computers on Organizations, by Thomas L. Whistler; The Computerized Society, by James Martin and Adrian R. D. Norman. Times Literary Supplement 21.5.71: 585.

Bommarito (like Olin) seems to find the experimental results unsurprising, given the commonplace that most (or all) people are not “Perfectly Rational Agents.”  Hard to argue this; if you’re not surprised, you’re not surprised.  But like Vazire, I am surprised, and would not have predicted (sans familiarity with social psychology) phenomena like the “Georgia effect.”  (Much as people in the early 1960s did predict the shocking rates of obedience in Milgram’s studies [see Doris 2002: 49], however familiar the results may seem today.)  I’m surprised because I find remarkable not so much the brute fact that people diverge from ideals of rationality, but the ways in which they do so.  As Haybron observes, it’s not astonishing when people are moved in ways “contrary to reason” by sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll.  Such considerations seem to tap motives that are both powerful and of a sort one is willing to count as compelling reasons in some, even many, circumstances.  (Perfectly reasonable to desire sex, one might think, so long as it is with the right person, in the right place, of the right sort, and so on.)  But the experimentally adduced motives don’t look like that:  they aren’t intuitively plausible candidates for the honorific reason.  So it seems that we have learned something new from the experiments: not that we are imperfectly rational agents, but that our divergence from standards of rationality may be effected by processes that are both unexpected and difficult to detect (quite unlike sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll).

Smyth is quite right to note the importance of the reasons/causes distinction. In fact, the challenge does not elide this distinction, but exploits it.  For what the studies point to is a class of motives that would not be counted as reasons by the actor, were she made aware of them.  Behaviors so described are plausibly thought of as irrational (or at least arational), so the studies identify a difficulty about human rationality.

None of this to deny that there are knotty questions about rationality.  As Young observes (with Nichols), for many behaviors it is quite unclear what a “rational explanation” would look like, or even that such an explanation is required.  Suppose I don’t have much articulate to offer when declining to partake in your soufflé of yak feces.  It’s “just yucky,” I say, much as I might say, regarding Haidt’s infamous example of sibling incest, it’s “just wrong.”  To lack a rationalization is not necessarily to act irrationally; to establish the latter, one seems to need a theory of rationality.

Yet it may be possible to motivate our difficulty on the theoretical cheap:  I’ve helped myself to a thinly subjective notion of rationality, in attempting to identify a class of cases where the operative motive is unlikely to be considered normatively compelling from the actor’s perspective.  Theoretical uncertainty notwithstanding, these cases look to be at least prima facie examples of irrationality, and I’ve proceeded on the assumption that such instances are enough to get the problematic off the ground.  Of course, much depends on the particulars of each case — if you like, the etiology of the judgments and actions at issue.  Some etiologies may be vindicating, and some debunking; the challenge intimated by the experimental literature is the prospect of surprising numbers of surprising etiologies that the actors themselves would regard as debunking. In the end, we’ll need substantive argument on particular normative issues, and (perhaps) more general argument on the theory of reasons (for example, on the authority of the subjective perspective).  But I think we can make a beginning without resolution of all the theoretical issues – as is usually the case.

In effect, Olin doubts that I’ve identified debunking etiologies: she is inclined to deny that the phenomena in question are instances of irrationality.  For example, the lovers on a bridge study does not show that the men asked out someone they found unattractive, which would look irrational; as Olin has it, the study identifies a causal factor plausibly implicated in the men finding the woman attractive, which is in turn implicated in their asking her out.  So on Olin’s reading, it’s not “they asked her out because they were frightened on the bridge,” but “they asked her out because they found her attractive.”  To put it more perspicuously, on Olin’s view it’s both, but so long as the second holds, there’s nothing much funny going on.
There’s something to this:  if I find someone attractive because of their clothes, or because of the champagne and oysters, I find them attractive all the same.   To say the heart (or other bits of anatomy) has its reasons is to say, in a sense, that the heart needn’t have reasons at all.  But I’m not sure the bridge case can be assimilated to the champagne and oysters case.   For I think that in evaluating one’s attractions (or career choices, etc.), the psychological history matters, and not all histories are created equal.  For matters of the heart, think of whatever sinister Freudian story you want.  Or try this: the philosophically ubiquitous mad scientist mucks about in your brain, making someone you previously found quite disgusting seem quite irresistibly attractive.  If you found out, how would you feel?  You might not care, and you might even decide to “go with it.”  But you might just as easily feel duped, or feel like you’d been manipulated.  We might say that your unlikely shift in attraction was not properly based on who you are, but on who the mad scientist is.  Described this way, the mad scientist’s science project seems creepy, and I’d have the same thought if I learned, say, that my inclinations of the heart were based on a fear of heights (so that I always date people who work on the ground floor).  And to observe, as I suspect Olin would, that attractions often are capricious in such ways, just is to make a point akin to that I want to make:  there’s likely more caprice, and less reason, in your decisions that you might have thought.

Nichols and I have gone ‘round about the Georgia effect many times, and here he seems to have upset my wagon with some straightforward calculations.  There is a Georgia effect, it turns out, but it looks to be tiny, increasing the likelihood of moving to Georgia by a nearly invisible .007 percent.  (Nichols calculations assume an equal likelihood of moving to each state.  If fact, number 9 Georgia has something like 20 times the population of number 50 Wyoming, but as Nichols observes, this does not substantially impact his point.)   In making this point, Nichols raises the issue of effect size, an extremely difficult and contentious issue in the methodology of social science.  As a philosopher, I’m in over my head here, but I’ll chance a few remarks.

The people who brought us the Georgia effect, Pelham and colleagues (2002), also found people were about 15% more likely than expected by chance to reside in cities with names resembling their surnames.  Once again, this might seem a ripe target for Nichols’ arithmetic, but as Pelham et al. (2002: 473) observe, the magnitude of this effect is about 3 times the effect size corresponding to the long term house advantage in roulette – and the house comes out ahead.

In a suggestive discussion, Meyer and colleagues (2001) report effect sizes in medicine in the form of correlation coefficients:

Aspirin consumption/reduced risk of heart attack: .02
Chemotherapy/surviving breast cancer: .03
Ever smoking/lung cancer within 25 years: .08

These numbers look puny too.  But it’s arguable – very arguable – that these effect sizes have clear practical implications: take the Aspirin, endure the chemo, and don’t light up. At this point, Nichols may want to say that these effects do not allow confident conclusions about particular outcomes for particular individuals, such as whether Sweet Georgia Brown will move to Georgia.  (Full disclosure: I’ve elsewhere registered a similar complaint about considerably larger effect sizes in personality psychology.) Quite true.  But wait.  Aspirin consumption (and “Georgia”) must be making a difference in some individual cases; or there would not be a significant correlation.  (Give the multitude of operative influences in any case, we cannot confidently say for whom the difference was made, but this sort of uncertainty is actually part of the problem, as we’ll now see.)

Like Haybron, I understand phenomena like the Georgia effect as a “foot in the door”; once we see that something like that can make a difference, we’re bound to admit there might be lots of such goofy influences, as indeed an enormous literature intimates.  And while each individual influence may be small (as in influences on our health), the additive effect may, for all we know, be quite potent.  If such additive effects may be plaguing our decisions, is rationality in doubt? Is there a good way to rule their presence out?

We can sharpen the difficulty by considering some remarks by Harman, who rightly observes that the studies are compatible with people exercising “considerable rational control.”  Obviously, the studies do not of show that self-ignorance is total: presumably the lovers on the bridge believed (rightly) that they were asking a woman out, and not a rutabaga.   As Greene intimates, a critical part of the question seems to be how much self-awareness is required for rational agency.  To put it another way, is self-ignorance limited to minor causal factors, or does it extend to major factors (or constellations of factors) that substantially determine behavioral outcomes?

I think self-ignorance extends to major factors.  Worse, I think some of these major factors are ones that those influenced would repudiate. Finally, I think such phenomena are widespread.

This is speculative.  But there is trouble enough without definitively establishing the empirical claims.  I suppose Harman would grant, as I think he should, that there are at least some cases where the kind of influences we are worrying about determine behavioral outcomes. And whatever we think about particular cases, I suppose Harman would grant, as I think he should, that there are some cases of such influence that should be counted as instances of irrationality, whether the actor has partial self-awareness or not.  We can argue (as I did with Olin) about whether individual cases look like irrationality; if you don’t like the ones I’ve used, there are many others, such as Comstock’s amusing example of the cancerous pork slabs.  But all that’s needed here is the highly plausible supposition that there are some such cases.

For to know that a person is acting rationally, one needs to rule out the presence of such factors – if you like, call these irrational influences defeaters.   But how is such a ruling out to be accomplished?  The answer, I think, is obscure; if I’m right about studies like the choice blindness experiments, it would be a mistake to appeal to something like introspection, or self-reports of experience.

The envisaged argument takes a familiar skeptical form:  a skeptical hypothesis is one that cannot be “ruled out,” and would falsify some belief, or category of beliefs, if true: if I cannot rule out the possibility of an epistemically malicious demon, or that I am an envatted brain, or that I’m frolicking about in a Matrix, I haven’t knowledge of the external world.  The present skepticism maintains that for any putative instance of something like rational agency, we cannot rule out the possibility of an alternate explanation of behavior that does not reference the materials of rational agency.  If we cannot rule out these hypotheses, we do not know that there are instances of rational agency.  Like other skeptical arguments, the argument is not that the phenomenon in question does not exist, but rather that there are not strong enough grounds for believing it does. (This argument is a much-compressed version of that appearing in Doris, forthcoming.) So far as I see, this argument has bite even if we concede to Harman, as I think we should, that the empirical record is compatible with considerable self- awareness.

Like O’Callaghan, what I find striking is the facility with which people produce “serviceable candidate explanations” for their behavior, even when their information, including about their own psychological states, is seriously inaccurate or incomplete.  I suspect that the kind of cases that strike Nichols and Young – call them instances of “rational dumbfounding” – are in fact pretty unusual.  Speaking for myself, I don’t often hear people say, “I have no idea why I did that.”  This is perhaps unsurprising, since such utterances will often not play very well.  While it may be that we’re genuinely clueless about matters of mate choice, for example, I doubt this is the understanding we typically go forward with. (Perhaps the married members of the audience will help us with an informal experiment:  go home and announce to your spouse,  “You know honey, I have no idea why I married you.”  I suspect the results, if listeners took the statement literally, would be illuminating.)  I’d be inclined to put O’Callaghan’s point like this:  what is most unsettling is just how well people can navigate the space of reasons, when this space is only tenuously related to the space of motives.   How does the discourse of reason work, then, and what purpose(s) does it serve?

Like Vazire, I want to find a place for personal self-direction that may fairly be considered rational agency, meaning I want to resist the skeptical argument.  I don’t suppose that this resistance will in the end amount to an eradication of skeptical anxiety — agency may well be harder to come by than one might suppose in a state of pre-scientific bliss — but I do believe substantial amelioration is possible.  But like Vazire, I believe there are difficult empirical questions here, ones that are not easy to systematically address; given the presence of phenomena like confabulation, what should be counted as evidence of genuine personal control?   But like Haybron, I believe the questions will become more tractable with the aid of the right sort of theory building.

I propose we undertake this theory building from the bottom up.  Start with an empirical question: how do human organisms regulate their behavior?  I expect that there will be more than one answer to this question: human organisms are likely possessed of multiple control systems.  Then we might ask, in a broadly pre-theoretical way, which – if any — control systems regulate behavior in ways that are apt for the attribution of agency.  On me view, this is a broadly Strawsonian exercise:  which forms of behavioral control appear to support behavior appropriately subject to “reactive attitudes” like anger and admiration?  At this point, we might indulge in some incipient theory building, and try to make some generalizations about the forms of control properly associated with reactive attitudes.  For example, we might find that many human achievements that merit admiration – keeping a marriage together, say, or writing a book – emerge socially and over time, and we might therefore want to focus some of our attention on socially and temporally extended processes, rather than on individual organisms and individual actions (as much philosophical action theory has done).  We’d then want to pursue longitudinal research on groups, and what we learn here might further refine both our pre-theoretical judgments and theoretical commitments. (I understand Vazire’s lab is now initiating such a project.)

My methodological proposal may seem both numbingly familiar and maddeningly vague.  Fair enough: it is, very substantially, an underformed riff on the Goodman-Rawls account of reflective equilibrium.  But notice that it contrasts sharply to a top-down approach to agency, such as that intimated by Bommarito’s comment, where one first develops, in a substantially a priori fashion, a ideal notion of agency (The “Perfectly Rational Agent”) and afterwards looks to the empirical literature to determine the extent to which actual human behavior approximates or diverges from this standard.  I won’t defend my methodology here.  I’ll only observe that in adopting it, one might reach an understanding of rational agency that is different from familiar philosophical understandings – and more human.

– John Doris

PS: I’m not familiar with the work of M.A. Curtis, which Lizzie commends.  Based on the linked excerpt, it represents a project quite different from, and much more ambitious than, mine.

References

• Doris, J. M. 2002. Lack of Character: Personality and Moral Behavior.  New York: Cambridge University Press.
• Doris, J. M. In preparation. A Natural History of the Self. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Doris, J. M. Forthcoming. “Skepticism about Persons.” Philosophical Issues 19: Metaethics.
• Meyer, G. J., Finn, S. E., Eyde, L., Kay, G. G., Moreland, K. L., Dies, R. R., et al. 2001. “Psychological Testing and Psychological Assessment: A Review of Evidence and Issues.” American Psychologist 56: 128–165