94 Book Three

So far, the researchers who study the ‘geography of thought’

have revealed the extent to which where we are shapes who we
are. The sort of person we become depends, to a great extent,
on who we need to be in our particular environment. But that’s
not to say that individual men and women don’t have the power
to change us too. To argue this would be to deny the effect that
Jesus, Aristotle, Confucius and all the other remarkable cultural
leaders we’re to meet on this journey have had on us. The fact
is that when we’re working out who we need to be in order to
get along and get ahead, we’re not just taking our information
from stories. Being tribal animals, we’re also constantly scan-
ning our environment for people who seem to have, in some
way, mastered the secrets of a successful life. The ideal self
we’re looking for doesn’t only exist in fiction and gossip, it’s
also right there in front of us. And these people can be a pow-
erful source of influence. The psychologist Professor Joseph
Henrich writes that the ‘cultural learning’ that comes from
those around us ‘reaches directly into our brains and changes
the neurological values we place on things and people, and in
doing so, it also sets the standards by which we judge our-
selves.’
Our brains identify these leaders by being alert to various
‘cues’ that they, and the people around them, display. A basic
cue we look for is ‘self-similarity’, for the straightforward reason
that we’re more likely to learn salient things by deciding to
follow people who are like us in some fundamental way. (Our
instinct to be drawn to and mimic those who are similar to
ourselves is, sadly, yet another way that we’re automatically
tribal.) Another cue is age, which is especially important for
children. Physical dominance is a cue that can be traced back
to our primal ancestors and was, of course, John Pridmore’s
favoured method of exerting influence. But we also hunt for
two more mercurial qualities that do much to explain not only
the way in which individuals end up having outsized effects

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 The Bad Self 95

on their culture, but the often barmy world of celebrity we

inhabit today. These cues are success and prestige.
Research suggests that we start mimicking people who we
see displaying competence when they’re completing tasks at
around the age of fourteen months. As we grow up these ‘skill
cues’ begin to take on a more symbolic form, as ‘success cues’.
In our hunter-gatherer pasts, it would’ve made sense to copy
the actions of the hunter who wore many necklaces of teeth
made from his kills, for example, as his success cue demon-
strated high competence. It seems likely that designer clothing,
expensive manicures and fast cars are today’s equivalents of
these attention-magnetizing displays. Success cues impress
because of how our brains have evolved. You might argue that
an investment banker’s Ferrari doesn’t signal any kind of excel-
lence you’re interested in – or, indeed, any kind of excellence at
all. That, sadly, is beside the point. This behaviour is automatic
and unconscious. It just happens. (And if you are somehow
immune to the cues that come with wealth, there’ll surely be
another set of success cues that have an equally powerful and
largely hidden effect on you.)
But we don’t just rely on our own sense of who’s skilful and
successful when we work out who to copy. As a highly social,
groupish species, we tend to look at who other people consider
worthy of attention. We’ll note, for a start, that these men and
women have plenty of admirers. Like St Benedict, the world’s
most popular hermit, everyone seems to be somehow drawn to
them. ‘Once people have identified a person as worthy of learn-
ing from,’ writes Henrich, ‘they necessarily need to be around
them, watching, listening and eliciting information through
interaction.’ This chosen person, and the people around them,
will then begin to show ‘prestige cues’. The chosen person’s
body language and speech patterns will show differences.
Others will defer to them in myriad ways, conversationally
and with eye contact. They might give them gifts or help them

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 96 Book Three

with chores, they might curtsy or bow or, as the monks do to

the Pluscarden Abbot, copy them in overt and ritualized ways.
Without realizing it, they’ll often mimic their body language,
mannerisms and vocal patterns.
One of the more sinister ways we mimic and signal our
deference to cultural leaders happens entirely outside of our
conscious awareness. The human voice contains a low-fre-
quency vocal band of 500 hertz that was long considered
useless because, when the higher frequencies are filtered out,
all that’s left is a deep information-less hum. It’s since been
discovered, though, that this hum is actually ‘an unconscious
social instrument’. The dominant person in a social situation
tends to set the level of the hum and everyone else adjusts
theirs to match it. Analyses of twenty-five CNN interviews
given by Larry King found that he changed his hum to match
George Bush and Liz Taylor, signalling his deference to them.
However, Dan Quayle and Spike Lee adjusted to match him.
Perhaps tellingly, in the more prickly interviews, such as that
with Al Gore, neither party accommodated the other.
We’re naturally attracted to prestige cues, and begin to
follow them early. A clever study by a team including Henrich
had pre-schoolers watch a video of two people using the same
toy in different ways. As they were playing with it, two by-
standers entered the room, watched the first person, then the
second person, then ‘preferentially watched’ just one of them.
‘The visual attention of the bystanders provided a “prestige
cue” that seemingly marked one of the two potential models,’
writes Henrich. Afterwards, children were thirteen times more
likely to copy the way the prestige-cued person had used the
toy.
The way we respond to these cues, by automatically defer-
ring and copying, seems to explain one of the stranger facets of
modern celebrity culture. It’s why, for example, the ex-boxer
George Foreman’s view on contraptions that grill meat can
apparently be taken seriously, at least unconsciously, by many

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 The Bad Self 97

of the hundred million customers that have bought them. If some-

one gives out prestige cues, we’re naturally triggered into this
behaviour, especially if that person is part of our perceived in-
group. The mind isn’t worried about whether it actually makes
sense – whether this person’s sphere of excellence is actually
useful in judging the product they happen to be selling – it’s
just a dumb mechanism picking up on cues and behaviour.
All of this leads to a phenomenon that’s sometimes known
as the ‘Paris Hilton effect’. Because we’re wired to direct our
attention towards the people who are already the subject of
attention, we’ll sometimes be drawn to people in the media
without really knowing why. But our being drawn to them
makes the media focus on them even more. We then attend to
them more, then the media attends to them more, and then
there’s a runaway effect, a feedback loop, in which the status of
an essentially nondescript person becomes madly amplified.
So we copy people. We’re helplessly drawn to them. We
identify the ones who seem to know best how to get along
and get ahead, we watch them, we listen to them, we open
our selves to their influence. And then we’ll often internalize
the things they’ve taught us. They have become absorbed into
our model of the perfect self. They are now part of us. And, so,
culture spreads.
*
After lauds, at 4:30 the next morning, I became distracted by a
quiet path that led through the wooden grave markers. Curi-
ous, I followed it. Behind an on old stone wall I came across a
Londoner called Robert. Pale, in his mid-forties with thinning
curly hair, small round glasses and a blue raincoat, he told me
he was staying at Pluscarden because he was considering
becoming a monk. ‘It’s scary,’ he said. ‘But then you think, “Is
it just the Devil trying to put me off?” If you have faith, you
shouldn’t be scared of anything.’
‘Why is it scary?’

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