- yesterday
Paul Bloom tells Morgan Freeman that very early in life, everyone has a moral sense. Bloom further elaborates that if a person is brought up in a culture that rewards bad behavior, then "your sense of empathy can be blunted."
The indiscriminate killings of Charles Whitman is discussed. Freeman reviews the importance of willpower.
Thanks for watching. Follow for more videos.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season3
#episode7
#cosmology
#astronomy
#spacetime
#spacescience
#space
#nasa
#morganfreeman
#spacedocumentary
#canweeliminateevil
The indiscriminate killings of Charles Whitman is discussed. Freeman reviews the importance of willpower.
Thanks for watching. Follow for more videos.
#cosmosspacescience
#throughthewormhole
#season3
#episode7
#cosmology
#astronomy
#spacetime
#spacescience
#space
#nasa
#morganfreeman
#spacedocumentary
#canweeliminateevil
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:00From the dawn of recorded history to the present day, humankind has struggled with its darker nature.
00:10We know that psychopaths can torture and kill without remorse.
00:15But what compels seemingly normal people to commit acts of cruelty and violence?
00:22Today, researchers are uncovering the hidden forces that inflame our inner demons.
00:28Looking for ways to neutralize our deadliest urges and change human nature.
00:36Can we eliminate evil?
00:44Space, time, life itself.
00:51The secrets of the cosmos lie through the wormhole.
00:58The nen injustices.
01:05The gas comes.
01:07Few people consider themselves evil.
01:10Yet, evil seems an inescapable part of life.
01:14The mystery is...
01:17why?
01:18For millennia, we blamed the devil, a creature of darkness that made us do terrible things.
01:26Today, most Christians believe Satan is just a symbol.
01:33Psychologists and brain scientists have shown us that the evil we fear comes from within ourselves.
01:40Will it always be there?
01:43Or can science find its roots and destroy it?
01:52When I was about nine years old, we moved back to Chicago.
01:58Being new in the neighborhood, I became the target of a bully.
02:06One day, I decided enough was enough.
02:12But as I watched him lying there on the ground, I found I just couldn't savor my unexpected victory.
02:21I wondered, what made this kid so mean?
02:25Are some people just born bad?
02:29What I need you to do for the next one is really curl out a bit more. I need to see more pain in there.
02:48In Amsterdam, neuroscientist Christian Kiesers is looking for the source of human cruelty.
02:57Christian investigates empathy, our ability to identify and respond to what someone else thinks or feels.
03:07Okay, that was good.
03:08To find out how empathy works in our brains, Christian makes short films of painful acts to screen for test subjects.
03:17We need very controlled stimuli where we just see two or three seconds of pain.
03:22And we need to repeat many of them, which is why we need to make them ourselves.
03:29So our actors are typically our graduate students and post-docs because they know what they're doing.
03:35And they can take some pain.
03:37Christian screens his torture films in a theater unlike any on Earth.
03:46Magnetic sensors inside this fMRI machine will peer deep into this man's brain, showing which areas are active when he experiences empathy.
03:57Okay, so I'll give you this button box.
04:00What I want you to do is each time to rate what you felt in this particular trial.
04:11First, Christian records what happens in the subject's brain when he sees someone else in pain.
04:21Then he measures what happens when the subject experiences pain firsthand.
04:30Now, he compares the brain scans.
04:34So the emotional empathy we've been studying here, you would mainly see in parts of your brain that are not on the surface of your brain,
04:42but inside of the insula that's a little bit deeper here, and really in the midline between your two hemispheres.
04:50Okay, so what you're seeing here is basically in red the brain activity that happened while we were hitting the subjects in the scanner.
04:57And then here you see two of the emotional brain regions that really add this feeling of unpleasantness to what you feel.
05:06So they're telling you kind of, ouch, I don't like that.
05:09And so what we're seeing here in the bottom, the brain activity that happens while the subject was watching somebody else's pain.
05:19All of these more emotional areas get reactivated as if the subject had been feeling pain himself.
05:25Whenever you see the pain of somebody else, you will share it inside of yourself.
05:30The other person becomes part of yourself.
05:34The pain of others is not just something you see out there.
05:38It basically comes inside of you, and it becomes your pain as well.
05:42After screening hundreds of people, Christian believes that empathy is hardwired into nearly all of our brains, but it is not distributed equally.
05:54There is a curve of empathy. Some people are extremely empathetic. Others feel almost nothing.
06:00Think of a romantic movie. Most of us get caught up in the emotions on screen.
06:07But for a few of us, it plays like this. People with low empathy see and hear things differently because their brains work differently.
06:27Information flows through most brains like boats move along the canals of Amsterdam.
06:37But in some brains, that movement is impeded by narrow or blocked channels.
06:41So if you imagine that back there, you would have the visual brain areas that see what happens to others.
06:48And down there, you would have the emotional areas that normally feel your pain.
06:53Then we think that what makes the difference, basically, between a very empathic person and a less empathic person,
06:59is just the size of the canal that brings the information from the visual part of your brain to the emotional part in which you will share the pain of other people.
07:07And what of the monsters of our nightmares? The psychopathic killers who look normal on the outside, but are twisted on the inside.
07:20It is often said that psychopaths have no empathy, and this lack of empathy makes them evil.
07:27They are able to torture and kill because they can't relate to other people.
07:31Christian disagrees.
07:35Well, I think the finding that surprised us most was actually the study on psychopaths.
07:41We went in there with the simple idea that evil people like psychopaths would just lack empathy.
07:47And what we actually saw in this study is that what makes them evil is more complex.
07:51It's not that they lack the capacity for empathy, they just don't use it spontaneously.
07:58But if they want to, because, for instance, it serves the purpose of fooling somebody into giving them all their money,
08:07then they're quite able to empathize and really get into people's minds.
08:10So empathy is not everything.
08:15To keep from falling into evil, we also need a moral system to guide our behavior.
08:22A code of conduct that helps us fit into society and act in a non-destructive way.
08:29Scientists Karen Wynn and Paul Bloom of Yale University believe that moral code may be written into us at birth.
08:37That is a lot of duck you're fitting in your mouth.
08:42I've been studying babies now for just a little over 20 years.
08:46The more that I see of them, the more complex they become.
08:53There is a lot going on in there, and it's far more rich and complex of a mental life than we had ever thought.
09:05By studying babies, you get to see humans before they're contaminated by culture, by television, by a lot of social interactions, by sex and romance.
09:16You get to see humans in some sense in their purest form.
09:20And then you could ask, what's our natures? Are we kind? Are we cruel? Are we morally intelligent? Can't we tell good from evil?
09:27And the work I'm doing here with my colleagues suggests that very early on, there's some fundamental moral sense, some moral instinct that's present in all of us.
09:37How do you pose moral questions to a baby? Karen devised a kind of morality play for babies to watch and judge.
09:49We show babies a little puppet show in which this one puppet is trying to open a box, and he's trying, and he's trying, and he just can't quite get it on its own.
10:00And another puppet comes along and grabs the other side of the box lid and helps him open it.
10:04They then see the little puppet, he's trying again to open the box, and a different puppet comes along and jumps on top of the box lid, slams it shut.
10:12And so our question to the babies is, babies, do you have any different feelings towards these two characters, towards the one who helped in nice fashion open the box, and towards this other, who just really quite rudely slams it down and foils this guy's attempts to get into the box.
10:30Which one do you like?
10:32And we find that very reliably, babies, even as young as five and six months of age, will reach towards and reach for the helpful puppet.
10:42Okay, good job.
10:45Layla has chosen the good puppet.
10:48Between 80 and 95% of babies do.
10:52Paul and Karen believe this is a sign that babies are drawn towards kindness and away from antisocial behavior.
11:00But if most of us are born good, why do some of us turn out so bad?
11:06Well, there's all sorts of ways in which our sense of good could get perverted.
11:10If you're brought up in a culture which teaches you to be dismissive of others, which rewards selfishness, which rewards bad behavior, your sense of empathy could be blunted.
11:21So we have this built-in morality, but it's fragile.
11:23Once we descend into darkness, assault, rape, murder, are we lost? Or can the impulses that lead to evil be squelched?
11:34This man thinks so. He believes we can strengthen our brains and crush the evil within.
11:44Deep inside every human being is an animal, a creature whose only goal is survival.
11:53Most of us can contain the animal within, but we all know people who yield to their baser impulses.
12:00Sometimes their actions have terrible consequences.
12:05We blame these people for their evil acts, but do they really have a choice?
12:12After years of probing the human mind, neuroscientist David Eagleman of the Baylor College of Medicine has come to a startling conclusion.
12:22With a little bad luck, we could all become monsters.
12:29Along any axis you measure brains, whether that's empathy or intelligence or aggression, you find a big distribution.
12:37Not all brains are the same.
12:38You are your brain, and your brain is a delicate, highly complex apparatus.
12:45Injury or disease can alter its chemical balance and physical integrity, which can alter your personality.
12:54If you were to damage your thumb in an accident, that wouldn't change you as a person.
12:58But if you damage an equivalently sized chunk of brain tissue, that can change your risk taking, your decision making, and even, perhaps, whether you become a murderer.
13:15In 1966, Charles Whitman climbed to the top of the tower on the UT Austin campus, and he indiscriminately shot 48 people.
13:24Now, the only thing that matched the horror of this event was the unexpected nature of it.
13:30There was nothing in his history that would have predicted this sort of behavior.
13:35He was an engineering student, he worked as a bank teller, he lived with his wife and his mother-in-law.
13:41So what could explain this?
13:43Well, in his suicide note, he said, when this is all over, I want an autopsy to be performed.
13:49And what they found in his brain was a tumor about the size of a walnut,
13:53and it was pressing on a region of the brain called the amygdala, which is involved in fear and aggression.
13:59The amygdala is the center of emotion, the source of our primal desires.
14:05It is held in check by the frontal lobes and the temporal lobes, the centers of self-control.
14:11We all have subconscious demons that we keep in check, but when the frontal lobes are compromised, startling behaviors can emerge.
14:22Behaviors we call evil.
14:26This is what probably happened to Charles Whitman.
14:31He sensed that something was wrong with his brain.
14:35He could no longer control his violent impulses.
14:39And one of the battles that humans have to fight is short-term versus long-term decision making.
14:44We have impulses that we want to gratify and we have longer-term thinking that try to squelch those impulses.
14:52Let's say that I'm considering throwing this brick through this window.
14:56Part of me maybe wants to do it.
14:58Part of me feels it's an illegal act and I'll get caught and I'll get in trouble.
15:02And it's an arm wrestle between these different things.
15:05Some people are better at this than others.
15:06David believes we can strengthen our willpower with a little workout.
15:18Together with neuroscientist Steven LeConte, he is testing something called the prefrontal gym.
15:26There are no treadmills here, just a scanner that lets people see how their brains respond when they flex the mental muscles that govern self-control.
15:36Today, David and Steven are conducting their first ever test on a criminal offender.
15:44A man whose cocaine addiction led him to steal from his friends and family.
15:50Right now what this gentleman is doing is he's looking at images of drug use cues and we're asking him to either enhance his craving to these cues or suppress them.
16:01When the addict sees images of drug use, his own craving for drugs spikes.
16:10The fMRI scanner sees this increased activity in the brain and displays it as a measurement on a bar.
16:17When the craving networks in his brain are revving high, the bar moves to the red.
16:22But when he fights his dangerous urges, he can push the bar back toward the blue.
16:29With this biofeedback, he's able to train his brain to resist his impulses.
16:36By the way, he's doing great. I mean, he's actually...
16:39Eventually, David and Steven hope to take this technology to prisons to try to help criminals not repeat their mistakes.
16:46The beauty about the prefrontal gym is that people are helping themselves.
16:51If they choose to strengthen their long-term decision-making, this is the way they can do that.
16:57It doesn't change anything about the person. It just gives them a better opportunity to make good long-term decisions.
17:03But there are some for whom this technique may never work. Psychopaths. They can pass for normal, but they are capable of terrifying acts of evil.
17:17Soon, a revolution in brain science may give us the tools to spot evil brains before they ever commit a crime.
17:24Psychopaths can inflict physical and psychological harm on others without feeling a shred of remorse.
17:35They are the people most of us consider evil.
17:39And there are more of them than you might suspect. Up to 3% of the population.
17:45That's a lot of dangerous minds.
17:48What if one of them was yours?
17:50If something was wrong with your brain, how would you know?
17:59If Jim Fallon got a look inside your head, he could tell you.
18:04He has spent his career studying the anatomy of the brain with an emphasis on psychopathic killers.
18:11Six years ago, two of my colleagues in psychiatry brought me a whole bunch of these scans.
18:15So we're doing PET scans, but also some fMRIs. And about three-quarters of the way through, I noticed a very definite pattern.
18:22And it turns out that these were scans of really bad killers, serial killers and very violent killers.
18:30Jim has identified the unique brain structure of psychopathic murderers.
18:34Here are the areas of the brain, amygdala, anterior temporal lobe, orbital cortex, medial prefrontal cortex, this cingulate, back here to the hippocampus, back down.
18:47You see, it makes a big loop. These are the areas that are turned off in psychopaths.
18:51Our brain anatomy radically affects how we see the world.
18:57How a normal person would see the world would be like driving around in this car.
19:02A normal person would be watching their speed. They would be putting themselves in other people's shoes.
19:07How fast would you go? What if you had kids here?
19:10And you'd be looking at people. They'd be looking at you. Nothing to hide.
19:13The world of the psychopathic mind is quite different.
19:29It's like driving around in this darkened car at night.
19:33Now I'm protected from people seeing where I really am.
19:37As a psychopath, one would look out and you see these forms walking around and they're no longer people.
19:48And so, in this way, you know, the psychopath is able to use the night.
19:54That is, the night of not connecting with empathy and emotion with other people.
19:59But seeing them as objects to use and to get in the way, just run them over.
20:04Jim estimates that at least 40 genes contribute to antisocial personality disorders and psychopathic brain patterns.
20:14These genes influence whether you are violent, narcissistic or homicidal.
20:21So, if you have the genetics of a killer and the brain anatomy of a killer, are you destined to become a killer?
20:27For Jim Fallon, this question was about to become uncomfortably personal.
20:34Worried about Alzheimer's disease, he decided to run brain scans on his entire family.
20:40All of the tests came back fine, except for one.
20:44So, I was comparing at that time all these brains of killers, and I had these sheets that I was analyzing on my desk, and I thought they had gotten mixed up.
20:55That is, I thought one of our family's patterns was mixed up with the murders, because it looked just like the murderers' brains.
21:01And, of course, it turned out to be my brain.
21:04Jim's brain showed the tell-tale psychopathic colonists around the amygdala and the orbital cortex.
21:10When I first saw this, I actually just kind of laughed.
21:15You know, I took it, it was like, it was funny, a little bit in denial, and it was a little confusing, but I thought I took it pretty well.
21:23Next, Jim analyzed his genetic profile in family history.
21:28He found that he had inherited dozens of high-risk genes, and had ancestors who had been convicted of murder.
21:36Then, he asked his family and friends if he showed psychopathic traits.
21:48Uh, they said, well, Jim, we've known all along you're a psychopath.
21:51You just, you don't really hurt anybody.
21:53You play with everybody's head, you manipulate people, you're too competitive, you gotta win everything, you gotta, you know, all this stuff.
21:58He said, you know, but you're funny, and you don't, you know, you don't swing at people, you don't do any of that, so we just let it go, but everybody knows you're a psychopath.
22:04So, which is the real Jim?
22:09The esteemed scientists and life of the party, or the dangerous man revealed by the brain scans?
22:16I kind of thought I really knew myself, and so I became very confident that I was interested in the brain, I was studying it, I felt confident in myself.
22:24When this happened, you know, when I was 60, that was a shock, actually, when I finally accepted that I wasn't who I thought I was.
22:33Jim discovered an unsettling truth, but he was left with a mystery.
22:38If he has the brain and genes of a killer, why isn't he a killer?
22:45But given all the, you know, the genetic risk factors and how my brain is, you know, where it's kind of stuck, as it were, I looked like I really dodged a bullet.
22:54And I, you know, it was because of my parents and my aunts and my uncles and my grandparents, so the people really kept me happy.
23:03That's for sure. Talk about nature and nurture, that's when the nature and nurture was really happening in a very positive way.
23:09High risk genes and unusual brain architecture do not automatically create killers.
23:18Childhood abuse seems to be a critical ingredient.
23:22A loving home helps Jim Fallon become a boisterous overachiever, not a dangerous psychopath.
23:29Not all psychopaths are violent criminals.
23:33But what do we do with the ones who are?
23:35Do we simply remove them from society and throw away the key?
23:41Perhaps not.
23:43Researchers are now pioneering a radical way to eliminate evil.
23:48By literally zapping it out of your brain.
23:54Some religions hold that man is a creature of evil.
23:59We may struggle to follow the righteous path, but ultimately we will fail.
24:05We are all sinners.
24:09But what if we could make people good?
24:18In Zurich, Switzerland, Dr. Christian Ruff is blazing a trail on a controversial frontier of neuroscience.
24:25Changing the way people think and behave.
24:28Human behavior is quite unique in the animal world.
24:32In contrast to most animals, we don't just follow our self-interests, but we are able to actually control our behavior in line with social norms and rules.
24:41Pretty much like the rules of this card game that we are playing here.
24:44People are always tempted to break rules, to break laws.
24:50And the problem really is that if some people start doing this, if some people start breaking out of social norms, then very soon chaos ensues.
24:58So it's quite important for society to put in place strong punishment threats, to basically instill in people's heads the knowledge that if they violate certain norms, certain laws, then they will get punished.
25:14What do we do with people who cannot or will not follow the rules of the game?
25:21Christian's solution is to zap their brains with electricity.
25:26These players are linked together in an interactive video game.
25:30They all wear headbands designed to pass electrical current into the parts of their brains that control altruism, or concern for the well-being of others.
25:43With a targeted electrical pulse, Christian has found that he can make people, including himself, much more considerate.
25:52In the beginning, there's a slight tingling underneath the electrodes at the scalp for about 30 seconds or so.
25:59But afterwards, I can't really feel it anymore, whether I'm being stimulated or not.
26:04Today, Christian and the volunteers are going to play a simple profit-sharing game.
26:10Each player is allotted a sum of money and decides how much to give an anonymous partner.
26:16You have to decide on every trial what your opponent, the other person, will consider to be fair.
26:25Here in this example, for instance, I can decide now the white is what I keep and the black is what I give to the other person.
26:31So I keep a lot, 70%. And in this condition, the other player can now punish me.
26:38Oh, and that's what they did. They took everything away from me for being so selfish.
26:42At first, most of the players act selfishly.
26:47But then the electricity begins to flow.
26:50After five minutes of brain stimulation, Christian and the other players are now much more willing to compromise.
26:57This is another punishment trial, actually, so I'm going to give a bit more now, actually, to the other person.
27:04And let's see whether they punish me or not.
27:07Ah, no, okay. So I get to keep what I basically chose for myself.
27:10The headbands have coerched the players into being nice.
27:17These behavioral changes are temporary.
27:20They persist for about 20 minutes after the stimulation stops.
27:24But Christian believes that repeated treatment will condition people to act kindly.
27:29Could this technology be used in jails and mental hospitals to suppress evil thoughts and turn criminals back into good people?
27:40I think we're definitely not at the point yet where we can employ these methods to make people who commit very selfish acts and harm others not commit them.
27:49But to understand these brain processes and how we can affect them with brain stimulation, we might be getting there one day.
27:56It's definitely not too far away.
27:58Neuroscientist Jim Fallon agrees.
28:01In fact, he believes we already have the means to do it with drugs.
28:06The big question is, can we control those behaviors that we consider evil in people?
28:12And the answer is probably yes.
28:14It depends on how far you want to go.
28:16What one could do is just simply snort intranasally, up the nose, different compounds.
28:23And so let's say one has a problem with impulse control.
28:26Well, impulse control happens to be that area, orbital cortex, right above where the smell receptors are.
28:34So it's the first thing that's hit.
28:36So one could simply put in pieces of DNA that will be snorted in and concentrated in the orbital cortex that will increase those neurotransmitter systems that increase the function of the area and therefore, inhibition.
28:50We could decide to do this so everybody has their own cocktail of behavior modification.
28:55It only lasts a certain amount of time.
28:58This is something that society could do.
29:02It sounds a little wild, but it's completely doable.
29:05We may soon have the means to reshape damaged brains and stop violent behavior before it starts.
29:12But this neuroscientist thinks eliminating evil will take more than peering into the heads of criminals.
29:20We must also probe the minds of those who judge them.
29:25Today, we tend to punish criminals more for the harm they inflict than for their evil intent.
29:32That's understandable.
29:33It is much easier to count bodies and bullet holes than determine what was going on in someone else's brain.
29:42But what if we could tear into criminal minds and judge them on the evil we find there?
29:49That day may be coming soon when the true motives of not just criminals, but also the people who judge them are laid bare.
30:00As one of the few people in the world who is both a biologist and a lawyer, Owen Jones has a unique view of criminal justice.
30:11Objection, Your Honor.
30:13This mock courtroom is part of Owen's laboratory, a place where he explores what goes on in the minds of criminals, judges, and juries.
30:23So we're seeing a lot of increasing effort to bring neuroscience into the courtroom, for better or for worse.
30:29Sometimes, for example, criminal defendants may be bringing evidence of their own brain scans to try to avoid conviction altogether.
30:40To say, I should not be held responsible.
30:43But Owen's focus is not so much on criminal brains as on the brains of the people who determine their guilt.
30:50And he's finding that the ways we judge evil behavior are severely flawed.
30:56Our legal system requires jurors to be amateur mind readers.
31:01They're supposed to figure out not just who did it, but what was the mental state of the person who did it.
31:07Do you remember the police coming to your house later that night?
31:09Yeah, they woke me up at about 3 a.m.
31:12Owen has found that jurors are not good at distinguishing the gray areas of criminal intent.
31:19Emotional circumstances will bias their decisions.
31:22Say two men drive home drunk from a bar.
31:32One hits a tree.
31:34The other hits a tree.
31:36And a little girl in front of the tree.
31:39The first man will get a light sentence.
31:42The man who killed the girl will go to prison.
31:45The question is, for how long?
31:48Owen has found that jurors are likely to give this man the stiffest possible sentence.
31:57Jurors have a tendency to think that the driver had a higher level of intent, a knowing level of intent, instead of a reckless level of intent, for example, than he actually did.
32:08In other words, even though the two drivers had exactly the same level of intent, jurors will believe the driver who hit the girl was more evil than the other driver.
32:21When emotions dominate, judgments are harsh.
32:26At other times, jurors will shut off their emotions completely, and inexplicably excuse murderous intent.
32:34Suppose, for example, that I want to poison my friend Amy, causing her death.
32:39And I believe her to be very allergic to poppy seeds.
32:43I sprinkle poppy seeds liberally, and I serve it to her.
32:46Unbeknownst to me, Amy's not allergic to poppy seeds, and so she does not die.
32:51But let's vary the circumstances a little bit.
32:54Suppose that, although she's not allergic to poppy seeds, Amy is very allergic to peanuts.
32:59And unbeknownst to me, who wants to kill her, the chef in the kitchen puts peanuts on her salad.
33:05If she dies as a consequence, a lot of people will start to think,
33:08wait a second, I shouldn't be punished for attempting to murder her, because I actually didn't cause the harm that befell her.
33:15So in a way, the fact that somebody else caused her death operates as a shield to my liability and punishment.
33:22Once again, the criminal has been judged on results, not on his intentions.
33:29Owen suspects there is a neurological explanation for this.
33:34To find out what happens in the brain when we try to gauge levels of evil,
33:38Owen has put judges and jurors into brain scanners and presented them with criminal scenarios like these.
33:45He first discovered significant activity in a region called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex.
33:54It governs analysis and cognition.
33:57This part of the brain seems to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting in deciding whether or not to punish someone at all.
34:04But once the prefrontal cortex decides to punish, another part of the brain decides how much.
34:11The amygdala, which governs our emotions.
34:15The punishment decision is a product of two very different regions.
34:20One highly analytic, one more emotional that is setting a punishment amount,
34:25that are separately deployed but yet jointly involved in yielding the punishment decision.
34:34Balancing the emotional and analytic parts of the brain is the magic trick required of every judge and jury.
34:41If jurors had reduced function in either area, their punishment decisions could be flawed.
34:48Research like this may enable us to de-bias decisions really focused on those aspects of a person's behavior
34:57that we want to take most into account when setting degrees of culpability.
35:03Owen hopes his findings will eventually lead to fairer sentencing.
35:08That we will eventually have a legal system that only imprisons people who truly want to do harm to others,
35:15rather than those who simply made tragic errors.
35:19But even if we improve the way we judge criminals,
35:23it will not be the end game in the struggle to eliminate evil.
35:27Because, as history bears witness,
35:31sometimes entire societies lose their moral compass.
35:36How do we stop the evil that poisons whole nations?
35:41We know that evil can twist and bend solitary minds.
35:50But there's another form of evil that infects whole societies.
35:54It compels ordinary people to support genocidal regimes and economies based on slavery.
36:02What makes societies turn bad?
36:06Can we stop it from happening?
36:09Karen Wynn's experiments at Yale show that even babies have a sense of good and evil,
36:16and seem to prefer goodness.
36:18But Karen runs another experiment that is far less comforting.
36:24It shows that the human tendency to identify with groups
36:28and discriminate against those not in our group starts very young.
36:34In this study, we present the baby with two food choices, graham crackers and, say, green beans.
36:42Then we bring babies into our experimental room, and they're introduced to two puppets.
36:47And each of the puppets gets a choice between graham crackers and green beans.
36:51Mmm, yum! I like graham crackers!
36:55The other puppet shows the opposite preferences.
36:58Ew, yuck! I don't like graham crackers!
37:02What we find, quite reliably, is that babies tend to choose the puppet who expressed the same tastes as they themselves did.
37:09Which one do you like?
37:11That one! Okay, good job! Does he get a hug?
37:15Babies not only prefer puppets that agree with them, they also like to see puppets that don't agree with them get punished.
37:23The puppet who doesn't like graham crackers has become an outsider, not part of the baby's group.
37:30My heart felt sad when I got that result because it did tell me that this preference for similarity that we're observing in babies under a year of age isn't just a trivial, superficial, fleeting thing,
37:45but it is having consequences across their psychological terrain in terms of how they think about these characters,
37:53what they expect of them, their perceptions of them, and also how they want them to be treated in the social world.
38:00Karen believes our brains are built to care more about people close to us, in our group, than those further away.
38:09And we segregate ourselves along lines drawn as simply as whether or not you like graham crackers,
38:16or have the same color skin.
38:19Sometimes, this can have very bad consequences.
38:23Steve Pinker is an experimental psychologist and cognitive scientist at Harvard.
38:41A lot of the worst atrocities in history came about when one group dehumanized or demonized another.
38:48They may have thought that they were subhuman, that they were like vermin, like rats or cockroaches.
38:53A lot of moral progress might come when we change our mindset and instead of dividing people into groups,
38:59think of the species as a group.
39:01Think of the world as being one big village and everyone is part of our tribe.
39:06Steve thinks this change in thinking, from identifying with small groups to belonging to one inclusive society,
39:15is slowly happening.
39:18The most obvious effect has been a dramatic decline in violence.
39:22When I tell people that violence has been in decline for long stretches of time,
39:26and that we're probably living in the most peaceful era in the history of our species,
39:30they think I'm nuts.
39:32So I had to make the case with a book that was 800 pages long,
39:36with graph after graph and statistic after statistic, just to prove the point to people.
39:47For example, not far from where I'm standing,
39:49there was an area of Boston that used to be called the combat zone,
39:52because there were so many murders and stabbings and muggings.
39:56Now it's being recolonized by young urban professionals.
40:00Or a few hundred years ago, there were wars going on not far from the earth
40:04that involved enemies like Canada and Britain and France.
40:08Now the idea of a war with those countries would seem like a bad joke.
40:11A few hundred years ago, I might have been burned at the stake for beliefs that I hold today.
40:15And a hundred years before that, I might have had my head cut off with a hatchet in the Indian Wars.
40:20It is difficult to overstate just how violent and cruel the world was for much of the history of the human race.
40:30Once slavery was legal everywhere in the world.
40:34Now it is officially illegal everywhere in the world.
40:38War and murder were daily facts of life.
40:41Now, for most people, they are exceptional events.
40:46Steve attributes most of this change to the increased role of government and the rule of law.
40:53But he also thinks people today are sharper than their ancestors.
40:57You might wonder, are people getting nicer because they're getting smarter?
41:01And believe it or not, the answer is maybe yes.
41:04IQ scores have been increasing throughout the 20th century and all over the world.
41:10No one knows exactly why, but it's probably a combination of increased schooling and a trickle-down of technological and analytic concepts from science into everyday life.
41:23But as a result, it's not far-fetched to think that people could see the benefits of cooperation and see the downsides of violence more as they start to intellectualize their lives.
41:36Mass communication and mass transportation are breaking down the barriers between us.
41:43And so is our increasing knowledge of how the human mind works.
41:48The more we learn, the more we see the humanity within us all.
41:53Even those we think of as evil.
41:56A world without a trace of evil will remain a fantasy.
42:04But the better we understand the brain, the better able we are to identify the most dangerous among us and stop them before they do serious harm.
42:15We may never eliminate evil, but perhaps we can contain it and reduce the damage it does to our lives.
42:25We may never lose the painful pain in a 200- Laborador's medical problem in our vehicle, but we think that Elvis Then movie was almost listening, though.
42:27It seems like the correct nature of
Recommended
43:57
|
Up next