The Bloody Benders and The Science Behind Moral Values

During a Detroit book fair in 1978, the author of Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder, made a claim that shocked her fans. She talked about how she shared a connection to America's very first serial killer family - The Bloody Benders. You see, the Bender murders took place in Cherryvale, Kansas, just 10 miles away from Independence, Kansas where the little house stands. Wilder said that she and her Pa knew the Benders, and according to Wilder, Pa might have had something to do with the frontier justice that ended the Bender's Killing spree. Wilder said. “The night of the day the bodies were found, a neighbor rode up to our house and talked earnestly with Pa. Pa took his rifle down from his place over the door and said to Ma, the vigilantes are called out. Then he sounded a horse and rode away with the neighbor. It was late the next day when he returned, and he never told us where he had been. For several years, there was more or less a hunt for the Benders and reports that they'd been seen here and there, at such times Pa always said in a strange tone of finality that they would never be found. They were, in fact, never found, and later, I formed my own conclusions why."

Not all of Wilder’s claims can be verified or disproven. It is true that the bodies of at least 10 people were found buried around the Benders’ property and that the property was within easy riding distance of the little house. It's also a long-standing theory that vigilantes caught up with the Benders after they ambushed and murdered 10-20 travelers with hammers. But there are a few small discrepancies that have been pointed out about the Bender's disappearance and Pa’s late-night ride. Regardless of who actually stopped the Benders, we know that Pa took part in the manhood, which given the opportunity, would have seen the Benders shot or hung. This is interesting to consider because the father was portrayed on television as the family's paragon and would always end the episode with a kindly dose of American values. His real-life counterpart was ready and willing to dispense a different kind of value - vigilante justice. What an interesting episode of Little House that would have been.

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Having a strong sense of moral values might seem like a handicap these days. Last year politicians were allegedly getting acts by the president for telling the truth. Like Michael Atkinson, or former head of US cybersecurity Chris Krebs. This year, several hedge funds that lost their butts during the Reddit game stock fiasco are getting bailouts, not by the government (not yet at least). But billionaire investment groups like Point 72 and Citadel are stepping in to offer financial life rafts to Melvin Capital, a hedge fund that had been betting on the stocks' inevitable death. Today on The Reengineered You, we want to ask a few questions about moral values. And while we're at it, we might as well bust a few myths.

Myth 1: Where does morality come from in the brain? And what if we could just turn morality off like a switch?

Joe: When you were young Todd, did you ever watch The Little House on the Prairie?

Todd: Oh, it was a favorite. It's very calming, especially for ADHD kids like me. It's probably before your time, right?

Joe: It was before my time, but I did see a couple of episodes when I was younger. I think calming is a very good way to describe it.

We want to look at what morals look like in the brain and how rare it is to have serial killer morals like the Little House/Benders story. Our episode today is all about values, especially the values as far as morals are concerned. So, let's get into the science of morals. First and foremost, do you think morals are something you are born with or learned? What is the line between innate morals from evolution vs. the morals that our parents/peers have instilled in us? I'm going to start with the Trolley Test, which is infamous in psychology. The test goes as follows:

Imagine this there is a railway track, and a trolley is barreling down those tracks out of control. The trolley driver maybe fell asleep and now it's just careening out of control. Ahead on the tracks, five people are tied up and unable to move, and the trolley is headed straight toward them. You see next to you a lever, and if you pull the lever, the trolley will switch to a different set of tracks. However, on the other track, there is one person who is tied up. You have to make a choice - do nothing at all and five people would be killed or pull the lever and kill one person. Many people say sacrifice the one person to save the five.

Now we are going to change the question just a little bit and see how you answer. It is the exact same question, but there's no side track this time. Instead, you are on a bridge with someone who is goofing around and not paying attention. You could push the person off to hit the trolley, alerting the driver that they hit someone and push the breaks before killing the five tied-up people. Or you can do nothing and the five people die. Still, many people still say push the one to save the five. We don't have a camera on here, but Todd's face while he was thinking about pushing somebody perfectly illustrates inborn values or inborn morals. What just happened was Todd made this grimace as he was considering pushing somebody off of a bridge to stop a trolley, and that wasn't there when he was talking about pulling a lever. This question is designed to elicit exactly that response. It is designed to make your brain go to war with itself to come to a moral decision.

When you ask this question to someone under a functional MRI, parts of the brain light up that are the “moral parts” of the brain. This includes the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate, and the angular gyrus. These all play a role in processing emotions and they influence morals. There is a quote from a CNN article on the brain and moral judgments - “Other studies have since confirmed that these areas are important in processing information about moral decisions as well as an area called the ventral prefrontal cortex.”

 The short and skinny of this, these are all parts that overlap into something called the default mode network. There is an idle setting in everyone's brain, where your brain idles or begins to think about other things. It is the part of your brain doing the least amount of effort but assigns the tasks for you to do later. In summary, it is the baseline of being awake but at rest. This network is also active during internally focused tasks, like autobiographical memory retrieval, envisioning the future, conceiving perspectives, and things like that. That part of your brain gets flooded and overlaps slightly when you're making a moral decision.

Overall, what functional MRI studies have found is that there's no moral organ in your brain. There's not like one seed of morality that shoots lightning bolts out whenever you feel morals. What morals actually are is a section of your brain that talks to the rest of your brain. It has a conflict. We talked about procrastination and how it is two parts of your brain disagreeing on what to do. That's effectively what morals are. A primitive part of your brain knows it's bad to reach over and push another person because you will be socially ostracized and not accepted in society anymore. The moment you get to the point where you're pushing somebody off a bridge, you feel like you have blood on your hands; that's where morals and values come in. So, the Benders did not have moral value anymore; they were willing to get their hands bloody. They weren't doing the math of if their actions were moral or not.

Myth 2: Do moral values make us better people? Do they make us more prosperous? Or our values just made up guidelines that society forced on us at a young age?

 Joe: Just out of curiosity, who is your favorite fictional serial killer?

Todd: I'm probably more of a true-crime person. Bur Henry Lee Lucas is probably the one. He was a gypsy traveler that used to kill hitchhikers.

Joe: Did he look like a killer moniker?

Todd: No, he was just a dummy - a big dummy.

Joe: It's funny you say dummy because we're going to get into the IQs of serial killers a little bit later.

We want to figure out if there is a lack of moral value for killers like this. We've looked at where moral values come from within the innate part of our brain. Now we want to show the opposite - what happens when you don’t have moral values. Using the same type of study, researchers scanned sociopaths, people who effectively failed the psychopath test. They took magnetic resonance imaging on 22 criminal psychopaths and 22 healthy men who were not offenders. They found that the psychopaths showed less activation in the medial frontal and posterior cingulate cortices. The areas of the brain associated with emotion showed reduced connectivity to the prefrontal areas and reduced connectivity to the areas associated with cognition. So, the feeling part of their brain was disconnected from the deciding part of their brain. The article stated, “The results suggest that in criminal psychopaths, the brain does not adequately use emotional information to control behavioral responses.”  - Journal of Biological Psychiatry.

As for the IQ part of this, you should think that serial killers would be super smart to plan all of their murders out and not get caught, like Ted Bundy, etc. So, there's something called the serial killer information center. It's a database created between a couple of universities like Florida Gulf Coast University, and they update it regularly with serial killer data, which includes the average IQ. All in all, these serial killers being accredited for being geniuses have average IQs of 90-100. They commit the crimes, and they do it in ways where they avoid the police because they're doing stuff that nobody thinks someone would do.

What we are taking away from this is that we are hard-wired to not want to get our hands bloody, but some people would (1% of the population), which are considered psychopaths. Those people are capable of being nasty and evil. There's also a huge portion that is handed down to us as children from our parents. So that is a segment of it, too. We know that parents will try to guide our morals. They will tell us what's right and wrong whether we listen to that or not.

Joe: Have you heard of the watching eye effect?

Todd: No, what’s that?

Joe: When you see a donation bucket at the counter when you're like buying a coffee, are you more willing to put money in it when someone is looking at you or if their back is turned?

Todd: I always make sure that they know that I'm putting in there.

Joe: What about littering? Are you more likely to pick up litter if somebody's watching?

Todd: I think that’s a given.

Joe: What about throwing trash on the ground?

Todd: Never when someone is watching.

Joe: For the record to our listeners, we don’t go around littering. This is just to demonstrate what this term means.

There has been a lot of studies on the watching eye effect. This is the concept of people being more likely to do something morally acceptable if there is a set of eyes on them. Another study shows that people are more likely to pick up trash at a bus stop and pick up after themselves in the cafeteria if there are eyes on them. Studies have also found that a fake set of eyes will also make somebody pay a higher amount or pick up their litter. People are less likely to be dishonest with this as well. Additionally, we're not going to get into this hugely, but there is something called the broken windows theory, where if a place is trashed, we're more likely to litter too because it is clearly socially acceptable in those cases.

How much health benefit do you think comes from being honest? I got an article from Newswise, and it talks about a well-known study about lying. They found that Americans lie about 11 times a week, and the team wanted to figure out if lying less was better for someone's health. Approximately half of the participants were instructed to stop telling major lies and minor lies for 10 weeks. The major takeaway for this study was the link between less lying and improved health, which health was significantly stronger, especially in the group that didn't lie at all. Mental health was better, and their relationships were better from lying less.

Myth 3: If we can't turn them off, how do we use values to our advantage? How do you use the compass to make us better achievers?

Do you want to talk about how to utilize values to our benefit? We want to take the values that are baked into us and the ones that we've learned and use it as a tool to ultimately become better people. Now, the best tool I could find that has been backed by the University of Colorado (talked about in a PBS article from 2009) and from Stanford is called a writing exercise. This was proven via an ongoing study with 400 7th grade students from a public school in Connecticut. They were given a 15-minute writing assignment, and the non-control group was asked to list personal values they held about relationships with their family, athletic abilities, smarts, etc. That included moral and religious values as well. The control group was asked to write about values and ranked unimportant and the values that might matter to somebody else - So, write values but not ones they valued themselves personally.

What they found was that this exercise reduced the achievement gap between black and white students by 40% over one term. Listing out one’s values and why they're important can lower the black and white achievement gap, and it was as short as one term. It is more effective than goal-setting in this specific instance in narrowing the achievement gap. In these groups, they're also less likely to need remedial work or repeat a grade, as only 5% had to repeat the grade as compared to 18% in the control group.

I'm going to quote the Stanford article, “It turns out that writing about your values is one of the most effective psychological interventions ever studied. In the short term, writing about personal values makes people feel more powerful, in control, proud, and strong. It also makes them feel more loving, connected, and empathetic toward others. It increases pain tolerance, enhances self-control, and reduces unhelpful ruminations after a stressful experience. In the long-term, writing about values has been shown to boost GPAs, reduce doctor visits, improve mental health, and help with everything from weight loss to quitting smoking and reducing drinking. It helps people persevere in the face of discrimination and reduces self-handicapping.” Keep in mind that you don't have to write about your values like a book, going on and on about them. This is just a 15-minute value expiration exercise that can help you build those cornerstone habits, which can positively change the trajectory of your life.

Final Thoughts

We can't all be the picture of moral value like Pa Ingalls from Little House on the Prairie. However, we can better handle why values are important and why we might want to have a few fireside chats about morality with our own children.

Morality, in a nutshell, is the brain arguing with itself. It's an internal argument that's been going back as far as early humans - as far back as one monkey looking at the other wondering if they can get away from shoving him off the branch. We were built with a moral circuit, sensing innately that it is bad to harm one another - except the 1% of the population, who are the psychopaths without that natural-born circuit. But don't worry too much about that 1%. Like the Bloody Benders, serial killers aren't common at all and are statistically dumber than you think. At the very least, they're on the lower side of the IQ average. So not quite the mega genius that has been portrayed in Hollywood like Hannibal Lecter.

Values, like honesty, can improve health and writing about your personal values can boost grades and shrink the achievement gap when you're in school. Outside of school, writing about your values can make you feel more powerful, more loved and connected towards others. It can also enhance self-control and reduce the brooding period after a stressful event.

So, you don't have to take Pa’s sermonizing the heart. Decide on your own values. Write about them and reap those sweet rewards of having your own internal code. Lastly, we can all stop worrying so much about genius serial killers, unless we find ourselves in an Airbnb with fake canvas walls. In that case, we should be very afraid.