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Ah, but you knew that. kwc He Who Cast the First
Stone Probably Didn’t
Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology
at Harvard, is the author of “Stumbling on Happiness.” In the wayback, we’d lounge around doing puzzles, reading
comics and counting license plates. Eventually we’d fight. When our fight had
finally escalated to the point of tears, our mother would turn around to
chastise us, and my brother and I would start to plead our cases. “But he hit
me first,” one of us would say, to which the other would inevitably add, “But
he hit me harder.” It turns out that my brother and I were not alone in
believing that these two claims can get a puncher off the hook. In virtually
every human society, “He hit me first” provides an acceptable rationale for
doing that which is otherwise forbidden. Both civil and religious law provide
long lists of behaviors that are illegal or immoral — unless they are responses
in kind, in which case they are perfectly fine. After all, it is wrong to punch anyone except a puncher, and
our language even has special words — like “retaliation” and “retribution” and
“revenge” — whose common prefix is meant to remind us that a punch thrown
second is legally and morally different than a punch thrown first. That’s why participants in every one of
the globe’s intractable conflicts — from Ireland to the Middle East — offer the
even-numberedness of
their punches as grounds for exculpation. The problem with the principle of even-numberedness is that
people count differently. Every action has a cause and a consequence: something
that led to it and something that followed from it. But research shows that while people think
of their own actions as the consequences of what came before, they think of
other people’s actions as the causes of what came later. In a study conducted by William Swann and colleagues at the University of Texas, pairs of
volunteers played the roles of world leaders who were trying to decide whether
to initiate a nuclear strike. The first volunteer was asked to make an opening
statement, the second volunteer was asked to respond, the first volunteer was
asked to respond to the second, and so on. At the end of the conversation, the
volunteers were shown several of the statements that had been made and were
asked to recall what had been said just before and just after each of them. The results revealed an intriguing asymmetry: When
volunteers were shown one of their own statements, they naturally remembered
what had led them to say it. But when they were shown one of their conversation
partner’s statements, they naturally remembered how they had responded to it.
In other words, volunteers remembered the causes of their own statements and
the consequences of their partner’s statements. What seems like a grossly self-serving pattern of
remembering is actually the product of two innocent facts. First, because our
senses point outward, we can observe other people’s actions but not our own.
Second, because mental life is a private affair, we can observe our own
thoughts but not the thoughts of others. Together, these facts suggest that our reasons for punching will always be more salient to us
than the punches themselves — but that the opposite will be true of other
people’s reasons and other people’s punches. Examples aren’t hard to come by. Shiites seek revenge on
Sunnis for the revenge they sought on Shiites; Irish Catholics retaliate
against the Protestants who retaliated against them; and since 1948, it’s hard
to think of any partisan in the Middle East who has done anything but play
defense. In each of these instances, people on one side claim that they are
merely responding to provocation and dismiss the other side’s identical claim
as disingenuous spin. But research suggests that these claims reflect genuinely
different perceptions of the same bloody conversation. If the first principle of legitimate punching is that
punches must be even-numbered, the second principle is that an even-numbered
punch may be no more forceful than the odd-numbered punch that preceded it.
Legitimate retribution is meant to restore balance, and thus an eye for an eye
is fair, but an eye for an eyelash is not. When the European Union condemned Israel for
bombing Lebanon in retaliation for the kidnapping of two Israeli soldiers, it
did not question Israel’s right to respond, but rather, its “disproportionate
use of force.” It is O.K. to hit back, just not too hard. Research shows that people have as much trouble applying the
second principle as the first. In a study conducted by Sukhwinder Shergill and colleagues at University
College London, pairs of volunteers were hooked up to a mechanical device that
allowed each of them to exert pressure on the other volunteer’s fingers. The researcher began the game by exerting a fixed amount of
pressure on the first volunteer’s finger. The first volunteer was then asked to
exert precisely the same amount of pressure on the second volunteer’s finger.
The second volunteer was then asked to exert the same amount of pressure on the
first volunteer’s finger. And so on. The two volunteers took turns applying
equal amounts of pressure to each other’s fingers while the researchers
measured the actual amount of pressure they applied. The results were striking. Although volunteers tried to
respond to each other’s touches with equal force, they typically responded with
about 40%
more force than
they had just experienced. Each time a volunteer was touched, he touched back
harder, which led the other volunteer to touch back even harder. What began as
a game of soft touches quickly became a game of moderate pokes and then hard
prods, even though both volunteers were doing their level best to respond in
kind. Each volunteer was convinced that he was responding with
equal force and that for some reason the other volunteer was escalating. Neither realized that the escalation was
the natural byproduct of a neurological quirk that causes the pain we receive
to seem more painful than the pain we produce, so we usually give more pain
than we have received.
Research teaches us that our reasons and our pains are more
palpable, more obvious and real, than are the reasons and pains of others. This
leads to the escalation of mutual harm, to the illusion that others are solely
responsible for it and to the belief that our actions are justifiable responses
to theirs. None of this is to deny the roles that hatred, intolerance,
avarice and deceit play in human conflict. It is simply to say that basic
principles of human psychology are important ingredients in this miserable
stew. Until we learn to stop
trusting everything our brains tell us about others — and to start trusting others themselves —
there will continue to be tears and recriminations in the wayback. Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is the
author of “Stumbling on Happiness.” http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/24/opinion/24gilbert.html |
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