Having finally stepped down after more than two weeks into a sexting scandal that grew exponentially tawdrier, Anthony Weiner still has his defenders.
“The Anthony Weiner that I have known throughout the years is a good man,” wrote Rabbi Gerard C. Skolnik in The Jewish Week on June 9 — the same day polls showed Weiner’s constituents preferred he stay in office, by 56% to 33% (12% were unsure).
This week, in her first interview, Mildred Baena — Arnold Schwarzenegger’s longtime mistress, maid and mother of his 13-year-old love child — insisted that Schwarzenegger “is a good man.”
At his personal and professional nadir, disgraced former presidential candidate John Edwards was described by his cuckolded, cancer-stricken wife and his mistress — also the mother of his secret child, whose paternity he denied for one year — as “a good man.”
Pathetically delusional as these protestations may sound — the reflexive push-back of the complicit or deceived — new research into the nature of character tells us that, in each of these cases, it very well may be, in part, true.
“People have this view of character as something that’s formed pretty early and is pretty rigid — and that just isn’t the case,” says David DeSteno, co-author of “Out of Character: Surprising Truths About the Liar, Cheat, Sinner (and Saint) Lurking in All of Us.” “Science has shown that people’s moral behavior is more situationally variable than ever.”
The word itself originates from the Greek kharakter, defined as “etching” or “imprint on the soul.” The Stoics believed that good character required constant self-control and that constant self-control evinced good character. Hence, a person who would indulge his baser instincts was, by definition, a person of poor character. The modern understanding of character isn’t necessarily that different, but it is more complicated, nuanced and, at times, in flux.
“Science has proven that we’re hard-wired to make ethical decisions,” says Mark Matousek, author of “Ethical Wisdom: What Makes Us Good.” “Our essential nature is moral. But it is also mutable.”
We are, all of us, constantly at odds between impulses that have beneficial short-term effects and damaging ones long term. It’s the function of our prehistoric selves, when indulging a short-term urge — sex with an alpha, eating everything available, lying and cheating — served our very survival. But our overarching endurance as a species demanded more sophisticated thinking, decisions made with the long view in mind, ones that would cultivate a sense of trust, community, a social contract that, when breached, had consequences.
“Ultimately, the mind is operating with two mechanisms,” says DeSteno. “Everyone wants what’s good for them in the here and now, yet humans are happiest in strong, stable relationships. If you have the opportunity to mate with someone with really good genes, biology tells you that that’s what you should do. In the long term, however, sleeping with someone who’s not your spouse may not be good for you.”
Neuroscience tells us that our moral reasoning resides in two parts of the brain — the limbic system, commonly referred to as the “reptilian” part of the brain and the locus of our pleasure center — and the much more sophisticated neocortex, which works something like the brain’s CEO. Daily, in ways big and small, we toggle between the two.
“Temptations saturate our environment, and it takes enormous energy to exert executive control,” says Hara Estroff Marano, who wrote the cover story on character in this month’s Psychology Today. (Adolescents, with their underdeveloped neocortexes, are much more inclined to take ill-advised risks and think mainly in the short term.) “If you’re overtired, exhausted, had a bad day, you’re much more susceptible to violating your own intentions, to feeling like the world owes you something.”
Yet we often have difficulty relating our own moral failings to those committed by famous or accomplished people. One of the most common refrains throughout the Weiner scandal has been “But he’s a congressman” — which, ironically, elevates the standards that should apply to him while allowing us to lower those that should apply to us.
The easy explanation, of course, is that we’re shocked by such blatant, outsize hubris and hypocrisy. It follows, however, that we’re also shocked that we were so easily fooled, and the conclusion that most of us draw — understandable but in many cases unfair — is that what these people were caught doing reveals who they were all along. Unless you’re dealing with a sociopath or a malignant narcissist — and both are rare — it’s not that simple.
“If we categorize someone as a good person, “ DeSteno says, “that’s supposed to be it. But character is a spectrum, a continuum. There aren’t rigid boundaries around selflessness or selfishness. For us to be able to carry on with others and have relationships based on trust and cooperation, we all have to believe we’re good people. Once in a while, we’re going to see ways we can get away with something — whether it’s satisfying a sexual urge or doing something unethical to get a promotion — and we’ll do it. Biologically, that’s good; that’s the way our brains are wired. We’re not saying that morally it’s good.”
You see it on television, where, over the past 12 years — since the dawn of “The Sopranos” — it seems that the kind of characters we’re most drawn to are capable of great good and incomprehensible bad. While Tony Soprano was revealed at the series’ end to be a sociopath, most viewers would agree that his wife wasn’t, nor were his family members, nor were all of his associates.
Why do we have such elasticity, such a capacity for marveling at the competing urges and conflicting decisions that make up the whole of a person only in fiction?
“We’re willing to look at complexity in TV or the movies or fiction because it’s safer,” Matousek says. “In real life, we’re less sophisticated.”
We’re also less inclined to identify ourselves with a transgressor in real life, and there’s an evolutionary rationale for this: The excoriation of someone who has broken the social contract, no matter how hyperbolic or hypocritical, serves a larger purpose.
“We judge,” says Psychology Today’s Marano, “because social shame and opprobrium are meant to keep people in line, to remind that there are consequences when we violate social standards. And that’s a perfectly fine function, although it tends to be hypocritical, because most of us are just doing our best.”