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of them. Admiral Luis Maria Mendia, one of the leaders in Argentina's "Dirty war," convinced victims to 
board a plane under the pretext of a freedom flight, and then once in flight, were thrown out of the plane, 
adding sheer terror to the brutality of their death. Accounts such as these litter the pages of history. They 
reveal that the desire to impress with excess is part of human nature. 
What we have learned in this chapter is that our biology hands us the tools for excess, and hands 
some of us more than our fair share. This does not mean that we will or must use such tools. It also 
doesn't mean that the tools were designed for excess. Some are endowed with genes that predispose to 
sensation-seeking and risk-taking, others to brain circuitry and chemistry that create an insatiable desire 
for reward. Different environments either encourage this biology or discourage it, a topic that occupies 
chapter 4. As the eighteenth century poet William Blake remarked "The road to excess leads to the palace 
of wisdom... for we never know what is enough until we know what is more than enough." To more 
deeply understand how our desires runaway to excess, we need to understand how the mind facilitates this 
process. We need to understand the role of denial. We need to understand how individuals and groups 
dehumanize the other and self-deceive themselves into believing that those unlike them represent a threat 
to their purity and power. We need to understand how desire and denial combine to pave the way to 
excessive harms. 
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Endnotes: Chapter 2 
Recommended books 
Bloom, P. (2010). How Pleasure Works. New York: W.W. Norton. 
E. Staub (2010). Overcoming Evil. Oxford University Press. 
Notes: 
• Mr. Greed, Bernie Madoff: Fishman, S. (2009). Bernie Madoff, Free at last. New York Magazine, vol. 
June, pp. 1-20; Henriques, D.B. (2011). From Prison, Madoff Says Banks `Had to Know' of 
Fraud. New York Times, February, 1-3; J. Creswell & L. Thomas, New York Times, 1/24/2009 
• Stimulating the brain: Berridge, K. C. (2009). Wanting and liking: Observations from the Neuroscience 
and Psychology Laboratory. Inquiry, 52(4), 378-398; Kringelbach, M., & Berridge, K. C. (2009). 
Towards a functional neuroanatomy of pleasure and happiness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13, 
479-487; Kringelbach, M., & Berridge, K. C. (2010). The functional neuroanatomy of pleasure and 
happiness. Discovery Medicine, 9(49), 579-587; Olds, J. (1956) Pleasure centers in the brain. Sci 
Am, 195:105-16; Olds J & Milner P. (1954) Positive reinforcement produced by electrical 
stimulation of the septa! area and other regions of rat brain. J Comp Physiol Psychol 47:419-27. 
Portenoy, R. K., Jarden, J. O., Sidtis, J. J., Lipton, R. B., Foley, K. M., & Rottenberg, D. A. (1986). 
Compulsive thalamic self-stimulation: a case with metabolic, electrophysiologic and behavioral 
correlates. [Case Report]. Pain, 27(3), 277-290. 
• Wanting, learning and liking: Pecifia S, Cagniard B, Berridge KC, Aldridge JW, Zhuang X. 2003. 
Hyperdopaminergic mutant mice have higher "wanting" but not "liking" for sweet rewards. J 
Neurosci 23:9395-402; Pecifia, S., Smith, K. S., & Berridge, K. C. (2006). Hedonic hot spots in 
the brain The Neuroscientist 12(6), 500-511. 
• Dopamine in and out of control: Chen, T., Blum, K., Mathews, D., & Fisher, L. (2005). Are 
dopaminergic genes involved in a predisposition to pathological aggression?:: Hypothesizing the 
importance of. Medical Hypotheses, 65(703-707); Di Chiara, G., & Bassareo, V. (2007). Reward 
system and addiction: what dopamine does and doesn't do. Current Opinion in Pharmacology, 7, 69-
76; Doya, K. (2008). Modulators of decision making. Nature Neuroscience, 11(4), 410-416; Dreher, 
J.-C., Kohn, P., Kolachana, B., Weinberger, D. R., & Berman, K. F. (2009). Variation in dopamine 
genes influences responsivity of the human reward system. Proceedings of the National Academy of 
Sciences, 106(2), 617-622; Everitt, B. J., Belin, D., Economidou, D., Pelloux, Y., Dailey, J. W., & 
Robbins, T. W. (2008). Review. Neural mechanisms underlying the vulnerability to develop 
compulsive drug-seeking habits and addiction Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: 
Biological Sciences, 363(1507), 3125-3135; Everitt, B. J., & Robbins, T. W. (2005). Neural systems 
of reinforcement for drug addiction: from actions to habits to compulsion Nature Neuroscience, 
8(11), 1481-1489; Grigorenko, E. L., De Young, C. G., Eastman, M., Getchell, M., Haeffel, G. J., 
Klinteberg, B. A., Koposov, R. A., et al. (2010). Aggressive behavior, related conduct problems, and 
variation in genes affecting dopamine turnover. Aggressive Behavior, 36(3), 158-176; Johnson, P. 
M., & Kenny, P. J. (2031). Dopamine D2 receptors in addiction-like reward dysfunction and 
compulsive eating in obese rats. Nature Publishing Group, 13(5), 635-641; Sabbatini da Silva Lobo, 
D., Vallada, H., & Knight, J. (2007). Dopamine genes and pathological gambling in discordant sib-
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pairs. Journal of Gambling Studies, 23,421-433; Sharot, T., Shiner, T., Brown, A. C., Fan, J., & 
Dolan, R. J. (2009). Dopamine Enhances Expectation of Pleasure in Humans. Current Biology, 
19(24), 2077-2080; Volkow, N. D., Wang, G.-J., & Baler, R. D. (2011). Reward, dopamine and the 
control of food intake: implications for obesity Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 15(1), 37-46; Walter, 
N., Marken, S., & Montag, C. (2010). A genetic contribution to cooperation: Dopamine-relevant 
genes are associated with social facilitation. Social Neuroscience 6: 289-301. 
• Desire for dominance: Boksem, M. A. S., Kostermans, E., Milivojevic, B., & De Cremer, D. (2011). 
Social status determines how we monitor and evaluate our performance. Social Cognitive and 
Affective Neuroscience; Chiao, J. Y. (2010). Neural basis of social status hierarchy across species. 
Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 20(6), 803-809. Elsevier Ltd; Chiao, J. Y., Mathur, V. A., Harada, 
T., & Lipke, T. (2009). Neural Basis of Preference for Human Social Hierarchy versus 
Egalitarianism. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1167(1), 174-181; Deaner, R. O., 
Khera, A. V., & Platt, Michael L. (2005). Monkeys pay per view: adaptive valuation of social images 
by rhesus macaques Current Biology, 15(6), 543-548; Klein, J. T., Deaner, R. O., & Platt, Michael L. 
(2008). Neural correlates of social target value in macaque parietal cortex Current Biology, 18(6), 
419-424; Liew, S., Ma, Y., & Han, S. (2011). PLoS ONE: Who's afraid of the boss: Cultural 
differences in social hierarchies modulate self-face recognition in Chinese and Americans. PLoS 
ONE, 6(2), 1—8; PLoS ONE, 4(5), 1-8; Watson, K. K., & Plan, M L. (2008). Neuroethology of 
reward and decision making. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 
363(1511), 3825-3835. 
•Envy and schadenfreude: Almas, I., Cappelen, A. W., Sorensen, E. O., & Tungodden, B. (2010). 
Fairness and the Development of Inequality Acceptance. Science (New York, NY), 328(5982), 
1176-1178; Blake, P. R., & Mcauliffe, K. (2011). "I had so much it didn't seem fair": Eight-year-
olds reject two forms of inequity. Cognition, 120(2), 215-224; Combs, D. J. Y ., Powell, C. A. J., 
Schurtz, D. R., & Smith, R. H. (2009). Politics, schadenfreude, and ingroup identification: The 
sometimes happy thing about a poor economy and death. Journal of Experimental Social 
Psychology, 45(4), 635-646; Dvash, J, Gilam, G, Ben-Ze'ev, A, Hendler, T, & Shamay-Tsoory, 
S.G. (2010). The envious brain: The neural basis of social comparison. Human Brain Mapping. 
31(11): 1741-1750; Fehr, E., Bernhard, H., & Rockenbach, B. (2008). Egalitarianism in young 
children Nature, 454(7208), 1079-1083; Leach, C.W., & Spears, R. (2008). A vengefulness of 
the impotent: the pain of in-group inferiority and schadenfreude toward successful out-groups. J 
Pens Soc Psycho!, 95(6), 1383-1396; Shamay-Tsoory, S.G., Fischer, M., Dvash, J., Harari, H., 
Perach-Bloom, N. & Levkovitz, Y. (2009). Intranasal administration of oxytocin increases envy 
and schadenfreude (gloating). Biol Psychiatsy, 66(9), 864-870; Shamay-Tsoory, S.G, Tibi-
Elhanany, Y, & Aharon-Peretz, J. (2007). The green-eyed monster and malicious joy: the 
neuroanatomical bases of envy and gloating (schadenfreude) Brain, 130, 1663-1678; Takahashi, 
H, Kato, M, Matsuura, M, Mobbs, D, Suhara, T, & Okubo, Y. (2009). When Your Gain Is My 
Pain and Your Pain Is My Gain: Neural Correlates of Envy and Schadenfreude. Science, 323, 
937-939; van de Ven, N., Zeelenberg, M., & Pieters, R. (2009). Leveling up and down: the 
experiences of benign and malicious envy. Emotion, 9(3), 419-429; van de Ven, N., Zeelenberg, 
M., & Pieters, R. (2010). Warding Off the Evil Eye: When the fear of being envied increases 
prosocial behavior. Psychological Science, 21(11): 1671-1677; Van Dijk, W.W. Ouwerkerk, 
J.W., Goslinga, S., Nieweg, M., & Gallucci, M. (2006). When people fall from grace: 
reconsidering the role of envy in Schadenfreude. Emotion, 6(1), 156-160; Van Dijk, W. W., 
Ouwerkerk, J. W., Wesseling, Y. M., & van Koningsbruggen, G. M. (2011). Towards 
understanding pleasure at the misfortunes of others: the impact of self-evaluation threat on 
schadenfreude Cognition and Emotion, 25(2), 360-368. 
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• Lustful violence: Gellerman, D.M, & Suddath, R. (2005). Violent fantasy, dangerousness, and the duty 
to warn and protect. Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatty and Law, 33, 484-495; V.J. 
Gerberth. (1998). Anatomy of a lust murder. Law and Order Magazine, 46 (5), pp. 1-6; Gray, N, 
Watt, A, & Hassan, S. (2003). Behavioral indicators of sadistic sexual murder predict the 
presence of sadistic sexual fantasy in a normative sample. Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 18, 
1018-1034; Smith, C.E, Fischer, K.W, & Watson, M.W. (2009). Toward a refined view of 
aggressive fantasy as a risk factor for aggression: interaction effects involving cognitive and 
situational variables. Aggr. Behay., 35(4), 313-323; Crombach, A, Weierstall, R, Schalinski, I, 
Hecker, T, Ovuga, E, & Elbert, T. (2010). Social status and the desire to resort to violence -- a 
study on former child soldiers of Uganda. Aggr. Behay., 1-24; Elbert, Thomas, Weierstall, 
Roland, & Schauer, Maggie. (2010). Fascination violence: on mind and brain of man hunters. 
European archives of psychiatty and clinical neuroscience, 260 (Suppl 2), S100-S105; Ruf, M., 
Schauer, M., Neuner, F., Catani, C., Schauer, E., & Elbert, T. (2010). Narrative exposure therapy 
for 7- to 16-year-olds: a randomized controlled trial with traumatized refugee children. J Trauma 
Stress, 23(4), 437-445; Schaal, S., & Elbert, T. (2006). Ten years after the genocide: trauma 
confrontation and posttraumatic stress in Rwandan adolescents. Journal of Traumatic Stress„ 
19(1), 95-105; Weierstall, R, Schaal, S, Schalinski, I, Dusingizemungu, J, & Elbert, T. (2010). 
The thrill of being violent as an antidote to posttraumatic stress disorder in Rwandese genocide 
perpetrators. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 1-30. 
Quotes: 
Child soldiers: cited in A. Crombach et al. (2010) Social status and the desire to resort to violence -- a 
study on former child soldiers of Uganda. Aggressive Behavior pp. 1-24 
The Nazis and excess: W. Sofsky (1993). The Order of Terror. Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 
p.228 
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Chapter 3: 
Ravages of denial 
Self denial is not a irtue: it is only' the effect of prudence on rascality. 
— George Bernard Shaw 
In October of 1980, a 39 year old man walked into the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Australia, having 
suffered a gun shot to the left side of his skull. Once the medical team removed the bullet fragments and 
cleared the blood clot, the man was able to speak. He had shot himself, aiming at his second head. Yes, 
his second head. This man believed that he had two heads, his own and the head of his dead wife's 
gynecologist. Before his wife died in a car accident, he believed that she was having an affair with her 
gynecologist. At night, the second head spoke, accompanied by voices from Jesus and Abraham who 
confirmed the existence of the second head. As the patient expressed to the interviewing doctor "The 
other head kept trying to dominate my normal head, and I would not let it. It kept trying to say to me I 
would lose, and I said bull-shit." "I am the king pin here" it said and it kept going on like that for about 
three weeks and finally I got jack of it, and I decided to shoot my other head off." Over a two year period, 
the perception of the second head disappeared. The attending neuropsychologist, David Ames, described 
the case as an example of schizophrenia-induced delusional bicephaly— a distortion of reality that 
creates a false belief of two heads. 
Cases like this are bizarre. But like many neuropsychological reports, they force us to reevaluate 
our perception of reality, what's normal and what's distorted, what's adaptive and what's maladaptive. 
The Australian patient who developed delusional bicephaly was suffering from the loss of his wife. Loss 
and suffering motivate explanation, along with something or someone to blame: Was it really an 
accident? Why her? Why not me? What if she had stayed home that morning? What if I had been driving 
with her? Was she distracted by her lover? Was he in the car? These questions represent gaps in a 
narrative, holes that we attempt to fill, often by distorting reality. 
Distortions of reality are common. Even the healthiest among us create stories designed to 
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explain a puzzle in our lives or to help us through trauma. These stories are narratives that provide new 
truths by denying particular elements of reality. They represent the mind's method of filling in gaps, 
providing justifications for what we can't explain or wish to explain in a different way. This is an 
adaptive feature of the human mind, one that is uniquely human. But this same feature can be used to 
justify immoral and atrocious behaviors, the kind that lead to excessive harms. When we distort reality 
by treating others as non-human, perceiving and judging them as animals, parasites, or machines, we have 
armed ourselves with a weapon that enables great harms by removing the moral consequences of our 
actions. Animals, parasites and machines are outside of our moral concerns, so we shouldn't feel guilty, 
or wrack our conscience when we end their lives or ability to move. Animals, parasites and machines 
don't have rights, and thus, we have no obligation to them. Similarly, when we distort reality by means 
of deception and self-deception, we have armed ourselves with weapons that enable desire to run wild. 
Self-deception generates overconfidence. Overconfidence enables us to pursue our desire for power, 
freed from the reins that pull us back, away from costly interactions. Self-deception allow us to convince 
ourselves and deceive others that we are under attack, threatened by those who are unlike us. Under the 
circumstances, we are justified in using self-defense, even if this leads to annihilating the enemy. Often, 
self-deception combines with dehumanization to maximize the effectiveness of the distortion, paving an 
unobstructed path for runaway desire. Denial enables desire to achieve satisfaction, minus the moral 
conscience. These are the ideas that I will explore in this chapter. 
Before discussing the scientific evidence that explains how the brain distorts reality by 
dehumanizing and self-deceiving — two core elements of denial —we must understand how the brain 
creates the reality of humanization, a process that imbues some things but not others with human qualities 
and moral worth. This is an important problem as it shapes our perception of evil, who can cause 
excessive harm and who can suffer from it. Rocks can cause great pain — as in landslides — but we 
don't hold them responsible for the harm caused because they lack intentions, beliefs, goals, and desires. 
Rocks can also be crushed, pulverized into sand by humans working in a quarry. But rocks are neither 
innocent nor victims as they have no moral worth, no capacity to suffer, and no ability to intentionally 
harm another. If not rocks, what? 
Uhlman 
Earthquakes, viruses, chimpanzees, children, and psychopaths can all cause harm to others, including 
humans and other animals. We might be tempted to think that only psychopaths are rightfully classified 
as evildoers because they are the only ones that can cause excessive harm to innocent others with harm as 
a goal. But this begs the question of what we mean by excessive, innocent, and goal. 
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Earthquakes, viruses, chimpanzees, and some children often cause excessive harm to innocent 
others, at least if the focus is on numbers and the way in which death arises. The earthquake that reached 
a magnitude of 7.0 on the Richter scale and demolished the capital of Haiti in 2010 took the lives of 
approximately 200,000 people, all innocent and undeserving of this natural disaster. This is excess 
beyond what any psychopath has ever achieved. The Spanish Flu found its way into the bodies of 
innocent people from the Arctic to the Pacific Islands from 1918 to 1920, and killed over 50 million 
people — a death toll that is at least four times higher than what Hitler caused during his reign, and 
comparable to that achieved by Mao Ze-Dong during his. As noted in chapter 1, chimpanzees kill at a 
rate that approximates many hunter-gatherer groups. When they kill, the frenzied attacks are over the top, 
involving gruesome dismemberment of their victims by biting into the face, ripping off testicles and 
dislocating limbs. By the age of 15 years, Willie James Bosket Jr had committed some 200 armed 
robberies, stabbed 25 innocent victims, kicked a boy off of a roof to his death, and killed two men 
following a failed robbery, all "for the experience." At the level of outcomes, these are all horrific cases 
of lives lost, with some excessive in terms of numbers and others in terms of means. 
We can eliminate earthquakes and other natural disasters from the list of evildoers by noting that 
they don't have, as their goal or as a foreseen consequence, the elimination of lives, innocent or not. They 
don't have goals at all. This also eliminates them from the class of victims, assuming the day comes when 
scientists can kill off earthquakes, cyclones, hurricanes, blizzards and so on before they pick up enough 
steam to cause great harm. One might think that viruses, and their virulent partners the parasites, lack 
goals because they lack brains. This intuition is correct anatomically, but incorrect conceptually. As the 
American philosopher Daniel Dennett has noted, the beauty of Darwin's theory of natural selection is that 
it provided a way of giving nature competence without comprehension. Thus, viruses and parasites have 
goals without understanding at all. To survive and reproduce, they have evolved exquisite chemical and 
electrical machines that harvest all of their host's resources. And if making a living requires killing the 
host, so be it. They do so without shedding a tear. No guilt, no remorse. Chimpanzees, on the other hand, 
have goals and brains that represent them. When chimpanzees kill, their goal is not food. Their brutal 
attacks are motivated by a desire to outcompete their rivals and absorb additional resources; no one 
knows if they feel guilt or remorse. Willie Bosket's goal was to rob two men, but when he failed, he 
turned to gratuitous violence, for the experience. Bosket certainly could, as a human, feel guilt and 
remorse, but all reports indicate he didn't. 
We can eliminate parasites and viruses from the list of evildoers and evilreceivers by noting that 
they lack an understanding of right and wrong, and are incapable of suffering. Chimpanzees are a harder 
case. They live in societies with norms and respond aggressively to norm transgressions, as occurs when a 
high ranking male beats a lower ranking male for trying to steal food or a mating opportunity. 
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Chimpanzees also suffer, experiencing pain from both physical attacks and social loss. But getting angry 
at something or someone and feeling pain from a physical or social assault are different from getting 
angry because someone's behavior was morally wrong, and suffering from a morally toxic action. I get 
angry at my computer all the time, swearing when it crashes, and even smacking it on its backside. But 
there is no moral harm. In this sense, there is no evidence that chimpanzees have a sense of right and 
wrong, and that the pain they experience is linked to a sense of how one ought to behave. Chimpanzees 
can't be evildoers, but they certainly can, and have been evilrecipients. 
There is also an important difference between violently harming another and knowing it is wrong, 
and harming another because it is wrong. The latter fits at least one view of evil, a kind of radical evil in 
which harm is created for harm's sake, because it is rewarding. When Willie Bosket killed those two men, 
he was certainly old enough to know the difference between right and wrong. He most likely killed 
knowingly, perhaps for the generic experience of shooting someone, but perhaps not with a desire to harm 
for harm's sake. Then again, when he noted that he killed for the experience, perhaps this was the 
experience of pleasure from harming another. 
Was Willie Bosket responsible for his shootings? The answer to this question depends on how 
we think about Bosket's options, and the link between cause and effect. At the simplest level, Bosket 
caused the death of the two men in the same way that a swinging wrecking ball can cause the death of two 
men. But the wrecking ball can't be held accountable or responsible in the same way that Bosket can. 
Wrecking balls lack options and lack the capacity to predict the consequences of their actions. Bosket 
had options, could foresee the consequences of his actions, and had the capacity to act upon his options. 
Or did he? 
We know that the frontal lobes of the brain play an important role in self-control and emotional 
regulation. We also know that this area of the brain is not fully mature until people reach their mid-
twenties. Bosket was, therefore, operating with an immature brain. His actions were, in some ways, like 
the wrecking ball, driven by inertia. Perhaps the frustration of failing to achieve his goal — robbery —
caused a dizzying chemical reaction in his brain, causing a flood of emotions, blinding his capacity to 
think rationally. Paraphrasing the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, these electrochemical storms in 
Bosket's brain caused him to deposit his conscience at the door. Like the husband who finds his wife in 
bed with her lover and kills them both on the spot, Bosket committed a crime of passion. On this account, 
not only is he not evil, he is pardonable. 
Immaturity is a mitigating factor when we evaluate a crime. It is why, in many countries, there is 
one legal system for youths and another for adults. It is why, in countries with the death penalty, such as 
the United States, youths are immune. With maturity comes a heightened capacity to control ones 
actions, or at least, to gain better self-control and thus, to take responsibility for what one does. This 
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means that maturation eventually legitimizes individuals as potential evildoers. It does not, however, 
cause a shift in our sense of evilrecipients. Willie Bosket may not have been an evildoer, but he certainly 
could have been an evilrecipient. 
What about psychopaths, people like Charles Manson and Ted Bundy? Pop culture tells us that 
they are depraved, heinous, immoral monsters, deliberately causing harm to others, and often with a 
delicious twinkle in their eye. But what if I told you that several recent studies of psychopaths indicate 
that they know the difference between right and wrong? When judging the moral permissibility of 
different actions, such as harming one person to save the lives of many, psychopaths' judgments are often 
like yours and mine, nuanced, varying depending upon the outcomes and the means by which they are 
achieved. This is a rational, albeit largely unconscious understanding of right and wrong. This makes 
psychopaths nothing like earthquakes, viruses, chimpanzees, or young children. It also means that they 
don't have bad moral principles, but rather, ones that are like yours and mine. What if I further told you 
that before they develop into fully licensed-to-kill or extort psychopaths, many have an early history of 
torturing pets and bullying other kids. What if I further told you that when they cooked the cat in the 
microwave or bloodied little Johnny's face with their fist, that the consequences of their actions left them 
cold —no guilt, remorse, or shame. Nothing. And what if I told you that these people are born with a 
different brain chemistry and structure than you or I, leading to poor self-control and an emotionally 
callous view of the world? If this medical report is correct, and I believe the scientific evidence supports 
it, then psychopaths lack the ability to see alternative options and act on them. They also lack the 
resources for self-control. Given this evidence, psychopaths are not evil at all, though the consequences 
of their actions are often excessively heinous. Given this evidence, not one member of our initial list 
would count as evildoers, though chimpanzees, children and psychopaths would all count as potential 
evilrecipients. 
What this discussion highlights is that our perception of evildoers and evilrecipients is influenced 
by our sense of what it means to be human. Though evildoers and evilreceivers overlap in their capacities 
to think and feel, there are differences, captured by Aristotle's distinction between moral agents — those 
who have responsibility for others well being —and moral patients—those who deserve moral 
consideration and care from moral agents. The distinction gains scientific credibility thanks to a set of 
studies by the American psychologists Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner. In one experiment, a large Internet 
population compared the qualities of different things, including humans at different stages of 
development — fetus, baby, child, and adult —an adult human in a vegetative state, a dead human, 
nonhuman animals — frog, pet dog, chimpanzee —God, and a socially savvy robot. Subjects judged 
different pairings of these things on a wide range of dimensions, including which was more likely to 
develop a unique personality, feel embarrassed, suffer pain, distinguish right from wrong, experience 
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conscious awareness, exert greater self-control, plan ahead, develop fears, feel pleasure, and erupt into 
rage. Subjects also provided their personal opinions on which individual, within the pair, they liked most, 
wanted to make happy or destroy, was most deserving of punishment, and most likely had a soul. 
I assume that everyone reading about the design of this study has already formed an opinion 
about some of the comparisons. Presumably everyone believes that a living adult is more consciously 
aware than a dead person, fetus, dog, and robot. Presumably everyone believes that all animals feel more 
pain than a dead human or a robot. And presumably everyone would rather make a dog happy than a 
frog, and would be more likely to allocate souls to fetuses, babies, and adult humans than to robots and 
frogs. But are we more conscious than God? Does a chimpanzee feel more embarrassed than a baby? Can 
a person in a vegetative state feel more pleasure than a frog or robot? What dimensions, if any, cause us 
to lasso some things together but not others? What things cluster together and why? As a reminder: this 
study is about our intuitions, not about what scientists have discovered about the minds and emotions of 
these different things. 
Adding up the large set of responses produced a map or landscape defined by two dimensions: 
experience and agency. Experience included properties such as hunger, fear, pain, pleasure, rage, desire, 
consciousness, pride, embarrassment, and joy. Agency included self-control, morality, memory, emotion 
recognition, planning, communication and thinking. Experience aligned with feelings, agency with 
thinking. With these dimensions, we find God at one edge, high in agency and low in experience. On the 
opposite side, huddled together on the landscape, defined by low agency and high experience, we find 
fetuses, frogs, and people in a vegetative state. High in both agency and experience were adult men and 
women. Robots and dead people were low on experience and in the middle for agency, whereas dogs, 
chimpanzees, and human kids were high on experience and middling on agency. This landscape not only 
helps us understand how people classify these different entities, but also plays a more active role in 
guiding individuals' judgments to punish, provide pleasure, and avoid harm. If you have to harm 
something, pick an entity low in experience, such as dead people and robots who can't suffer. If you have 
to punish something, pick an entity high in agency, such as living adults who recognize the difference 
between right and wrong and have the capacity for self-control. 
What this work shows is that people have strong intuitions about which things are morally 
responsible as agents and which are deserving of our moral concerns as patients. Moral patients are high 
in experience, and can thus suffer as victims, innocent or not. This is why many countries have created 
laws against harming nonhuman animals, including restrictions on which animals can serve in laboratory 
experiments, what can be done to them, and how they should be housed. This is also why we don't do 
experiments on fetuses, newborns, adults in a vegetative state, or humans with neurological disorders that 
knock out aspects of their experience and agency. Once something enters the arena of moral patients, we 
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tend to leave them within this arena even if they lose particular capacities. Conversely, if scientists 
discover that an organism outside the arena of moral patient-hood has capacities of experience and agency 
that are on a par with those inside the arena, this evidence often promotes their legal status and protection. 
Such was the fate of the octopus, an invertebrate once classified by Aristotle as "stupid", but now 
elevated to the company of much smarter animals that solve novel problems, deploy trickery, and show 
some evidence of being aware of their behavior. As such, they are one of the few invertebrates to enjoy 
heightened protection and care when they are kept in captivity. 
Moral agents are high in agency, meaning that they can distinguish right from wrong, exert self-
control in the context of selfish temptation, can be blamed and punished, and are expected to care for 
moral patients. Moral patients are high in experience, including especially the capacity to feel pain. Both 
moral agents and patients have moral worth. But as in all entities that have worth or value, some are more 
valuable than others. So it is with moral worth. This is where departures from humanness get interesting, 
dangerously so. When we strip individuals of their moral worth, denying them qualities that define 
humanness, we have entered a world of distortion and denial that facilitates and justifies excessive harms. 
Across many studies, individuals consider themselves to be more human—as defined by the 
dimensions of experience and agency —and to have greater moral worth than other individuals. When 
individuals are socially ostracized and excluded from a group, they judge themselves as less human, and 
so do the spectators who observe the ostracism. Individuals judge members of their own group to be more 
human and morally worthy than those outside the group, no matter how small or broad the group is. What 
counts is our overall sense of how we compare to others, and the dimensions used to calibrate this 
similarity metric. The Australian social psychologist Nick Haslam carried out several experiments to 
determine how our rating of a group's humanness influenced how much we praise, blame and protect 
them, as well as whether we believe that rehabilitation or punishment is most appropriate after they have 
done something wrong. Haslam based his study on the idea, supported by the law, science, and our folk 
intuitions that we blame, praise and punish only those who do bad things on purpose as opposed to by 
accident. Conversely, we favor rehabilitation in those cases where we believe that the person can right a 
wrong, learning a lesson from a prior transgression. 
Subjects started by rating several different social groups along different dimensions of 
humanness. Though Haslam's dimensions were slightly different from those used by Gray and Wegner, 
they generally corresponded to experience and agency, including compassion, warmth and a sense of 
community on the one hand, and reason, self-control, civility, and refinement on the other. The target 
social groups were associated with negative or positive stereotypes such as the homeless, mentally 
disabled, athletes, politicians, doctors, lawyers, gays, and different religious groups. Next subjects 
imagined that a member of one of these groups had acted morally or immorally, or had been mistreated in 
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some way. Then they decided whether the person should be praised for a particular moral act such as 
returning a wallet, considered responsible for an immoral act such as breaking a promise, helped out for 
mistreatment such as being pushed out of line by a person in a hurry, and punished or rehabilitated for 
wrongful behavior. 
Haslam's results generated a landscape of humanness very much like Gray and Wegner's. Those 
groups rated highly in terms of agency, were more likely to be blamed and punished. Those groups rated 
high in experience were more likely to be praised, protected, and placed into rehabilitation. Those groups 
perceived as more emotional, compassionate and warm—components of experience — were praised 
more, whereas those perceived as more civil and rational — components of agency —were praised less. 
Overall, the more a group tilts toward the experience end of the spectrum, the more we see them as moral 
patients, deserving of our care and compassion. The more a group tilts toward the agency end of the 
spectrum, the more we see them as moral agents, having responsibilities and duties to act morally. 
Haslam's findings are not only of great conceptual interest, shaping our understanding of the 
defining qualities of being human, but also figure into everyday political and legal decision making. 
When do we believe a person has the right to vote, drive responsibly, drink alcohol reasonably, and serve 
an adult as opposed to a youth sentence for a crime? In the United States, the age cut off for considering 
the punishment of a crime under the jurisdiction of a juvenile court proceeding ranges from 16-19 years. 
Juvenile sentences are lighter than adult sentences, and rarely include life in prison or the death penalty. 
Though there is an arbitrariness to these age cut offs, and no good reason why states should differ, the 
decision to treat youths differently not only maps on to our intuitions but to the attributes that 
psychologists such as Haslam, Gray and Wegner have discovered. Treating an individual as a youth is 
more likely to trigger the dimension of experience in jury members and thus, more likely to trigger a 
sense that the individual should be protected and given the opportunity to change through rehabilitation. 
This fits with scientific evidence that an immature brain is a more plastic brain, capable of change. It also 
fits with the evidence that an immature brain is a brain with less self-control and critical reasoning—
both components of the agency dimension. These less than fully human qualities on the agency 
dimension, balanced by more qualities on the experience dimension, provide youths with an automatic 
entry ticket into the arena of moral patients. 
Moving outside of the arena of moral patienthood and into that of moral agency requires a change 
in perception. It requires us to see individuals as acting responsibly, controlling temptation, and 
understanding the distinction between right and wrong. It is for these reasons that our legal system, and 
the courts that carry out its principles, must consider psychological differences. Classifying individuals 
as adults or juveniles drags with it a massive psychology that is biased toward responsibility, blame and 
punishment on the one hand and protection, intervention, and rehabilitation on the other. The same biases 
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are also engaged when we consider adults with developmental disorders or brain injury, as these deficits 
are often associated with selective loss of either components of agency or experience, and sometimes 
both. As demonstrated by the work of Kurt Gray, Andres Martinez, and others, labeling someone a 
psychopath, autistic, or schizophrenic effectively pigeon holes the individual into a class of individuals 
with less than fully human qualities. This is a good thing when it focuses us on protection, intervention 
and rehabilitation. It is a bad thing when it allows us to morally disengage because those lacking the full 
compliment of qualities associated with agency and experience are less morally worthy. Humanness 
drives our moral concerns and our sense of others' moral worth. When we lower our sense of another's 
value, we are willing to violate our sense of the sacred, engaging in trade-offs that are normally taboo. 
Experiments by the American psychologists Philip Tetlock and Jonathan Haidt help us see what 
is sacred by asking individuals what they would pay to do something sacrilegious. If something is sacred, 
of great moral worth either personally or to your group, could you be paid off by a wealthy investor to 
give up the object or engage in an act against it? For each of the acts below, think about your payoff 
point in dollars from $0 (for free) to $1million, including the option of saying that you would never do it 
for any amount of money. Keep in mind that if you choose to carry out an act and receive payment you 
will not suffer any consequences: 
• Kick a dog in the head, hard. 
• Sign a secret but binding pledge to hire only people of your race into your company 
• Burn your country's flag in private 
• Throw a rotten tomato at a political leader that you dislike. 
• Get a one pint transfusion of disease-free, compatible blood from a convicted child molester. 
If you are like the subjects in these experiments, the mere process of considering a payoff, even 
for a short period of time, will have turned your stomach into knots and triggered a deep sense of disgust. 
This is because violating the sacred is akin to violating our sense of humanness. It is playing with the 
devil, accepting a Faustian offer of money to strip something of its moral worth. As Haidt notes, even 
though it is sacrilege to accept payment across different moral concerns, including avoiding harm, acting 
fairly, and respecting authority, different experiences can modulate the aversion we feel when we imagine 
such transgressions. Women typically demand more money for each of these acts than men, and more 
often reject them as taboo. Those who lean toward the conservative end of the political spectrum either 
ask for more money or consider the act taboo when compared to liberals, and this was especially the case 
for questions focused on acting against an in-group (race), an authority figure (political leader), or ones 
purity (blood transfusion). What this shows is that our cultural experiences can distort what we consider 
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morally worthy or sacred. It shows how easily we can flip our values in the face of tempting alternatives. 
The scientific evidence presented in this section shows that our decisions to treat others according 
to different moral principles or norms is powerfully affected by our sense of what counts as another 
human being. What counts includes at least two important dimensions, one focused on agency and the 
other on experience. These dimensions determine whether we blame or praise someone, punish or 
rehabilitate them, and ultimately, include or exclude them from the inner circles of moral agents or moral 
patients. Those who fall outside these two inner circles are morally worthless. Those who are morally 
worthless can be destroyed or banished. Some things are justifiably excluded and fit with our general 
sense of reality — rocks, dirt, cardboard boxes, plastic balls, and pieces of glass. Other things are 
excluded because they don't fit with our values of what reality should be. This is where distortion and 
denial enter the process. This is where we create walls around members of one group in order to keep 
others out. This is where we express partiality instead of the impartiality that Lady Justice champions 
with her two balanced scales and blind fold-covered eyes. This is where we exclude others from our inner 
sanctum in order to justify great harms. How is the inner sanctum set up and put into action over a 
lifetime, sometimes for legitimate causes and sometimes for illegitimate and unconscionable causes? 
Populating the inner sanctum 
Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Laureate and Holocaust survivor, remarked that "anti-Semitism is the most 
ancient form of prejudice." This claim may well be true of human written history, but is most definitely 
false if one considers the fact that all social animals and human societies, including the hunter-gatherer 
groups that are descendants of people that predated the Jews, hate some individuals and love others. 
Prejudice, though often based on deep seated ideological biases and stereotypes that humans invent, is, at 
root, a form of partiality. Every social animal, either extinct or alive today, expresses partiality. This is a 
highly adaptive and ancient psychology, promoting the care of young, investment in mates, and escape 
strategies against enemies. Humans are no different, except for the role that our promiscuous brains play 
in fueling partiality with ideology and symbolism. Sometimes when we express our partiality it is for the 
noble cause of caring for our children and for defending ideological beliefs surrounding humanitarian 
causes, including defense of basic human rights. Sometimes when we express our partiality, it is for the 
ignoble cause of destroying others. How does human partiality begin? Do babies express preferences for 
certain social categories? How does their experience sculpt new categories? How is the inner sanctum 
populated, enabling us to preferentially help those within and harm those outside? 
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At birth, newborns preferentially listen to their native language over a non-native language. Soon 
thereafter, infants prefer to listen to their native dialect over a non-native dialect, and look longer at their 
own race than another race. This shows that they can discriminate between different languages, dialects, 
and racial groups. But do they form social preferences based on these distinctions? Would a young baby 
or child prefer to take a toy from an unfamiliar person who speaks the same or different language, from 
the same or different race? To answer these questions, the American psychologist Katharine Kinzler put 5 
months old babies to a test. 
Babies born into mono-racial and mono-lingual families sat on their mother's lap in front of two 
monitors, each presenting short video clips of different people. After watching the videos, Kinzler 
created a bit of magic. The people in the monitor appeared to emerge from the 2D image and offer the 
baby a toy. The trick: a real person, hidden beneath the monitor, synchronized her reach with the reach in 
the monitor. Who would the baby choose given that both people offered the same toy? Babies preferred 
people speaking the native over non-native language, and native-accent over the non-native accent. At 
this young age, however, they showed no preference for native over non-native race. Thus, early in life 
the connection between discrimination and social preference is well established for language, but not race. 
When do things change for race? 
Kinzler carried out another series of experiments on race with one group of 2.5 year old children 
and a second group of 5-year olds. Though the methods were somewhat different, they both focused on 
the child's preferences, including who they would share toys with and who they would prefer as friends. 
The 2.5 year olds showed no preferences, whereas the 5 year olds preferred their own race. Race is 
therefore a slowly developing category, at least in terms of its impact on social preferences, and especially 
when contrasted with both language and accent. 
Kinzler took these studies one step further to explore whether there is anything like a hierarchy 
among these social categories and the features that define them. What's more important to a young child 
building an inner sanctum of trusted others —race, language, or dialect? Would they rather interact with 
someone of the same race who speaks a foreign language or someone of a different race who speaks the 
native language? Using similar procedures, Kinzler showed that by 4-5 years of age, language trumps 
race. Children would rather interact with someone from a different race speaking the same language than 
someone of the same race speaking a foreign language. 
Why would language trump race? Kinzler's answer relies on an idea developed by the American 
evolutionary psychologist Robert Kurzban. Imagine a hunter-gatherer in South Africa, living during the 
earliest stages of our evolutionary history. As individuals searched for food to eat, areas to sleep, water to 
drink, and places to avoid, they came across other individuals. These individuals were always members 
of the same race. Racial differences did not emerge until relatively late in human evolution, well after our 
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ancestors took their first steps out of Africa. If we are thinking about an evolved psychology for bonding 
with members of our own group and fighting those outside, our ancestors would have been blind to race 
as it was not yet an emergent property of our species. Language was, however, a property of our species, 
and one that varied across populations. A hunter-gatherer walking the plains of South Africa would 
indeed have run into people speaking either a completely different language, or the same language with a 
different dialect. New languages are not easily acquired, and nor are new dialects. It takes real talent to 
speak a new language or dialect without a trace of ones origins. Thus, like the stoning gazelles, 
magnanimous spenders, and healthy evildoers discussed in chapter 2, the native languages and dialects we 
speak are honest signals of social group membership. Honesty is supported by the costs we pay to 
acquire them. Cheating is hard because there is a start-up cost associated with perfecting the natural 
rhythm of a second language or novel dialect. 
The babies in Kinzler's experiments tell us something important: race and language are both 
important social categories and discriminable from an early age. But language trumps race as a feature 
because it is a better predictor of membership within the inner sanctum, at least early in life. Ultimately, 
both language and race allow us to close off some from the inner sanctum and allow others in. Ultimately, 
our allegiance to our native language and race can fuel our hatred toward those who look different and 
speak in different tongues. 
Closed doors 
As adults, we tend to rely on rules of thumb to guide our social interactions, including who we trust and 
who we distrust. We tend to trust those we know more than those we don't know. Within the circle of 
those we know, we believe those who are more like us than those who are unlike us, using fixed body 
features — race, height, hair color — flexible psychological features—food preferences, sports' 
interests, religious beliefs — and features that are flexibly constrained —language and intelligence. 
Together, these different dimensions cause us to close the door on some and open it to others. 
Language is particularly interesting. If you can't understand someone because they don't speak 
your language or because their accent is too heavy, then the issue is not trust, but comprehension. But 
what if you can understand the person perfectly well, but they speak with a foreign accent, either one 
from a different country (e.g., a French speaker speaking English) or one from the same country but a 
different region (e.g., a Southern accent in the northeast of the United States)? 
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Subjects in an experiment first listened to people reading trivia, such as "A giraffe can go without 
water longer than a camel can," and then judged whether the sentence was true or false. If the sentence 
was read in a foreign accent, subjects were more likely to say that it was false than if it was read in the 
native accent. Subjects voiced this opinion even though the experimenter told them that the reader was 
not expressing an opinion, but merely reading the passage as instructed. In a second experiment, British 
subjects listening to a non-guilty plea by a person on trial were more likely to judge the person as guilty if 
he committed a blue collar crime and spoke with a non-standard British accent (e.g., Australian). In 
contrast, they were more likely to judge a white collar criminal as guilty if he spoke with a standard 
British accent. Even within the class of British accents, biases emerged: subjects from the Worcester 
region were more likely to judge supposed criminals as guilty if they spoke with a Birmingham accent 
than with a Worcester accent. Together, these studies paint a bleak picture: accents from an out-group are 
perceived as less truthful than others, and in the context of a criminal case, more guilty as well. 
Accents are learned early in life, and once in place, are both clear markers of your origins and 
difficult to undue. As such, they are honest indicators of at least one dimension of group membership. 
What about dimensions that can readily be acquired at any point in life, and just as easily dropped? How 
do these influence not only our perception of those who share these dimensions in common, but how we 
treat them? In the last chapter I discussed a study by Tania Singer in which both men and women showed 
more pain empathy— as revealed by activation in the insula region of the brain— when they watched a 
cooperator experiencing pain. Further, men showed a reduction of activity in this area when a cheater 
experienced pain, and increased activity in a reward area — the nucleus accumbens. This pattern fits well 
with the research on human and nonhuman animals showing that winning, and watching winners win, 
triggers a choreographed ballet of physiological responses associated with reward. Singer took this work 
further, asking whether an individual's support for a sport's team might similarly modulate both the 
feeling of pain empathy as well as reward. Subjects, all soccer fanatics, sat in a scanner and watched as a 
player from their favorite team or a rival experienced pain. Next, Singer provided subjects with three 
options for interacting with these players: help them by personally taking on some of the pain they would 
receive, letting them take on all the pain but watch a video as distraction, or let them take on all the pain 
and watch as it happens. Option one is costly altruism, two is blissful ignorance, and three is 
schadenfreude. 
In parallel with the earlier work on fairness, here too Singer observed greater pain empathy when 
the favorite team player experienced pain than when the rival experienced pain. She also observed that 
subjects were more likely to help favorite team players by taking on some of their pain, but more likely to 
watch rivals receive pain. The higher the activation level in the insula, the more they took on their 
favorite team player's pain session —the more they helped. When they watched rivals experience pain, 
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there was significant activation in the nucleus accumbens. They felt an immediate honey hit, joy over the 
rival's pain. The higher the activation in this reward area, the more likely they were to choose the option 
of watching the rival experience pain — like watching a public execution and cheering for just deserts. 
These results show that individual differences in our compassion toward others in pain predicts our 
willingness to help them. It reveals another dimension, like language, that biases our sense of justice, both 
in our judgments and in our behavior. Conversely, individual differences in our joy over others' misery 
predicts our willingness to allow others to suffer, suppress our instincts to help and, I suggest, facilitate 
our capacity to harm. Similar response patterns arise in the context of race— a feature of group 
membership that is fixed at birth. 
As noted earlier, babies stare longer at faces of people from the same race than from people of a 
different race, and by the pre-school years, are more likely to show social preferences for peers and adults 
of the same race. In brain imaging studies, specific areas activate when we process faces as opposed to 
other objects, and one tenth of a second later, other associated regions activate when we process race. 
This rapid activation occurs whether we are consciously engaged in classifying faces by race or not; for 
example, the same areas activate even when we are forced to focus on gender or familiarity. This shows 
that from the brain's perspective, we don't have an option of processing a person's race. The brain 
automatically and unconsciously hands us this information, like it or not. 
The fact that we process race automatically gains importance based on a powerful set of 
behavioral studies showing that virtually every person, independently of their explicit avowals of non-
racist attitudes, holds implicit or unconscious racist biases. Using a research tool developed by the social 
psychologists Tony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji called the Implicit Attitudes Test or IAT, subjects see 
different faces or read different descriptions of people, and then make evaluative judgments about these 
people. Often, the presentations are rapid so that there is little or no time to reflect upon the evaluation. 
For example, in a study focused on race, subjects first classified photographs of people's faces as either 
Caucasian or Black. Next they classified words into those associated with good positive meaning—joy 
and friend —and those with bad negative meaning — hate and bomb. In the third and critical step, 
subjects saw faces and words together and, using a rule provided by the experimenter, struck one of two 
keys on a keyboard as fast as possible: for example, strike the #1 key if you see a Black face and a good 
word, but the #2 key if you see a Caucasian face and a good word. The intuition here is that if certain 
faces and words are more strongly associated, because this is what people have learned over time, then 
they will press the relevant key faster than for weaker associations. Results from several studies confirm 
this intuition. For example, Caucasian subjects who explicitly deny racist attitudes are nonetheless slower 
to respond when Black, as opposed to Caucasian faces are associated with good words, and faster to 
respond when Black, as opposed to Caucasian faces are associated with bad words. These patterns hold 
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even when subjects respond to names commonly associated with Caucasian and Black people. A quick 
skim through the many blogs commenting on this work reveals a common refrain that makes the key 
point: many that have taken this test, whether focusing on race, sexual orientation, or political affiliation, 
opine that the test must be invalid because they explicitly disavow any groupish biases. But that's the 
point! What we disavow explicitly has less impact than we would like on what we hold implicitly. 
If our implicit system champions one view of racism and our explicit system another, then we are 
continuously faced with an epic conflict. To resolve this conflict, and enable the explicit system to emerge 
triumphant, requires self-control, keeping the implicit system quiet. Studies of the brain provide 
interesting insights into this process. Recall that when we experience conflict, regardless of its content, 
there is activation in the anterior cingulate. When we exert self-control, regardless of content, there is 
activation in particular regions within the prefrontal cortex. When we feel threatened by a dangerous 
animal or person, there is activation in the amygdala. These three brain regions tell an interesting story 
about how we process race. When Caucasian subjects view faces of Black as opposed to Caucasian 
people staring at them, there is greater activation in the amygdala. This racial difference disappears if 
subjects view photos of faces looking away or with eyes closed. It is the potentially threatening aspect of 
a face staring at you that engages the racial difference. If you briefly flash faces at Caucasian subjects so 
that they are unaware of them, there is stronger activation in the amygdala for Black than Caucasian 
faces. But if you present the faces for long enough, allowing them to enter conscious awareness, the 
amygdala's pattern of activity goes away, replaced instead by strong activation in the anterior cingulate 
and prefrontal cortex. Staring longer at someone from a different race triggers a sense of conflict and 
engages the system of self-control, pushing down our implicit racism to enable more explicit neutrality 
and equality. 
What this work shows is that understanding our attitudes and actions toward those of the same 
and different race requires consideration of implicit and explicit components. Think of this process like a 
hand pushing down on an automatic watering fountain. The machinery that produces the pressure to push 
water out of the holes in the fountain operates without concern for what happens outside in the world. The 
hand that pushes down is under human control, consciously guided, perhaps with the aim of simply 
spreading the water or feeling its' coolness on a hot day. Though the hand may try to control the 
movement of the water, it may only do so to some extent, guided by the power of the automatic engine 
below. Thus, we have an automatic bottom up mechanism and a controlled top down mechanism. So it is 
with race. The bottom up mechanism operates automatically, pushing forward our implicit prejudice. The 
top down mechanism attempts to exert control, when and where it can, to avoid looking racist, sexist, or 
what have you. Somewhere, the two meet, creating a personality profile that is more explicitly racist, 
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sexist, or X-ist in some cases than others, either because the individual lacks top down control or because 
they decide to relinquish it. 
In parallel with Singer's work on the relationship between pain empathy and our classification of 
others as fair-minded cooperators or narcissistically-minded cheaters, so too does race influence our 
expression of compassion toward those in pain. Both Caucasian, Black and Asian subjects showed 
stronger activation in the pain-related areas of the brain when viewing individuals from the same race 
experience pain than when viewing individuals of a different race. When Black subjects played a 
computerized game involving social ostracism, they showed stronger activation in areas of the brain 
involved in social pain when excluded by Caucasian players than when excluded by Black players. When 
others suffer and we have the opportunity to help them, we are more likely to help those of the same race, 
and feel good about it as evidenced by activation of brain areas involved in reward. 
Our biases, both implicit and explicit, influence our compassion toward others and our motivation 
to help. This statement is true whether we are looking at evidence from young children or adults, and 
using measures that assess sensory perception, behavioral judgment, or activity patterns in the brain. 
Beginning with an evolutionarily ancient brain system that was designed to distinguish friendly ingroup 
members and antagonistic outgroup members, we populate the inner sanctum with people who we 
perceive as most like us, using both fixed and variable features. With time, the walls surrounding this 
sanctum close, attributing the full richness of human nature to those within, and bleaching it from those 
outside. 
Bleaching humanity 
Draw an imaginary circle around yourself with a diameter of about fifty feet. Now imagine packing this 
circle with people, forming an expanding set of concentric circles that radiates out from those closest to 
you to those you don't know at all. Based on social network analyses by sociologists such as Nicholas 
Christakis, the majority of people within the inner circles will be like you in a number of ways, including 
their race, religion, political affiliation, food preferences, and aesthetics. This includes family members 
and close friends, but also those we work with, vote for, and play with. As you travel from the inner core 
to the outside, you will find less in common. Some in the outer core will not only have less in common, 
but as noted earlier in this chapter based on work by Gray, Wegner and Haslam, will be perceived as less 
human, stripped of dimensions of experience and agency that define humanity. Some will appear like 
objects, others like animals. When we transform others into objects, we have stripped away core aspects 
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