Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
Ratings42
Average rating4.2
This is second on my all time list behind Kahneman. This thing is huge, it's as close to a comprehensive multi-field discussion of human behavior I've seen, and it manages to stay coherent, well structured, and compelling throughout.
This book goes from the basic structure and biology of neurons, the brain, neurotransmitters and hormones, genetic elements of behavior, epigenetics, development of the brain and behavior from early in pregnancy through adolescence and how negative events (malnutrition, abuse, neglect) alter that development, a pretty damn in depth discussion of evolution and the various selection processes in play from survival of the individual to close family to the species as a whole, and how social structures and culture influence behavior just to lay the groundwork for how much goes into any single decision.
The second part starts to look into behavior closer to directly through the lens of research by psychology. It starts with in-group bias, with solid coverage of how researchers have manipulated whether people feel someone is an us or a them. Next is peer pressure. Excellent coverage of Milgram's electric shock work and the Stanford Prison Experiment. Really there's a lot here and touching on every subject in depth. What I will say is that the psychology, which is the material I'm most familiar with, is presented masterfully, engaging, does a good job of being clear on what the research does and doesn't say, and consistently refers back to the groundwork in the first part of the book.
There is a third part where he discusses what we should take away from all of this, and he loses me a bit at points in the discussion of the justice system. I'm not entirely sure what he's trying to say. But he comes back strong with discussions of how to work past large scale conflict including war and even genocide, then the overall message that we can use our understanding of context to frame things in ways that allow us to be better to the people around us and drive positive change. Overall with some very minor hiccups, he manages to keep a consistent thread throughout this absolutely insanely broad work. He doesn't just skim through topics. There's a solid level of depth throughout. The organization is excellent. To the best of my ability to determine, it's one of the best sourced books I've read. He does all this while keeping a light, not too serious tone and throwing in mild wit and wordplay in a way that adds to the level of engagement.
If that's not enough, the appendices are great too.
A very interesting read about human behavior. It helped to understand the link between behavior, biology and other factors to be taken into consideration. In short: It's complicated. The author tries their best to make it understandable for everyone without a biology degree. The beginning felt quite hard to understand, but it got better over time. Still, the book felt quite lengthy with many anecdotes and repetitions.
All you could ever want to know about human behavior from a scientific perspective.
Looking at behavior through different lenses, Sapolsky slowly zooms out in time, going from neurons firing (milliseconds) to sensory inputs (seconds) to hormones (hours) to neural-plasticity (days, months) to epigenetics and genetics (your lifetime) to cultural programming (many many lifetimes) to evolution itself (humanity's lifetime). And the path is highlighted with summaries and anecdotes from the most famous scientific studies. The second half of the book talks about topics like Us-Them, hierarchy/obedience/resistance, morality, pain and empathy, what leads us to kill and the free will discourse.
Things I've learned:
- The prefrontal-cortex is the last part of our brain that matures (in the early twenties), therefore it's more prone to be influenced by nurture than nature. This is where our culture takes root, overrules our genes and influences our decision making.
- Ecology shapes culture. Asia, a continent build on rice, has a holistic world-view, as rice-agriculture requires the collaboration of the many. The west has a individualistic world-view in contrast.
- The brains of conservatives and progressives are indeed different!
- As soon as societies evolved into forming bigger groups, the need for a moralizing god emerged.
The writing is a lot more engaging as one might expect from a 700-page psychology book. Sapolsky is quite witty, which keeps it entertaining. Still took a while to get through though.
There are few books which leave you in a mesmerizing state after having read them. You ponder about it for days to come, want to scream your head off about it to anyone who'd listen, and then dwell in this fear of picking up another book because how can something else ever come close to being this perfect! I have felt this way before - first when I'd finished The Complete Sherlock Holmes, later when I was left in a daze for multiple days after finishing the notorious and brilliant House of Leaves, and much more recently when I was unable to sleep after reading Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.
Behave is one of those few books.
I first heard about Dr. Sapolsky when my then-girlfriend recommended me one of his lectures on Depression (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOAgplgTxfc&t=632s) from his popular lecture series titled “Human Behavioral Biology” (Playlist available on Youtube). I was immediately taken in. He reminded me of those hilariously brilliant and yet humble grand-dads with whom you can be best friends with (of course, only seen in the movies) - and I picked up this book the very next day.
Dr. Sapolsky is a neuroendocrinologist by profession and currently a professor of biology and neurology at Stanford. To save you the pain of having to look up neuroendocrinologist - it's the branch of biology which studies how the brain regulates the hormonal activity in the body. From the late 70s to early 90s, he spent a vast majority of his time studying the social behaviors of baboons in the wild - something that features prominently in this book where he discusses different social behaviors of humans and how they relate to our biology. He writes early on in the book -
Some of the time, we are indeed just like any other animal. When we're scared, we secrete the same hormone as would some subordinate fish getting hassled by a bully. The biology of pleasure involves the same brain chemicals in us as in a capybara. Neurons from humans and brine shrimp work the same way. House two female rats together, and over the course of weeks, they will synchronize their reproductive cycles so that they wind up ovulating within a few hours of each other. Try the same with two human females (as reported in some but not all studies), and something similar occurs. It's called the Wellesley effect, first shown with roommates at all-women's Wellesley College. And when it comes to violence, we can be just like some other apes—we pummel, we cudgel, we throw rocks, we kill with our bare hands. So some of the time an intellectual challenge is to assimilate how similar we can be to other species. In other cases, the challenge is to appreciate how, though human physiology resembles that of other species, we use the physiology in novel ways. We activate the classical physiology of vigilance while watching a scary movie. We activate a stress response when thinking about mortality. We secrete hormones related to nurturing and social bonding but in response to an adorable baby panda. And this certainly applies to aggression—we use the same muscles as does a male chimp attacking a sexual competitor, but we use them to harm someone because of their ideology.
Various muscles have moved, and a behavior has happened. Perhaps it is a good act: you've empathically touched the arm of a suffering person. Perhaps it is a foul act: you've pulled a trigger, targeting an innocent person. Perhaps it is a good act: you've pulled a trigger, drawing fire to save others. Perhaps it is a foul act: you've touched the arm of someone, starting a chain of libidinal events that betray a loved one. Acts that, as emphasized, are definable only by context.
If you had to boil this book down to a single phrase, it would be “It's complicated.” Nothing seems to cause anything; instead, everything just modulates something else. Scientists keep saying, “We used to think X, but now we realize that . . .” Fixing one thing often messes up ten more, as the law of unintended consequences reigns. On any big, important issue, it seems like 51 percent of the scientific studies conclude one thing, and 49 percent conclude the opposite. And so on. Eventually, it can seem hopeless that you can actually fix something, can make things better. But we have no choice but to try. And if you are reading this, you are probably ideally suited to do so. You've amply proven you have intellectual tenacity. You probably also have running water, a home, adequate calories, and low odds of festering with a bad parasitic disease. You probably don't have to worry about Ebola virus, warlords, or being invisible in your world. And you've been educated. In other words, you're one of the lucky humans. So try.
Human behavior is much more complicated than you might have thought. Or maybe you already figured it was complicated. Well, it's still probably more complicated than even that. Perhaps you are attracted to facile descriptions of behavior that are motivated by your political leanings such as genetic determinism or social construction? There's a very good chance it's actually a swirling interplay of the two. Nearly all of our best and worst actions turn out to be some result of gene-environment interaction, and delineating the two takes some solid scientific work to get right.
Much (perhaps too much) of the book is spent on “humans at our worst”. Why are we violent and aggressive to each other? It's a mix of hormones, social interaction, evolution, socioeconomic stratification, in vitro conditions, pollution, genes, gender, political forces, religion, luck, and many other factors. There's just no easy answer here despite many peoples' attempts to pin it on their pet theories. This isn't to say it's not worth trying to figure out because that's how progress is made. It requires an open mind and some scientific curiosity.
Sapolsky builds a moral framework towards the end that I mostly agree with, though he seems to let up on the academic rigor that is evident in the earlier parts of the book. This is the same criticism I have of other science books such as Sean Carroll's The Big Picture. Amazing detail, citation, dispassion, and patience explaining the hard science of their field ...and then a breezy approach to laying philosophy and social science on the table. It's to be expected, though I'm left in serious doubt when he presents the case that the biology is this decades-long battle of competing research but that a single psychology experiment is able to explain a murky aspect of cognition.
In the end his takeaway is valuable. We should be skeptical of the unseen homunculus in peoples' heads pulling the levers of “free will” and causing them to be an evil Other of the out-group. It's easy to heap undue moral scorn on someone who might just be the equivalent of a 17th century “witch” who is actually just suffering from epilepsy. Give your political enemies the benefit of the doubt. Show compassion towards folks with even the most repugnant behavior. You have no idea what they've been through.
I've been struggling for two weeks, trying to figure out what to say about Behave. Sapolsky is one of my all-time heroes: kind, wise, eloquent, a great teacher. This is possibly his most important book, at least in the sense of material that everyone should know. Unfortunately, it's not his most readable one. It's dense, so rich in information that it's overwhelming—and I say that as someone who is already familiar with much of this material and who likes to stay informed. He writes clearly; humanely; but it's just too much at once. And despite that, I'm going to urge you to read it anyway. Take your time. Have a highlighter handy, be willing to dog-ear copiously. Go back and reread when you feel lost. And don't feel obligated to learn it all: you'll pick up enough along the way and, perhaps, change a little of how you see yourself and your fellow humans.As a side note, I read this while also reading Parker Palmer's [b:Healing the Heart of Democracy 10836406 Healing the Heart of Democracy The Courage to Create a Politics Worthy of the Human Spirit Parker J. Palmer https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1347421252s/10836406.jpg 15750551] and am dumbstruck by the parallels. Heartened by their common message of compassion and understanding.