The Blank Slate

The acknowledgment of human nature must start with a sense of awe about the complexity of the human brain. However, the idea of the Blank Slate leads people to believe that our perceptions of the world, including those of scientists, are all relative.

In this chapter, Pinker discusses our assumptions about cognition. He begins by acknowledging that the relativists are right to say that we don’t comprehend reality as it actually exists. However, he counters that “just because the world we know is a construct of our brain, that does not mean it is an arbitrary concept” (199). Instead, our brains are designed to register the world in ways that helped our own survival. Though they can be fallible, our brains help maintain contact with the parts of reality that helped our ancestors survive, and we have developed ways to test our perceptions of the world to discover the truth.

Relativists are more concerned with how we categorize what we see, as categorizations including race, gender, ethnicity, etc. developed into damaging stereotypes. To erase these stereotypes, thinkers began to promote the idea that these categories do not exist and that all categories are socially constructed. Pinker disagrees, writing that cognitive psychologists have determined that categorization recognizes actual qualities. These psychologists have determined that conceptual categories arise from two mental processes. One is recognizing the “fuzzy boundaries” (203) around categories and the other is looking for precise rules to define categories.

While social scientists have often decried stereotypes as irrational, objective measures show that stereotypes are often generally accurate. Though people may believe these general stereotypes, they are still capable of individualizing members of a group. In some cases, they need to use conscious decision-making to override stereotypes. When people are under pressure, for example, they tend to fall back on using stereotypes to judge an individual because of our tendency to rely on a network of fuzzy boundaries. In other words, Pinker says, stereotypes are not always accurate, but they are not always inaccurate either. Human categorization is designed to keep track of the parts of the world that are related to our wellbeing. This process of categorization can be offensive when applied to people.

The partial accuracy of stereotypes, moreover, does not mean that racism, sexism, and other forms of prejudice are acceptable. Stereotypes based on hostile assumptions rather than firsthand experience tend to be inaccurate, and other stereotypes may be accurate only because of self-reinforcing social barriers. Stereotypes also tend to be less accurate when dealing with a group that pitted against one’s own.

Pinker discusses the cognitive process behind language, which social scientists and others view as a process that constrains thought. Pinker believes that language is not the same as thought itself. Instead, perception and cognition help us to connect to the world, and language connects these concepts to words. Language affects the way we think about the world, including the metaphors we use to define concepts, but it is not the same as thought in general. To Pinker, language is “the slave of an executive” (210). Pinker writes that infants and primates have demonstrated categories of thought— such as objects, space, and numbers—without language. Language does not represent a direct transcription of our thoughts; there is always a give-and-take between language and thought.

Language conveys not just thoughts but also the speaker’s attitude. Attempts at linguistic reform are evidence of linguistic determinism, or the euphemism treadmill, as words evolve from terms such as “undertaker” to “funeral director.” The euphemism treadmill shows that concepts behind the words are more important than the words themselves.

Like words, images are thought to have a significant impact on our thinking, partly because we are assumed to have a Blank Slate in our minds. However, the fact that we can disagree with images we encounter—for example, understanding that an old movie’s portrayal of happily enslaved people is misleading—shows that images and thoughts are distinct.

Pinker writes that the complexity of the visual brain allows us to recognize deceptions in the visual world. The brain can even manipulate images like a “visuo-spatial sketchpad” (215). Images are not simply downloaded into our brains like snapshots but are instead linked to vast knowledge. We are not simply passive interpreters of images, words, or stereotypes. Instead, we are complex analyzers. 

Human reasoning arises from different systems and intelligences. These processes are present in everyone early in life. In this chapter, Pinker reviews the cognitive faculties and intuitions in our brains. These include an intuitive sense of physics, biology, engineering, psychology, spatial sense, and other faculties. We also have systems that combine cognition and emotion, such as our system for assessing danger and our moral sense. In contrast, we have no innate mental tools for grasping the changes brought about by science and technology.

Educational philosophy is largely based on the Blank Slate and Noble Savage concepts which help posit that the young have empty minds that can be shaped by education. Other cognitive scientists have developed the idea that the mind is innately poor at certain things and that education has to make up for those deficits. Our innate systems, such as spatial cognition, can also be used to learn subjects such as math. Children may not be innately motivated to learn, as much of learning runs counter to our intuitive systems.

“Theory of mind”—our ability to understand the thoughts of others—is also deeply rooted. This idea helps support our conception of the Ghost in the Machine. The idea that bodies come with souls is culturally engrained which can make it difficult for people to change their beliefs in accordance with current science. The moment of determining when life exactly begins is also complicated and relevant to cultural issues such as abortion, animal rights, and contraception. People also fear clones, though they are simply identical twins born at different times, not re-creations of earlier beings.

Continuing to explore the issue of the beginning of personhood, Pinker notes that the nervous system takes time to be differentiated into the brain. Similarly, it is also hard to determine the moment at which life ends. These problems cannot be easily solved because they pit our intuitive sense that there is a hard dividing line between what constitutes a person and what does not with the facts of biology, which point to a slower development and senescence of the brain.

Pinker discusses the debate over genetically modified foods and makes the argument that such foods are no more dangerous than natural foods, since all food has been modified through selective breeding. Fears of modified food come from our sense that there is an invisible essence in living things. However, this sense of what Pinker calls “intuitive essentialism” (230) can lead us to make errors. People are also bad estimators of their risks (for example, there is a prevalent fear of flying though riding in a car is statistically far more dangerous).

Anthropologists have determined that human interaction falls into four patterns. The first is Communal Sharing, in which people share what they have without keeping track. The second is Authority Ranking, in which dominant individuals determine what they can take from others. The other two are exchanges. The most common type of exchange is Equality Matching, in which people exchange goods or favors at different times and assess whether they are equal in the end. This type of exchange is different from Market Pricing, which takes place in modern society but was absent in our evolutionary history. This gives rise to misunderstandings such as the “physical fallacy”—the idea that goods have a true and constant value.

Pinker also talks about the ideas of Thomas Malthus, an 18th and 19th century economist who predicted widespread famine when the population outstripped the ability of the earth to produce enough food. His dire predictions never came true because increased technological efficiency helped us provide enough food for a growing population. The economist Paul Romer has shown that humans can develop new solutions to problems because of the combinatorial process of creating new ideas. So far, our minds have kept up with the demands of an increasing population, but Pinker points out that there might be an end to our cognitive rope. In other words, we may not be able to come up with the solution to every problem.

Pinker quotes from the Robert Trivers’s foreword to The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins. Trivers writes about how genetics can offer us “a deeper understanding of the many roots of our suffering” (241) and that if we “follow the genes” (241), we can uncover much about the logic of our human relationships.

Pinker writes about different types of human relationships, including adversarial, cooperative, and altruistic. Logically, helping a relative allows us to ensure the survival of copies of our own genes, and reciprocal altruism involves trading favors so that the people we help also help us when we need it. An inclination to genetically propagate, then, affects the way we treat others.  

Just because we are influenced by genetics does not mean we mindlessly follow demands of our DNA. Genes also give us the ability to deliberate and use free will. Selecting for their genes is also a process that occurs over millennia; it is not something that happens in our minute-by-minute decisions (which are influenced by the desire for love and happiness, among other factors).

In other words, Pinker argues that human interactions are far more complex than a simple mathematical calculus of how best to perpetuate our genes. He discusses our deeper feeling for kin over non-kin by discussing how people have greater interest in helping their own children than investing in those they are unrelated to and the prevalence of nepotism. Though kinship bonds can run contrary to the goals of governments, using the metaphor of kinship can help people form closer bonds with non-kin. However, this can also lead to groupthink and myths of racial purity.

The seeds of familial conflict also lie in our genes: Parents want to split their time equally among children, while an individual child wants more time for himself or herself. This gives rise to parent-offspring and sibling-sibling conflict. Parent-offspring conflict suggests that the doctrine of “family values” (250) and the idea that women should not assign their offspring to be watched by non-kin is not scientifically grounded. Anthropology shows that women have long balanced mothering and keeping themselves healthy; they do not give all their attention to offspring and sometimes share childcare duties with others. Pinker argues that many children have benefited from the general loosening of parental control that has taken place in the West since medieval times.

Male-female relationships are governed by the need for balance in childcare investment; physically, men can put minimal investment into having children, while women cannot. In much of the animal world, men compete for a large number of mates, while females choose fewer quality mates. Men show sexual jealousy to prevent a woman from having another man’s children, while women show jealousy about the diversion of a man’s energy to supporting another woman’s children.

Because sex can lead to procreation, it continues to be what Pinker calls “an emotional bramble bush” (253). Men and women may have different levels of involvement in the birth and raising of a child. People also face pressures from their own parents, who have a stake in their child’s reproduction. The fact that we live in a society that espouses women’s freedom but in which sex is still so emotionally fraught shows, according to Pinker, the “long reach of human nature” (254).

People are often uninvested in helping others who are not kin. In the Dawkins foreword, Trivers writes that while altruism to the public at large is rare because it is vulnerable to exploitation, people are capable of participating in reciprocal altruism with people who have helped them in turn. Research has shown that people are neither all-out egoists nor total communalists. Rather, we are all somewhere in between. In many cultures, there is a calculus involved in generosity, and people tend to return favors and punish cheaters. However, there are some people who engage in unreturned generosity and others who engage in outright treachery. Again, most people exist somewhere in the middle. In the theory of frequency-dependent selection, people choose a temporary mixture of strategies depending on a specific situation.

Pinker continues to discuss how research has shown that some people are genetically predisposed to psychopathology, and others only exhibit signs of psychopathy when in situations where they believe themselves to be at a disadvantage. Pinker uses this as further evidence against the idea of the Noble Savage. He describes several examples of people have been taken in by psychopaths and writes that the idea that psychopaths are depraved on account of being deprived is false.

He also discusses human self-deception, which runs deep. We are prone to rationalization, defense mechanisms, and overrating our own talents. Pinker ends the chapter by writing that though our nature and inherent conflict in relationships can be the source of suffering, they can also be the springboard to improved consciousness and a better understanding of our emotions.

One of the deepest fears that people have about a scientific approach to human nature is that it leads to nihilism. On the contrary, Pinker still believes in the value of a moral system even if we understand it to be “an assembly of neural circuits cobbled together from older parts of the primate brain and shaped by natural selection to do a job” (270). It is not “a figment of our imagination” (270). However, moral sense can also fall prey to error and illusion.

Pinker writes that our emotions emerge from neurobiological design. The psychologist Jonathan Haidt has uncovered four major families of emotions (which follow from Trivers’s theory of reciprocal altruism). These families are other-condemning (anger, contempt); other-praising (gratitude, awe); other-suffering (sympathy, compassion); and self-conscious (guilt, embarrassment). Pinker also explains the three spheres of morality: the ethic of autonomy (which emphasizes one’s individual rights); the ethic of community (relating to the values of the group); and the ethic of divinity (relating to the sense of holiness).

Haidt and the psychologist Paul Rozin further built on this work to show that moral spheres equate with universal mental faculties. For example, disgust evolved from the system for avoiding contaminants such as disease and spoilage and embarrassment evolved from the show of appeasement found in other primates.

Relativists might think that the Western culture is different from others, as it emphasizes individual rights, but Pinker writes that this same sense is present in Asian cultures; conversely, communitarian values are also present in the West. This ethic also explains our deference to hierarchy and to tendency toward celebrity worship. People tend to confuse morality with literal purity or cleanliness, and this tendency can have horrible consequences, such as condemning the “untouchables” in India. Philosopher Jonathan Glover has written about how the atrocities of the 20th century relate to the common denominator of degrading the victim so that people no longer feel compassionate towards them. Pinker argues that this equation of literal and moral purity should make us wary of using moral judgments to make choices regarding difficult issues such as cloning. We need to sort out initial gut reactions from defensible moral positions.

Moral emotions can vacillate between two states called moralization and amoralization. Moralization involves inherent values while amoralization involves preferences. For example, the choice to smoke used to be a personal preference, but in our contemporary society it has evolved into a choice that reflects personal values, a kind of moral failing. Other practices—such as divorce—have gone in the opposite direction. In other words, our tendency to moralize has not gone away; we are now simply moralizing different things, such as pollution and fast food.

Pinker also discusses the sacred and the taboo, citing research that backs up the idea that we consider some ideas so venerable that they cannot be questioned. Pinker writes that this thinking can lead to overblown reactions and bad consequences. He writes that it is too dangerous to touch some of our culturally sacred things and that “moralization and scholarship thus often find themselves on a collision course” (279).