Jun 16, 2016 06:19 AM
How human sacrifice helped to enforce social inequality
https://aeon.co/ideas/how-human-sacrific...inequality
EXCERPT: To mourn the death of aristocrats, the Ngaju people of Borneo performed a sacred ritual that began at sunset with the tying of a slave to a pole, involved dancing throughout the night and stabbing the victim, and then climaxed with the slave collapsing in a pool of his own blood at sunrise. In other parts of the world, methods of human sacrifice included bludgeoning, drowning, strangling, burning, decapitation, burial and even being used as the rollers to launch a newly built canoe. How could something as costly as human sacrifice have been so common in early societies? And why did these rituals need to be so dramatic and gory?
Anthropologists and historians have put forward the ‘social control hypothesis’ of human sacrifice. According to this theory, sacrificial rites served as a function for social elites. Human sacrifice is proposed to have been used by social elites to display their divinely sanctioned power, justify their status, and terrorise underclasses into obedience and subordination. Ultimately, human sacrifice could be used as a tool to help build and maintain systems of social inequality.
Hereditary social inequality was the first form of social complexity to have emerged in human history, and gave rise to chiefdoms, kingdoms and political states. By helping to build and maintain social inequality, human sacrifices could have helped us establish the kinds of modern societies that we live in today. One line of support for this theory is found in the archaeological record of Southwest North America where the remains of ritually slaughtered individuals have been found in the same regions as the remains of early hierarchical societies. However, up until now, this idea had not been rigorously tested.
With my colleagues at the University of Auckland and elsewhere, we recently tested the social control hypothesis using a sample of 93 Austronesian-speaking cultures, and published our findings in Nature.
[...] Using a language-based family tree and statistical methods developed by evolutionary biologists, we were able to model how human sacrifice and social inequality evolved in the prehistory of Austronesia. These phylogenetic methods enabled us to target causality by modelling the order in which human sacrifice and social inequality tended to arise, as well as the effects they had on one another. We found strong support for the social control hypothesis: human sacrifice helped to build strictly inherited class systems, and prevented cultures from becoming more egalitarian....
How disgust made humans cooperate to build civilisations
https://aeon.co/essays/how-disgust-made-...ilisations
EXCERPT: The young man was having sex with his dog. In fact, he’d lost his virginity to it. Their relationship was still very good; the dog didn’t seem to mind at all. But the man’s conscience was eating at him. Was he acting immorally?
In search of sage counsel, he sent an email to David Pizarro, who teaches a class on moral psychology at Cornell University in New York. ‘I thought he was just pulling my leg,’ said Pizarro. He sent the man a link to an article about bestiality, and thought that would be the end of it. But the man responded with more questions. ‘I realised this kid was pretty serious.’
Although Pizarro is a leader in his field, he struggled to craft an answer. ‘What I ended up responding was: “I might not say this is a moral violation. But in our society you’re going to have to deal with all manner of people believing that your behaviour is odd, because it is odd. It’s not something anybody likes to hear about.” And I said: “Would you want your daughter to date someone who has been having sex with their dog? And the answer is no. And this is critical: you don’t have animals writing essays about how they’ve been mistreated because of their love of human beings. I would get help for this.”’
In essence, Pizarro was saying that the man’s behaviour was weird, concerning and distressing, but he wasn’t willing to condemn it. If that doesn’t sit well with you, you’re probably sickened by the very image of someone having sex with a dog. But was the man acting immorally? At least by the man’s own account, the dog wasn’t being harmed.
If you’re struggling to put your finger on why exactly the man’s behaviour seems wrong, psychologists have a term for your confused state of mind. You’re morally dumbfounded.
A ballooning body of research by Pizarro and others shows that moral judgments are not always the product of careful deliberation. Sometimes we feel an action is wrong even if we can’t point to an injured party. We make snap decisions and then – in the words of Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University – ‘construct post-hoc justifications for those feelings’. This intuition, converging lines of research reveal, is informed by disgust, an emotion that most scientists believe evolved to keep us safe from parasites. Marked by cries of ‘Yuck!’ and ‘Ew!’, disgust makes us recoil in horror from faeces, bed bugs, leeches and anything else that might sicken us. Yet sometime deep in our past the same feeling that makes us cringe at touching a dead animal or gag at a rancid odour became embroiled in our most deeply held convictions – from ethics and religious values to political views.
Disgust’s key role in our moral intuitions is echoed in language: dirty deeds; slimy behaviour; a rotten scoundrel. Conversely, cleanliness is next to godliness. We seek spiritual purity. Corruption can contaminate us, so we shun the evil.
Pizarro has a deep distrust of using disgust as a moral compass. If people rely on it, he warns, it can lead them astray. Denouncing homosexuality on the grounds that it’s repugnant is a prime example of that danger, he argues. ‘I tell my class: as a heterosexual male, it’s not as if I won’t be disgusted if you show me pictures of certain sexual acts between two males. The task for me is to say: what the hell does this have to do with my ethical beliefs? I tell them, the thought of two very ugly people having sex also revolts me, but that does not lead me to consider legislating against ugly people having sex.’
The homeless are another group that people frequently speak ill of, probably because they, too, can trigger disgust alarms, making it easier for society to dehumanise them and find them guilty of crimes they didn’t commit. ‘My ethical duty is to make sure that this emotion doesn’t influence me in a way it might actually tread on someone’s humanity,’ Pizarro said.
He knows better than most the travails of not letting disgust seep into ethical judgments. He is so squeamish that he has to rely on his students to programme all the pictures of repulsive imagery used in his studies on moral reasoning. ‘It took just brute reasoning to shake myself of some of my attitudes,’ he said. ‘I consider it an intellectual achievement that I became liberalised about a lot of issues.’
The curse of being exceedingly easy to disgust has nonetheless been a benefit in his work: it has given him keen insights into how the emotion can guide moral thought.
If you’re skeptical that parasites have any bearing on your principles, consider this: our values actually change when there are infectious agents in our vicinity. In an experiment by Simone Schnall, a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge, students were asked to ponder morally questionable behaviour such as lying on a résumé, not returning a stolen wallet or, far more fraught, turning to cannibalism to survive a plane crash. Subjects seated at desks with food stains and chewed-up pens typically judged these transgressions as more egregious than students at spotless desks. Numerous other studies – using, unbeknown to the participants, imaginative disgust elicitors such as fart spray or the scent of vomit – have reported similar findings. Premarital sex, bribery, pornography, unethical journalism, marriage between first cousins: all become more reprehensible when subjects were disgusted.
The repulsed are also more likely to read evil intent into innocuous acts. In a trial conducted by Haidt and his graduate student Thalia Wheatley, hypnotic suggestion was employed to cue subjects to feel a wave of disgust when they came across the words take and often. Then the volunteers read a story about Dan, a student council president who was trying to line up topics for students and professors to discuss. It had no moral content. Yet subjects who got the version that contained the disgust-trigger words were more suspicious of Dan’s motives than controls who read a virtually identical story without the hypnotic cues. Explaining their distrust of Dan, participants offered rationalisations such as: ‘It just seems like he’s up to something’ and ‘Dan is a popularity-seeking snob.’
Harmless sex acts can similarly acquire immoral overtones if germs are foremost on your mind. When subjects in one of Pizarro’s studies were shown a sign recommending the use of hand wipes, they were harsher in their judgment of a girl who masturbated while clutching a teddy bear and a man who had sex in his grandmother’s bed while housesitting for her.
There’s a clear pattern to these findings, as an investigation by Mark Schaller and Damian Murray, psychologists at the University of British Columbia, reveals. People who are reminded of the threat of infectious disease are more inclined to espouse conventional values and express greater disdain for anyone who violates societal norms. Disease cues might even make us more favourably disposed toward religion. In one study, participants exposed to a noxious odour were subsequently more likely to endorse biblical truth than those not subjected to the polluted air.
When we’re worried about disease, it appears, we’re drawn not just to Mama’s cooking but also to her beliefs about the proper way to conduct ourselves – especially in the social arena. We place our faith in time-honoured practices probably because they seem like a safer bet when our survival is in jeopardy. Now’s not the time to be embracing a new, untested philosophy of life, whispers a voice in the back of your mind.
In light of these findings, Pizarro wondered if our political attitudes might shift when we’re feeling susceptible to disease....
https://aeon.co/ideas/how-human-sacrific...inequality
EXCERPT: To mourn the death of aristocrats, the Ngaju people of Borneo performed a sacred ritual that began at sunset with the tying of a slave to a pole, involved dancing throughout the night and stabbing the victim, and then climaxed with the slave collapsing in a pool of his own blood at sunrise. In other parts of the world, methods of human sacrifice included bludgeoning, drowning, strangling, burning, decapitation, burial and even being used as the rollers to launch a newly built canoe. How could something as costly as human sacrifice have been so common in early societies? And why did these rituals need to be so dramatic and gory?
Anthropologists and historians have put forward the ‘social control hypothesis’ of human sacrifice. According to this theory, sacrificial rites served as a function for social elites. Human sacrifice is proposed to have been used by social elites to display their divinely sanctioned power, justify their status, and terrorise underclasses into obedience and subordination. Ultimately, human sacrifice could be used as a tool to help build and maintain systems of social inequality.
Hereditary social inequality was the first form of social complexity to have emerged in human history, and gave rise to chiefdoms, kingdoms and political states. By helping to build and maintain social inequality, human sacrifices could have helped us establish the kinds of modern societies that we live in today. One line of support for this theory is found in the archaeological record of Southwest North America where the remains of ritually slaughtered individuals have been found in the same regions as the remains of early hierarchical societies. However, up until now, this idea had not been rigorously tested.
With my colleagues at the University of Auckland and elsewhere, we recently tested the social control hypothesis using a sample of 93 Austronesian-speaking cultures, and published our findings in Nature.
[...] Using a language-based family tree and statistical methods developed by evolutionary biologists, we were able to model how human sacrifice and social inequality evolved in the prehistory of Austronesia. These phylogenetic methods enabled us to target causality by modelling the order in which human sacrifice and social inequality tended to arise, as well as the effects they had on one another. We found strong support for the social control hypothesis: human sacrifice helped to build strictly inherited class systems, and prevented cultures from becoming more egalitarian....
How disgust made humans cooperate to build civilisations
https://aeon.co/essays/how-disgust-made-...ilisations
EXCERPT: The young man was having sex with his dog. In fact, he’d lost his virginity to it. Their relationship was still very good; the dog didn’t seem to mind at all. But the man’s conscience was eating at him. Was he acting immorally?
In search of sage counsel, he sent an email to David Pizarro, who teaches a class on moral psychology at Cornell University in New York. ‘I thought he was just pulling my leg,’ said Pizarro. He sent the man a link to an article about bestiality, and thought that would be the end of it. But the man responded with more questions. ‘I realised this kid was pretty serious.’
Although Pizarro is a leader in his field, he struggled to craft an answer. ‘What I ended up responding was: “I might not say this is a moral violation. But in our society you’re going to have to deal with all manner of people believing that your behaviour is odd, because it is odd. It’s not something anybody likes to hear about.” And I said: “Would you want your daughter to date someone who has been having sex with their dog? And the answer is no. And this is critical: you don’t have animals writing essays about how they’ve been mistreated because of their love of human beings. I would get help for this.”’
In essence, Pizarro was saying that the man’s behaviour was weird, concerning and distressing, but he wasn’t willing to condemn it. If that doesn’t sit well with you, you’re probably sickened by the very image of someone having sex with a dog. But was the man acting immorally? At least by the man’s own account, the dog wasn’t being harmed.
If you’re struggling to put your finger on why exactly the man’s behaviour seems wrong, psychologists have a term for your confused state of mind. You’re morally dumbfounded.
A ballooning body of research by Pizarro and others shows that moral judgments are not always the product of careful deliberation. Sometimes we feel an action is wrong even if we can’t point to an injured party. We make snap decisions and then – in the words of Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at New York University – ‘construct post-hoc justifications for those feelings’. This intuition, converging lines of research reveal, is informed by disgust, an emotion that most scientists believe evolved to keep us safe from parasites. Marked by cries of ‘Yuck!’ and ‘Ew!’, disgust makes us recoil in horror from faeces, bed bugs, leeches and anything else that might sicken us. Yet sometime deep in our past the same feeling that makes us cringe at touching a dead animal or gag at a rancid odour became embroiled in our most deeply held convictions – from ethics and religious values to political views.
Disgust’s key role in our moral intuitions is echoed in language: dirty deeds; slimy behaviour; a rotten scoundrel. Conversely, cleanliness is next to godliness. We seek spiritual purity. Corruption can contaminate us, so we shun the evil.
Pizarro has a deep distrust of using disgust as a moral compass. If people rely on it, he warns, it can lead them astray. Denouncing homosexuality on the grounds that it’s repugnant is a prime example of that danger, he argues. ‘I tell my class: as a heterosexual male, it’s not as if I won’t be disgusted if you show me pictures of certain sexual acts between two males. The task for me is to say: what the hell does this have to do with my ethical beliefs? I tell them, the thought of two very ugly people having sex also revolts me, but that does not lead me to consider legislating against ugly people having sex.’
The homeless are another group that people frequently speak ill of, probably because they, too, can trigger disgust alarms, making it easier for society to dehumanise them and find them guilty of crimes they didn’t commit. ‘My ethical duty is to make sure that this emotion doesn’t influence me in a way it might actually tread on someone’s humanity,’ Pizarro said.
He knows better than most the travails of not letting disgust seep into ethical judgments. He is so squeamish that he has to rely on his students to programme all the pictures of repulsive imagery used in his studies on moral reasoning. ‘It took just brute reasoning to shake myself of some of my attitudes,’ he said. ‘I consider it an intellectual achievement that I became liberalised about a lot of issues.’
The curse of being exceedingly easy to disgust has nonetheless been a benefit in his work: it has given him keen insights into how the emotion can guide moral thought.
If you’re skeptical that parasites have any bearing on your principles, consider this: our values actually change when there are infectious agents in our vicinity. In an experiment by Simone Schnall, a social psychologist at the University of Cambridge, students were asked to ponder morally questionable behaviour such as lying on a résumé, not returning a stolen wallet or, far more fraught, turning to cannibalism to survive a plane crash. Subjects seated at desks with food stains and chewed-up pens typically judged these transgressions as more egregious than students at spotless desks. Numerous other studies – using, unbeknown to the participants, imaginative disgust elicitors such as fart spray or the scent of vomit – have reported similar findings. Premarital sex, bribery, pornography, unethical journalism, marriage between first cousins: all become more reprehensible when subjects were disgusted.
The repulsed are also more likely to read evil intent into innocuous acts. In a trial conducted by Haidt and his graduate student Thalia Wheatley, hypnotic suggestion was employed to cue subjects to feel a wave of disgust when they came across the words take and often. Then the volunteers read a story about Dan, a student council president who was trying to line up topics for students and professors to discuss. It had no moral content. Yet subjects who got the version that contained the disgust-trigger words were more suspicious of Dan’s motives than controls who read a virtually identical story without the hypnotic cues. Explaining their distrust of Dan, participants offered rationalisations such as: ‘It just seems like he’s up to something’ and ‘Dan is a popularity-seeking snob.’
Harmless sex acts can similarly acquire immoral overtones if germs are foremost on your mind. When subjects in one of Pizarro’s studies were shown a sign recommending the use of hand wipes, they were harsher in their judgment of a girl who masturbated while clutching a teddy bear and a man who had sex in his grandmother’s bed while housesitting for her.
There’s a clear pattern to these findings, as an investigation by Mark Schaller and Damian Murray, psychologists at the University of British Columbia, reveals. People who are reminded of the threat of infectious disease are more inclined to espouse conventional values and express greater disdain for anyone who violates societal norms. Disease cues might even make us more favourably disposed toward religion. In one study, participants exposed to a noxious odour were subsequently more likely to endorse biblical truth than those not subjected to the polluted air.
When we’re worried about disease, it appears, we’re drawn not just to Mama’s cooking but also to her beliefs about the proper way to conduct ourselves – especially in the social arena. We place our faith in time-honoured practices probably because they seem like a safer bet when our survival is in jeopardy. Now’s not the time to be embracing a new, untested philosophy of life, whispers a voice in the back of your mind.
In light of these findings, Pizarro wondered if our political attitudes might shift when we’re feeling susceptible to disease....