Behave: The Biology of Humans at our Best and Worst is a comprehensive overview of ways to think about the causal mechanisms involved in human behavior. This is of course a massive subject that is still poorly understood despite large strides made in the lace century. Robert Sapolsky tackles the root causes of behavior through multiple lenses to give the reader a sense of how our minds work. This book is not easy and the material it covers is from many technical subjects which are then interwoven. But for the interested reader this is a pretty remarkable achievement as one gets an overview of human nature from a combinatorial lens of primatology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, biochemistry, psychology among other subjects. Such an attempt would seem impossible for almost any author, but this book largely achieves its goals.
Behave is split into 17 chapters in which each chapter effectively thinks about behavior on a longer time scale, starting with immediately before to getting to evolutionary origin. The author starts by posing questions on how our behavior originates. The first 5 chapters highlight this point and the author discusses topics from how the neuroscience of decisions works to how our the neural architecture is laid through our experiences. There is a lot of technical material which can be tough to follow, but there is an appendix which helps clarify the subject for those less familiar. Nonetheless Chapter 2 discusses the various parts of the brain and aspects of their evolution and has a lot of detail but is a core reference chapter for later in the book. The author then starts getting into hormones and regulation and how they impact our actions, there is a lot of discussion of myths and facts and one gets a sense of how complex the interactions are. The author discusses the adolescent brain and how it is still very much in development. Ideas like how accountable are youths get's discussed, these kinds of questions are posed and re-discussed throughout. The author discusses how the environment can influence behavior and some epigenetic ideas are discussed along side general brain development. The author discusses the basis of our political nature as well, in particular how people categorize other people and have internal Us vs Them delineations. How we frame who is an us and who is a them though is extremely variable and our characterization of groups is deemed to be largely constructed rather than innate. The author discusses how different societies have different levels of social interactions and consequentially how different people think about interacting with strangers depends heavily on how much social capital their respective societies have. The author discusses hierarchies and brings in his primatology expertise and discusses how different ape families manage their hierarchies and stress associated with such systems. Human hierarchical systems are discussed in this contexts and the author highlights that our current capitalistic hierarchical society is all new relative to hunter gatherer systems. The author discusses our systems of morality and where they originate; the author looks at cases of high generosity and discusses what parts of the brain were involved. There are lots of interesting facts to be read in these chapters, really fascinating material. The author discusses things like empathy and sympathy and how too much empathy gets in the way of prudent action. It is the dispassionate observer who ends up being more helpful on average. The author revisits the criminal justice system and discusses the deep flaws in how we might be thinking of right and wrong and responsibility; there are useful ideas to consider when thinking about policy. The author ends up by discussing our propensity for violence and war overtime. There are some great anecdotal stories from recent world wars on reconciliation as well as front line behavior when people weren't considering the enemy a them.
Behave is a pretty remarkable book. It is a combination of material from so many subjects, all of which are non-trivial, and it is put together remarkably well. For those interested in how people can behave, where our behavior comes from, what time scales are involved in our propensities and how flexible our responses are this is a must read. One should get a sense of optimism from this, despite science's progress on understanding behavior, we are nowhere close to claiming we have strong causal mechanisms that took a person from point a to b. There are correlated variables and we have some indication on where propensities come from but one still has room for individualism in this book. Very informative, very impressive.
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Reviews with images
Simply one of the best I've read ever
It took me twelve days to read this book. I'm a Chilean reader so my English is no native and it's hard for me to understand everything, but this book deserved to retry any time I couldn't catch the entire meaning of a sentence or an idea. Robert Sapolsky writes as a lecturer. The reader is seated in the classroom and he's the professor who talks, so you feel very comfortable listening him and, more than that, you feel welcome by him. He's so natural and informal that you feel that a distance has been abolished, and this is just what is needed to capture the very essence of this tremendous achievement.The book is about "us" and "them," and how our biology has modeled us to to replicate and to live this duality as an inexorable destiny. That's the reason why Sapolsky in a very smart design of the book dedicates the thirteen first (out of seventeen) chapters in describing to you how does our brains (and by extension our biology) to produce a human being with all that it means. And it means a lot. More than I can say here. Thus, the first thirteen chapters of the book leave you with the sensation that we are all design to be just the way we are. So nothing to be much optimistic here.There's (for me at least) a tipping point in the book that synthesizes everything. It is in page 448 and shows you a graph that plots the "proportion of rulings in favor of the prisoners by ordinal position [i.e., the order in which they were heard by the judge]," with "points [indicating] the first decision in each of the three decisions sessions." Well, the thing is that "in a study of more than 1,100 judicial rulings, prisoners were granted parole at about a 60 percent rate when judges had recently eaten, and at essentially a 0 percent rate just before judges ate... Justice may be blind, but she's sure sensitive to her stomach gurgling."Well, there you are. And this is just one example, there are dozens before and after indicating how sensible we are to the environment, the internal and the external one, something that Sapolsky summarize at the end of the book: "...we haven't evolved to be "selfish" or "altruistic" or anything else--we've evolved to be particular ways in particular settings. Context, context, context."As long as you read you think that the book was written to let you know how remarkably open AND close is our nature, in such a way that we are condemned to suffer our tremendous limitations: there is no way out (or in). Yes, as Sapolsky says, it's complicated. In fact, that could have been the title of the book. But that would have lessened the final chapters which are like the cracks in the wall through which a silver lining filters. The thing is that you didn't expect what Sapolsky tells you there.This is not a detectives novel so what's the point in not commenting what's there for everyone of us? Well, I guess that the point is I shouldn't deprive you of discovering by yourself as I did. Yes, I'm talking here of the pleasure that renders the experience of something that sounds (even in a scientific manner) like a revelation. And that is: at the end of the book you see...I'm sure that other reviewers have revealed everything in order to criticize some points here and there. I guess that could be several, but to me that's not the point. The point is that Behave has not been written to convince you, not at all. Behave has been written to show you. Behave is not a book is a window as I suppose any great book is.As I said, I'm Chilean and here, in my country, are hundreds of political prisoners that haven't the minimal chance of being paroled. Not even that light ray that could traverse a crack in a wall. Not even that. They have no chance. Unfortunately this book is not going to be translated to Spanish. And if it is, it's not going to arrive to our commercial and poor (intellectually speaking) bookstores. My country is a very quiet one compared with the rest of the world. Nobody even notice it, so quiet it is. We are like Switzerland bur without the money. And with the political prisoners they don't have.Sapolsky it's not going to change nothing, but that's not the point, I insist: the point is that things are going to change anyway because history tells so. The thing is that we could do something to hurry the future. I don't know how. Sapolsky either. And what about you?Read this book if you are interested into thinking how does it feel not to be the good guy you think you are most of the time. In a sentence: how does it feel to be human.And it feels good.Five highly deserved stars.
Top reviews from other countries
Honest Jon
striking , scary and disturbing insights into what being human means
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on December 24, 2023