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.