Great article in the Times about how our brains are hard-wired, not just for retaliation against injury, but for disproportionate retaliation. Regarding a psychological experiment where test subjects were instructed to lightly push each other over and over again with equal force:

What began as a game of soft touches quickly became a game of moderate pokes and then hard prods, even though both volunteers were doing their level best to respond in kind.

Each volunteer was convinced that he was responding with equal force and that for some reason the other volunteer was escalating. Neither realized that the escalation was the natural byproduct of a neurological quirk that causes the pain we receive to seem more painful than the pain we produce, so we usually give more pain than we have received.

Science again illustrates the self-deception of human beings. Perhaps this escalation was beneficial to our ancestors (or perhaps it really is just a side effect of how our brains work), but in this modern world of handguns and nucelar weapons… well, I’m not exactly optimistic. The article mentions the growing sectarian murders in Iraq and the war in Israel/Lebanon as two particularly current and depressing examples of the kind of violence this “quirk” can lead to in the wrong situation.

It seems to me that we are always going to have conflicts and disagreements between people, and that as long as we allow standard behaviors like retaliation and escalation, its unlikely we’ll ever achieve anything close to peace for humanity. Every conflict is a potential future war, and the only way to break the cycle is to change our minds about what is the right way to deal with violence. I don’t know how to do that, but understanding how these processes manipulate our own behavior is certainly a good start.

At least we’ll always have the good examples of Gandhi and King to strive toward.