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Rethinking bankers see, bankers do
K.C. Cole
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TEXT OF COMMENTARY
Kai Ryssdal: Finance ministers from the G-20 countries are meeting today in South Korea. They'll talk about a whole bunch of things -- first among them the ongoing unease in European financial markets. Part of what they're worried about is a repeat of Wall Street circa 2008. When bankers started doing the same thing at the same time -- not lending because everybody else wasn't lending.
Commentator K.C. Cole says they couldn't help themselves.
K.C. Cole: Monkey see, monkey do. It's not a new observation. We're all natural mimics, especially in close-knit groups. Take any bunch of journalists, senators, gangsters, truckers or Wall Street bankers, and you'll find an astonishing array of similarities -- in the way they dress, walk, think, spend money, even raise children.
It's all rather amusing until it gets out of control. That is, when a couple of really bad actors influence a whole religion or industry until "bad actor" becomes the default position. And yes, I'm talking about religious extremists. But I'm also talking about Goldman Sachs and their whole entitled ilk. How did "Bankers Behaving Badly" get to be so "normal" that people barely notice?
Recently, science has thrown its two cents in. Neuroscientists have known for years that if one monkey reaches for a banana, and a second monkey watches, the same neurons fire in the "watching" monkey as in the monkey who grabbed the banana.
Okay, monkeys are monkeys. But this year, for the first time, researchers at UCLA made direct recordings of such mirror neurons at work in the human brain. Humans see, humans do.
There's a definite upside to all this. We cry at weddings, because our mirror neurons get soppy right along with the bride's. We scream in slasher movies, because neurons in our own brains mimic those in the mind of the victim.
Alas, this kind of unconscious mimicry requires absolutely no understanding of the actions or emotions involved, no thought to what we are doing or why. What's worse, we like people who mimic us, so we keep them around, multiplying the effect.
What's this got to do with Bankers Behaving Badly? For starters, bankers could dump that "me too, everybody does it" attitude, and think about what values they're reflecting.
Mirror, mirror on the wall, save us from a big Dow fall.
Ryssdal: K.C. Cole's most recent book is called "Something Incredibly Wonderful Happens."
You may be right about this being a problem in the banking industry. But it's a far worse problem in the Democratic Party--and the political Left in general--and its syncophantic allies in the media. Until the media stops encouraging the notion that the government should--or even should be able to--protect people from the negative consequences of their actions, unscrupulous people--such as the bankers this column condemns--will continue in their corrupt path.
Thanks for this piece. I have often wondered why people resort to the "everyone's doing it" defense, but it makes sense in the context of self-selecting herds. It reminds me of teenagers who are asked why they did something bad. Maybe Wall Street bankers are all stuck at age 16?
As a cognitive neuroscientist familiar with the mirror neuron literature, this piece is probably the worst overstatement and exaggeration of scientific results I have seen from NPR in quite some time. Based on the actual current data from the mirror neuron literature, the idea that mirror neurons could have anything to do with “Bankers Behaving Badly†borders on absurd. While it is correct that the recordings made in the UCLA study identify neurons showing responses similar to the ‘mirror neurons’ in monkeys, the actual role of these neurons in human perception and behavior is largely unknown at this point. To quote from the commentary piece appearing in the same issue of Current Biology as the UCLA study: “What lies in front of us is a number of newer but equally challenging questions. What do mirror neurons do for us?†the implication being of course that we don’t yet know! At this time there is little, or inconclusive, evidence for the high-level functional role (and some would even argue the existence) of a mirror system in human behavior. Ms. Cole greatly overreaches, speculating far beyond the current evidence in a manner that suggests that what she is saying is supported by the science when it is not. This inflation of scientific results to conclusions not supported by current data is all too common in the current media, especially in reporting on neuroscience and neuroimaging. NPR has usually been an exception to this rule (for instance the excellent ATC interview with Dr. Chris Baker on over-interpretation of fMRI data last summer), so I am somewhat surprised by this piece coming from a science writer with the stature of Ms. Cole. I hope that next time more care will be taken.
Hi Kai-
This "phenomena' is not so new or startling. Rupert Sheldrake, an evolutionary biologist, wrote a book called 'The Presence of the Past' that I read in the early 90's. There are a number of later writings of his pointing to this "morphogenic field" behavior in other species (including human primates). Sheldrake has a website if you want to check it out, I was relying on memory initially after hearing this piece and it took a while to recall his name. Behavior often reminds me of a tuning fork...
