Hood, Bruce - Supersense

WHAT NEXT?

In this chapter we have looked at an emerging biological understanding of the world that depends on categorization based on outward appearances and inferred invisible properties. Our mind design seems set to look for patterns and deeper causal explanations for the different kinds of things we think exist in the living world. This process leads to spontaneous untaught concepts of essences, life energies and holistic connection. Many of these beliefs can also be found in ancient models of the natural world where hidden structures and mechanisms were thought to reflect a supernatural order in the universe.

While these intuitive concepts have true scientific validity to some extent, our naive way of thinking about them leads us to attribute additional properties that would be supernatural if true. For example, supernaturalism forms the basis of belief for those who advocate the sympathetic power of diluted potions and magical foods that share some resemblance to the affliction under question. In these situations, belief alone is sometimes sufficient to produce the desired result even though there is no active ingredient in the potion or food. Like the illusion of control discussed in chapter 1, believing that you will benefit is sometimes good enough.

Such beliefs also influence the way we see ourselves as members of a group. In particular, our supersense leads us to infer something essential and integral to the group that should not be violated or contaminated by outside influences. When this happens, we feel revulsion and disgust. These are emotional states triggered by mechanisms that exhibit many supernatural properties of sympathies, antipathies and spiritual contamination. In this way, our supersense operates to unite the group members by shared sacred values.

Groups are held together by these sacred values. All humans can be disgusted and we would be very suspicious of anyone who did not experience this particular emotional response. When someone says that they could easily wear a killer’s cardigan, we identify them as an individual not prepared to share the group’s sacred values even when these values are purely arbitrary. This is because our supersense makes these values seem reasonable because of the moral indignation we experience fuelled by our intuitive emotional system. As social animals, we depend on our supersense, even when it flies in the face of reason.

In the next chapter we examine how this supersense can lead to some very bizarre beliefs and practices where we think we can absorb someone else’s essence.

CHAPTER SEVEN

WOULD YOU WILLINGLY RECEIVE A HEART TRANSPLANT FROM A MURDERER?

THE HUMAN BODY is made up of about two-thirds water. Maybe this explains our proclivity to describe other people with liquidized language, especially those with whom we may have to share some intimacy. Some people are slimy, while others are wet. Someone can be drippy, whereas another can just ooze charm. Is it a coincidence that these descriptions reflect comparisons with slime, a substance usually associated with disgust?

Like food, certain people can be yummy, whereas others can be revolting. And in the same way that essential reasoning influences how we feel about incorporating food into our bodies, the same goes for connecting with other people. When Granny ‘just wants to eat you all up’, not only is she comparing you to something delicious, she may want to absorb you!

When we reason about others, our judgements are coloured by our sense of essential connectedness. At one level, humans are tribal: we belong to one particular group and not another. But we also see ourselves as individuals willing to share certain levels of physical intimacy with the group and with specific significant others. Love, hatred, and disgust toward others are fuelled by gut responses that forge our strongest social relationships, and we intuitively think in an essential way about the nature of these connections.

We think like this because we need to justify our emotions in a tangible way. For example, in one study, adult subjects were told that they were to be given a vitamin shot to study the effects on visual tasks. In fact, some were given a shot of adrenaline, without their knowledge. Adrenaline is the naturally occurring hormone triggered during times of arousal. It makes you breathe faster, your heart races, and your palms sweat. What did the subjects make of their change in arousal? It all depended on the context. While they were in the room awaiting the fake visual test, they were asked to complete a mood questionnaire. At this point, a confederate of the experimenter who was pretending to be a genuine participant started acting either very happy or very irritated. The subjects who were unaware that their faster breathing, racing pulse, and sweaty palms had been caused by a drug reported feeling either angry or happy, depending on the state acted out by the confederate. 1Do you remember the Numskulls from chapter 5? It was like the boss Numskull in the head office was receiving memos from all around the body telling him that something was up and that he had to send out a press release to explain why the body was feeling so aroused. Conscious experience was the spin doctor making sense of the messages.

In another study, an attractive female experimenter stopped and interviewed male subjects as they crossed a very narrow footbridge over a very deep ravine. 2After the interview, she gave them her telephone number. The measure of interest was whether they called her later. Twice as many males whom she stopped in the middle of the bridge called her in comparison to males who had been interviewed at the side of the bridge. The explanation was as cunning as the finding: males who were interviewed in the middle of the high bridge were physiologically more aroused by the danger of the situation but misinterpreted this physical response as sexual attraction to the female interviewer. So our experience of emotions is a combination of bodily sensations and our attempts to interpret them. We try to make sense of our sensations.

When we encounter someone who triggers an emotional response, we apply the same interpretive processes. We may not be able to say exactly what it is that we either like or dislike about the person, but we have feelings about him or her. For example, have you ever felt uncomfortable in the presence of someone and not known exactly why? Maybe she stood too close to you, or maybe he shook your hand longer and harder than you expected. Or maybe the person touched your arm during the conversation. Physical contact can be either charming or repulsive. Why? I think the answer is that physical contact leads to the belief in potential contamination during social interaction. If the person is someone we are inclined toward, such as a potential mate or someone we respect, then the contact is welcomed. If it is someone we don’t like, then physical contact can be revolting. Both responses operate on the basis of psychological essentialism even when we are not fully aware of this threat of contamination. By assuming some exchange of essence, we can justify our response in terms of contamination. For example, members of the lowest caste in the Indian system were known as the ‘untouchables’: they were deemed to be so disgusting that a higher-caste member would be contaminated by contact with them. Although the term ‘untouchable’ was officially abolished in 1950, it still operates today as members from different castes maintain various degrees of physical separation. 3The same was true for the segregation that operated in the United States and the apartheid system of South Africa.

Calling people names such as ‘filth’ or ‘vermin’ not only dehumanizes them but also leads others to treat them as essentially different and contaminated. How else could a Hutu neighbour butcher a Tutsi child with a machete if not because the child had ceased to be human and become a cockroach? 4Essentialism justifies whether we embrace others or shun them by providing a physical reason for our actions. Our actions may be socially motivated and for the good of the group, but they also feel right. Where do these feelings come from, and how do we link them to others?