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Street roots May 13, 2011 hypocritical mind A talk with the man who understands our two-faeed tendencies BY JULIA CECHVALA C O N T R IB U T IN G W R IT E R version is that the mind consists of a large number of specialized devices^ and that’s contrasted with the view that the mind is a big general machine. So the idea is that modularity suggests that we as humans are smart because we’ve bundled together lots of different kind of dumbish pieces of the mind. And modularity is a commitment to the view that you can identify these little systems, what they’re for, how they work, how they interact and so forth. hy do people say one thing yet do another? Scientist Robert Kurzban believes the reason is all inside your head It’s getting so common for anti-gay- marriage Republicans and conservative Christian preachers to turn out to be gay it’s becoming cliché. How can they be such hypocrites? Cognitive scientist Robert Kurzban has an J.C.: How controversial of a view is that in explanation. He sees evidence that inconsistencies are inherent to how our psychology? brains work. What people say and what R.K.: I would characterize it as pretty people do may be directed by entirely separate parts of thie brain. This goes way controversial. I would say it?s one of the more controversial ideas in cognitive beyond right and left hemispheres. science. Everyone recognizes modularity to According to Kurzban our brains are made some extent, although not everyone realizes up of many different components or that they do. Everyone recognizes that “modules” responsible for different there’« a visual system that has the job of functions. Here’s the kicker: Not all of these modules can talk to each other and not all of seeing. And my thesis is that this idea of specialized systems them can talk at all includes many of the because they’re not mind’s, or all of the connected to the "This notion of voting for or mind’s, systems modules that allow including social us to verbalizè. against your self-interest, in systems that have < With all these my view, this is a way that W 2 £ io d u le sin o u r specialized some people have lisfedfo mechanismsfor brains contributing choosing mates, for persuade other people about sometimes making friends, for contradictory how to change their votes. 1 choosing alliances, for information, even think that this is part of the morally condemning how we think of our language of persuasion that's other people’s “self” becomes problematic. used in the political process." behavior. That’s pretty controversial. Kurzban explains all of this in his entertaining new J.G.: Is it just book, “Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite: through language, or is there some other Evolution and the Modular Mind” reason that we are attached to a unitary sense (Princeton University Press, $27.95). of self? A lot comes up in a discussion about the brain, so when I sat down with Kurzban on R.K.: I don’t think it’s just through his recent Seattle visit, the topics ranged language.! think it’s that our conscious from issues with language, to our similarity experiences are unitary. When you go to with the rest of the animal kingdom, to sleep you feel like you are somebody and what’s happening when you get a “gut you wake up and you’re basically the same guy. You don’t have the sense immediately feeling.” of these different systems doing their jobs, Julia Cechvala: Ever since I was a kid ? but that doesn’t mean that they’re n o t It I ’ve been calling out my clad as a hypocrite seems to me that it’s not even clear what it and I ’m wondering if you would say I should would feel like to really have an experience lighten up on him? Stuff like eating at fast of all these modular systems at the same food restaurants but not liking factory farms. time. So I think the reason is not just language: It’s that for whatever reason we : Robert Kurzban: What I would say is have a very unitary senseof the world. that lightening up on him depends on The danger is that our sense of the world exactly how you think about i t On the one can be very misleading in terms of figuring hand I think it’s important to identify out what’s true. Historically in science, potential inconsistencies and you’d have to intuitions have often gotten in the way. I was doing an ihterview with Brian Greene, play this out in the example you just the physicist, and he talked about how we articulated. You have to say “Look, by purchasing these items you are creating experience objects as filling space, but that demand for them in the supply chain which they’re mostly empty, they mostly-consist of is therefore endorsing them, and so your emptiness. We interact with them as though behavior is doing something which you they’re solid, but that doesn’t necessarily oppose.” What I would say is that it could reflect something that’s true about the physics of the world. So I think that this is very well be that teiere are also inconsistencies in your own behavior — and true of many levels of analysis. I’m not saying there are. But I think that J.C.: When you say that the modular mind one of the risks with making these sorts of and the inherency of hypocrisy are part of charges is being sensitive to the fact that human nature, does it help explain why people you might find certain kinds of these vote against their self interest? I suppose it inconsistencies difficult to hear. depends on what’s the selfinterest? J.C.: That's fair enough. Your whole thesis R.K.: Yes, the notion of self-interest turns is based around the modular nature of the out to be a little more problematic than mind. Can you explain that? some people might want you to believe. I think that there are lots of different systems R.K.: Yeah, basically, the very concise PHOTO COURTESY OF UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA in your head and those systems are designed to bring about certain states of affairs. Sometimes those things are consistent with each other and sometimes they’re n o t There are systems designed to keep you healthy said there are systems designed to cause you to take in high calorie foods, and those two things are in conflict. And so when you talk about self-interest particularism the context of policy, especially in a representative democracy as we have, at the end of the day you have to vote for a candidate who is for a basket of policies. It’s possible to talk about economic self-interest, but even then it’s problematic, because any set of policies are going to have multiple implications and it depends on what happens. So this notion of voting for or against your self-interest, in my view, this is a way that some people have used to persuade other people about how to change their votes. I think that this is part of the language of persuasion that’s used in the political process. J.C.: In your book it seems like humans are a very deceptive species both in deceiving ourselves and trying to get others to believe good things about us. What do you think that says about us as a.species?. R.K.: I think it says that we’re not that different from other species. If you look at the nonhuman animal kingdom and the nonhuman plant world there’s-all kinds of trickery all over the place. Everywhere. Organisms are continuously led to then- death by fake offers of food or what have you. In that sense we’re in good company. It’s not surprising to find individuals within any given species engaged in deceptive practices because deceptions will mitigate advantage, and natural selection punishes organisms th at don’t use all possible means to gain advantage. In some sense it would be shocking to find that humans weren’t deceptive. And language exacerbates us, because language allows you to say anything you want for a very cheap price—th e cost of a breath of áir. What’s amazing in some sense about humans is how honest we are, that often many of the things we say are basically true. From a biological perspective the only time you see true advertising is when being truthful benefits the signaler. If I’m a big ox and other ox aren’t going to bug me if they see that I’m big, it pays for me to advertise .that fact. If I’m poisonous it pays to advertise the poison so that people-don’t try to eat my body parts. Honesty typically in the biological world is seen only when it’s advantageous, making humans look, in some sense, striking in the other direction. J.G.: I want to get back to humans a sá deceptive species and how that’s really more like the rest of the animal world. So then where do the morals come in — trying to inhibit that? R.K.: So if you think it’s true, as I do, that morality is in part a system that each of us has to constrain other people’s behavior, then each of us is wandering around the world trying not to trip over these morality traps that other people have,laid for us. So we agree what we’re all going to punish, and we then have a good reason to not do these things that are “morally wrong,” because those are the things for which we will be punished, sometimes by the law, sometimes by social censure, exclusion and so on. One way to think about morality is that the moral rules make us afraid to do a certain set of things. Now some of those things it’s good that we’re afraid of, right? You shouldn’t take other people’s stuff, and you shouldn’t harm them intentionally. We shouldn’t break contracts. So it’s good that we punish those things. Other behaviors, it s less clear. At least in my opinion, it’s less clear how we should feel about them. Originally published by Real Change, Seattle, Wash.
