We’re Not So Special: A new book challenges human exceptionalism

Summary

Suppose that you are walking at night, and you see someone on your side of the street coming toward you, about to pass you. Is his face angry, or is he just thinking seriously about something? Your answer to that question may well depend on the faces that you are used to seeing. If you tend to encounter a lot of very angry faces, your threshold for considering a face “angry” is probably high, and so you might well think: He’s thinking seriously about something. But if the faces you encounter are rarely angry, and if you see a lot of friendly people, you might think: He looks pretty angry to me. The phenomenon I am describing has a name: “prevalence-induced concept change.” It has in fact been demonstrated for judgments about whether faces are angry. When people have seen a lot of very angry faces, they are less likely to perceive arguably angry faces as angry. Prevalence-induced concept change has also been found for ethical judgments: When people see a lot of clearly unethical behavior, they are less likely to characterize arguably unethical behavior as unethical. If, for example, you live in a nation in which corruption is open and rampant, you might not be much agitated when you learn that your neighbors cheat on their taxes. Prevalence-induced concept change should be seen as a demonstration of the immense power of the normal. What people normally see, or see as normal, establishes the baseline against which they make judgments about both facts and values. That principle helps explain challenges to democracy as well. If a nation is experiencing a significant increase in corruption, or a major deterioration in practices of self-government, its citizens might not be much alarmed today about something that would have been horrifying five years previously. Christine Webb, a primatologist at New York University, is focused on “the human superiority complex,” the idea that human beings are just better and more deserving than are members of other species, and on the ex...