Are we really in control?
Some shocking conclusions emerge when we study the origins of our behaviours
Hi friends,
Do you know what’s common between our best and worst behaviors?
Do you know what’s common between all our diverse actions: from diving into the river to save a drowning child and raising a fist to punch someone who insulted our disgusting tattoo?
What’s common is that there are a bunch of mysterious forces in our brains and bodies that come together and ultimately cause these behaviors.
And even more intriguingly, I believe that we have very little conscious control when it comes to the final outcomes. The implications of this idea, if it is true, are profound and I will leave them for the end of the article.
This is a discussion that you should not ignore. Because once you really come to terms with what is being postulated, it’ll mandate a total revolution in the way you look at and behave with yourself and others.
Let’s look at this from a biological perspective.
Assume that some action has taken place. For the sake of simplicity, let’s assume you just yelled at someone when they said “Hi”. What really happened? Or rather, what are the factors that came together to make this event happen?
Tons of things at different points in time, most of which we probably can’t even explain right now. But from the things we do know, here’s the cocktail of causal factors that probably impacted the final outcome:
Just a few seconds before, there was some neurotransmitter action in your brain that created enough electrical potential to trigger certain pathways and activate certain brain regions, which impacted the response. Now, this is a physical process and is affected by how well those brain regions are functioning, how damaged they are, and how they are being affected by substances (like psychedelics or alcohol) that were ingested.
Some seconds to minutes before, there were some external stimuli. Maybe you came across an insect that you absolutely hate, or maybe you saw the face of a person that triggered some negative sentiments subliminally, all unknown to you. Subliminal marketing has clearly worked without customers finding out about it. There’s also ample research that white people, when subliminally primed with black faces in an experiment (meaning a black face was flashed for some milliseconds- so fast that they wouldn’t consciously notice it), reported much more hostility in subsequent tasks. Similarly, there are tons of external stimuli in our environment that our bodies/minds are constantly exposed to, that are impacting our behavior in the coming seconds, minutes, and hours in very significant (and oft-undecipherable) ways.
Hours to days before, there have been numerous hormones flowing through your body which impacted those behaviors. PMSing women have shown to be much less generous and much more hostile. Men interviewed by a pretty reporter on creaky bridges (which causes a surge of adrenaline) make them more likely to ask them out! Nice guys can demonstrate shockingly selfish behaviours just because of an overload of glucocorticoids in their bloodstream (a hormone that causes stress).
Many years before, the way you were brought up during your childhood can alter the way you behave in massive ways. Kids exposed to violence have a higher-than-usual chance of turning out violent when they grow up. Even fetuses aren’t spared: pregnant mothers with high levels of stress end up giving birth to babies that are likely to have had sub-optimal brain development and a higher likelihood of succumbing to depression. Even genetically gifted kids in poor socioeconomic backgrounds cannot exploit their talent due to constant issues, lack of facilities and a stressful life.
Before being born, you were endowed with a set of genes. They make up your entire source code and have an outsized influence on your growth and development over time. Even the genes that do end up getting activated and shape us in major ways depend on other genes and a bunch of physical and environmental factors. And the impact of these genes on various traits: from intelligence to height to impulsivity are well documented.
Centuries to millennia before, the way our particular culture developed has also impacted us in profound ways. Pastoralists had to constantly defend their herds from loot and ended up becoming aggressive. Americans became individualistic because it is a nation of immigrants- full of cranks, heretics, and unconvetional folks rearing to be free and get out of their places of birth. The Chinese became collectivist because they had to work together to farm and share the back-breaking load of growing rice. The ways in which people of individualistic and collectivist cultures behave are starkly different.
And finally, there were events in your long evolutionary past that define what it means to be human. These forces have endowed us with certain algorithms that have had great adaptive value. We are wired to mate, to demonstrate reciprocal altruism and to gorge on all the food that we can find: anything we can to successfully pass on our genes.
In essence, a combination of genes, evolutionary forces, culture, environment and external stimuli- all factors that are outside our own conscious control- come together and end up determing how we behave. You can apply this logic to every little behaviour- from some of your best acts of compassion to your worst moments of hatred. Everything is caused by a stack of turtles- one causal factor stacked atop another- and this stack is literally responsible for everything we do from moment to moment.
Now, are you in control of this stack? Is there anything you can do to decide what genes and evolutionary algorithms you inherit, how your brain grows, how your childhood gets shaped, what culture and socioeconomic background you’re born and brought up in or the kind of hormonal activity that your body witnesses? Not at all. These are all matters of pure chance- and they end up deciding the way we act in this world.
So if we don’t really have conscious control over the things we do and the behaviours we demonstrate, a couple of things become clear. If a person has done something offensive/disgusting/repulsive, it is not because they are a bad person who decides to do bad things. We have to go back to the stack of turtles and understand that the behaviour we just witnessed has so many causal factors behind it. They were probably influenced by some hormonal changes. Maybe they were bullied really badly during childhood, which reinforced certain behaviour patterns. Maybe they have a medical condition (like PTSD) and can’t really help it. Maybe they never received adequate care during childhood- without which probably even we would have done the same thing.
The exact same line of thinking applies to people at their best. Invert all the negative conditions stated above and you’ll see how once again, a cocktail of factors ends up creating a good behaviour.
What this means is that we really can’t be gloating if we have done something good because, well, it was ultimately shaped by so many forces that were…just there. Purely by chance. And since those same forces lead to the worst behaviours, we ought not to harbour ill-will and hatred for people demonstrating misbehaviours but rather empathise with them and attempt to fix the things that could have been the root causes.
We, humans, are like drivers riding cars that we were all given randomly at birth. If a car malfunctions and leads to an accident, we wouldn’t blame the driver, would we? Rather, we’d isolate the car, try to understand the malfunctioning elements and attempt to fix them.
Similarly, we humans are riding our brain-body apparatuses which shape the ways in which we behave. A superb car doesn’t mean that the driver deserves credit. A malfunctioning car doesn’t mean that the driver ought to be punished. The way the car was shaped over the years was a sum total of millions of chance events that the driver couldn’t really do anything about.
With this understanding, let us see fellow humans for what they are: people shaped by numerous forces beyond their control; beings who are just stumbling through life as characters in a puppet show. These puppets need all the empathy and goodwill you have because it doesn’t seem like they’re in control.
This article is based on Robert Sapolsky’s masterful book titled Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst