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of human nature, including emotional sensitivity, warmth, and flexibility. When we transform others into 
animals, we have stripped them of uniquely human qualities such as rationality, self-control, moral 
sensibility, and civility. Of those who are like animals, some will seem like kin to the domesticated form 
and thus controllable as property; others will seem like wild animals and thus dangerous, dirty and 
deserving of elimination. However we engage this process, we have bleached individuals of their 
humanity. This process, one that occurs in both everyday life and in cases of conflict, has allowed us to 
treat the mentally and physically disabled like animals, to consider women as sexual property, justify 
slavery and slave wages, deny certain races the opportunity to vote and receive education, and mandate 
ethnic cleansing. 
Before I describe a shocking set of experimental findings on dehumanization, consider first a 
snapshot into some of our historical attitudes, shared across many countries and cultures. Before we 
knew much about human evolution and the causes of variation, scientists made sweeping statements 
about the relationship between brain structure and differences in intelligence and behavior among men, 
women and the variety of races. It was commonly believed that, compared with white men, women and 
all other races had smaller brains, approximating our cousins the apes. Listen to Gustave LeBon, a 
distinguished social psychologist, writing in 1879: 
In the most intelligent races, as among the Parisians, there are a large 
number of women whose brains are closer in size to those of gorillas 
than to the most developed male brains. This inferiority is so obvious 
that no one can contest it for a moment; only its degree is worth 
discussion. All psychologists who have studied the intelligence of 
women, as well as poets and novelists, recognize today that they 
represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and that they are 
closer to children and savages than to an adult, civilized man. They 
excel in fickleness, inconstancy, absence of thought and logic, and 
incapacity to reason. Without doubt there exist some distinguished 
women, very superior to the average man, but they are as exceptional as 
the birth of any monstrosity, as, for example, of a gorilla with two heads; 
consequently, we may neglect them entirely. 
By elevating white men to the gold standard of perfection, it was easy to see everyone else as a 
degenerate form of God's creation or, in biological terms, of arrested evolution, with non-Caucasian races 
showing greater affinity to our furry cousins the apes. Looked at today, backed by our understanding of 
genetics and the evolutionary process, these accounts are absurd and offensive. Sadly, despite efforts to 
clean up our explicit racist and sexist attitudes, overwhelming evidence reveals that the brain holds dear a 
suite of unconscious prejudices that serve to dehumanize those unlike us. 
Now the shocking experiments. The American social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt dared to 
ask whether US citizens unconsciously associate Black people with imagery ofd apes, using the 
disturbing history of this association as her jumping off point. In parallel with the studies of race 
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presented in the last section, Eberhardt was also interested in the possibility that if people carry this 
association around in their head, they do so unconsciously, despite explicit avowals that they are not at all 
racist. And if they carry this association around unconsciously, how does it impact upon their judgments 
and actions? 
In one experiment with both Caucasian and non-Caucasian subjects, Eberhardt used a technique 
called subliminal priming. Subliminal priming involves rapidly presenting pictures, sounds or other 
experiences under the radar of awareness and then presenting material that falls within our radar. If the 
two experiences are similar, the unconscious version affects subjects' perception of the conscious one. 
For example, if you first prime people by flashing the picture of a woman's face, subjects then respond 
faster to faces of women than to faces of men. In other words, despite the fact that subjects are unaware of 
the prime, it affects their judgments. Eberhardt first primed subjects with photographed faces of 
Caucasian or Black people or an unrecognizable non-face. They then watched a short movie that started 
off with an unrecognizable object that looked like it was covered by dense snow. As the movie 
progressed, the snow lifted, making it easier to recognize the object as a line drawing of either a duck, 
dolphin, alligator, squirrel or ape. Subjects stopped the movie as soon as they recognized the animal. 
Compared with Caucasian faces and non-faces, priming with Black faces caused subjects to stop 
the movie much sooner for apes, but not for any other animal. Compared with non-faces, priming with 
Caucasian faces caused subjects to stop the movie much later for apes, but not for any other animal. This 
suggests that Black faces made it easier to identify apes, whereas Caucasian faces made it harder to 
identify apes, with no comparable effects for any other animals. Caucasian and non-Caucasian subjects 
showed the same pattern of response, and so too did individuals with and without strong, explicit racial 
attitudes. Although the similarity among Caucasian and non-Caucasian subjects is of interest, and 
suggests that the association is held even among those who were perhaps less strongly associated with 
this form of dehumanization, there were relatively few Black subjects in this non-Caucasian group. This 
first set of experiments suggests, therefore, that among a racially heterogeneous group of educated 
Stanford undergraduates, individuals carry an unconscious association between Black people and apes, 
and thus, an unconsciously dehumanized representation of another human being. Given the animal form 
of this dehumanization, the implication from Haslam's work is that Caucasians associate Blacks with less 
rationality, civility, and self-control, in essence, less uniquely human qualities. 
These are remarkable and disturbing findings. They can't be explained by some superficial 
similarity between human faces and animals because Eberhardt found the same results when she 
presented either line drawings or words of animals. Had Eberhardt used actual photographs of animals, 
subjects could have used similarity in skin color or nose shape— for example, seeing a black human face 
would prime seeing a black ape face because both have the color black in common. Line drawings and 
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written words cut the legs out of this account. Eberhardt's results suggest that apes are associated with the 
socio-cultural, racial category "Black." 
These findings reveal a deep seated, dehumanized representation that is readily triggered even in 
highly educated people. But perhaps they are less disturbing then we might imagine. not so bad if the 
take home message is that we are closet racists with antiquated theories of evolution or God's design. 
Outside of these artificial studies, we are well educated citizens who keep our isms tucked away, locked 
up in our unconscious. Unfortunately, the unsettling feelings that many will have to these studies are 
exacerbated by an additional set of results collected by Eberhardt, linking unconscious impressions to 
harmful actions. Caucasian male subjects watched a video of a policeman using force to subdue a suspect 
who was either Black or Caucasian. When primed with an ape drawing, but not that of a tiger, subjects 
were more likely to say that the policeman was justified in subduing the Black suspect than the Caucasian 
suspect. We are more than closet racists. We are out of the closet, armed for prejudice and 
dehumanization. 
To unconsciously think that Blacks are more like apes than other racial groups is to strip them of 
characteristics that are uniquely human. As Haslam notes, when we dehumanize others in this particular 
way, we no longer see them as human, but as incompetent wild animals or immature children lacking in 
intelligence, etiquette, rationality, and moral wherewithal. This mode of dehumanization is ancient, 
reflected in the writings and paintings of European explorers who encountered indigenous cultures in 
Asia, Australia, and Africa. Dehumanizing others into objects is equally ancient, unflattering and 
dangerous. In one study, American adults were told to focus on either the physical appearance or 
personality of the actress Angelina Jolie and the ex-governor of Alaska and presidential hopeful Sarah 
Palin— both famous personalities within the United States. When subjects focused on appearance as 
opposed to personality, they judged both Jolie and Palin as relatively lacking in traits of experience or 
human nature. Jolie and Palin were seen as objects. In other studies, carried out by Haslam, subjects 
judged objectified men and women as less capable of suffering and less deserving of moral compassion 
and protection, reinforcing the age old attitude we once held toward slaves, and that many hold today 
toward prostitutes. When people become property, they fall outside of the circle of moral patients. Studies 
of the brain provide further support for these dehumanizing transformations, and highlight, once again, 
both the beneficial and malignant consequences of our mind's promiscuity. 
Brains without borders 
Dehumanization enables doctors to treat their patients—human or nonhuman animal—as mechanical 
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devices that require repair. This allows for cool-headed, rational, and skillful surgeries, while fending off 
the humanizing emotions of compassion and empathy. This is adaptive. This is a transformation that 
enables doctors working in war-torn areas or regions afflicted with a disease outbreak, to treat hundreds 
of suffering patients as if they were treating inert cars on an assembly line. Good doctors allow their 
compassion and empathy to return as their patients regain awareness. Bad doctors maintain their cool, 
detached manner, insensitive to the physical and psychological pain of their waking patients. Bad doctors 
continue to perceive their patients like cars on the assembly line. Really bad doctors see their patients like 
cars that were created for personal R&D. 
Recall from earlier sections that when we see someone else in pain, particular areas of the brain 
activate as we imagine their suffering. Many of the same areas of the brain also activate when we 
personally experience pain. This is the circuitry for pain empathy. The French cognitive neuroscientist 
Jean Decety showed that when physicians look at video clips of people experiencing pain from a needle 
prick, this circuit is suppressed relative to non-physicians. For physicians, it's as if they were watching a 
needle prick a pillow. Though we don't know how much experience was necessary or sufficient to cause 
the physician's lack of pain empathy, or the extent to which physicians are physicians because they were 
born with less empathy, Decety's findings point to individual differences in our capacity to feel what 
others feel and the potential modulating role of experience. 
Several studies now show that based on individual experience, the human brain readily flip-flops 
between empathy and callousness. In two similarly designed experiments, one recording from pain related 
areas in the brain, and the other from a motor area associated with the hand, Caucasian and Black subjects 
watched a video of a needle penetrating a human hand. Consistently, subjects showed weaker activation 
in the pain and motor areas when watching the needle penetrate the hand from another race. This lowering 
of pain empathy and motor response for the out-group was greatest for subjects with the highest implicit 
or unconscious racial biases, as measured with the IAT tool noted earlier. 
These studies of the brain, like the behavioral studies I discussed earlier, add to the idea that we 
have a racial bias for pain empathy. We feel others' pain, but only for those who share the same race. But 
since, by definition, we look more like those from within our racial group than those outside it, perhaps 
the bias is less about race and more about those that don't look like us. To explore this possibility, Black 
and Caucasian subjects saw a needle penetrate a violet-colored hand. Violet hands are not only different, 
but far more different than either black or white hands in terms of our experience of skin coloration. 
Nonetheless, the activation pattern in the brain matched the subject's own race. When we feel less 
compassion for someone of another race, it is because of racial biases, not because of superficial 
differences in appearance. Color is simply a cue that reminds us of our prejudice. 
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The fact that we feel less empathy for people in pain if they fall outside our inner sanctum 
suggests that we have dehumanized them, stripping away dimensions of experience that humanize those 
within the sanctum. These are the dimensions associated with emotion, and when taken away, cause us to 
perceive the other as an object. Since objects can't feel pain or joy, we can't share in their experience 
because they lack experience altogether. If that is the case, then when we perceive any human group that 
has been dehumanized in this particular way, there should be little to no activity in those areas of the brain 
associated with thinking, feeling, wanting, and believing. To explore this possibility, the social 
psychologist Susan Fiske placed subjects in a brain scanner and presented photographs of either extreme 
out-group members, such as the homeless and drug addicts, or photographs of other groups such as the 
elderly, middle-class Americans, and the rich. When viewing the extreme out-group, not only did Fiske 
see little activity in an area critically related to self-awareness and the process of thinking about others 
thoughts and emotions—the medial prefrontal cortex —but she also observed an intense increase of 
activity in the insula, a brain area that is recruited when we experience disgust. 
Fiske's results highlight the dangers of dehumanization. Once we turn off areas of the brain that 
are involved in thinking about others' thoughts and emotions, and turn on areas involved in disgust, we 
have set ourselves up for moral disengagement. As the distinguished American psychologist Albert 
Bandura has documented through decades of research, moral disengagement allows people to justify harm 
by transforming lethal motives into morally justified and even benevolent ones. Moral disengagement 
allows us to excuse ourselves from moral responsibility, either disregarding the harm imposed or 
convincing ourselves that it was justified, even obligatory. In several international studies of school-aged 
children, results consistently show that those who are most morally disengaged are most likely to engage 
in various forms of aggression, including bullying and repeated criminal offenses. These same children 
are also least likely to engage in helpful behavior, revealing that moral disengagement dispenses with the 
typical process of self-censure and sanctioning that we carry around when we are morally engaged. In a 
study of American prison personnel involved in death penalty sentences, executioners were more morally 
disengaged than support staff or prison guards. Executioners were more likely to dehumanize the 
convicted prisoner and provide moral and economic justifications. Executioners also felt less guilt 
because they had developed a narrative to justify their actions, one that ascribed complete fault and 
responsibility to the victim. Support staff flipped in the opposite direction, fully involved with the 
weighty moral issues associated with ending someone's life. In a study of people's political attitudes, 
those with strong right wing authoritarian views, commonly associated with fascism and submission to 
authority, were more likely to support war by means of morally disengaging. In particular, they were most 
likely to support war by justifying its necessity and trivializing the harm that will necessarily arise — for 
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example, invading another country is not aggressive, but designed as a pre-emptive strike to protect group 
interests. 
Moral disengagement enables behaviors that are either immoral, illegal, or counter to deeply 
rooted intuitive prohibitions against harming others. It is a process that has the beneficial consequence of 
empowering soldiers to go to war under just causes, as well as the toxic consequence of empowering 
rogue leaders to carry out genocide under unjust causes. It is a process that allows us to hibernate from 
our moral responsibilities. It is a form of self-deception, a partner to dehumanization in the denial of 
reality. But self-deception, like deception of others, is not always harmful. In fact, it is often highly 
adaptive. 
Angelic denial 
In a nationally televised address in 2005, the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad pronounced that 
the Jews had "created a myth in the name of the Holocaust and consider it above God, religion and the 
prophets." Judge Daniel Schreber believed that his brain was softening and that he was turning into a 
woman in order to form a sexual union with God. During a doctor's visit, a man reported that his pet 
poodle had been replaced by an impostor, masquerading as if he was the real deal. Judge Patrick 
Couwenberg stated under oath that he received the Purple Heart for military operations in Vietnam, and 
soon thereafter carried out covert missions in Southeast Asia and Africa as a CIA agent. The pilots of Air 
Florida flight 90 ignored signs from their dashboard indicating engine trouble and then proceeded to crash 
into a bridge, killing 74 of the 79 people on board. In 2008, while Hilary Clinton was running for 
President of the United States, she regaled admiring supporters with stories of her international 
experience, including her visit to Bosnia in 1996 where her plane was forced to land "under sniper fire", 
followed by a rapid evacuation for cover. When I was a teenager, I often walked onto the tennis court 
thinking that I was John McEnroe, serving and volleying like the world's number one player. 
Each case above tells the story of a person who acted as if the world was one way even though it 
wasn't. The Holocaust and its trail of atrocities were real, confirmed by thousands of scarred survivors 
and the relatives who have heard their accounts. Judge Couwenberg was never in Vietnam, never earned a 
Purple Heart, and never had a connection with the CIA. There are no pet poodle impostors. Our brains 
don't soften, though they do deteriorate with age. When dashboard indicators suggest engine trouble, 
better to be safe than sorry when you are responsible for the lives of many people. Hilary Clinton landed 
in the exceptionally safe airport of Tuzla where she was warmly greeted by US and Bosnian officials. I 
am no McEnroe. 
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In each of these cases, there was a mismatch with reality. The person harbored a false belief, but 
believed it was true. In some cases, the mismatch was due to psychosis, some kind of delusion or 
malfunctioning of the brain. These people didn't know that their beliefs were false. In other cases, the 
mismatch resulted from an intentional lie or distortion, a process that is adaptive, designed to promote 
self-confidence and manipulate others. When I conjured up images of McEnroe, I momentarily deceived 
myself. I believed it helped my game. I never thought I was McEnroe. I carried my self-deception 
honestly. When Hilary Clinton misreported her trip to Bosnia, perhaps she misremembered or perhaps she 
distorted her memory to convince voters that she had what was necessary to run the country — toughness 
and international experience. Unfortunately for Clinton, her comment about Bosnia was accompanied by 
other distortions, which led the American essayist William Safire to write "Americans of all political 
persuasions are coming to the sad realization that our First Lady... is a congenital liar." 
Some cases of self-deception are harmless and even beneficial, as in my illusion of tennis 
grandeur. Others are only mildly harmful, as in Clinton's distortion of her political experiences. And yet 
others are deeply harmful, as when leaders such as Ahmadinejad deny the suffering of millions. The 
problem is that anyone can harness the power of self-deception for ill gotten gains. 
Why does our mind play tricks on us, allowing us to believe things that are false? Why didn't 
evolution endow us with a reality checking device that is vigilant 24/7? The answer here parallels the 
refrain carried throughout this book: like its evil sister dehumanization, self-deception is Janus-faced, 
showing both an adaptive and maladaptive side. Self-deception allows us to protect ourselves from the 
reality of a current predicament or loss. Self-deception allows us to provide a better personal marketing 
brand to defeat our competitors in attracting mates and garnering other resources. Self-deception may 
even be critical to the functioning of a healthy and safe society: in a study of male criminal offenders, 
those with the lowest levels of self-deception with respect to their own self-worth showed the highest 
levels of recidivism. There is, however, a fine balancing act, revealing the slippery slope from adaptive to 
maladaptive: as studies by Roy Baumeister reveal, individuals with the highest self-esteem and the most 
overblown sense of themselves are also the ones most likely to lash out with extreme violence when 
someone threatens the reality of their stature. 
The evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers was the first to identify the adaptive significance of 
self-deception and its connection to deception. As he insightfully notes in his book The Folly of Fools, 
what appears completely irrational about self-deception evolved as a consequence of selection to deceive 
competitors: "To fool others we might be tempted to reorganize information internally in all sorts of 
improbable ways and to do so largely unconsciously." The most effective self-deceiver acts without any 
sense of his true motives. He is on autopilot, driven by a purely self-interested mind. No checks and 
balances. Here, I build on this idea. I will show you how studies of pathology and healthy brain function 
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illuminate the mental chicaneries that lead us down the road to self-deception. As with the dangers of 
dehumanization and its role in denying reality, so too is self-deception a dangerous state of mind, 
allowing individuals to inflict great harm while feeling aligned with the angels. 
What did William Safire have in mind when he called Hilary Clinton a congenital liar? 
Congenital refers to a trait that is present in utero, at birth or soon thereafter. Congenital disorders, 
diseases, or anomalies typically refer to defects caused by a combination of genetic and environmental 
problems. A cleft lip is an example of a congenital anomaly, one that appears at birth as a gap in the 
upper lip. Because we don't have detailed records of Hilary Clinton's life as a child, it is hard to say 
whether her lying was congenital in the same way that a hair lip is congenital. We can rule out the in 
utero and at birth periods because Hilary, like all other children, was not born speaking or lying. These 
capacities mature. That she developed a tendency to exaggerate and distort is consistent with other 
reports. She falsely claimed that she was centrally involved in the creation of a Children's Health 
Insurance Program, an initiative that was actually created by Senators Ted Kennedy and Orin Hatch. She 
also claimed that she played a significant role in the Good Friday Agreement for Northern Ireland, a 
comment that Nobel laureate Lord William David Trimble described as "a wee bit silly." When Safire 
described Clinton as a congenital liar, what he was referring to was the habitual pattern of fabrication. 
When patterns of the mind become habits, they are hard to break. Each distortion, rehearsed over and 
over, becomes part of the fabric of truth. It is a life story that starts as fiction and ends up as non-fiction in 
the mind of the story-teller. We can begin to understand this transformation by looking at the clinician's 
notebook. 
For more than 100 years, psychiatrists have described a syndrome known as pathological lying. 
If lying is pathological, it must deviate from some norm. The psychiatrist Charles Dike sums up the 
essence of this disorder: 
Pathological liars can believe their lies to the extent that, at least to 
others, the belief may appear to be delusional; they generally have sound 
judgment in other matters; it is questionable whether pathological lying 
is always a conscious act and whether pathological liars always have 
control over their lies; an external reason for lying (such as financial 
gain) often appears absent and the internal or psychological purpose for 
lying is often unclear; the lies in pathological lying are often unplanned 
and rather impulsive; the pathological liar may become a prisoner of his 
or her lies; the desired personality of the pathological liar may 
overwhelm the actual one; pathological lying may sometimes be 
associated with criminal 
behavior; the 
pathological 
liar may 
acknowledge, at least in part, the falseness of the tales when 
energetically challenged; and, in pathological lying, telling lies may 
often seem to be an end in itself. 
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What seems most critical to the pathology is the lack of control which leads to repetitive lying over a long 
period of time. Compared with run of the mill liars, pathological liars often seem unaware that they are 
lying and do so many times a day as part of their daily habit. In the same way that birds have to fly and 
fish have to swim, pathological liars have to lie. If pathological liars are unaware of their lies and 
incapable of controlling themselves, then they are not responsible for the harm they impose. They have no 
choice. Unbeknownst to them, their brain has been hijacked by a creative fiction writer. They are 
following a script, but have no sense of its author. 
Dike's summary is based on a loose and eclectic set of clinical observations. Several clinicians 
thus debate whether habitual lying counts as pathology and thus, whether it is worthy of an entry into the 
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. For example, how can the clinician establish 
pathology given the evidence that healthy people lie about twice a day, physicians lie about 40-80% of the 
time to help their patients gain better health care, and lying within an experimental context increases as 
subjects generate more lies? My own sense is that despite the difficulty of defining the pathology with 
precision, clinicians have identified individuals that lie with every breath and often identify psychopaths 
by their calculated conning. These observations sharpen our approach to understanding the seeds of deceit 
and self-deception in the non-pathological condition. For example, does excessive and sustained lying 
stem from a specific problem associated with recognizing the truth or does it grow from a more general 
problem with self-control? Or, does the habitual liar suffer from an emotional deficit such that when he or 
she lies, there are no feelings of guilt and shame? Without these emotional regulators, it is impossible to 
learn from the harm caused. When healthy people distort the truth, they often feel bad. When healthy 
people think about distorting the truth, they often think about the potential harm and then silence the 
option to lie in favor of the truth. Perhaps unhealthy people never hear these emotional alarms. The mind 
sciences have begun addressing these issues. 
The American neuroscientist Adrian Raine reported that individuals with a history of repeated 
lying and con-artistry have structurally different brains from non-liars, including individuals with a 
history of anti-social problems. Habitual liars have more white matter in the frontal lobes, but less grey 
matter. White matter consists of axons and myelin. The axon is the part of a nerve cell that carries 
information. It is like the electric cable that runs from the power station. Myelin covers the axon, at least 
in healthy individuals. It is like the fat around your bones, protecting and insulating neurons. Fat helps 
keep us warm. Myelin helps neurons transmit information. The grey matter consists of nerve cell bodies, 
which lack myelin. The function of grey matter is to connect up the neurons to transmit information 
between areas of the brain. 
Raine suggests that the increase in white matter gives habitual liars the upper hand when it comes 
to lying, helping them suppress the truth, control their emotions, and mind read what others believe and 
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desire. The decrease in gray matter allows habitual liars to lie without feeling guilty. The messaging 
center that sends healthy subjects moral reminders about the virtues of truth, is shut down or barely 
audible within the mind of a pathological liar. The brain of a pathological liar allows for the ultimate 
poker face. The brain of a healthy individual allows us to perfect the poker face by repeating a distorted 
narrative, converting a lie into a self-justified truth. This is dangerous denial. 
When we lie, either to manipulate someone else or ourselves, we distort the truth. We can either 
do this on the fly or use a narrative held in long-term memory. When Hilary Clinton told her supporters 
that she had to dodge bullets in Bosnia, she either lied in the moment to convey a stronger image or she 
developed this distortion over a long period of time. In the first instance, she knew that her comment 
about Bosnia was false. She was deceptive, but not self-deceived. In the second case, she was self-
deceived and most likely unaware. Her narrative was so clear that she could picture running for cover 
without the usual welcoming party. Several studies now reveal that both forms of lying engage brain 
areas associated with self-control and conflict— the right backside of the prefrontal cortex and the 
anterior cingulate. This makes sense. To tell a lie, either to oneself or another, requires controlling what 
we know about reality to convey an alternative reality. When we hold both versions of this narrative in 
mind, there is conflict. As we rehearse one version more than the other, the conflict dissipates. The more 
we rehearse, the more we push this narrative into long term memory. The more we push this narrative 
into long term memory, the more it becomes part of what we believe is true. The more we believe it is 
true, the more we hold onto a narrative that can be used to justify our actions. 
The imaging results fit well with our understanding of which brain regions are involved in self-
control, conflict, memory, and social knowledge. To understand which regions are either necessary or 
sufficient for representing truths and lies, we turn to a technique called transcranial direct current 
stimulation. This method allows researchers to safely increase or decrease activity in a brain area 
through electrical stimulation. Think of this technique as a volume knob on an old fashioned radio. Turn it 
clockwise and you amplify the signal. Turn it counter-clockwise and you quiet the signal. When the 
German neuroscientist Ahmed Karim and his colleagues applied this technique to the right backside of 
the prefrontal cortex, and decreased activity, healthy subjects were better at telling lies, lied without guilt, 
and were less stressed out as measured by the sweatiness of their skin. This pattern mirrors the natural 
state of pathological liars. Absent the circuitry in the brain that exerts self-control over our distortions, 
Karim turned healthy subjects into conscience-free, poker-faced, liars. 
If self-deception and deception are not only part of normal brain function, but adaptive processes, 
then what makes this system turn toxic? What tips the brain over to the dark side, allowing self-deceptive 
illusions to empower the individuals and groups to cause great harm? 
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I am God! 
Across the globe, in Eastern and Western cultures, clinicians have reported a consistent pattern of 
psychotic delusion, typically associated with schizophrenia: many believe that they are God, God's 
messenger, or the Devil, equipped with extraordinary, invincible powers. This is the same disorder that 
led the Australian gentleman we encountered at the start of this chapter to believe that he had two heads 
and heard the voices of Jesus and Abraham. Estimates reveal a greater number of cases among Catholic 
than Islamic or Protestant societies, and the fewest among Hindu societies, although experts are uncertain 
as to why such particular biases exist. The interesting point is that there are individual differences in the 
expression of religious delusions that are at least partially mediated by the particular beliefs and customs 
of the religion. Religious delusions are also held with greater conviction than other delusions, more 
resistant to change, and often result in self-mutilation or harming others; when harm occurs, it follows 
the narrative from a religious text, plucking out eyes or cutting off genitals as the means to cleansing 
sins. 
What makes religious delusions like these, in which the individual has created a narrative of 
supreme confidence and power, different from non-delusional, non-psychotic forms of distortion? In a 
Gallup poll, 10% of the Americans surveyed claimed they had spoken with the devil. In several 
psychological experiments, healthy non-psychotic subjects consistently report that they are smarter than 
most, more attractive, and more likely to win than lose an athletic competition. Though some of these 
people are correct —they are in fact smarter, more attractive, and better competitors —most are wrong 
and yet believe they are right. What this research reveals is that we all suffer, some more than others, 
from positive illusions—biases that distort our sense of confidence, control, and invincibility These 
illusions differ from delusions in that they are less fixed, more flexible, and more amenable to change. 
Delusions are highly maladaptive, a signature of brain dysfunction, and the source of great suffering. 
Positive illusions, in contrast, are often highly adaptive, generating the confidence necessary to take on 
great challenges and challengers, convincing an audience or a group of opponents that we are stronger, 
smarter, and sexier. Positive illusions have been linked to direct mental and physical health benefits, 
including evidence that distorted optimism can slow disease progression. Positive illusions are, as noted 
by the biologists Richard Wrangham, Robert Trivers, and Dominic Johnson, a form of self-deception with 
considerable evolutionary benefits. But like the runaway capacity of desire, so too can our illusions of 
grandeur runaway. When this occurs, illusion and delusion are virtually indistinguishable. What was 
once a narrative centered on the grandiose belief of being god-like has been transformed into the belief of 
being God, leading individuals and groups to engage in extreme extortion or violence, not only blind to 
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obvious risks but incredulous that there would be any risks. This is denial. This is another way in which 
we close off our senses to reality in order to create our own imagined reality. How does this process get 
started? 
It is not until the age of about 18-24 months that we acquire the ability to recognize ourselves in a 
mirror. It is not until a couple of years later that we have a sense that our own beliefs can sometimes 
differ from others that we interact with. It is not until this time that we develop the capacity to deceive, 
along with a powerful suite of social emotions that enable us to feel embarrassed, envious, and elated. 
These feelings link up our sense of self with our sense of others. These are comparative feelings and 
beliefs, and they feed back to who we are, either building up our self-confidence or crushing it. When my 
daughter Sofia was ten years old, she announced that she will one day go to Brown University —
attracted by their course offerings and the fact that Emma Watson, aka Hermione Granger of Harry Potter 
fame, was a student — be rich and have five children — she wanted more siblings and has always had a 
taste for the luxurious—obtain a veterinarian degree—my wife is a veterinarian and we have five pets 
— open a restaurant — I love to cook — and be an Olympian in gymnastics —sports run in our family. 
Sofia was not delusional, but brimming with uncalibrated confidence. Her confidence was uncalibrated 
because she had no sense of what it takes to get into Brown, become rich, take care of five kids, obtain a 
vet degree, open a restaurant, and win gold. My wife and I would be horrid parents if we burst her 
bubble. We would be irresponsible parents if we didn't, over time, describe the exciting challenges 
associated with each of these desirable goals. 
Developing a sense of self depends on at least two capacities: looking inwards at what we know 
and are capable of doing, and looking outwards at what others know and are capable of doing. When we 
look inwards, if we honestly open our eyes to the richness of our autobiography, we will recognize cases 
where we have succeeded and those in which we have failed. This history reveals our knowledge and 
ignorance, our strengths and weaknesses, and our capacity to exert control or meld to external forces. 
When we look outwards, again with an honest, panoramic perspective, we learn about those who know 
more or less than we do, about those we can outcompete and those we lose to in defeat, and about 
situations that undermine our capacity for self-control. Distortion enters these personal narratives when 
we either lack information or filter it in some way, consciously or unconsciously. 
The British criminology scholar Mandeep Dhami examined positive illusions in criminals 
incarcerated in prisons within the United States and the United Kingdom. Because recidivism levels are 
high among convicted criminals, with 40-60% of offenders re-convicted after 1-3 years from release, it is 
important to understand risk factors. One possibility is that criminals believe that their prior offense was 
just a one-off event or bad luck, and that, of course, they will never engage in crime again, having learned 
their lesson and feeling fully confident in their capacity to lead a crime-free life. Based on a sample of 
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over 500 prisoners from medium security prisons, 60-80% believed that they would find a place to live as 
well as employment once released, whereas less than 30% felt that they would commit another crime. 
Prisoners also felt that they were much less likely to commit another crime than other prisoners. Thus, 
whether prisoners were evaluating their own chances of success or their success relative to others, they 
were living with a distorted narrative. The shorter the criminal record, the more distorted the narrative. 
Repeated experience with crime appears to anchor the narrative in a more realistic assessment of the 
future. 
Certain experiences can also enhance positive illusions by giving individuals an unrealistic sense 
of self-control, along with a distorted expectation that future outcomes are highly deterministic. For 
example, people who are wealthy, highly educated, part of a dominant group, or citizens within a society 
that values independence, are more likely to believe that they have control over the future and are more 
likely to express optimism and high self-esteem. These attitudes often lead to a boosted sense of control 
and an illusory sense of control over future outcomes. The American psychologist Nathanael Fast ran a 
series of experiments to further explore the relationship between power and illusory control, specifically 
asking whether subjects endowed with power expect control over outcomes that are strictly due to chance 
or that are unrelated to the domain of power. Across each study, whether subjects recalled a personal 
situation where they were in power or had to imagine being in power, they were more likely than those in 
a subordinate position to express confidence about the outcome of rolling a six-sided die, predicting the 
future of a company, and influencing the results of a national election. Power and winning distort, a tale 
that has been told and retold countless times in the annals of industry and warfare. As the American 
business administration scholars Francesca Gino and Gary Pisano note, the business world is full of cases 
where leaders and leading companies crash because they fail to examine the causes of success. They 
assume, for example, that their success is entirely due to their brilliance, control over the market, and the 
weakness of the competition, as opposed to a shot of good luck. So too goes the story of unexamined war 
victories, as supremely confident generals discount relevant information about their opponents, leading 
battalions on a death march. Our willingness to accept victories without question stands in direct contrast 
with our motivation to scrutinize failures, drilling down for explanations or causes. When we lose or fail 
in some way, the negative emotions accompanying this experience focus our attention on working out an 
explanation. When we win, we bask in the glory, fueled by the brain's chemicals and the body's 
hormones. This physiological orchestration sets up the positive illusion of overconfidence, a winning 
card in many competitive arenas, and a disaster in others. 
Recall from chapter 1 that our brains, and the brains of other animals, are configured to reward 
victory with a cascade of hormonal and neurobiological changes. Winning delivers a shot of testosterone, 
and so too does observing others win. Winning also delivers a shot of dopamine, further generating a 
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honey hit to the brain when we shine. There is evidence that schizophrenia is associated with a 
dysfunctional dopamine system, which might help explain the overconfidence in their beliefs, especially 
beliefs in powerful religious icons. Winning boosts confidence, which increases the chances of winning 
again. This is a highly adaptive cycle that can lead to overconfidence. 
Dominic Johnson took advantage of the research on human and animal competition to explore the 
link between overconfidence, testosterone, and war within the context of a simulated game. Each subject 
played the role of a leader in a country at war with another over diamond resources. The goal of the game 
was to accrue the highest level of resources or defeat the neighboring country. Though war games on a 
computer can not capture the full reality of war, the fact is that military specialists throughout the world 
use simulations to prepare combatants for some of the strategic and emotional problems they will 
confront. 
Most subjects judged that they would outcompete their opponents, and this was exacerbated in 
males relative to females. Those who believed that they would whip their opponents actually had the 
worst records, suggesting that they were not only uncalibrated but that their distortion of reality led to 
costly outcomes. Those with the highest expectation of victory had the highest testosterone levels and 
were most likely to launch unprovoked attacks on their opponents. 
Whether in real life or in the simulated world of computer games, brimming overconfidence can 
lead to a distorted sense of risk and the odds of victory in war— or any competitive arena. Though this is 
a costly strategy, there are clear evolutionary benefits under conditions explained by Trivers and Johnson. 
Self-deception is favored when opponents have imperfect information about their strengths and 
weaknesses, and where the payoffs are high relative to the costs. Self-deception leads individuals to go 
for it, convincing themselves and others that the risks are low, the gains are great, and the standard social 
norms are no longer applicable. This is a dangerous form of denial, recruiting moral disengagement to 
justify horrific means and ends. This is a piece of the psychology that can facilitate the process of 
runaway desire. This is a piece of the psychology that enables individuals to cause great harms. 
My goal in this book has been to find the universal core of evil, the elements or ingredients that 
are shared across all cases of evil. My suggestion is that the mixture of desire and denial are both 
necessary and sufficient ingredients in the recipe for evil. All other ingredients are flourishes, creative 
additions that do not take away from the universal core. Within each of us is a recipe for causing 
excessive harm and for expressing exceptional compassion. We have choices. But as evidence 
accumulates from the sciences, it has become increasingly clear that some of us have fewer choices than 
others. Some of us are equipped to resist the temptations of a culture of evil, while others fall prey. This is 
the story of our species. This is our story. 
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Endnotes: Chapter 3 
Recommended books: 
Baron-Cohen, S. (2011). The Science of Evil. New York: Basic Books. 
Hamburg, D. (2008). Preventing Genocide. Denver: Paradigm Publishers. 
Johnson, D. P. (2004). Overconfidence and war. Cambridge, Harvard University Press. 
Kelman, H.C., & Hamilton, V.L. (1989). Crimes of Obedience: toward a social psychology of authority and 
responsibility. New Haven: Yale University Press. 
Mikulincer, M., & Shaver, P.R. (Eds.). (2011). The Social Psychology of Morality. Washington: American 
Psychological Association. 
Staub, E. (2010). Overcoming EviL New York: Oxford University Press. 
Trivers, R. (2011). The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life. New 
York: Viking Press. 
Notes: 
• Delusions, confabulations and the fabric of belief: Ames, D. (1984). Self shooting of a phantom head. 
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Cambridge, MIT Press. 
• iHuman: Bastian, B., Laham, S.M, Wilson, S., Haslam, N., & Koval, P. (2011). Blaming, praising, and 
protecting our humanity: The implications of everyday dehumanization for judgments of moral 
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values and evil adversaries: a moral foundations approach. in M. Mikulincer & P.R. Shaver (Eds.), 
The Social Psychology of Morality; pp. 11-32, Washington ,American Psychological Association; 
Gray, H M, Gray, K, & Wegner, D M. (2007). Dimensions of Mind Perception. Science, 315(5812), 
619-619; Gray, K, & Wegner, D M. (2011). Morality takes two: dyadic morality and mind 
perception. In M. Mikulincer & P.R. Shaver (Eds.), The Social Psychology of Morality, pp. 109-128, 
Washington ,American Psychological Association; Gray, K., Jenkins, A., Heberlein, A. S., & 
Wegner, D. M. (2011). Distortions of mind perception in psychopathology. In Proceedings of the 
National Academy of Sciences, 108: 477-479; Haslam, N., Bastian, B., Laham, S., & Loiugham, S. 
(2011). Humanness, dehumanization, and moral psychology. In M. Mikulincer & P.R. Shaver (Eds.), 
The Social Psychology of Morality, pp. 203-218, Washington, American Psychological Association; 
Loughnan, Steve, Leidner, Bernhard, Down, Guy, Haslam, Nick, Kashima, Yoshihisa, Tong, 
Jennifer, & Yeung, Victoria. (2010). Universal biases in self-perception: Better and more human than 
average. British Journal of Social Psychology, 49(3), 627-636; Martinez, A., Piff, P., Mendoza-
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humanity, and social Rejection. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 30(1): 1-23. 
• Populating the inner sanctum: Cosmides, L., Tooby, J., & Kurzban, R. (2003). Perceptions of race. 
Trends in Cognitive Science, 7(4), 173-179; Kinzler, K.D, Corriveau, K.H, & Harris, P.L. (2011). 
Children's selective trust in native-accented speakers. Developmental Science, /4(1), 106-111; 
Kinzler, K.D, & Spelke, E.S. (2011). Do infants show social preferences for people differing in 
race? Cognition, 119(1), 1-9; Kinzler, K.D., Dupoux, E., & Spelke, E.S. (2007). The native 
language of social cognition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United 
States of America, 104(30), 12577-12580; Kinzler, K.D, Shutts, K., Dejesus, J., & Spelke, E.S. 
(2009). Accent trumps race in guiding children's social preferences. Social Cognition, 
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27(4), 623-634; Kurzban, R, Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2001). Can race be erased? Coalitional 
computation and social categorization. . Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 
98(26), 15387-15392; Markus, H.R. (2008) Pride, prejudice, and ambivalence: toward a unified 
theory of race and ethnicity. American Psychologist, 63 (8), 651-70. 
• Prejudiced language: Dixon, J, Mahoney, B, & Cocks, R. (2002). Effects of regional accent, race, and 
crime type on attributions of guilt. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 21(2), 162-168. 
Lev-Ari, Shiri, & Keysar, Boaz. (2010). Why don't we believe non-native speakers? The 
influence of accent on credibility. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46(6), 1093-1096. 
• Unconscious attitudes and prejudice: Avenanti, A, Sirigu, A, & Aglioti, S.M. (2010). Racial Bias 
Reduces Empathic Sensorimotor Resonance with Other-Race Pain. Current Biology, 20, 1018-
1022; Balas, B., Westerlund, A., Hung, K., & Nelson, C.A. (2011). Shape, color and the other-
race effect in the infant brain. Developmental Science, 14(4), 892-900; Banaji, M.R. (2001). 
Implicit attitudes can be measured. In H.L. Roediger, J.S. Nairn, i. Neath & A. Surprenant 
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American Psychological Association; Correll, J, Wittenbrink, B, Park, B, Judd, C.M, & Coyle, 
A. (2010). Dangerous enough: Moderating racial bias with contextual threat cues. Journal of 
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Empathy: How Does Race Affect Empathic Neural Responses? Current Biology, 20(11), R478-
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Empathy constrained: Prejudice predicts reduced mental simulation of actions during observation 
of outgroups. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 46, 841-845; Hein, G, Silani, G, 
Preuschoff, K, & Batson, CD. (2010). Neural responses to ingroup and outgroup members' 
suffering predict individual differences in Costly Helping. Neuron, 68, 149-160; ito, T.A, & 
Bardtolow, B.D. (2009). The neural correlates of race. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 13(12), 524-
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negative social treatment to racial discrimination. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23(5), 
1042-1051; Xu, X., Zuo, X., Wang, X., & Han, S.. (2009). Do you feel my pain? Racial group 
membership modulates empathic neural responses. Journal of Neuroscience, 29(26), 8525-8529. 
• Dehumanization: Baron-Cohen, S. (2011). The Science of Evil. New York: Basic Books; Cheng, Y, Lin, 
CP, Liu, HL, Hsu, YY, Lim, KE, Hung, D, & Decety, J. (2007). Expertise modulates the 
perception of pain in others. Current Biology, 17(19), 1708-1713; Decety, J. (2009). Empathy, 
sympathy and the perception of pain. Pain, 145(3), 365-366; Decety, J, Michalska, KJ, Akitsuki, 
Y, & Lahey, BB. (2009). Atypical empathic responses in adolescents with aggressive conduct 
disorder: a functional MRI investigation. Biological Psychology, 80(2), 203-211; Decety, J, 
Yang, C, & Cheng, Y. (2010). Physicians down-regulate their pain empathy response: An event-
related brain potential study. Neuroimage, 50(4), 1676-1682; Jackson, P., Meltzoff, A., & 
Decety, J. (2005). How do we perceive the pain of others? A window into the neural processes 
involved in empathy. Neuroimage, 24(3), 771-779; Fiske, S. (2009). From dehumanization and 
objectification to rehumanization. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1167, 31-34; 
Goff, P, Eberhardt, J, Williams, M.J, & Jackson, M.C. (2008). Not yet human: Implicit 
knowledge, historical dehumanization, and contemporary consequences. Journal of Personality 
and Social Psychology, 94(2), 292-306; Haslam, N. (2006). Dehumanization: An integrative 
review. Personality and Social Psychology Review 10(3), 252-264; Haslam, N, Kashima, Y, 
Loughnan, S, Shi, J, & Suitner, C. (2008). Subhuman, inhuman, and superhuman: contrasting 
humans with nohumans in three cultures. Social Cognition, 26(2), 248-258; Lammers, .1, & 
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Stapel, D. (2010). Power increases dehumanization. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 
14(1), 113-126; Moller, A.C, & Deci, E.L. (2009). Interpersonal control, dehumanization, and 
violence: A self-determination theory perspective. Group Processes & Intergroup Relations, 
13(1), 41-53; Viki, G T, Zimmerman, A, & Ballantyne, N. (2010). Dehumanization and attitudes 
towards the ill-treatment and social exclusion of Muslims: The mediating role of perceived 
symbolic threat. Manuscript, 1-14. 
• Moral disengagement: Bandura, A., Barbaranelli, C., Caprara, G., & Pastorelli, C. (1996). Mechanisms 
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Psychology, 71, 364-374; Bandura, A. (2002). Selective moral disengagement in the exercise of 
moral agency. Journal of Moral Education, 31(2), 101-119; Bandura, A. (2004). The role of 
selective moral disengagement in terrorism and counterterrorism. In: Understanding terrorism: 
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Washington, APA Press, 121-150; Jackson, L. E., & Gaertner, L. (2010). Mechanisms of moral 
disengagement and their differential use by right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance 
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(1973). Violence without moral restraint: reflections on the dehumanization of victims and 
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University Press; McAlister, AL, Bandura, A, & Owen, SV. (2006). Mechanisms of moral 
disengagement in support of military force: The impact of Sept. II. Journal of Social and 
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Bandura, A, & Zimbardo, PG. (2005). The role of moral disengagement in the execution process. 
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Fagan, J. (2011). Moral disengagement among serious juvenile offenders: A longitudinal study of 
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• Lies and self-deception: Carri6n, R.E., Keenan, J.P., & Sebanz, N. (2010). A truth that's told with bad 
intent: an ERP study of deception. Cognition, 114(I), 105-110; Dike, C., Baranoski, M, & 
Griffith, E.E.H. (2005). Pathological lying revisited. Journal of the American Academy of 
Psychiatry and Law, 33, 342-349; Ekman, P., Friesen, W.V., & O'Sullivan, M. (1988). Smiles 
while lying. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 414-420; Greene, J. D, & Paxton, 
J. M. (2009). Patterns of neural activity associated with honest and dishonest moral decisions. 
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Sauseng, P., Braun, C., & Birbaumer, N. (2010). The truth about lying: inhibition of the anterior 
prefrontal cortex improves deceptive behavior. Cerebral Cortex, 20(1), 205-213; Mameli, F., 
Mrakic-Sposta, S., Vergari, M., Fumagalli, M., Macis, M., Ferrucci, R., Priori, A.. (2010). 
Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex specifically processes general - but not personal - knowledge 
deception: Multiple brain networks for lying. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 211(2), 164-168; 
McKay, R.T, & Dennett, D.C. (2009). The evolution of misbelief. Behavioral and Brain 
Sciences, 32,493-561; Mele, Alfred. (2010). Approaching self-deception: How Robert Audi and I 
part company. Consciousness and Cognition, 19(3), 745-750; Otter, Z., & Egan, V. (2007). The 
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definition of "lie": an examination of the folk models underlying a semantic prototype. In D. 
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• I'm God!: Bhaysar, V., & Bhugra, D. (2008). Religious delusions: finding meanings in psychosis 
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Prisoners' positive illusions of their post-release success. Law and Human Behavior, 30(6), 631-647; 
Fast, N. J., Gruenfeld, D. H., Sivanathan, N., & Galinsky, A. D. (2009). Illusory control: a generative 
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Quotes 
• Racist, white male superiority: published in Gould, S.J. (1980). "Women's Brains" in The Panda's 
Thumb, New York, W.W. Norton. Pages 152-159. 
• Holocaust denier, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-
dyn/content/article/2005/12/14/AR2005121402403.htm I 
• Hilary Clinton as congenital liar: W. Saffire, 1996, Blizzard of lies, New York Times, 
http://wvvw.nytimes.com/1996/01/08/opinionIessay-blizzard-of-lies.html 
• The adaptive logic of self-deception: Trivers, R. The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-
Deception in Human Life, New York, Viking/Penguin Press. 
• Clinical liars: Dike et al. (2005). Pathological lying revisited. Journal of the American Academy of 
Psychiatry and Law, 33 pp. 342-349; quote on p. 342 
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Chapter 4: 
Wicked in waiting 
The wicked are estranged from the womb: they go astray as soon as they 
be born, speaking lies. 
— Bible, Psalm 53:8 
Growing up is a lottery. No one has a say over their genes or their parents, including the environment that 
is created on their behalf. For individuals raised in poverty, abused by parents or abandoned by them, 
there may come a time when it is possible to purge the past, rise above it, and lay down new tracks. 
Success in this endeavor depends upon biological potential and the environment's toxicity. Though every 
healthy human being acquires the same basic biological ingredients, individual differences in how our 
biology expresses itself can either provide immunity against toxic environments or deep vulnerabilities. 
The unlucky ones inherit genes that predispose to sensation-seeking and risk-taking, callous and 
unemotional attitudes toward others, weak self-control, and narcissistic leanings. With this lottery ticket, 
it takes little to trigger the mindset of an evildoer. And yet some resist. An impressive accumulation of 
scientific evidence helps explain the source of these individual differences, including its role in sculpting 
different personality profiles that either deviate greatly from societal norms or follow them to perfection. 
What's normal? 
Much of our fascination with evil stems from the distinct impression that evildoers are anomalies. Their 
actions are inhuman, unimaginable, rarely witnessed, and detrimental to our species' survival. This 
impression carries with it an assumption about what is expected or typical of our species, as well as what 
is possible. It assumes that evildoers have thoughts, feelings, and desires that fall outside of the repertoire 
of an average human being. Their actions are unimaginable because most human minds lack the capacity 
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to imagine butchering human bodies. Like so many simple claims that go unchallenged, we should be 
puzzled by this one. We should ask: what's normal? 
The evolutionary history of each species' brain does not provide a complete account of what the 
brain can do. Consider again a topic from chapter I: domesticated dogs and their ancestors, the wolves. 
Though dogs live with humans, and are often raised by them, they never acquire a human language. In 
this sense, the domesticated dog is just like the wolf. But what dogs can do, with greater facility than any 
wild wolf, is understand a variety of human gestures such as pointing and the movement of our eyes. This 
capacity emerged following a period of human domestication. Wolves were not part of this selective 
regime. But, and this is the most interesting twist in the story, wolf puppies raised by human caretakers 
develop into adults that can read pointing and looking extremely well. This tells us that even wolves 
evolved the potential to read human gestures, but only human environments favor this skill. This tells us 
that what animals express is not necessarily indicative of their potential. To uncover their potential, we 
must alter the environment or wait for such changes to happen naturally. 
When we ask What's normal?, we are asking two questions: what is the evolved repertoire and 
what is the evolved capacity? The evolved repertoire tells us something about the relationship between a 
species' biology and the environments that have shaped their behavior. The evolved capacity tells us 
about a reservoir of behaviors that may only emerge in novel environments. 
What's normal human behavior? The same distinctions apply to us as to dogs and wolves, with 
the extra complication that our species adds because of historical twists and turns orchestrated by legal, 
political, ethical, religious, and medical points of view. History presents us with hundreds of cases where 
an accepted normal mutated into abnormal, or where abnormal transformed into normal. During the 
Italian Baroque— a period of decadence that started in the late 16th century and ended in the early 18th 
century— some 500,000 boys were castrated in order to freeze their youthful voices for the enjoyment 
of others. These castrati formed an essential part of music culture, of what people expected and wanted. 
For many of these young boys, not only did castration end their reproductive careers, but often, their 
lives. 
As the 18th century drew to a close, so too did castration in the name of art. What was normal 
then is perceived as abnormal and heinous today. The same story can be told for other sexual practices, 
including female genital mutilation, circumcision, and homosexuality. In the United States, 
homosexuality was considered a disease before the 1970s, with its own entry in the Diagnostic and 
Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Thanks to an underground movement of gay psychiatrists and 
the work of Evelyn Hooker who discovered that the manual's classification entry was based entirely on 
clinical interviews of gay prisoners, homosexuality has been freed from its jail sentence as a mental 
disease — as abnormal. 
Hauser 
Chapter 4. Wicked in waiting 
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