Renowned neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky discusses the implications of his 'no free will' thesis on behavior in humans and baboons, touching on political figures like Donald Trump and issues like justice and societal responsibility.
“Blame and punishment make no sense. Praise and reward make no sense. A criminal justice system is not only intellectually but ethically unacceptable. Likewise, any sort of meritocracy is intellectually and morally unacceptable,” he told Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart and 347,000 others in The Rest is Politics videocast some 6 months ago (LINK).
He followed this up with the declaration: “Hating somebody makes as much sense as hating an earthquake.”
Campbell was once U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair’s PR manager, and Rory Stewart was once in charge of the U.K.’s prison system. So they were bound to challenge this.
Campbell asked Sapolsky whether his argument that “free will” is a nonsense idea is giving Vladmir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu a “get out of jail” free card?
Sapolksy countered: “A ‘get out of moral condemnation’ card”. He explained: “Like everyone else, they’re biological machines. They turned out to be incredibly damaging ones, and people need to be protected from them. But, nonetheless, none of this happens by chance.”
Stewart suggested: “If you look at what is happening in Gaza at the moment, clearly partly what Israel is doing is not just a practical act of dismantling a terror network, it is deterrence, it’s revenge, it’s a desire to demonstrate violence…”
Sapolsky, who in real life is a professor of biology, neurology, neurological sciences and neurosurgery at Stanford University, and comes from an Orthodox Jewish family, had an answer for the two British politicos to such judgements, as well:
“It is disastrous what is being done [to civilians in Gaza]. It is Old Testament Biblical vengeance of the most savage, animalistic kind.
“But it is not by chance that [Israel] is a country that turned out that way,” he says. “It is not by chance that Hamas turned out to be people who would sexually mutilate victims and things of that sort. Historical exigences guaranteed that they were plunked down in a position in 1948 as sort of a last grand gesture of British colonialism to give away the Palestinians’ land to somebody else and say: ‘The two of you go out and spend the next 70 years turning your children into bloody savages because you hate each other so much and let’s see how it looks.’ […] They are all victims of the circumstances, but that never ever means don’t bother doing anything, and forgiveness is an irrelevant concept” (at 50:00, times are approximate).
What has put the intense spotlight on Sapolsky in the past year is his latest book: Determined, the Science of Life Without Free Will, available as a Kindle as well as hardback and paperback.
Sapolsky, officially a neuroendocrinology researcher, has already received a MacArthur Foundation ‘Genius Grant’ (at age 30), and his earlier books include the international bestseller Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, The Trouble with Testosterone, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers and A Primate’s Memoir.
He speaks and writes so provocatively and entertainingly it’s hard to resist just quoting his words.
He started professional life as a baboon specialist. This has meant spending 32 years in Kenya 8-10 hours a day from the age of 20 watching the same troop of baboons and living in a tent for the season, hauling water from 20 miles (30km) away.
His wife, “somewhat of an animal behaviourist”, is a clinical psychologist who joined him for 8 seasons and wound up writing her doctorate on female baboons. Their children joined them for a season about 12 years ago.
Baboons, Sapolsky points out, “have the highest rates of aggression of any non-human primate”.
“Attaining high rank in male baboon society is all about muscles and aggression and canines and fighting skill and all that kind of ‘dawn of the savannah’ type stuff.
“Once you attain high rank, maintaining it is all about social intelligence and psychological intimidation and manipulation, which provocations you ignore and which challenges you walk away from.”
“It’s absolutely a realm where if you are an alpha male and you are having fights, you are on your way out. If you are a competent alpha male” […], all you’ve had to do is look at somebody the wrong way and they cower in terror. […] It’s pure social bluff.”
“Baboons are just like westernized humans,” he told another interviewer. “They’ve got the luxury of living around and all day long generating psycho-social nonsense with each other. They get high blood pressure. They get problems with ulcers. Their immune systems don’t work as well — as a function of who they are in the hierarchy and what their personalities are, and what their parents or social affiliation are.”
Campbell commented on Sapolsky’s alpha male observation: “While you were talking an image of Donald Trump kept coming into my head.”
The professor responded: “Sadly, I think that is highly appropriate and only slightly insulting to my study animals”. Trump, he suggested, has been “a poster child for the pathologies of when dominance sort of goes wrong. He’s a disaster. There’s a lot about baboon behaviour that seems way too sophisticated when compared to him.”
He contrasted male with female baboons, who would band together to fight off threats. [Females] “function in family units. The males have none of that solidarity.”
His book sums up our place in the primate family: “For various reasons, humans were sculpted by evolution over millions of years to be, on the average, more aggressive than bonobos but less so than chimps, more social than orangutans but less so than baboons, more monogamous than mouse lemurs but more polygamous than marmosets” (79).
His views on free will as nonsense put him on “the lunatic fringe” of neuroscientists, he jokes. But how we make decisions and act depend on “everything from 1 second ago to millenia ago”.
Explanations of behaviour must answer a hierarchy of questions, he argues:
— “which parts of the brain did or didn’t do something in the last half-second”
— “the sensory stimuli for that individual in the prior minutes: were they stressed, were they terrified, were they hungry? —”because that is going to affect how your brain is responding”
— “you are asking what about your hormone levels that morning, that’s going to be shaping to how sensitive your brain was to various environmental stimuli”
— “what were your last years like in terms of trauma, finding love, finding God, whatever: […] you will get major changes in brain function, in structure and response to experience”
“Then you are off to your usual suspects: adolescence, childhood, foetal life, your genes. Amazingly, you also have to consider what culture your ancestors came up (what kind of ecosystem): Within minutes of birth, the culture in which your mother was raised will influence her mothering style.”
His book uses an example from rats:
“If you’re a baby rat growing up with an atypically inattentive mother, epigenetic changes in the regulation of one gene in your hippocampus will make it harder for you to recover from stress as an adult,” he says, citing the “landmark work pioneered by neuroscientist Michael Meaney of McGill University”.
He also points out that “the adverse effects of low socio-economic status in childhood” do not delay brain development, as you might expect. “The problem is that the early-life stress accelerates maturation of the brain, meaning that the window for brain construction being sculpted by experience closes earlier” (p.443).
“Some epigenetic changes in the brain can have multigenerational consequences,” he adds: “(e.g., helping to explain why being a rat, monkey, or human abused in childhood increases the odds of being an abusive parent)”.
How can we change others’ behaviour?
“A great example of events over the course of weeks to months changing behavior without conscious awareness” can be found in a experiment carried out post-ISIS Iraq, Sapolsky writes (442).
“Soccer teams in a league were experimentally composed of either solely Christian players or a mixture of the two religions (without players being aware of this intentional design as part of a study). Spending a season playing with Muslim teammates made Christian players far more affiliative with their Muslim teammates on the field — without changing overtly stated attitudes about Muslims.”
He also offers some practical advice:
“You do not want to ask for a home mortgage loan at the bank if it has been hours since the person you are talking to has eaten a meal.”
It’s known as the hungry judge phenomenon. A study of all parole board decisions over a year in a Middle Eastern country found that, after controlling for obvious factors such as political affiliation and judges’ schooling etc., the best predictor of whether someone would get parole was how many hours since the judge had eaten a meal. Just after lunch 60% of applicants got parole. Four hours since, the result was zero.
The research had been challenged, but it was found to stand up in replication, he noted.
Why do the judges act that way? Sending offenders back to prison is “the easiest, most reflexive thing” for their brains and is less demanding of the pre-frontal cortex. “It takes a mighty energetic PFC to try to understand, to feel, what the prisoner’s life — filled with horrible luck — has been like, to view the world from his perspective, to search his face and see those hints of change and potential beneath the toughness” (Determined, p107).
Similarly, “when people are hungry, when they are sleep deprived, they become less generous, they become less cooperative,” Sapolsky reported. “If you are hungry, you are more likely to commit an anti-social violent act.”
“All sorts of things often out of your control — stress, pain, hunger, fatigue, whose sweat you’re smelling, who’s in your peripheral vision — can modulate how effectively your PFC does its job.” (Determined, p109)
“We are very hardwired as to dividing the world into them and us,” he told the Stanford Alumni Association. This comes from reactions in the amygdala — our fear, anger and aggression reactor — to shots of faces of a different race, in 75% of the tested subjects in 60-70 thousandths of a second, before you are even consciously aware of it: “hardwired racism”. He describes it as “one of the truly depressing findings in the whole field.” (20:00).
You can replicate the effect with baseball fans using photos of people wearing caps of those teams you hate. “We are totally malleable as to who counts as an us and who counts as a them. And it could change in a fraction of a second.”
Taking a longer view, he cites work that shows “the frontal cortex — with its roles in executive function, long-term planning, gratification postponement, impulse control, and emotion regulation — isn’t fully functional in adolescents.”
“Hmm, what do you suppose that explains?” he asks and responds: “Just about everything in adolescence, especially when adding the tsunamis of estrogen, progesterone, and testosterone flooding the brain then.”
“Adolescence and early adulthood consist of the frontal cortex pruning synapses that turn out to be superfluous, poky, or plain wrong, as the region gets progressively leaner and meaner.”
“For our purposes, the main point about delayed frontal maturation isn’t that it produces kids who got really bad tattoos but the fact that adolescence and early adulthood involve a massive construction project in the brain’s most interesting part. The implications are obvious. If you’re an adult, your adolescent experiences of trauma, stimulation, love, failure, rejection, happiness, despair, acne — the whole shebang — will have played an outsize role in constructing the frontal cortex you’re working with” (60-61).
As for culture, in parts of northern China the ecosystem precludes rice-growing. The more individualistic system of wheat farming prevails. “Farmers from this region, and even their university student grandchildren, are as individualistic as Westerners.” This observation was tested in a study where two chairs were experimentally placed to block the way in Starbucks. The Chinese from rice regions walked around the chairs. “People from wheat regions remove obstacles (i.e. moving the chairs apart” (p75-6).
“Cultural differences arising centuries/millennia ago influence behaviors from the most subtle and minuscule to dramatic.”
And this can be genetic. Take the gene DRD4, coding for a dopamine receptor (i.e. for motivation, anticipation and reward). One variant increases the likelihood of novelty seeking, extroversion and impulsivity in people. Europeans and European Americans have a 23% incidence of this variant. East Asians: 1%.
This, Sapolsky points out is, “a difference way above chance, suggesting the variant being selected against in East Asia for thousands of years.” (511)
His message: “Every time you are pleased with yourself or displeased with another human, remember neither of you had any control over how you turned out to be in that moment.”
For dealing with murderers and the like, he says: “We have endless societal mechanisms that we have been developing for centuries where we could subtract responsibility out of somebody’s damaging actions and protect society from them and still not sermonize them about their rotten soul.” Norway is exemplary in not treating its criminals and offenders as people to be punished as distinct from quarantined and educated, Sapolsky declared. Their recidivism rate is one-fifth of the U.S. level.
He is particularly critical of the U.S. criminal justice system, which punishes offenders if it decides they are consciously aware of making a decision, what the consequences will be, and what alternatives they could adopt. “That’s like a tenth of one percent of what you need to be paying attention to. You are learning zero, unless you ask how did they turn out to be the person who formed that intent at that moment? — that’s 99.9% of what goes on. […] Most of the time you are not thinking: how did I turn out to be somebody who would have that desire, that intent at that point? That’s where all the free will disappears.”
What troubled the politicos among his questioners was why the poor support a rule of the rich and privileged.
“If you are a subordinate baboon, you are a remarkably similar equivalent to a socio-economically unprivileged human in that your life is filled with lack of control, lack of outlets, lack of predictability and lack of social support,” he pointed out. “This is the recipe for the toxicity of social subordination.”
“Your temperament, your emotional makeup, etc., is a much better predictor of your political views than whatever it is you thought through carefully,” Sapolsky asserted. “People who are made anxious by ambiguity and novelty wind up being political conservatives. If the future is an exciting place you are going to be a political progressive.
“If the future is a scary place and the past was great, you are going to be a conservative.
“If ambiguity makes you feel you are overwhelmed and you look for patterns and for structure, you are going to love autocrats, you are going to have an orientation towards social dominance, you are going to find […] social dominance is more important than freedom.”
He added: “In the U.S. conservatives are more freaked out by dirt, by getting soiled. They have more cleaning products in their homes than do progressives. You show somebody a picture of some open gaping wound filled with maggots and the more their stomach lurches the more that is a predictor that they are a social conservative. [To them] if it’s different, it’s kinda disgusting, And if it’s disgusting, it’s wrong, wrong, wrong.”
When Stewart noted that some professions seem to encourage people to take on extreme amounts of stress, Sapolsky warns against taking on stressful activity no matter how stimulating it may seem. He pointed out, though, that stimulating stress can vary between getting up early to go bird-watching or signing up for military service.
“Society is very good at manipulating us into thinking our optimal setpoint for stimulation is a lot different from what it actually is,” he commented. “All we hear is ‘Seize the Day, go out and make every moment count’. That winds up being pretty maladaptive for a lot of folks.”
But he advised, 50 minutes into an address to the Beckman Institute 7 years before: “Stress has virtually nothing to do with cancer. There has never been a decent prospective human study longitudinally that stress increases the risk, reoccurrence or growth rate of any type of tumour “(LINK).
Nevertheless, we have seen progress through the physical sciences, “even in the past four years”, in abolishing “free will” explanations, notably for schizophrenia (a neuro-genetic disorder) and dyslexia (due to cortex abnormalities rather than laziness), and also recently for attitudes towards obesity (due a variant of the gene coding for the leptin hormone receptor in the brain rather than greed or lack of self-discipline).
Among society’s implicit biases, the only one that has grown stronger in recent years has been prejudice against people who are overweight, Sipolsky complains — “because we associate it with lack of discipline and self-indulgence and they secretly don’t love themselves. You get that gene variant and you are screwed” (Within Reason 40:00).
Without using free will as an explanation, “it’s a much nicer world to live in. For most people, every single time we have subtracted free will out of our views of why people do what they do, the world has become a more humane place. It’s great news.”
Campbell and Stewart wondered how to live successfully believing you have no free will or responsibility for your actions?
“How are you supposed to function that way? I don’t know,” Sapolsky admits. “I manage to function that way about 3 minutes every 2 months. It’s incredibly difficult. […] We have been inculcated to see responsibility in all sorts of places where there isn’t.”
“If you’ve got a choice and you want to have nice low-stress hormone levels and live to a ripe old age, don’t choose to be high-ranking.”
Sapolsky says he wasted the first 20 years of his research life trying to match high standing in baboons to reduced stress levels. But in fact, he found, the tensions varied between troups. In less fractious groups, lower ranked males also suffered lower stress.
On the videocast Within Reason, Sapolsky speaks of “the machine that we are” (55:30). “We are smart enough to know our machineness, and we have the cognitive and affective and cultural tools to try to deny that.”
And he told the Stanford alumni: “You can’t will yourself to have more willpower. The fundamental building blocks of everything, from the criminal justice system to our notions of meritocracy, are medieval in their viewpoints.” (26:00).
On his YouTube podcast with his daughter, Sapolsky was asked what people in the U.S. do that would have seemed mentally deranged in East Africa. The neuroscientist suggested not knowing his neighbours in San Diego for two years when he was plunged in post-doctoral work and rented an apartment. “I never once spoke to my neighbours. I don’t think I even saw them” (LINK).
“Every time we manage to abstract out another domain where we perceive ourselves as having free will, where there is none at all, the world becomes a much more kind place,” Sapolsky told the Stanford alumni (31:00).
By this time, the Stanfordians already had 60 questions, among them: what do you tell your kids?
“That’s something I wrestled with,” Sapolsky confessed. But he and his wife agreed to take them through “the really cognitive challenging task of thinking about distributed causality” and got them to see that other children “had no control over it any more than you had control over the fact that you picked an educated upper middle-class family that loves you to bits” (37:30).
Once you stop believing you have an objective choice in your decisions, how does the world change?
Even under quantum indeterminacy, the subject of his latest book’s last two chapters, “once we see how [the] unpredictable future has turned out, we will be able to see how the response to it was deterministic” (46:30).
Or, my suggestion: you might consult the ever-original Umbrella Academy, now streaming all four seasons on Netflix. Each of the characters change, often within the same episode, depending on the timeline they inhabit. The brilliant cast gives you a different person to analyse and understand in each scene.
Or you could try the quadrupled-timed Bodies series on Netflix (no spoiler alerts, sorry, but see episode 4).
As for the book’s arguments, “I’ve gotten an incredible number of not only hostile book reviews, but really hostile emails” (48:00). The reason? “We evolved an enormous capacity for self-deception.”
Expect lots of repetition when covering the same ground. * = different material from the others. In descending order of views:
“Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: Stress and Health”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9H9qTdserM, 1:27:43, 918K views since 2017
See also Summary on Four Minute Books (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k76Wa-tlUzc) 5.8K views since January 2024
You have 3 brains. This is how to use them
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4_GpSok5VI, 7:43 The Well, 524K views since September 2023
Within Reason podcasts: There’s No Free Will. What Now?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZgvDrFwyW4k, 57:04 408K views since March 2024
Being Human
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnlZwfD-GiU, 36:59, The Leakey Foundation 299K views 2015
“Hardly any other species have non-reproductive sex — and nobody else talks about it afterward. In that regard we are totally unprecedented” (7:20).
Neuroscientist: How To Escape The Rat Race
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNMLlX7tyQk, 1:22: 29, Light Watkins, 248K views
Determined: Life without Free Will
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rv38taDUpwQ, 53:06, Stanford Alumni, 178K views since March 2024
Do we really have free will?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpIsLZrAbEs, 34:43, University of Chicago, 44K views since January 2024
Life Without Free Will
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZGpbdrDU0g, 1:25:40, The Psychology Podcast, 34K views since October 2023
Hyenas, Buddhism & Neuroscience
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oVbIiZx1jU0, 1:00:59, Everyday Stoic, 6.8K views since April 2024
Father-Offspring Interviews. A playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOXn0rUD2D-eBMO44WUaxRFYqwv61pDaa
Questions from his daughter Rachel
Some episodes:
Sabine Hossenfelder, Big Bang, ASD (discussed elsewhere)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tXX-0xQ4gNI, 29:33. Father-Offspring Interviews #11. 25K views since June 2024 (28 episodes).
Sabine “is the greatest. We love her in this house. She is this mad, eccentric physicist who has this fantastic YouTube video up explaining why there is no free will” (01:30).
“Conscious intent is just an afterthought” (10:45).
“In a biologically deterministic world, everything can change” (18:30).
“Us” vs “Them”, zombies, beauty and awe
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6yWTFagQQI, 15:159. Father-Offspring Interviews #12. 8K views since 23 May 2024
Sapolsky’s dream team against the Zombie apocalypse: Edgar Alan Poe, Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce, Vladimir Putin (“so that if we are running for our lives, we could always trip him up and hope he falls and he’s the one behind”) (4:00).
Munchausen’s, Munchausen by proxy, Cognitive Bias, 28:08. Father-Offspring Interviews #28, 12 September 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRqyvGIbb1c