The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
Robert M. Sapolsky · 2017 · Science
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Behave asks why people act as they do, from kindness to violence. Neuroscientist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky answers by rewinding the clock on a single behaviour. He starts with the brain activity a second before an action, then works back through the hormones of the previous hours, changes to the brain over months, adolescence, childhood, life in the womb, genes, culture and, finally, millions of years of evolution.
His central argument is that behaviour never has a single cause. Biology and environment interact at every level, and simple explanations such as a gene or hormone ‘for’ aggression are almost always wrong. Later he applies this lens to group loyalty, hierarchy, morality, empathy and war, and questions how much blame and free will our legal systems assume.
Key insights
- Dopamine is more about anticipating reward than enjoying it, which helps explain why the pursuit of a goal can motivate more than achieving it.
- Hormones tend to amplify existing tendencies rather than create them. Testosterone, for example, boosts efforts to maintain status, which can mean aggression or generosity depending on context.
- The frontal cortex helps us do the harder but right thing, yet it is the last brain region to mature, which helps explain adolescent risk-taking.
- Us-versus-them thinking forms quickly and on trivial grounds, but the categories are flexible and can be redrawn through shared goals and identities.
- Understanding the biology behind behaviour should make us more cautious about blame and more focused on the conditions that produce harm.
Read it if you want a thorough, often witty tour of the science behind human behaviour and have time for a long, dense book.