Rarely has it been thought that the way to show you deserve to be the most powerful person on earth is to demonstrate you’re also the touchiest. This presidential campaign has been an offense fest. From the indignation over a fashion writer’s observation about Hillary Clinton’s cleavage, to the outraged response to the infamous Obama New Yorker cover, to the histrionics over “lipstick on a pig,” taking offense has been a political leitmotif.
It’s often the pettiest-seeming things that drive people mad. Or worse. Jostling our way through the world can have violent consequences. A significant percentage of murders occur between acquaintances with the flash point being a trivial insult. Sometimes it seems we live in a culture devoted to retribution on behalf of the thin-skinned – just think of university speech codes. Feeling affronted has global implications: Islamic organizations and countries seek to ban speech anywhere they decide is insulting to Islam, asserting that a perceived insult can justify a deadly response.
Study the topic of “taking offense” and you realize people are like tuning forks, ready to vibrate with indignation. So why do humans seem equipped with a thrumming tabulator, incessantly calculating whether we are getting proper due and deference?
We like to think we go through life as rational beings. Much of economic theory is based on the notion that humans make rational choices (which may mean that economists don’t get out much). In 1982, some economists came up with a little game to study negotiating strategies. The results showed that rationality is subservient to more powerful drives – and demonstrated why human beings so easily conclude they are being wronged. The idea of the “ultimatum game” is simple. Player A is given 20 $1 bills and told that, in order to keep any of the money, A must share it with Player B. If B accepts A’s offer, they both pocket whatever they’ve agreed to. If B rejects the offer, they both get nothing. Economists naturally expected the players to do the rational thing: A would offer the lowest possible amount – $1; and B, knowing $1 was more than zero, would accept. Ha!
In the years the game has been played, it’s been found that almost half the A’s immediately offer to split the money – an offer B’s accept. When A offers $9 or even $8, B usually says yes. But when A’s offer drops to $7, about half the B’s walk away. The lower A’s offer, the more likely the B’s are to turn their backs on a few free dollars in favor of a more satisfying outcome: punishing the person who offended their sense of fairness. This impulse is not illogical; it is essential. In “Descartes’ Error,” neurologist Antonio Damasio shows that humans who behave purely rationally are brain-damaged. Patients who have suffered injury to the areas in the brain that control emotion, but who retain their intellectual abilities, end up acting in socially aberrant ways.
Since the 1990s, building on the work of E.O. Wilson, father of sociobiology, a disparate band of researchers, from psychologists to zoologists, have been studying the origin and expression of moral emotions – our instinctive feelings of right and wrong. They say Homo sapiens did not invent morality; instead, we come equipped with it. Yes, we have to teach our children accepted rules of conduct and proper character. But Marc Hauser, a professor of psychology at Harvard, argues that they are readily able to learn because a moral template is already there, just as linguists believe children quickly pick up speech because they are born with intrinsic language-learning ability.
A paradox of human life is that the evolutionary forces that have made us cooperative and empathetic are the same ones that have made us prickly and explosive. Jonathan Haidt, a psychology professor at the University of Virginia, is a leading theorist in the field of moral psychology. He says the paired emotions of gratitude and vengeance helped us become the ultrasocial, ultrasuccessful species that we are. Gratitude allows us to expand our social network and recruit new allies; vengeance makes sure our new friends don’t take advantage of us.
You could say our lives as social beings are ruled by the three R’s: respect (the sense that proper deference has been paid to our status), reputation (the carefully maintained perception of our qualities), and reciprocity (the belief that our actions are responded to fairly). In other words, high school may be the most perfect recapitulation of the evolutionary pressures that shaped us as a species. Or politics. In a Washington Post article about John McCain‘s legendary temper, McCain acknowledged, “I’ve been known to forget occasionally the discretion expected of a person of my many years and station when I believe I’ve been accorded a lack of respect I did not deserve.”
Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, directors of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology at UC-Santa Barbara, have done experiments showing that when people play a game of logic – they are given a set of abstract rules and asked to select the correct cards based on the rules – most players can’t figure it out. But when the rules are restated – they are told the game is about detecting violations of the legal drinking age, and the cards represent people at a bar – the majority of players can quickly solve the problem. Experiments such as this, writes neuropsychologist Michael Gazzaniga in “Human,” show that we have a finely developed ability to detect those who cheat in social exchanges.
Being on the alert for scoundrels is exhausting, and confronting those who violate social rules is potentially dangerous. But humans feel compelled to do it because without vigilance, fairness and cooperation break down.
Since the rest of us don’t have a legion of advisers trying to help us calibrate our response to daily hostilities, is there a way for us to turn off the radar that’s constantly scanning for offense? Not really. Being tuned in to the social clues around us is necessary. What we can work at is dialing down our response. Some researchers recommend that when it comes to feeling offended, we could benefit from becoming a little bit Buddhist.
Pema Chodron illustrates this in her book “Comfortable With Uncertainty.” She retells the parable of a man in a boat enjoying the serenity of the river at dusk. He sees another boat coming his way and starts yelling to the boatman to turn aside, but the vessel just keeps coming faster and faster. By this time he’s standing up in his boat, screaming and shaking his fist, and then the boat smashes right into him. He sees that it’s an empty boat. This is the classic story of our whole life situation. There are a lot of empty boats out there.”
From Slate.com