False apologies generally work because it is in our nature to believe what we are told. We are a species that relies on information and advice from others and so it makes sense to trust them. ‘She told me that she thinks you are really attractive’ or ‘I would not eat that if I were you!’ are just two sorts of statements that could change the course of our lives. If you did not believe what you were told, then you would not survive very long. It is in our interest to trust others.
Children start out as fairly gullible creatures, trusting what they are told. Part of the fun of being an adult is our ability to easily trick children and they generally enjoy the deception. Fantasy, magic, jokes and unexpected surprises work particularly well with children because they trust adults are telling the truth. This makes a lot of sense because they are naïve. They are not in a position to check the truth of many of the claims they hear. Imagine trying to pass on information if everything you said was taken with a degree of scepticism. Schooling children would be impossible if they always doubted.
This bias to believe even shows up in our brain activity. Neuroscientist Sam Harris put adults in a scanner and asked them to decide whether statements were true or false.84 Irrespective of whether participants agreed with the statement, were not sure or rejected it, the PFC was activated. However, when participants rejected statements as false, this decision activated other regions of the brain, including the ACC and the caudate that are both involved with negative emotions. They also took significantly longer to reject statements. This finding supports an idea originally proposed by the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, who wrote that merely contemplating an idea leads to the assumption that it is correct and that rejecting it as untrue is more difficult. We want to believe what we are told. We prefer to trust.
We are both good and bad
Humans are naturally inclined to be helpful. It is not in our nature to disagree, refuse help or harm others in our group. But we must also be guided by domestication as to what is appropriate. There may always be temptations to take advantage of others, but this is risky and we do so at our peril. When we lived in smaller groups, it would have been catastrophic for our survival if we were excluded from the group as a cheat or freeloader. The evolution of cooperation and collaboration that propelled early hominids into societies bound by rules was based on the principle of reciprocity – an eye for an eye. Even today, when it is possible to survive on our own because we no longer need to forage and hunt for survival, most of us still carry the burden of obligation deep in our brains as the emotional consequences of prosocial behaviour.
Of course, there are always a few that do not operate with these inclinations and this may come down to their biology, their childhood experiences or some combination of the two. Earlier, we learned how abusive experiences shape children’s brains and influence their behaviour. In one study comparing children raised in stable homes with those raised in abusive environments, only one toddler from an abusive household came to the aid of or comforted another distressed child in the playgroup. Most from the stable homes helped.85 Remember how securely attached children readily seek out and accept comfort from a caregiver. In contrast, insecurely attached children either do not seek out comforting or do not readily settle when it is offered. When they observed the helper/hinderer movies we described earlier, insecurely attached infants were not surprised when the mother shape abandoned her child.86 This is why domestication is so important in moulding children’s expectations about what is right or wrong.
On the other hand, our biological propensity to be prosocial does not of course mean that we will indiscriminately help anyone. The modern world is still full of conflict between groups that fight over territory, resources and ideas. We may be prosocial animals but our kindness typically only extends to those we identify with – the groups to which we belong. This may be due to an evolutionary imperative to favour those with whom we share genes but the general rule of thumb is to be kind and assume that others will be kind back to you. Somehow that message seems to get lost when we think about the ills of our modern society. This need to belong to groups and the way it influences our attitudes and behaviour is extraordinarily strong – one of the most powerful incentives we can experience as a social animal. It may be no surprise that most people prefer social acceptance, but what is surprising are the lengths that some will go to to become members of a group – and the terrible retribution they can wreak when they are excluded.
Shane Bauer was one of three American hikers imprisoned in Iran in 2009. At the time of their arrest in the Middle East, Shane, his girlfriend Sarah Shourd and friend Josh Fattawere were hiking in the Zagros Mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan, looking for the Ahmed Awa waterfall, a tourist attraction near the Iraq–Iran border. After they visited the waterfall, the Iranian authorities claimed that they had entered Iran illegally and arrested the three on suspicion of spying. Shourd was released after fourteen months on humanitarian grounds, but Bauer and Fattawere were convicted of espionage and sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment. They spent twenty-six months in captivity and were later released in September 2011 after bail of $500,000 was paid.
This experience in a foreign land would leave a profound effect on Bauer and his attitude towards imprisonment, especially when he discovered that prison conditions were sometimes more extreme in his own country. In an article in the magazine Mother Jones1 Bauer wrote, ‘Solitary in Iran nearly broke me. I never thought I’d see worse in American prisons.’ He was determined to reveal the horrors of his homeland’s use of solitary confinement as a form of legalized torture. On a visit to a Californian prison, an officer asked him about his time in Iran. Bauer explained
no part of my experience – not the uncertainty of when I would be free again, not the tortured screams of other prisoners – was worse than the four months I spent in solitary confinement. What would he say if I told him I needed human contact so badly that I woke every morning hoping to be interrogated?
Loneliness is often only a temporary state as one adapts to new environments, but when that isolation is used as a punishment enforced over days, months and even years in solitary confinement, it can be the cruellest way to treat another human. Physical torture and starvation are dreadful, but according to those who have suffered imprisonment, it was the isolation that they found the worst. Of his time in prison on Robben Island, Nelson Mandela wrote that ‘Nothing is more dehumanizing than the absence of human companionship’, and he knew men in prison who preferred half a dozen lashes with a whip rather than being in solitary confinement.2
It is estimated that 25,000 US prisoners are currently locked in tiny cells, deprived of all meaningful human contact. Many of them spend a few days there. Some have been isolated for years. These are not always the most violent inmates. Prisoners have been ‘locked down’ for simply reading the wrong book. There are no international codes of conduct for this punishment and no other democratic country uses solitary confinement as much as the US. It is a shocking anomaly from a nation that claims to be so committed to human rights. In 2012, the New York Civil Liberties Union published their findings about the use of solitary confinement in the state and concluded ‘These conditions cause serious emotional and psychological harm, including severe depression and uncontrollable rage.’3