The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,360

can imagine, it’s pretty terrifying. I mean, every time I cough or feel a bit run down, I wonder, is this it? Is this the beginning—you know—of the slide? Sometimes I feel pretty good, but in the back of my mind it’s always there. Any day I could take a turn for the worse [pause]. And I know that—at least right now—there’s no escape. I know they’re trying to find a cure—and I know that we all die. But it all seems so unfair. So horrible. Like a nightmare. [pause] I mean, I feel like I was just starting to live, and now, instead, I’m dying. [pause] It can really get you down.60

Later, when the students were asked to fill out a questionnaire on attitudes toward people with AIDS, the perspective-takers had become more sympathetic than the technical evaluators, showing that sympathy had indeed spread from the individual to the class she represented. But there was an important twist. The effect of perspective-taking on sympathy was gated by moralization, as we might expect from the fact that sympathy is not an automatic reflex. When Julie confessed to having contracted the disease after a summer of unprotected promiscuous sex, the perspective-takers were more sympathetic to the broad class of victims of AIDS, but they were no more sympathetic to the narrower class of young women with AIDS. Similar results came out of a study in which students of both sexes listened to the plight of a man who became homeless either because he had come down with an illness or because he had grown tired of working.

The team of psychologists then pushed the outside of the envelope by seeing how much sympathy they could induce for convicted murderers.61 It’s not that anyone necessarily wants people to develop warm feelings toward murderers. But at least some degree of sympathy for the unsympathetic may be necessary to oppose cruel punishments and frivolous executions, and we can imagine that a grain of sympathy of this sort may have led to the reforms of criminal punishment during the Humanitarian Revolution. Batson didn’t press his luck by trying to induce sympathy for a psychopathic predator, but he artfully invented a typical crime-blotter homicide in which the perpetrator had been provoked by a victim who was not much more likable than he was. Here is James’s story of how he came to kill his neighbor:Pretty soon, things went from bad to worse. He’d dump garbage over the fence into my back yard. I sprayed red paint all over the side of his house. Then he set fire to my garage with my car in it. He knew that car was my pride and joy. I really loved it and kept it in great shape. By the time I woke up and they got the fire out, the car was ruined—totaled! And he just laughed! I went crazy—not yelling; I didn’t say anything, but I was shaking so hard I could hardly stand up, I decided right then that he had to die. That night when he came home, I was waiting on his front porch with my hunting rifle. He laughed at me again and said I was chicken, that I didn’t have the guts to do it. But I did. I shot him four times; he died right there on the porch. I was still standing there holding the rifle when the cops came.

[Interviewer: Do you regret doing it?]

Now? Sure. I know that murder is wrong and that nobody deserves to die like that, not even him. But at the time all I wanted was to make him pay—big—and to get him out of my life. [Pause] When I shot him, I felt this big sense of relief and release. I felt free. No anger; no fear; no hate. But that feeling lasted only a minute or two. He was the one that was free; I was going to be in prison for the rest of my life. [Pause] And here I am.

The perspective-takers did feel a bit more sympathy for James himself than did the technical evaluators, but it translated into just a sliver of a more positive attitude toward murderers in general.

But then there was a twist on the twist. A week or two later the participants got a phone call out of the blue from a pollster who was doing a survey on prison reform. (The caller was in cahoots with the experimenters, but none of the students figured this out.) Tucked into