Is Compassion Smart?

You may have heard of the “Flynn effect”. Named for intelligence researcher James Flynn, this refers to the sustained rise in worldwide IQ scores over the course of the 20th century. IQ tests are standardized by administering the test to a sample group and setting their average score to 100, with a standard deviation of 15. When updated versions of the test are standardized, a new, usually younger sample group takes the updated test and their averaged results are set to 100. Researchers noticed that when these younger subjects take the older tests, they routinely score well above average, indicating a higher IQ than previous generations. This is why the exams must continue to be recalibrated.

Prior to the publication of Flynn’s findings in 1987, the lion’s share of cognitive scientists considered IQ to be immutable. A rising average baseline called for explanation, however. They most commonly pointed to superior education and nutrition as the cause. These factors likely contributed a great deal, but they don’t solve the puzzle entirely. Flynn noted that on exams which assessed the subject matter traditionally covered in primary school (vocabulary, arithmetic, historical knowledge) there was little improvement over the same period. In the domain of abstract thinking (pattern recognition, analogies), particularly as measured by Raven’s Progressive Matrices exam, test scores had skyrocketed. Flynn estimated an average increase of three points every ten years over the course of the 20th century.

Observers eventually noticed that this soaring capacity for abstract thinking coincided with the rapid expansion of “modernity”, particularly in the realm of education. Whereas premodern education had focused almost entirely on practical instruction geared toward the community’s immediate needs, modern education introduced abstract, symbolic representation with the tools of literacy and numeracy. Words and numbers had obviously been in use for over a thousand years prior to the twentieth century, but their application was largely restricted to concrete cases. As modern education developed, teachers began to present Numbers as entities which existed apart from any particular instance of two horses or five wagons. Similarly, the lexicon quickly came to incorporate words that signified concepts or standards. I.E., “justice”, “liberty”, “law”. This same movement followed the arrival of perspective in painting, the artist now adding a third person view to his repertoire.

Even the nature of religion changed, particularly in the Judeo-Christian tradition’s tale of the covenant between God and his people. The Israelites conceived of Yaweh as the personification of justice, the one who makes covenants — an abstract ideal. This “modern” picture of God came to supplant the ancient panacea of human-like deities, drawing the interior psyche away from egocentric scheming and toward Truth. This shift is broadly referred to as the axial revolution and it occurred partly due to the invention of intellectual tools such as numeracy and literacy, which afforded a third-person view of cognition. This detached perspective revealed that much of common thought was riddled with error, and it hastened the development of interior examination and transformation. The Jewish prophets upbraided the Israelites for their “hardness of heart”, exhorting them to repentance. Socrates invited his fellow Athenians to critically examine their presuppositions, to confront their rampant self-deception. Socrates’s disciple Plato went further, blazing the western world’s first trail to enlightenment by means of union with the Ideas. Modernity continues this path: the search for the universal laws of nature and the mind.

To put it in psychological terms, the axial revolution prompted humanity’s arrival at Piaget’s “Formal Operational” stage. An aspect of Piaget’s theory of childhood cognitive development, the formal operational stage is the final step in an adolescent’s intellectual maturation. Its predecessor, the concrete operational stage, finds a child capable of logical reasoning, but only as applied to physical objects. For instance, children come to grasp concepts such as conservation, whereby the quantity of a substance remains static despite changes in appearance, as in the case of transferring water from small glass to a large glass, or an equal number of cookies spaced closer or farther apart. Children also ascertain how to classify items based on their properties. They cannot, however, apply these new conceptions to abstract quantities like number itself, nor can they reason through a hypothetical problem in which no concrete objects are present. They must see it to believe it.

Once they reach the formal operational stage, children become capable of abstract thought, able to utilize underlying logical rules and employ inferential and hypothetical reasoning. One can now think about things one has not experienced and draw conclusions from these hypothetical considerations. Researchers that have visited the few remaining premodern tribes have reported a marked inability to perform this type of inferential reasoning. For instance, a researcher posed the following to a Ukrainian villager: “If all polar bears are white, then what color are the polar bears in England?” to which the man replied, “It is impossible to say because I have not been to England.” He was unable to make a connection based solely on the logic of the words, confident only in his experience.

Those who have documented premodern people’s transition to modernity have noted that even brief exposure to modern education tends to awaken the capacity for inferential reasoning and for entertaining hypotheticals. Once we become clued in to the patterns and and properties that underlie phenomena, we latch onto it quickly. Since numeracy and literacy are now the primary emphasis in elementary school, we become accustomed to seeing our thoughts and reasoning externalized, which makes it much easier to spot the patterns and errors. Widespread modern education seems to be responsible for the skyrocketing IQ scores of the 20th century. The change is no illusory — we are smarter than our great-grandparents.

Beyond elevated intelligence, one of the noteworthy features of the modern era has been the liberation of women and slaves, as well as a shift toward democratic societies founded upon the bedrock of individual rights. These changes unfolded rapidly, and were largely due to agitation on the part of the young. One wonders if there is a correlation between this unprecedented rise in intelligence and the surge of liberation movements. They seem to be correlated, but can we provide any plausible evidence of causation?

Why would a collective arrival at the formal operational stage incite a concurrent emancipation of the long-marginalized? Perhaps we can attain some insight by briefly considering the nature of compassion. Commonly, we consider compassion to be a recognition of another’s suffering and a desire to alleviate their misery. Compassion has its roots in empathy, whereby we understand the feelings of others. Humans are naturally egocentric, however, so this capacity only emerges with practice and development. Notice the blank stare you receive when you ask a small child to consider how another person might feel. Because they must work so hard simply to survive and grow, infants and toddlers are supremely egocentric. This self-centeredness dissipates with age, the child first extending her sense of self to the family and later to the tribe or group. Prior to modernity, this was often the extent of human development.

What is required to understand another’s feelings? Most would say that it is the ability to “put yourself in their shoes.” If you are incapable of hypothetical reasoning, or of taking a third-person view of a situation, you will be unable to perform this mental transformation. Like the premodern villagers, you cannot apply logic to anything but your own experience. Such a dilemma underpinned male apathy to women’s liberation or white hostility toward the civil rights movement. To ask men, “How would you feel about these social arrangements if you were a woman?” would have been meaningless to those with little exposure to modernity, because such a question requires the use of a hypothetical. You have to adjust your perspective from that of a man to a woman. A premodern mind will dismiss such a suggestion, responding, “But I’m not a woman and never will be. Therefore, I have no reason to entertain this thought.” They are incapable of compassion. Once large numbers of young people had imbibed such hypothetical reasoning from the cradle, attitudes rapidly changed.

All the great moral teachers possessed this type of intelligence in spades, and made it a foundational element of their appeals for compassion. Jesus exhorted his followers to love their neighbors as themselves and to love their enemies. Jesus also asked his followers to see his face in that of every indigent. Martin Luther King exposed the logical fallacy of stating that all men were created equal while simultaneously denying the rights of man to large segments of the population based on an accidental, not essential, difference. Nelson Mandela insisted that he was able to survive decades in prison by nurturing compassion for his captors, understanding that they were also in pain. Alexandr Solzhenitsyn warned that the line between good and evil runs through every heart — each of us is just as capable of oppression as we are of love.

This makes me think that intellectual development is a prerequisite for moral development. IQ is certainly no guarantee of compassion, to be sure. History is replete with individuals of prodigious intelligence but abominable morals (Himmler, Stalin, Ted Kacynski). I would maintain that it is still necessary for moral advance. We find plentiful examples of kindness and simple compassion among people of limited cognitive ability, but we find few unintelligent moral champions. The individuals who foment the awakening of collective compassion always utilize formal operational reasoning to arrive at their convictions, while making use of the hypothetical in their appeals. They invariably call for the transcendence of the ego, and this is unattainable without formal operational thinking.

There seems to be a trend in current educational theory which believes that logical intelligence is a hindrance to empathy and charity. The head and the heart are so often portrayed as opposites, implying that rationality is coldhearted; it is only by cultivating emotion and appealing to sentiments that we may hope to amend our moral standards. We have deemphasized the importance of analogy and the necessity of abstract categorization. This is folly, because it is precisely through such intellectual exercise that we realize compassion. We become benevolent because we see that it is correct — to live otherwise is to live in error. The more scorn we heap upon IQ intelligence, the more we can expect to witness the recurrence of ethnocentrism and selfishness. One may fairly say, to quote John Erskine, that we have “a moral obligation to be intelligent.”