Tag Archives: behaviour

Hard wired 15: The unthinking mental module

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It’s easy to understand how humans and other species evolved physical characteristics as a result of adaptation and natural selection. Helpful variations confer their advantages down through the generations whilst less helpful variations die out. So longer-legged (fast-running) wild horses outrun their predators but those with overly long legs suffer broken shafts and are eaten. The optimum leg length is maintained by natural selection. That’s straightforward enough.

But what about mental and behavioural evolution? Evolved psychological traits are a little harder to grasp. To make sense of this fascinating topic it’s helpful to begin by considering evolved animal behaviours…. animal instincts, in other words.

Animal instincts

The following examples of instincts from the animal world are directly analogous to human behaviours that are often described as ‘just human nature’:

  • Social (non reproductive), sexual behaviours (including promiscuous chimps and mutually masturbatory bonobos);
  • Protective behaviours from cats with kittens to soldier ants defending their nests;
  • Slave making behaviours such as ants carrying off pupae;
  • Parasitic behaviours such as cuckoos laying eggs in the nests of other species;
  • Flight distances that determine how close a gazelle will let the lion approach before it flees (abandoning its meal);
  • The Ichneumon wasp cruelly ‘sacrificing’ caterpillars of other species so that its own young can thrive.

It’s unlikely that all these creatures are fully aware of the implications of their actions – they act unconsciously and with sometimes ruthless efficiency. That’s instinct.

Homo sapiens shares these same instincts, often with just as little awareness of their true motivation.

These instincts – these ‘mental modules’ , are just as influential for our physical behaviours (homemaking, status-seeking) as they are for our psychological behaviours (paranoia, pattern-seeking, deference to authority).

Robert Wright’s acclaimed book The moral animal provides an accessible and detailed account of mental modules, using the life of Charles Darwin himself to illustrate the point. I won’t do the book justice here (I’ve read it twice so far and I still haven’t taken it all in). But I will try to give an outline. Here’s just one example…

Loyalty

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Most people like the idea of loyalty – in fact they value it. Governments and religions, businesses and family groups alike consider it a great virtue. And yet even a moment of thought shows that in truth, loyalty is far from a universal virtue in the modern world and may actually be better thought of as a vice.

Why loyalty is a vice

People generally behave differently toward members of their own group than toward others. This is loyalty. So freemasons will favour other freemasons when seeking employees and racists give preference to strangers of their particular skin colour even though they know absolutely nothing more about them than. It doesn’t take much to realise just how unfair and unethical these sorts of distinctions, these group loyalties are. These are the more obvious of loyalty’s problems. There are other, less obvious but equally damaging examples too.

image Imagine a support worker who sees a visitor beating a vulnerable care home resident with a stick. What should the support worker do?

The answer, of course, is obvious – he should report the assault in the knowledge that adult protection is his legal obligation. This would allow the law to step in, protect the victim and prosecute the abuser. There’s nothing very difficult about that.

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But what if the abuser was a friend and colleague? What if the abuser was the victim’s husband disciplining his wife in accordance with religious doctrine (a religion such as Islam, for example, which the support worker also followed)?

The law is still the same. The abuse is still the same but the loyalties will be different. And that’s where the problems begin.

Loyalty prevents us from doing what we believe to be right. When the support worker fails to report their colleague or fellow worshipper through loyalty they make continued abuse more likely. The same is true of ‘no grassing’ cultures where victims and bystanders alike are seen as disloyal to the group (think of schoolyards) or some vague notion of honour (think of adult crime). Loyalty that prevents reporting of offences is no more than an abusers’ charter.

And yet that’s the whole point of loyalty – to get people to bend or even break the rules. Without loyalty people are likely to do what they believe to be right. Loyalty simply interferes with right action. Far from being a virtue it is a major vice, a cause of great unfairness and superficial prejudice. So why do humans across the globe value it so highly?

Loyalty as a universal human trait (hard wired)

Remember our earlier discussion about the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation (EEA)? That’s the environment in which most of our species’ characteristics were developed in response to the prevailing selection pressures.

In that environment early humans (and their evolutionary predecessors) lived in small groups where survival. of every individual (and their genes) depended upon the survival of every other individual. They were truly interdependent in ways that modern humans generally can only imagine. In order to survive they had to help each other, ensure mutual co-operation and, if they came into contact with other human groups, make sure that their own kin didn’t lose out. The principle of loyalty was born.

The mental module of loyalty

We covered heuristics in an earlier post too. The mental shortcut that gets us to solve problems without having to think about them. Loyalty is an heuristic. It’s a mental module hardwired since the pleistocene that says

“Favour members of your own group”.

In the early days of human evolution that may have been a vital principle but today it’s just unfair and unethical. Nationalism, sexism, racism and a host of other ‘isms’ really just boil down to arbitrary loyalties based upon irrelevancies such as skin colour, religious cultural tradition and place of birth.

And now the good news

The universal nature of loyalty based cultures shows us that this particular mental module is hard wired. And yet many people have managed to get beyond these petty loyalties and act in accordance with their conscience instead. This must give us cause for optimism.

The fact that whistle-blowers exist and that most people have moved beyond racism shows that it is possible to overcome hard-wired mental modules. I suspect that greater understanding will go a long way toward this goal as we discover more and more about the various mental modules bequeathed to us by our earliest human and pre human ancestors. Knowledge is power. If we want to outgrow the primitive behaviour of Homo habilis we’ll do well to try to understand him/her first.

I don’t care: Belligerence and behavioural boundaries

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Sometimes the only way to protect the therapeutic relationship is temporarily to behave as though you have no concern whatsoever for the other person’s point of view. This seems counter-intuitive and it most certainly doesn’t ‘feel’ good but how we feel is often far less important than what we do.

It’s important not to allow anyone to use our emotions against us in order to influence our therapeutic decision-making. That’s a form of emotional blackmail. It’s also a very common behaviour strategy that people use because it often works.

You probably won’t be able to stop someone using this sort of underhand strategy with others but you certainly can stop them using it on you. The trick is to show them that it won’t work and then invite them to bring something better to your therapeutic relationship instead.

Expectation

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Care workers need to learn from past experiences.
The best predictor of future behaviour is past behaviour.
But the people we work with can change too.
The whole point of much of our work is to help them to change.
How can we balance past behaviours and future potential?
How do we promote change without becoming naive and vulnerable?

Complete the contact form below to arrange training for your staff.

Introducing the cognitive model

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Excuse the voice – I had a headcold when I made this. Hopefully it’s still clear enough.

This video outlines the basic idea behind the cognitive model and why, far from being beyond our control, human emotions, behaviours, situations and thoughts are entirely ours to manage and to master.

Beginning with the basic quadrangle of thoughts, feelings, physiology and behaviour we use different examples of situations that people find themselves in to demonstrate how making a change in any one of these four areas of experience can affect all the rest. Then we look at the role of core beliefs, conditional assumptions and the activating events for emotional and cognitive crises that don’t always make a great deal of sense either to us or to those around us.

By following the structure laid out in the cognitive model (the basis of CBT) we can understand precisely how people come to have the negative thoughts they have, what beliefs underpin their emotional distress and begin to see (often with surprising ease) just what to do about it.

That has to be worth 15 minutes of your time!

If you’d like to arrange training for your staff please fill in the form here…

Should psychiatrists diagnose personality disorder?

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Personality disorder is a controversial diagnosis. There are no blood tests or physical criteria confirming personality disorder. In fact there’s no real evidence to suggest that personality disorder is a medical condition at all. So why do psychiatrists diagnose personality disorder? More importantly… should they?

Here we consider the roots of personality disorder diagnoses from the Moral defective of a century ago to the 3 personality disorder clusters of today. We look at the way personality disorder is diagnosed through behaviours, emotions and enduring patterns of response to society and we consider the advantages of understanding a person’s personality traits. Knowledge is power.

The more we know the more likely we are to be able to help. But we must be careful. Too often the diagnosis of personality disorder is used as an excuse to write a person off as incurable, hopeless or even undeserving. That’s the legacy we’ve been left by our Edwardian and Victorian predecessors.

If we are to do right by the personality disordered patients of today and in the future we need to embrace the understanding this diagnosis can bring but reject the pejorative notions of undeservingness, incurability and hopelesness that all too often come along with it.

To arrange training for your staff please complete the contact form below…

Privileged glimpses 7: What people say

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This series of blog posts first appeared a few years ago on a now defunct blog called ‘Care Training’. It was inspired by the training maxim of ‘making the unconscious conscious’. It is intended to take what really ought to be the most basic principles of health and social care and put them down on paper. The series isn’t only an exercise in stating the obvious though whatever the title might suggest. It’s actually intended as a philosophical foundation manual for workers and informal carers to help them get their care ‘on track’ and then to keep it that way.

Just a quick post today. This one is as obvious as it gets.

What people say may not be what people mean

There are many reasons why people in health and social care settings don’t say what they mean and it’s worth taking a little time to think before deciding whether or not to take what they say at face value.

Here are just a few possibilities to consider…

People may be too frightened or insecure to tell the truth. Or they may know that what they have to say will be unpopular. Many would argue that fear of exposure and a basically unpopular message explains why people are often less than honest about their true intentions. The truth may be too problematic (or the other person’s reaction too scary) to admit to honestly.

The service-user who is always satisfied with the care we give them may genuinely be happy with what we do but, realistically speaking, the person who never feels dissatisfied is pretty rare. That’s why inspectors such as those from the CQC sometimes worry when an organisation receives no complaints at all. Are the service-users too intimidated to say what they actually mean.

There is a power imbalance between nurse, carer and service-user and it’s easy for people to be intimidated by that imbalance – even if it’s unintended. If it is intended, if the nurse is a bully for example then it’s even more of a problem.

If nobody in your service ever complains it’s a good idea to ask yourself why. You may want to look beyond their words and understand the fear that prevents them from being honest.

The other possibility I want to consider here is the ‘challenging behaviour’ strategy of taking people at their word even if you don’t think they’re being honest.

Sometimes people will tell you things they don’t mean because they have a hidden agenda. In those cases you may want to consider acting as if they’re being honest with you even though you think they may not. This more or less guarantees that the solution you give them, although appropriate for the problem they stated will be unlikely to match the subtext. Stick to the stated problem until they tell you what they really mean.

This means that over time they learn that it’s better to be clear and to be honest.

Privileged glimpses 6: Don’t blame people for their disorders

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This series of blog posts first appeared a few years ago on a now defunct blog called ‘Care Training’. It was inspired by the training maxim of ‘making the unconscious conscious’. It is intended to take what really ought to be the most basic principles of health and social care and put them down on paper. The series isn’t only an exercise in stating the obvious though whatever the title might suggest. It’s actually intended as a philosophical foundation manual for workers and informal carers to help them get their care ‘on track’ and then to keep it that way.

Don’t blame people with disorders for behaving like people with disorders

l_300_168_BFB62138-883B-4070-8F84-F868E3CC5219.jpegOne of the fundamental themes throughout almost all of my writing is the idea that there is no ‘us and them’ and that people are just people. We are all fallible and we are also all capable of improving ourselves. This means that it is never OK to assume that people with mental health problems can never overcome them. Those of us who work in mental health services have an obligation to work toward improved functioning and coping skills development. That obligation includes a duty to believe that the people we work with are capable of change given the right circumstances, opportunities and motivations.

Unfortunately there is a downside to this approach. Some mental health workers use the belief that ‘there is no us and them’ to justify unrealistic expectations of their service users. It is true that people can achieve great things regardless of diagnosis but it is also true that people with mental health problems are unlikely to function as well as those who are free of such problems in the short term. It takes time to overcome our difficulties and there is no value (or logic) in expecting people who have problems to act as though they had not.

And yet some mental health workers, of all grades and professions seem unable to separate potential coping skills from current achievement. They expect their service-users to behave as though they had already overcome their problems and then blame them when they do not. This is not only lazy thinking, it is evidence of severely limited understanding of mental disorders, the process of recovery and the role of mental health workers.

When we blame our service-users for behaving like service-users we recreate the same sort of invalidation that brought many of them into our care in the first place. Rather than assisting people to develop better coping strategies this attitude further damages service-users and serves to trap them in their existing circumstances and psychological difficulties. Our job is to help people to develop beyond their problems, not to judge them for having those problems in the first place.

Don’t blame people with mental disorders for behaving like people with mental disorders.