This week, I continue to discuss ideas from participants at the Cheltenham science festival as to what consciousness might be for. Another theme that emerged from discussions is the idea that consciousness facilitates altruistic or social behaviour. Here are some of those suggestions.
“Consciousness is why we look out for each other in our village.”
“Self-awareness gives us ethics, because we think about the well-being of others.”
“Self-awareness makes us sentient and we have the ability to utilise this to create, learn and connect with others, assisting with our social nature.”
In light of these ideas, we might ask: if consciousness does facilitate altruistic and social behaviour, then what, in particular, must we be conscious of?
One candidate is that consciousness enables us to be aware that other people have a cognitive life much like that which we experience ourselves – that’s to say that they have beliefs, desires, experiences, intentions, projects and plans, albeit with different content to our own. Most philosophers think that we can’t ourselves experience someone else’s desires or intentions directly, but we can theorise or imagine that they have these attitudes, perhaps because of what they say and how they act. Psychologists call this activity having a ‘Theory of Mind’ (‘ToM’). Perhaps the ability to imagine that someone else has beliefs and desires guides social behaviour?
We can explore this experimentally. We’re able to chart when children start to develop ToM using the ‘false belief’ test. In this test, participants observe one experimental confederate conceal an object in a box, before leaving the room. A second confederate then enters, takes the object out of the first box and places it inside a second box, before also leaving. Then the first confederate returns, and participants are asked where she will look for the object. Participants who say ‘in the first box’ are interpreted to be theorising that because the first confederate did not see the second confederate move the object, she still has the (now false) belief that the object will be where she left it, and will act accordingly: They are theorising on the basis that the first confederate did not have access to the information about the devious second confederate that they did, and so has beliefs that are different to participant’s own beliefs. Children typically pass the false belief test at around five years of age (Callaghan et al., 2005).
However, research on ToM and altruistic behaviour suggests that the relationship between the two is complex. Some studies suggest that ToM plays a role in enhancing sharing and other pro-social behaviour (Moore et al. 1998; Moore and Macgillivray, 2004; Takagishi et al., 2010). Other studies find no relationship between ToM and altruistic behaviour (Keskin and Jones, 2011) and others still find a negative relationship, where ToM competence correlates with reduced sharing behaviour (Cowell et al., 2015). The differing designs of these studies, and the sharing activities therein may explain the divergence in results, but, reasonably, the relationship between ToM and altruism is not straightforward.
But perhaps the Cheltenham science festival participants had something more specific in mind than the ability to theorise about other minds – perhaps consciousness enables us to empathise with other people, the ability to appreciate and perhaps even simulate another person’s cognitive and emotional life from their standpoint. And perhaps it is this ability that promotes altruistic and social behaviour. There are a number of procedures designed to measure empathy. Subjects might be asked about their experiences, or fill out out self-report questionnaires such as the Empathy Quotient (Baron-Cohen and Wheelwright, 2004). Other procedures measure facial expressions, gestures and vocal patters identified with empathetic responses (Zhou, Valiente, and Eisenberg, 2003) or physiological signs such as heart rate and skin conductance (Reiss, 2010). And, indeed, a number of studies show that empathy correlates with altruistic behaviours on a variety of measures (Krebs, 1975; Baston et al., 1988; Kruger, 2003).
The viewpoints under discussion might face a challenge if we find any altruistic behaviours that occur without conscious representation. One line of response might be that whilst consciousness might not be necessary for initiating all cases of altruistic behaviour, it still facilitates at least some altruistic acts. More generally, our ability to theorise about and to empathise with other minds seems deeply intertwined with our narratives and practices of helping behaviour, and perhaps that in itself is important.
