A Decade of Humanity

Universities are peculiar places, sequestered from the "real world" and yet expected to make sense of it all. Our world is more confusing and challenging than ever. Though we live in supposedly enlightened times, we all too frequently encounter examples of destructive human behavior. Nuclear, biological and chemical weapons appear to be proliferating worldwide, increasing the inevitability of their use. Prejudice and discrimination remain a way of life for many Americans and millions around the globe. And regardless of one's views on the war in Iraq, the human toll is unmistakably enormous.

How do contemporary academics explain such evils? Despite impressive advances in knowledge over the past century, scholarly efforts to understand our inhumanity to ourselves have been too often isolated from each other, or worse, sensationalized. The 1990s were declared the Decade of the Brain in recognition of the extraordinary new knowledge that was being accumulated in neuroscience. However, breakthroughs in the study of the brain also generated unbridled speculation about direct links between genes and inhumanity. In an unfortunate contrast, the years 2001-2010 have been declared the Decade of Behavior by a collection of scientific organizations, seeking to focus the energy and creativity of behavioral and social science on meeting society's most significant challenges. The logic of the Decade of Behavior is that evils such as war, poverty, discrimination and racism need to be addressed as behavioral and social, but a "me too" motive also may be lurking behind this declaration.

As a behavioral researcher who borrows shamelessly from neuroscience and social science among other disciplines, I find myself dissatisfied with such initiatives. The Decade of the Brain indeed was worth celebrating, but our world still lacks compelling efforts to use neuroscience knowledge to understand problems like war and injustice. The ongoing Decade of Behavior is to be applauded for reminding researchers and policy makers about the importance of behavioral science, but its ultimate impact on the evils it seeks to remedy remains to be seen. And surely we could make similar arguments in favor of a Decade of Philosophy, a Decade of Ethics, a Decade of Literature and so on. Committees of scholars would produce recommendations, websites would go live and foundations would invite applications for grants. But at the end of each decade, there would still be war, poverty, discrimination and racism.

Perhaps it is time for our universities to declare, not a Decade of the Humanities, but a Decade of Humanity. That is, perhaps it is time for universities to acknowledge their responsibility to seek comprehensive solutions to the problems that continue to plague us. And despite our tendencies as academics to specialize, perhaps it is time to emphasize scholarship that crosses traditional boundaries, challenges conventional thinking about human behavior and inspires our students to commit themselves to the hunt for solutions.

My own observation is that Duke is assuming leadership in the search for more compelling responses to some of the world's most significant challenges. As a relative newcomer, I've been impressed with the willingness of Duke faculty to tackle the toughest problems and to engage colleagues from adjacent as well as distant disciplines in that process. It's something that transcends the missions of particular departments; rather, it's a way of thinking that both recognizes the responsibility that scholars have to society and grasps the possibilities for making sense of previously intractable problems. And most of all, it's a commitment to keeping the "big picture" of human behavior alive in the minds and hearts of our students.

Consider the question, why do individuals act selfishly? As a psychologist, my "level of analysis" might involve determining how that person interpreted the situation that elicited the behavior (perhaps the selfishness was primarily in the eye of the beholder). Such an analysis could be applied to investigating how groups behave toward other groups, or even how nations behave with respect to other nations. A cognitive or motivational analysis might be a necessary part of understanding problems such as discrimination, but it would certainly be insufficient. There are as many other possible levels of analysis as there are disciplines. To a sociologist, an anthropologist, an ethicist, an economist or a genome scientist, different questions and answers would be salient. But without finding ways to combine and integrate those perspectives, would we ever really understand discrimination or find ways to prevent it?

Granted, it's a long way, literally and metaphorically, from the research laboratory of a behavioral scientist to the battlefields of Iraq or the killing fields of the Balkans. But all of us, inside and outside the ivory tower, have a stake in understanding human behavior. From the perspective of a scientist, there has never been a greater urgency to that search for understanding. And as a Duke faculty member, I'm eager to see what the next decade will bring. Ten years of hard work together might just do wonders.

Timothy Strauman is a professor of psychology and chair of the Department of Psychology: Social and Health Sciences.