I’ve been railing against the futility of trying to figure out why we behave as we do for several decades. Now I’ve come across the clearest explanation yet of why why (or why backward, as I refer to it) is a gigantic can-of-worms question that’s just not useful to ask in regard to behavior change.
This is a long quote from Robert Sapolsky’s book Behave, which, at 717 pages, is also a long book. But so far I find that it’s definitely worth reading.
A behavior just occurred. Why did it happen? Your first category of explanation is going to be a neurobiological one. What went on in that person’s brain a second before the behavior happened? Now pull out to a slightly larger field of vision, your next category of explanation, a little earlier in time. What sight, sound, or smell in the previous seconds to minutes triggered the nervous system to produce that behavior? On to the next explanatory category. What hormones acted hours to days earlier to change how responsive that individual was to the sensory stimuli that trigger the nervous system to produce the behavior? And by now you’ve increased your field of vision to be thinking about neurobiology and the sensory world of our environment and short-term endocrinology in trying to explain what happened.
And you just keep expanding. What features of the environment in the prior weeks to years changed the structure and function of that person’s brain and thus changed how it responded to those hormones and environmental stimuli? Then you go further back to the childhood of the individual, their fetal environment, then their genetic makeup. And then you increase the view to encompass factors larger than that one individual—how has culture shaped the behavior of people living in that individual’s group?—what ecological factors helped shape that culture—expanding and expanding until considering events umpteen millennia ago and the evolution of that behavior.
…
Any given type of explanation is the end product of the influences that preceded it. … If you say, “the behavior occurred because of the release of neurochemical Y in the brain,” you are also saying, “The behavior occurred because the heavy secretion of hormone X this morning increased the levels of neurochemical Y.” You’re also saying, “The behavior occurred because the environment in which that person was raised made her brain more likely to release neurochemical Y in response to certain types of stimuli.” And you’re also saying, “…because of the gene that codes for the particular version of neurochemical Y.” And if you’ve so much as whispered the word “gene,” you’re also saying, “…and because of the millennia of factors that shaped the evolution of that particular gene.” And so on.
It is impossible to conclude that a behavior is caused by a gene, a hormone, a childhood trauma, because the second you invoke one type of explanation, you are de facto invoking them all.
Don’t Ask Me Why I declared in a post on this topic published more than five and a half years ago, in which I commented that it isn’t just that our answers are incomplete and often erroneous…
…once we get an answer that seems satisfying, we close the door on that particular line of inquiry. Once we get a good-enough answer, the cause-and-effect link is cemented into place. Occasionally someone might say, “Well, that’s as good an explanation as any,” but that probably applies to the vast majority of our explanations: one is probably just as good (or bad) as another. Yet we believe in whatever answers we’ve arrived at, and we proceed as if they are the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
It isn’t that I believe there are no answers or explanations to be determined. But as Sapolsky puts it, explanation for any behavior involves a “whole multifactorial arc.” Any given type of explanation is the end product of the influences that preceded it. It’s unlikely you or I are going to have access to all those influences.
So I aim to focus my attention on what questions—and on asking why forward instead of backward.
