Moralistic Emotions (quote)

Follow up to Reciprocal Altruism 

Humans are, of course, a brainy species, and are zoologically unusual in how often they help unrelated individuals (Chapter 3). Our lifestyles and our minds are particularly adapted to the demands of reciprocal altruism. People have food, tools, help, and information to trade. With language, information is an ideal trade good because its cost to the giver—a few seconds of breath—is minuscule compared with the benefit to the recipient. Humans are obsessed with individuals; remember the Blick twins from Chapter 2, one of whom bit a police officer but neither of whom could be punished because each benefited from reasonable doubt that he and not his twin did the deed. And the human mind is equipped with goal-setting demons that regulate the doling out of favors; as with kin-directed altruism, reciprocal altruism is behaviorist short hand for a set of thoughts and emotions. Trivers and the biologist Richard Alexander have shown how the demands of reciprocal altruism are probably the source of many human emotions. Collectively they make up a large part of the moral sense. 

The minimal equipment is a cheater-detector and a tit-for-tat strategy that begrudges a gross cheater further help. A gross cheater is one who refuses to reciprocate at all, or who returns so little that the altruist gets back less than the cost of the initial favor. Recall from Chapter 5 that Cosmides has shown that people do reason unusually well about cheaters. But the real intrigue begins with Trivers' observation that there is a more subtle way to cheat. A subtle cheater reciprocates enough to make it worth the altruist's while, but returns less than he is capable of giving, or less than the altruist would give if the situation were reversed. That puts the altruist in an awkward position. In one sense she is being ripped off. But if she insists on equity, the subtle cheater could break off the relationship altogether. Since half a loaf is better than none, the altruist is trapped. She does have one kind of leverage, though. If there are other trading partners in the group who don't cheat at all, or who cheat subtly but less stingily, she can give them her business instead.

The game has become more complicated. Selection favors cheating when the altruist will not find out or when she will not break off her altruism if she does find out. That leads to better cheater-detectors, which leads to more subtle cheating, which leads to detectors for more subtle cheating, which leads to tactics to get away with subtle cheating without being detected by the subtle-cheater-detectors, and so on. Each detector must trigger an emotion demon that sets up the appropriate goal—continuing to reciprocate, breaking off the relationship, and so on.

Here is how Trivers reverse-engineered the moralistic emotions as strategies in the reciprocity game. (His assumptions about the causes and consequences of each emotion are well supported by the literature in experimental social psychology and by studies of other cultures, though they are hardly necessary, as real-life examples no doubt will flood into mind.) 

Liking is the emotion that initiates and maintains an altruistic partnership. It is, roughly, a willingness to offer someone a favor, and is directed to those who appear willing to offer favors back. We like people who are nice to us, and we are nice to people whom we like. 
Anger protects a person whose niceness has left her vulnerable to being cheated. When the exploitation is discovered, the person classifies the offending act as unjust and experiences indignation and a desire to respond with moralistic aggression: punishing the cheater by severing the relationship and sometimes by hurting him. Many psychologists have remarked that anger has moral overtones; almost all anger is righteous anger. Furious people feel they are aggrieved and must redress an injustice.
Gratitude calibrates the desire to reciprocate according to the costs and benefits of the original act. We are grateful to people when their favor helps us a lot and has cost them a lot. 
Sympathy, the desire to help those in need, may be an emotion for earning gratitude. If people are most grateful when they most need the favor, a person in need is an opportunity to make an altruistic act go farthest.
Guilt can rack a cheater who is in danger of being found out. H. L. Mencken defined conscience as "the inner voice which warns us that someone might be looking." If the victim responds by cutting off all future aid, the cheater will have paid dearly. He has an interest! in preventing the rupture by making up for the misdeed and keeping it from happening again. People feel guilty about private transgressions because they may become public; confessing a sin before it is discovered is evidence of sincerity and gives the victim better grounds to maintain the relationship. 
Shame, the reaction to a transgression after it has been discovered, evokes a public display of contrition, no doubt for the same reason.

Lily Tomlin said, "I try to be cynical, but it's hard to keep up." Trivers notes that once these emotions evolved, people had an incentive to mimic them to take advantage of other people's reactions to the real thing. Sham generosity and friendship may induce genuine altruism in return. Sham moral anger when no real cheating took place may nonetheless win reparations. Sham guilt may convince a wronged party that the cheater has reformed his ways, even if cheating is about to resume. Feigning dire straits may evoke genuine sympathy. Sham sympathy which gives the appearance of helping may elicit real gratitude. Sham gratitude may mislead an altruist into expecting a favor to be reciprocated. Trivers notes that none of this hypocrisy need be conscious; indeed, as we shall see, it is most effective when it is not.

The next round in this evolutionary contest is, of course, developing an ability to discriminate between real emotions and sham emotions. We get the evolution of trust and distrust. When we see someone going through the motions of generosity, guilt, sympathy, or gratitude rather than showing signs of the genuine emotion, we lose the desire to cooperate. For example, if a cheater makes amends in a calculating manner rather than out of credible guilt, he may cheat again when circumstances allow him to get away with it. The search for signs of trustworthiness makes us into mind readers, alert for any twitch or inconsistency that betrays a sham emotion. Since hypocrisy is easiest to expose when people compare notes, the search for trustworthiness makes us avid consumers of gossip. In turn, our reputation becomes our most valuable possession, and we are motivated to protect (and inflate) it with conspicuous displays of generosity, sympathy, and integrity and to take umbrage when it is impugned.

Are you keeping up? The ability to guard against sham emotions can in turn be used as a weapon against real emotions. One can protect one's own cheating by imputing false motives to someone else—by saying that a person really isn't aggrieved, friendly, grateful, guilty, and so on, when she really is. No wonder Trivers was the first to propose that the expansion of the human brain was driven by a cognitive arms race, fueled by the emotions needed to regulate reciprocal altruism. 

 -Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works, ch 6 pg 403