Did you have THE appropriate reaction to the news of Osama Bin Laden’s death? According to some arguments on the internet, it was perfectly proper to cheer in the streets over the guy’s death—he was a mass murderer, responsible not only for the deaths for a lot of people in New York, but for a lot of people in the Muslim world as well. But then there’s the reaction to that reaction—that the cheering crowds ought to be ashamed of themselves. If you’re an American, you should hold a higher standard than the barbarians who went cheering into Middle Eastern streets after Bin Laden’s attacks on the civilians in New York. If you’re a Christian, you’re supposed to value all life, and triumph over hatred with love, charity, and forgiveness. If you’re a realist, you ought to face the fact that the warfare isn’t over yet.
Well, I’ll admit that I'm not qualified to cast a vote in this debate.
Why?
Because I had all these reactions.
I should also admit that I have a form of multiple personality disorder. And most of what we’ve learned about how the mind works suggests that you do, too.
The mind is modular, and we all use different cognitive software when we are confronting different problems. There is not one single executive decision-maker inside your head, but a number of different subselves. When you’re in a threatening situation, your inner night watchman takes over; when someone attractive bats their eyelashes, your swinging single takes the helm; when you’re in a dirty public restroom in the back of a bad restaurant, your compulsive takes over your mind, and when you’re around your children, your inner parent steps up. Each of those subselves uses different decision-rules, values different things, and feels good or bad about different things. I’m not just trying to be clever or pop-psychy when I say this, thinking about modularity has led to a number of interesting scientific findings, and altered the way we think about the links between motivation and cognition (see the references below).
But is one of the different reactions the better one? That’s like asking whether it’s better to have the emotion of anger, love, guilt, or disgust. Our different subselves, and the different emotions and cognitive biases associated with each of them, serve different purposes. If someone does you an injustice, it might sound all zen/Christian/Hallmark to respond with love, but we’re here because our otherwise charitable ancestors sometimes responded with anger—it’s functional to send a message that you’re mad as hell and won’t take any more. Mike McCullough points out that forgiveness and revenge are both functional, but we have capacities for both rather than just one, because depending on circumstances and our current life situation, both serve different adaptive purposes.
So if you didn’t have a single consistent reaction to the news of Osama’s death, forgive yourself (or at least some of your subselves).
References
Kenrick, D.T. (2011). Sex, murder, and the meaning of life: A psychologist investigates how evolution, cognition, and complexity are revolutionizing our view of human nature. New York: Basic Books. ((Chapter 6 in that book is titled “subselves” and chapters 7 and 8 explore the implications of these ideas for motivation and cognitive biases)).
Kenrick, D.T., Neuberg, S.L., Griskevicius, V., Becker, D.V., Schaller, M. (2010). Goal-Driven Cognition and Functional Behavior: The Fundamental Motives Framework. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19, 63-67.
Kenrick, D.T., & White, A.E. (2011). One self divided or multiple selves dissociated. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 34, 29-30.
McCullough, M. E., Kurzban, R., & Tabak, B. A. (2010). Evolved mechanisms for revenge and forgiveness. In P. R. Shaver and M. Mikulincer (eds.), Understanding and reducing aggression, violence, and their consequences (pp. 221-239). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association. ((Hit the link on McCullough’s name for his page on revenge and forgiveness, and more links to some of his papers on these very discrepant aspects of our emotional makeup)).
