Higher consciousness is the consciousness of a god or "the part of the human mind that is capable of transcending animal instincts". While the concept has ancient roots, dating back to the Bhagavad Gita and Indian Vedas, it was significantly developed in German idealism, and is a central notion in contemporary popular spirituality, including the New Age movement.
Fichte distinguished the finite or empirical ego from the pure or
infinite ego. The activity of this "pure ego" can be discovered by a
"higher intuition".
According to Michael Whiteman, Fichte's philosophical system "is a remarkable western formulation of eastern mystical teachings (of Advaita)."
Schopenhauer
In 1812 Arthur Schopenhauer started to use the term "the better consciousness", a consciousness
...[that] lies beyond all experience and thus all reason, both theoretical and practical (instinct).
According to Yasuo Kamata, Schopenhauer's idea of "the better
consciousness" finds its origin in Fichte's idea of a "higher
consciousness" (höhere Bewusstsein) or "higher intuition", and also bears resemblance to Schelling's notion of "intellectual intuition".
According to Schopenhauer himself, his notion of a "better
consciousness" was different from Schelling's notion of "intellectual
intuition", since Schelling's notion required intellectual development
of the understanding, while his notion of a "better consciousness" was
"like a flash of insight, with no connection to the understanding."
According to Schopenhauer,
The better consciousness in me
lifts me into a world where there is no longer personality and causality
or subject or object. My hope and my belief is that this better
(supersensible and extra-temporal) consciousness will become my only
one, and for that reason I hope that it is not God. But if anyone wants
to use the expression God symbolically for the better
consciousness itself or for much that we are able to separate or name,
so let it be, yet not among philosophers I would have thought.
Main types
Different
types of higher states of consciousness can arise individually or in
various combinations. The list of known types of higher states of
consciousness:
modified states of consciousness, achieved with the help of meditative psychotechnics;
optimal experience and the “flow” state;
euphoria of a runner;
lucid dreaming;
out-of-body experience;
near-death experience;
mystical experience (sometimes regarded as the highest of all higher states of consciousness) Revonsuo, A. (2009). Exceptional States of Consciousness. San Diego: Academic Press. p. 1034 p. ISBN978-0-12-373873-8.
Religion
Faiths
The concept of higher consciousness is pervasive in religion. The earliest historical mention is in the Sanskrit Hindu texts, the Upanishads.
Schleiermacher
Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) made a distinction between lower and higher (self) consciousness.
In Schleirmacher's theology, self-consciousness contains "a feeling
that points to the presence of an absolute other, God, as actively
independent of the self and its 'world'."
For Schleiermacher, "all particular manifestations of piety share a
common essence, the sense of dependency on God as the outside
'infinite'." The feeling of dependency, or "God-consciousness", is a higher form of consciousness. This consciousness is not "God himself", since God would then no longer be "an infinite infinite, but a finite infinite, a mere projection of consciousness."
For Schleiermacher, the lower consciousness is "the animal part
of mankind", which includes basic sensations such as hunger, thirst,
pain and pleasure, as well as basic drives and pleasures, and higher consciousness is "the part of the human being that is capable of transcending animal instincts", and the "point of contact with God". Bunge describes this as "the essence of being human".
When this consciousness is present, "people are not alienated from God by their instincts". The relation between the lower and the higher consciousness is akin to "Paul's struggle of the spirit to overcome the flesh", or the distinction between the natural and the spiritual side of human beings.
19th century movements
The idea of a "wider self walled in by the habits of ego-consciousness" and the search for a "higher consciousness" was manifested in 19th century movements as TheosophyNew ThoughtChristian Science, and Transcendentalism.
The 19th century Transcendentalists saw the entire physical world as a representation of a higher spiritual world.
They believed that humans could elevate themselves above their animal
instincts, attain a higher consciousness, and partake in this spiritual
world.
According to Blavatsky, who founded the Theosophical Movement,
By that higher intuition acquired
by Theosophia - or God-knowledge, which carried the mind from the world
of form into that of formless spirit, man has been sometimes enabled in
every age and every country to perceive things in the interior or
invisible world.
Blavatsky refers to Fichte in her explanation of Theosophy:
Theosophy [...] prompted such men
as Hegel, Fichte and Spinoza to take up the labors of the old Grecian
philosophers and speculate upon the One Substance - the Deity, the
Divine All proceeding from the Divine Wisdom - incomprehensible, unknown
and unnamed.
Modern spirituality
The idea of "lower" and "higher consciousness" has gained popularity in modern popular spirituality. According to James Beverley, it lies at the heart of the New Age movement.
Ken Wilber
has tried to integrate eastern and western models of the mind, using
the notion of "lower" and "higher consciousness". In his book The Spectrum of Consciousness
Wilber describes consciousness as a spectrum with ordinary awareness at
one end, and more profound types of awareness at higher levels.
In later works he describes the development of consciousness as a
development from lower consciousness, through personal consciousness, to
higher transpersonal consciousness.
Cognitive science
Gerald Edelman, in his 'Theory of Consciousness', distinguishes higher consciousness, or "secondary consciousness" from "primary consciousness",
defined as simple awareness that includes perception and emotion.
Higher consciousness in contrast, "involves the ability to be conscious
of being conscious", and "allows the recognition by a thinking subject
of his or her own acts and affections". Higher consciousness requires,
at a minimal level semantic
ability, and "in its most developed form, requires linguistic ability,
or the mastery of a whole system of symbols and a grammar".
Psychotropics
Psychedelic drugs can be used to alter the brain cognition and
perception, some believing this to be a state of higher consciousness
and transcendence. Typical psychedelic drugs are hallucinogens including LSD, DMT, cannabis, peyote, and psilocybin mushrooms.
According to Wolfson, these drug-induced altered states of
consciousness may result in a more long-term and positive transformation
of self.
According to Dutta, psychedelic drugs may be used for psychoanalytic therapy,
as a means to gain access to the higher consciousness, thereby
providing patients the ability to access memories that are held deep
within their mind.
The Painter and the Buyer (1565). In this drawing by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, the painter is thought to be a self-portrait.
In philosophy of self, self-awareness is the experience of one's own personality or individuality. It is not to be confused with consciousness in the sense of qualia.
While consciousness is being aware of one's environment and body and
lifestyle, self-awareness is the recognition of that awareness. Self-awareness is how an individual consciously knows and understands their own character, feelings, motives, and desires. There are two broad categories of self-awareness: internal self-awareness and external self-awareness.
Neurobiological basis
Introduction
There are questions regarding what part of the brain allows us to be self-aware and how we are biologically programmed to be self-aware. V.S. Ramachandran has speculated that mirror neurons may provide the neurological basis of human self-awareness. In an essay written for the Edge Foundation in 2009, Ramachandran gave the following explanation of his theory:
"... I also speculated that these neurons can not only help simulate
other people's behavior but can be turned 'inward'—as it were—to create
second-order representations or meta-representations of your own
earlier brain processes. This could be the neural basis of
introspection, and of the reciprocity of self awareness and other
awareness. There is obviously a chicken-or-egg question here as to which
evolved first, but... The main point is that the two co-evolved,
mutually enriching each other to create the mature representation of
self that characterizes modern humans."
Health
In health
and medicine, body-awareness is a construct that refers to a person's
overall ability to direct their focus on various internal sensations
accurately. Both proprioception and interoception allow individuals to be consciously aware of various sensations. Proprioception allows individuals and patients to focus on sensations in their muscles and joints, posture, and balance, while interoception
is used to determine sensations of the internal organs, such as
fluctuating heartbeat, respiration, lung pain, or satiety. Over-acute
body-awareness, under-acute body-awareness, and distorted body-awareness
are symptoms present in a variety of health disorders and conditions,
such as obesity, anorexia nervosa, and chronic joint pain. For example, a distorted perception of satiety present in a patient suffering from anorexia nervosa
Human development
Bodily
self-awareness in human development refers to one's awareness of their
body as a physical object, with physical properties, that can interact
with other objects. Tests have shown that at the age of only a few
months old, toddlers are already aware of the relationship between the
proprioceptive and visual information they receive. This is called first-person self-awareness.
At around 18 months old and later, children begin to develop
reflective self-awareness, which is the next stage of bodily awareness
and involves children recognizing themselves in reflections, mirrors,
and pictures.
Children who have not obtained this stage of bodily self-awareness yet
will tend to view reflections of themselves as other children and
respond accordingly, as if they were looking at someone else face to
face. In contrast, those who have reached this level of awareness will
recognize that they see themselves, for instance seeing dirt on their
face in the reflection and then touching their own face to wipe it off.
Slightly after toddlers become reflectively self-aware, they
begin to develop the ability to recognize their bodies as physical
objects in time and space that interact and impact other objects. For
instance, a toddler placed on a blanket, when asked to hand someone the
blanket, will recognize that they need to get off it to be able to lift
it. This is the final stage of body self-awareness and is called objective self-awareness.
Non-human animals
The mirror test is a simple measure of self-awareness.
Studies have been done mainly on primates to test if self-awareness is present. Apes, monkeys, elephants, and dolphins
have been studied most frequently. The most relevant studies to this
day that represent self-awareness in animals have been done on chimpanzees, dolphins, and magpies. Self-awareness in animals is tested through mirror self-recognition.
Animals that show mirror self-recognition undergo four stages:
social response,
physical mirror inspection,
repetitive mirror testing behavior, and
the mark test, which involves the animals spontaneously touching a
mark on their body which would have been difficult to see without the
mirror.
David DeGrazia
states that there are three types of self-awareness in animals; the
first being, bodily self-awareness. This sense of awareness allows
animals to understand that they are different from the rest of the
environment; it is also the reason why animals do not eat themselves.
Bodily-awareness also includes proprioception and sensation.
The second type of self-awareness in animals is social self-awareness.
This type of awareness is seen in highly social animals and is the
awareness that they have a role within themselves in order to survive.
This type of awareness allows animals to interact with each other. The
final type of self-awareness is introspective awareness. This awareness
is responsible for animals to understand feelings, desires, and beliefs.
The red-spot technique created and experimented by Gordon G. Gallup
studies self-awareness in animals (primates). In this technique, a red
odorless spot is placed on an anesthetized primate's forehead. The spot
is placed on the forehead so that it can only be seen through a mirror.
Once the individual awakens, independent movements toward the spot after
seeing their reflection in a mirror are observed. During the red-spot
technique, after looking in the mirror, chimpanzees used their fingers
to touch the red dot that was on their forehead and, after touching the
red dot they would even smell their fingertips.
"Animals that can recognize themselves in mirrors can conceive of
themselves," says Gallup. Another prime example are elephants. Three
elephants were exposed to large mirrors where experimenters studied the
reaction when the elephants saw their reflection. These elephants were
given the "litmus mark test" in order to see whether they were aware of
what they were looking at. This visible mark was applied on the
elephants and the researchers reported a large progress with
self-awareness. The elephants shared this success rate with other
animals such as monkeys and dolphins.
Chimpanzees and other apes – species which have been studied
extensively – compare the most to humans with the most convincing
findings and straightforward evidence in the relativity of
self-awareness in animals so far. Dolphins were put to a similar test and achieved the same results. Diana Reiss, a psycho-biologist at the New York Aquarium discovered that bottlenose dolphins can recognize themselves in mirrors.
Researchers also used the mark test or mirror test to study the magpie's self-awareness. As a majority of birds are blind below the beak, Prior et al.
marked the birds’ neck with three different colors: red, yellow, and
black (as an imitation, as magpies are originally black). When placed in
front of a mirror, the birds with the red and yellow spots began
scratching at their necks, signaling the understanding of something
different being on their bodies. During one trial with a mirror and a
mark, three out of the five magpies showed a minimum of one example of
self-directed behavior. The magpies explored the mirror by moving toward
it and looking behind it. One of the magpies, Harvey, during several
trials would pick up objects, pose, do some wing-flapping, all in front
of the mirror with the objects in his beak. This represents a sense of
self-awareness; knowing what is going on within himself and in the
present. The authors suggest that self-recognition in birds and mammals
may be a case of convergent evolution, where similar evolutionary pressures result in similar behaviors or traits, although they arrive at them via different routes.
A few slight occurrences of behavior towards the magpie's own
body happened in the trial with the black mark and the mirror. It is
assumed in this study that the black mark may have been slightly visible on the black feathers. Prior et al.
stated, "This is an indirect support for the interpretation that the
behavior towards the mark region was elicited by seeing the own body in
the mirror in conjunction with an unusual spot on the body."
The behaviors of the magpies clearly contrasted with no mirror
present. In the no-mirror trials, a non-reflective gray plate of the
same size and in the same position as the mirror was swapped in. There
were not any mark directed self-behaviors when the mark was present, in
color, or in black. Prior's et al. data quantitatively matches the findings in chimpanzees. In summary of the mark test, the results show that magpies understand that a mirror image represents their own body; magpies show to have self-awareness.
Cooperation and evolutionary problems
An organism can be effectively altruistic
without being self-aware, aware of any distinction between egoism and
altruism, or aware of qualia in others. This by simple reactions to
specific situations which happens to benefit other individuals in the
organism's natural environment. If self-awareness led to a necessity of
an emotional empathy mechanism for altruism and egoism being default in
its absence, that would have precluded evolution from a state without self-awareness to a self-aware state in all social animals.
The ability of the theory of evolution to explain self-awareness can be
rescued by abandoning the hypothesis of self-awareness being a basis
for cruelty.
Psychology
Self-awareness
has been called "arguably the most fundamental issue in psychology,
from both a developmental and an evolutionary perspective."
Self-awareness theory, developed by Duval and Wicklund in their 1972 landmark book A theory of objective self awareness,
states that when we focus our attention on ourselves, we evaluate and
compare our current behavior to our internal standards and values. This
elicits a state of objective self-awareness. We become self-conscious as objective evaluators of ourselves. However self-awareness is not to be confused with self-consciousness.
Various emotional states are intensified by self-awareness. However,
some people may seek to increase their self-awareness through these
outlets. People are more likely to align their behavior with their
standards when made self-aware. People will be negatively affected if
they don't live up to their personal standards. Various environmental
cues and situations induce awareness of the self, such as mirrors, an
audience, or being videotaped or recorded. These cues also increase
accuracy of personal memory. In one of Andreas Demetriou's neo-Piagetian theories of cognitive development,
self-awareness develops systematically from birth through the life span
and it is a major factor for the development of general inferential
processes. Moreover, a series of recent studies showed that self-awareness about cognitive processes participates in general intelligence on a par with processing efficiency functions, such as working memory, processing speed, and reasoning. Albert Bandura's theory of self-efficacy
builds on our varying degrees of self-awareness. It is "the belief in
one's capabilities to organize and execute the courses of action
required to manage prospective situations." A person's belief in their
ability to succeed sets the stage to how they think, behave and feel.
Someone with a strong self-efficacy, for example, views challenges as
mere tasks that must be overcome, and are not easily discouraged by
setbacks. They are aware of their flaws and abilities and choose to
utilize these qualities to the best of their ability. Someone with a
weak sense of self-efficacy evades challenges and quickly feels
discouraged by setbacks. They may not be aware of these negative
reactions, and therefore do not always change their attitude. This
concept is central to Bandura's social cognitive theory, "which
emphasizes the role of observational learning, social experience, and
reciprocal determinism in the development of personality."
Developmental stages
Individuals become conscious of themselves through the development of self-awareness.
This particular type of self-development pertains to becoming conscious
of one's own body and mental state of mind including thoughts, actions,
ideas, feelings and interactions with others.
"Self-awareness does not occur suddenly through one particular
behavior: it develops gradually through a succession of different
behaviors all of which relate to the self." The monitoring of one's mental states is called metacognition and it is considered to be an indicator that there is some concept of the self.
It is developed through an early sense of non-self components using
sensory and memory sources. In developing self–awareness through
self-exploration and social experiences one can broaden one's social
world and become more familiar with the self.
According to Emory University's Philippe Rochat, there are five
levels of self-awareness which unfold in early development and six
potential prospects ranging from "Level 0" (having no self-awareness)
advancing complexity to "Level 5" (explicit self-awareness).
Level 0: Confusion. At this level the individual has a degree of
zero self-awareness. This person is unaware of any mirror reflection or
the mirror itself. They perceive the mirror as an extension of their
environment. Level 0 can also be displayed when an adult frightens
himself in a mirror mistaking his own reflection as another person just
for a second.
Level 1: Differentiation. The individual realizes the mirror is able
to reflect things. They see that what is in the mirror is different
from what is surrounding them. At this level they can differentiate
between their own movement in the mirror and the movement of the
surrounding environment.
Level 2: Situation. At this point an individual can link the
movements on the mirror to what is perceived within their own body. This
is the first hint of self-exploration on a projected surface where what
is visualized on the mirror is special to the self.
Level 3: Identification. This stage is characterized by the new
ability to identify self: an individual can now see that what's in the
mirror is not another person but actually them. It is seen when a child,
instead of referring to the mirror while referring to themselves,
refers to themselves while looking in the mirror.
Level 4: Permanence. Once an individual reaches this level they can
identify the self beyond the present mirror imagery. They are able to
identify the self in previous pictures looking different or younger. A
"permanent self" is now experienced.
Level 5: Self-consciousness or "meta" self-awareness. At this level
not only is the self seen from a first person view but it is realized
that it is also seen from a third person's view. They begin to
understand they can be in the mind of others. For instance, how they are
seen from a public standpoint.
Infancy and early childhood
It
is to be kept in mind that as an infant comes into this world, they
have no concept of what is around them, nor for the significance of
others around them. It is throughout the first year that they gradually
begin to acknowledge that their body is actually separate from that of
their mother, and that they are an "active, causal agent in space". By
the end of the first year, they additionally realize that their
movement, as well, is separate from movement of the mother. That is a
huge advance, yet they are still quite limited and cannot yet know what
they look like, "in the sense that the infant cannot recognize its own
face".
By the time an average toddler reaches 18–24 months, they will discover
themselves and recognize their own reflection in the mirror,
however research has found that this age varies widely with differing
socioeconomic levels and differences relating to culture and parenting.
They begin to acknowledge the fact that the image in front of them, who
happens to be them, moves; indicating that they appreciate and can
consider the relationship between cause and effect that is happening.
By the age of 24 months the toddler will observe and relate their own
actions to those actions of other people and the surrounding
environment.
Once an infant has gotten a lot of experience, and time, in front of a
mirror, it is only then that they are able to recognize themselves in
the reflection, and understand that it is them. For example, in a study,
an experimenter took a red marker and put a fairly large red dot (so it
is visible by the infant) on the infant's nose, and placed them in
front of a mirror. Prior to 15 months of age, the infant will not react
to this, but after 15 months of age, they will either touch their nose,
wondering what it is they have on their face, or point to it. This
indicates the appearance that they recognize that the image they see in
the reflection of the mirror is themselves.
There is somewhat of the same thing called the mirror-self recognition
task, and it has been used as a research tool for numerous years, and
has given, and lead to, key foundations of the infant's sense/awareness
of self.
For example, "for Piaget, the objectification of the bodily self
occurs as the infant becomes able to represent the body's spatial and
causal relationship with the external world (Piaget, 1954). Facial recognition places a big pivotal point in their development of self-awareness.
By 18 months, the infant can communicate their name to others, and upon
being shown a picture they are in, they can identify themselves. By two
years old, they also usually acquire gender category and age
categories, saying things such as "I am a girl, not a boy" and "I am a
baby or child, not a grownup". Evidently, it is not at the level of an
adult or an adolescent, but as an infant moves to middle childhood and
onwards to adolescence, they develop a higher level of self-awareness
and self-description.
As infants develop their senses, using multiple senses of in
order to recognize what is around them, infants can become affected by
something known as "facial multi stimulation". In one experiment by
Filippetti, Farroni, and Johnson, an infant of around five months in age
is given what is known as an “enfacement illusion”.
“Infants watched a side-by-side video display of a peer’s face being
systematically stroked on the cheek with a paintbrush. During the video
presentation, the infant’s own cheek was stroked in synchrony with one
video and in asynchrony with the other”.
Infants were proven to recognize and project an image of a peer with
that of their own, showing beginning signs of facial recognition cues
onto one's self, with the assistance of an illusion.
Piaget
Around
school age a child's awareness of personal memory transitions into a
sense of one's own self. At this stage, a child begins to develop
interests along with likes and dislikes. This transition enables the
awareness of an individual's past, present, and future to grow as
conscious experiences are remembered more often.
As a preschooler, they begin to give much more specific details about
things, instead of generalizing. For example, the preschooler will talk
about the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team, and the New York Rangers
hockey team, instead of the infant just stating that he likes sports.
Furthermore, they will start to express certain preferences (e.g., Tod
likes mac and cheese) and will start to identify certain possessions of
theirs (e.g., Lara has a bird as a pet at home). At this age, the infant
is in the stage Piaget names the pre operational
stage of development. The infant is very inaccurate at judging
themselves because they do not have much to go about. For example, an
infant at this stage will not associate that they are strong with their
ability to cross the jungle gym at their school, nor will they associate
the fact that they can solve a math problem with their ability to
count.
Adolescence
One becomes conscious of their emotions during adolescence. Most children are aware of emotions such as shame, guilt, pride and embarrassment by the age of two, but do not fully understand how those emotions affect their life.
By age 13, children become more in touch with these emotions and begin
to apply them to their own lives. A study entitled "The Construction of
the Self" found that many adolescents display happiness and
self-confidence around friends, but hopelessness and anger around
parents due to the fear of being a disappointment. Teenagers were also
shown to feel intelligent and creative around teachers, and shy,
uncomfortable and nervous around people they were not familiar with.
In adolescent development, the definition self-awareness also has
a more complex emotional context due to the maturity of adolescents
compared to those in the early childhood phase, and these elements can
include but are not limited to self-image, self-concept, and
self–consciousness along many other traits that can relate to Rochat's
final level of self awareness, however it is still a distinct concept
within its own previous definition.
Social interactions mainly separate the element of self-awareness in
adolescent rather than in childhood, as well as further developed
emotional recognition skills in adolescents. Sandu, Pânișoară, and
Pânișoară demonstrate these in their work with teenagers and
demonstrates that there is a mature sense of self-awareness with
students who were aged 17, which in term provides a clear structure with
how elements like self-concept, self-image, and self-consciousness
relate to self-awareness.
Mental health
As
children reach their adolescent stages of life, the acute sense of
emotion has widened into a meta cognitive state in which mental health
issues can become more prevalent due to their heightened emotional and
social development.
There are elements of contextual behavioral science such as
Self-as-Content, Self-as-Process and Self-as-Context, involved with
adolescent self-awareness that can associate with mental health.
Moran, Almada, and McHugh presented the idea that these domains of self
are associated with adolescent mental health in various capacities. Anger management is also a domain of mental health that is associated with the concept of self-awareness in teens.
Self-awareness training has been linked to lowering anger management
issues and reducing aggressive tendencies in adolescents: “Persons
having sufficient self-awareness promote relaxation and awareness about
themselves and when going angry, at the first step they become aware of
anger in their inside and accept it, then try to handle it”.
Philosophy
Locke
An early philosophical discussion of self-awareness is that of John Locke. Locke was apparently influenced by René Descartes' statement normally translated 'I think, therefore I am' (Cogito ergo sum). In chapter XXVII "On Identity and Diversity" of Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689) he conceptualized consciousness as the repeated self-identification of oneself through which moral responsibility could be attributed to the subject—and therefore punishment and guiltiness justified, as critics such as Nietzsche
would point out, affirming "...the psychology of conscience is not 'the
voice of God in man'; it is the instinct of cruelty ... expressed, for
the first time, as one of the oldest and most indispensable elements in
the foundation of culture." John Locke does not use the terms self-awareness or self-consciousness though.
According to Locke, personal identity (the self) "depends on consciousness, not on substance".
We are the same person to the extent that we are conscious of our past
and future thoughts and actions in the same way as we are conscious of
our present thoughts and actions. If consciousness is this "thought"
which doubles all thoughts, then personal identity is only founded on
the repeated act of consciousness: "This may show us wherein personal
identity consists: not in the identity of substance, but ... in the
identity of consciousness." For example, one may claim to be a reincarnation of Plato, therefore having the same soul. However, one would be the same person
as Plato only if one had the same consciousness of Plato's thoughts and
actions that he himself did. Therefore, self-identity is not based on
the soul. One soul may have various personalities.
Locke argues that self-identity is not founded either on the body
or the substance, as the substance may change while the person remains
the same. "Animal identity is preserved in identity of life, and not of
substance", as the body of the animal grows and changes during its life.
describes a case of a prince and a cobbler in which the soul of the
prince is transferred to the body of the cobbler and vice versa. The
prince still views himself as a prince, though he no longer looks like
one. This border-case leads to the problematic thought that since
personal identity is based on consciousness, and that only oneself can
be aware of his consciousness, exterior human judges may never know if
they really are judging—and punishing—the same person, or simply the
same body. Locke argues that one may be judged for the actions of one's
body rather than one's soul, and only God knows how to correctly judge a
man's actions. Men also are only responsible for the acts of which
they are conscious. This forms the basis of the insanity defense which argues that one cannot be held accountable for acts in which they were unconsciously irrational, or mentally ill—
In reference to man's personality, Locke claims that "whatever past
actions it cannot reconcile or appropriate to that present self by
consciousness, it can be no more concerned in it than if they had never
been done: and to receive pleasure or pain, i.e. reward or punishment,
on the account of any such action, is all one as to be made happy or
miserable in its first being, without any demerit at all."
Disorders
The medical term for not being aware of one's deficits is anosognosia,
or more commonly known as a lack of insight. Having a lack of awareness
raises the risks of treatment and service nonadherence.
Individuals who deny having an illness may be against seeking
professional help because they are convinced that nothing is wrong with
them. Disorders of self-awareness frequently follow frontal lobe
damage.
There are two common methods used to measure how severe an individual's
lack of self-awareness is. The Patient Competency Rating Scale (PCRS)
evaluates self-awareness in patients who have endured a traumatic brain
injury.
PCRS is a 30-item self-report instrument which asks the subject to use a
5-point Likert scale to rate his or her degree of difficulty in a
variety of tasks and functions. Independently, relatives or significant
others who know the patient well are also asked to rate the patient on
each of the same behavioral items. The difference between the relatives’
and patient's perceptions is considered an indirect measure of impaired
self-awareness. The limitations of this experiment rest on the answers
of the relatives. Results of their answers can lead to a bias. This
limitation prompted a second method of testing a patient's
self-awareness. Simply asking a patient why they are in the hospital or
what is wrong with their body can give compelling answers as to what
they see and are analyzing.
Anosognosia
Anosognosia was a term coined by Joseph Babinski
to describe the clinical condition in which an individual suffered from
left hemiplegia following a right cerebral hemisphere stroke yet denied
that there were any problems with their left arm or leg. This condition
is known as anosognosia for hemiplegia (AHP). This condition has
evolved throughout the years and is now used to describe people who lack
subjective experience in both neurological and neuropsychological
cases. A wide variety of disorders are associated with anosognosia. For example, patients who are blind from corticallesions
might in fact be unaware that they are blind and may state that they do
not suffer from any visual disturbances. Individuals with aphasia
and other cognitive disorders may also suffer from anosognosia as they
are unaware of their deficiencies and when they make certain speech
errors, they may not correct themselves due to their unawareness. Individuals who suffer from Alzheimer's disease lack awareness; this deficiency becomes more intense throughout their disease.
A key issue with this disorder is that people who do have anosognosia
and suffer from certain illnesses may not be aware of them, which
ultimately leads them to put themselves in dangerous positions and/or
environments.
To this day there are still no available treatments for AHP, but it has
been documented that temporary remission has been used following
vestibular stimulation.
Dissociative identity disorder
Dissociative identity disorder or multiple personality disorder (MPD)
is a disorder involving a disturbance of identity in which two or more
separate and distinct personality states (or identities) control an
individual's behavior at different times.
One identity may be different from another, and when an individual with
DID is under the influence of one of their identities, they may forget
their experiences when they switch to the other identity. "When under
the control of one identity, a person is usually unable to remember some
of the events that occurred while other personalities were in control."
They may experience time loss, amnesia, and adopt different mannerisms,
attitudes, speech and ideas under different personalities. They are
often unaware of the different lives they lead or their condition in
general, feeling as though they are looking at their life through the
lens of someone else, and even being unable to recognize themselves in a
mirror.
Two cases of DID have brought awareness to the disorder, the first case
being that of Eve. This patient harbored three different personalities:
Eve White the good wife and mother, Eve Black the party girl, and Jane
the intellectual. Under stress, her episodes would worsen. She even
tried to strangle her own daughter and had no recollection of the act
afterward. Eve went through years of therapy before she was able to
learn how to control her alters and be mindful of her disorder and
episodes. Her condition, being so rare at the time, inspired the book
and film adaptation The Three Faces of Eve,
as well as a memoir by Eve herself entitled I'm Eve. Doctors speculated
that growing up during the Depression and witnessing horrific things
being done to other people could have triggered emotional distress,
periodic amnesia, and eventually DID.
In the second case, Shirley Mason, or Sybil, was described as having
over 16 separate personalities with different characteristics and
talents. Her accounts of horrific and sadistic abuse by her mother
during childhood prompted doctors to believe that this trauma caused her
personalities to split, furthering the unproven idea that this disorder
was rooted in child abuse, while also making the disorder famous. In
1998 however, Sybil's case was exposed as a sham. Her therapist would
encourage Sybil to act as her other alter ego although she felt
perfectly like herself. Her condition was exaggerated in order to seal
book deals and television adaptations.
Awareness of this disorder began to crumble shortly after this finding.
To this day, no proven cause of DID has been found, but treatments such
as psychotherapy, medications, hypnotherapy, and adjunctive therapies
have proven to be very effective.
Autism spectrum disorder
Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a range of neurodevelopmental
disabilities that can adversely impact social communication and create
behavioral challenges (Understanding Autism, 2003).
"Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and autism are both general terms for a
group of complex disorders of brain development. These disorders are
characterized, in varying degrees, by difficulties in social
interaction, verbal and nonverbal communication and repetitive
behaviors."
ASDs can also cause imaginative abnormalities and can range from mild
to severe, especially in sensory-motor, perceptual and affective
dimensions.
Children with ASD may struggle with self-awareness and self
acceptance. Their different thinking patterns and brain processing
functions in the area of social thinking and actions may compromise
their ability to understand themselves and social connections to others.
About 75% diagnosed autistics are mentally handicapped in some general
way and the other 25% diagnosed with Asperger's Syndrome show average to
good cognitive functioning.
When we compare our own behavior to the morals and values that we were
taught, we can focus more attention on ourselves which increases
self-awareness. To understand the many effects of autism spectrum
disorders on those afflicted have led many scientists to theorize what
level of self-awareness occurs and in what degree. Research found that
ASD can be associated with intellectual disability and difficulties in
motor coordination and attention. It can also result in physical health
issues as well, such as sleep and gastrointestinal disturbances. As a
result of all those problems, individuals are literally unaware of
themselves.
It is well known that children suffering from varying degrees of autism
struggle in social situations. Scientists at the University of
Cambridge have produced evidence that self-awareness is a main problem
for people with ASD. Researchers used functional magnetic resonance
scans (FMRI) to measure brain activity in volunteers being asked to make
judgments about their own thoughts, opinions, preferences, as well as
about someone else's. One area of the brain closely examined was the
ventromedial pre-frontal cortex (vMPFC) which is known to be active when
people think about themselves.
A study out of Stanford University has tried to map out brain
circuits with understanding self-awareness in Autism Spectrum Disorders.
This study suggests that self-awareness is primarily lacking in social
situations but when in private they are more self-aware and present. It
is in the company of others while engaging in interpersonal interaction
that the self-awareness mechanism seems to fail. Higher functioning
individuals on the ASD scale have reported that they are more self-aware
when alone unless they are in sensory overload or immediately following
social exposure.
Self-awareness dissipates when an autistic is faced with a demanding
social situation. This theory suggests that this happens due to the
behavioral inhibitory system which is responsible for self-preservation.
This is the system that prevents human from self-harm like jumping out
of a speeding bus or putting our hand on a hot stove. Once a dangerous
situation is perceived then the behavioral inhibitory system kicks in
and restrains our activities. "For individuals with ASD, this inhibitory
mechanism is so powerful, it operates on the least possible trigger and
shows an over sensitivity to impending danger and possible threats.
Some of these dangers may be perceived as being in the presence of
strangers, or a loud noise from a radio. In these situations
self-awareness can be compromised due to the desire of self
preservation, which trumps social composure and proper interaction.
The Hobson hypothesis reports that autism begins in infancy due
to the lack of cognitive and linguistic engagement which in turn results
in impaired reflective self-awareness. In this study ten children with
Asperger's Syndrome were examined using the Self-understanding
Interview. This interview was created by Damon and Hart and focuses on
seven core areas or schemas that measure the capacity to think in
increasingly difficult levels. This interview will estimate the level of
self understanding present. "The study showed that the Asperger group
demonstrated impairment in the 'self-as-object' and 'self-as-subject'
domains of the Self-understanding Interview, which supported Hobson's
concept of an impaired capacity for self-awareness and self-reflection
in people with ASD."
Self-understanding is a self description in an individual's past,
present and future. Without self-understanding it is reported that
self-awareness is lacking in people with ASD.
Joint attention (JA) was developed as a teaching strategy to help increase positive self-awareness in those with autism spectrum disorder.
JA strategies were first used to directly teach about reflected mirror
images and how they relate to their reflected image. Mirror Self
Awareness Development (MSAD) activities were used as a four-step
framework to measure increases in self-awareness in those with ASD.
Self-awareness and knowledge is not something that can simply be taught
through direct instruction. Instead, students acquire this knowledge by
interacting with their environment.
Mirror understanding and its relation to the development of self leads
to measurable increases in self-awareness in those with ASD. It also
proves to be a highly engaging and highly preferred tool in
understanding the developmental stages of self- awareness.
There have been many different theories and studies done on what
degree of self-awareness is displayed among people with autism spectrum
disorder. Scientists have done research about the various parts of the
brain associated with understanding self and self-awareness. Studies
have shown evidence of areas of the brain that are impacted by ASD.
Other theories suggest that helping an individual learn more about
themselves through Joint Activities, such as the Mirror Self Awareness
Development may help teach positive self-awareness and growth. In
helping to build self-awareness it is also possible to build self-esteem
and self acceptance. This in turn can help to allow the individual with
ASD to relate better to their environment and have better social
interactions with others.
Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a chronic psychiatric illness characterized by
excessive dopamine activity in the mesolimbic tract and insufficient
dopamine activity in the mesocortical tract leading to symptoms of
psychosis along with poor cognition in socialization. Under the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
people with schizophrenia have a combination of positive, negative and
psychomotor symptoms. These cognitive disturbances involve rare beliefs
and/or thoughts of a distorted reality that creates an abnormal pattern
of functioning for the patient. The cause of schizophrenia has a
substantial genetic component involving many genes. While the heritability of schizophrenia has been found to be around 80%, only about 60% of sufferers report a positive family history of the disorder, and ultimately the cause is thought to be a combination of genetic and environmental factors.
It is believed that the experience of stressful life events is an
environmental factor that can trigger the onset of schizophrenia in
individuals who already are at risk from genetics and age. The level of self-awareness among patients with schizophrenia is a heavily studied topic.
Schizophrenia as a disease state is characterized by severe
cognitive dysfunction and it is uncertain to what extent patients are
aware of this deficiency. Medalia and Lim (2004) investigated patients’
awareness of their cognitive deficit in the areas of attention,
nonverbal memory, and verbal memory.
Results from this study (N=185) revealed large discrepancy in patients’
assessment of their cognitive functioning relative to the assessment of
their clinicians. Though it is impossible to access one's consciousness
and truly understand what a schizophrenic believes, regardless in this
study, patients were not aware of their cognitive dysfunctional
reasoning. In the DSM-5,
to receive a diagnosis of schizophrenia, they must have two or more of
the following symptoms in the duration of one month: delusions*,
hallucinations*, disorganized speech*, grossly disorganized/catatonic
behavior and negative symptoms (*these three symptoms above all other
symptoms must be present to correctly diagnose a patient.) Sometimes
these symptoms are very prominent and are treated with a combination of antipsychotics
(i.e. haloperidol, loxapine), atypical antipsychotics (such as
clozapine and risperdone) and psychosocial therapies that include family
interventions and socials skills. When a patient is undergoing
treatment and recovering from the disorder, the memory of their behavior
is present in a diminutive amount; thus, self-awareness of diagnoses of
schizophrenia after treatment is rare, as well as subsequent to onset
and prevalence in the patient.
The above findings are further supported by a study conducted by Amador and colleagues.
The study suggests a correlation exists between patient insight,
compliance, and disease progression. Investigators assess insight of
illness was assessed via Scale to Assess Unawareness of Mental Disorder
and was used along with rating of psychopathology, course of illness,
and compliance with treatments in a sample of 43 patients. Patients with
poor insight are less likely to be compliant with treatment and are
more likely to have a poorer prognosis. Patients with hallucinations
sometimes experience positive symptoms, which can include delusions of
reference, thought insertion/withdrawal, thought broadcast, delusions of
persecution, grandiosity, and many more. These psychoses skew the
patient's perspectives of reality in ways in which they truly believe
are really happening. For instance, a patient that is experiencing
delusions of reference may believe while watching the weather forecast
that when the weatherman says it will rain, he is really sending a
message to the patient in which rain symbolizes a specific warning
completely irrelevant to what the weather is. Another example would be
thought broadcast, which is when a patient believes that everyone can
hear their thoughts. These positive symptoms sometimes are so severe to
where the schizophrenic believes that something is crawling on them or
smelling something that is not there in reality. These strong
hallucinations are intense and difficult to convince the patient that
they do not exist outside of their cognitive beliefs, making it
extremely difficult for a patient to understand and become self-aware
that what they are experiencing is in fact not there.
Furthermore, a study by Bedford and Davis
(2013) was conducted to look at the association of denial vs.
acceptance of multiple facets of schizophrenia (self-reflection,
self-perception, and insight) and its effect on self-reflection (N=26).
Study results suggest patients with increased disease denial have lower
recollection for self-evaluated mental illnesses. To a great extent,
disease denial creates a hardship for patients to undergo recovery
because their feelings and sensations are intensely outstanding. But
just as this and the above studies imply, a large proportion of
schizophrenics do not have self-awareness of their illness for many
factors and severity of reasoning of their diagnoses.
Bipolar disorder
Bipolar disorder is an illness that causes shifts in mood, energy,
and ability to function. Self-awareness is crucial in those suffering
from this disease, as they must be able to distinguish between feeling a
certain way because of the disorder or because of separate issues.
"Personality, behavior, and dysfunction affect your bipolar disorder, so
you must 'know' yourself in order to make the distinction."
This disorder is a difficult one to diagnose, as self-awareness changes
with mood. "For instance, what might appear to you as confidence and
clever ideas for a new business venture might be a pattern of grandiose
thinking and manic behavior".
Issues occur between understanding irrationality in a mood swing and
being completely wrapped in a manic episode, rationalizing that the
exhibited behaviors are normal.
It is important to be able to distinguish what are symptoms of
bipolar disorder and what is not. A study done by Mathew et al. was done
with the aim of "examining the perceptions of illness in self and among
other patients with bipolar disorder in remission".
The study took place at the Department of Psychiatry, Christian
Medical College, Vellore, India, which is a centre that specializes in
the "management of patients with mental and behavioural disorders". Eighty two patients (thirty two female and fifty male) agreed to partake in the study. These patients met the "International Classification of Diseases – 10 diagnostic criteria for a diagnosis of bipolar disorder I or II and were in remission"
and were put through a variety of baseline assessments before beginning
the study. These baseline assessments included using a vignette, which
was then used as an assessment tool during their follow-up. Patients
were then randomly divided into two groups, one who would be following a
"structured educational intervention programme" (experimental group), while the other would be following "usual care" (control group).
The study was based on an interview in which patients were asked
an array of open-eded questions regarding topics such as "perceived
causes, consequences, severity and its effects on body, emotion, social
network and home life, and on work, severity, possible course of action,
help-seeking behaviour and the role of the doctor/healer". The McNemar test
was then used to compare the patients perspective of the illness versus
their explanation of the illness. The results of the study show that
the beliefs that patients associated with their illness corresponds with
the possible causes of the disorder,
whereas "studies done among patients during periods of active psychosis
have recorded disagreement between their assessments of their own
illness". This ties in to how difficult self-awareness is within people who suffer from bipolar disorder.
Although this study was done on a population that were in
remission from the disease, the distinction between patients during
"active psychosis" versus those in remission shows the evolution of
their self-awareness throughout their journey to recovery.
Plants
Self-discrimination in plants is found within their roots, tendrils and flowers that avoid themselves but not others in their environment.
Self-incompatibility mechanism providing evidence for self-awareness in plants
Self-awareness
in plants is a fringe topic in the field of self-awareness, and is
researched predominantly by botanists. The claim that plants are capable
of perceiving self lies in the evidence found that plants will not
reproduce with themselves due to a gene selecting mechanism. In
addition, vining plants have been shown to avoid coiling around
themselves, due to chemical receptors in the plants' tendrils. Unique to
plants, awareness of self means that the plant can recognise self,
whereas all other known conceptions of self-awareness is the ability to
recognise what is not self.
Recognition and rejection of self in plant reproduction
Research
by June B. Nasrallah discovered that the plant's pollination mechanism
also serves as a mechanism against self-reproduction, which lays out the
foundation of scientific evidence that plants could be considered as
self-aware organisms. The SI (Self-incompatibility) mechanism in plants
is unique in the sense that awareness of self derives from the capacity
to recognise self, rather than non-self. The SI mechanism function
depends primarily on the interaction between genes S-locus receptor protein kinase (SRK) and S-locus cysteine-rich protein gene (SCR).
In cases of self-pollination, SRK and SCR bind to activate SKR,
Inhibiting pollen from fertilizing. In cases of cross-pollination, SRK
and SCR do not bind and therefore SRK is not activated, causing the
pollen to fertilise. In simple terms, the receptors either accept or
reject the genes present in the pollen, and when the genes are from the
same plant, the SI mechanism described above creates a reaction to
prevent the pollen from fertilising.
Self-discrimination in the tendrils of the vine Cayratia japonica mediated by physiological connection
The
research by Yuya Fukano and Akira Yamawo provides a link between
self-discrimination in vining plants and amongst other classifications
where the mechanism discovery has already been established. It also
contributes to the general foundation of evidence of self-discrimination
mechanisms in plants. The article makes the claim that the biological
self-discrimination mechanism that is present in both flowering plants
and ascidians, are also present in vining plants. They tested this
hypothesis by doing touch tests with self neighbouring and non-self
neighbouring pairs of plants. the test was performed by placing the sets
of plants close enough for their tendrils to interact with one-another.
Evidence of self-discrimination in above-ground plants is demonstrated
in the results of the touch testing, which showed that in cases of
connected self plants, severed self plants and non-self plants, the rate
of tendril activity and likeliness to coil was higher among separated
plants than those attached via rhizomes.
Theater
Theater also concerns itself with other awareness besides
self-awareness. There is a possible correlation between the experience
of the theater audience and individual self-awareness. As actors and
audiences must not "break" the fourth wall in order to maintain context, so individuals must not be aware of the artificial, or the constructed perception of his or her reality.
This suggests that both self-awareness and the social constructs
applied to others are artificial continuums just as theater is.
Theatrical efforts such as Six Characters in Search of an Author, or The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, construct yet another layer of the fourth wall, but they do not destroy the primary illusion. Refer to Erving Goffman's Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience.
Science fiction
In science fiction, self-awareness describes an essential human property that often (depending on the circumstances of the story) bestows personhood onto a non-human. If a computer, alien
or other object is described as "self-aware", the reader may assume
that it will be treated as a completely human character, with similar
rights, capabilities and desires to a normal human being. The words "sentience", "sapience" and "consciousness" are used in similar ways in science fiction.
Data on the Murder Accountability Project’s website. Photos by Cait Oppermann for Bloomberg Businessweek.
On Aug. 18, 2010, a police lieutenant in Gary, Ind., received an e-mail,
the subject line of which would be right at home in the first few
scenes of a David Fincher movie:
“Could there be a serial killer active in the Gary area?”
It isn’t clear what the lieutenant did with that
e-mail; it would be understandable if he waved it off as a prank. But
the author could not have been more serious. He’d attached source
material—spreadsheets created from FBI files showing that over several
years the city of Gary had recorded 14 unsolved murders of women between
the ages of 20 and 50. The cause of each death was the same:
strangulation. Compared with statistics from around the country, he
wrote, the number of similar killings in Gary was far greater than the
norm. So many people dying the same way in the same city—wouldn’t that
suggest that at least a few of them, maybe more, might be connected? And
that the killer might still be at large?
The police lieutenant never replied. Twelve days
later, the police chief, Gary Carter, received a similar e-mail from the
same person. This message added a few details. Several of the women
were strangled in their homes. In at least two cases, a fire was set
after the murder. In more recent cases, several women were found
strangled in or around abandoned buildings. Wasn’t all of this, the
writer asked, at least worth a look?
The Gary police never responded to that e-mail,
either, or to two follow-up letters sent via registered mail. No one
from the department has commented publicly about what was sent to
them—nor would anyone comment for this story. “It was the most
frustrating experience of my professional life,” says the author of
those messages, a 61-year-old retired news reporter from Virginia named
Thomas Hargrove.
Hargrove spent his career as a data guy. He analyzed
his first set of polling data as a journalism major at the University
of Missouri, where he became a student director of the university’s
polling organization. He joined an E.W. Scripps newspaper right out of
college and expanded his repertoire from political polling data to
practically any subject that required statistical analysis. “In the
newsroom,” he remembers, “they would say, ‘Give that to Hargrove. That’s
a numbers problem.’ ”
In 2004, Hargrove’s editors asked him to look into
statistics surrounding prostitution. The only way to study that was to
get a copy of the nation’s most comprehensive repository of criminal
statistics: the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, or UCR. When Hargrove called
up a copy of the report from the database library at the University of
Missouri, attached to it was something he didn’t expect: the
Supplementary Homicide Report. “I opened it up, and it was a record I’d
never seen before,” he says. “Line by line, every murder that was
reported to the FBI.”
This report, covering the year 2002, contained about
16,000 murders, broken down by the victims’ age, race, and sex, as well
as the method of killing, the police department that made the report,
the circumstances known about the case, and information about the
offender, if the offender was known. “I don’t know where these thoughts
come from,” Hargrove says, “but the second I saw that thing, I asked
myself, ‘Do you suppose it’s possible to teach a computer how to spot
serial killers?’ ”
Like a lot of people, Hargrove was aware of
criticisms of police being afflicted by tunnel vision when investigating
difficult cases. He’d heard the term “linkage blindness,” used to
describe the tendency of law-enforcement jurisdictions to fail to
connect the dots between similar cases occurring right across the county
or state line from one another. Somewhere in this report, Hargrove
thought, could be the antidote to linkage blindness. The right person,
looking at the information in the right way, might be able to identify
any number of at-large serial killers.
Every year he downloaded and crunched the most
recent data set. What really shocked him was the number of murder cases
that had never been cleared. (In law enforcement, a case is cleared when
a suspect is arrested, whatever the eventual outcome.) Hargrove counted
211,487, more than a third of the homicides recorded from 1980 to 2010.
Why, he wondered, wasn’t the public up in arms about such a large
number of unsolved murders?
To make matters worse, Hargrove saw that despite a
generation’s worth of innovation in the science of crime fighting,
including DNA analysis, the rate of cleared cases wasn’t increasing but
decreasing—plummeting, even. The average homicide clearance rate in the
1960s was close to 90 percent; by 2010 it was solidly in the mid-’60s.
It has fallen further since.
These troubling trends were what moved Hargrove to
write to the Gary police. He failed to get any traction there. Sure
enough, four years later, in October 2014, in Hammond, Ind.—the town
next door to Gary—police found the body of 19-year-old Afrikka Hardy in a
room at a Motel 6. Using her phone records, they tracked down a
suspect, 43-year-old Darren Deon Vann.
Once arrested, Vann took police to the abandoned buildings where he’d
stowed six more bodies, all of them in and around Gary. Anith Jones had
last been seen alive on Oct. 8; Tracy Martin went missing in June;
Kristine Williams and Sonya Billingsley disappeared in February; and
Teaira Batey and Tanya Gatlin had vanished in January.
Before invoking his right to remain silent, Vann
offhandedly mentioned that he’d been killing people for years—since the
1990s. Hargrove went to Gary, reporting for Scripps, to investigate
whether any of the cases he’d identified back in 2010 might possibly be
attributed to Vann. He remembers getting just one helpful response, from
an assistant coroner in Lake County who promised to follow up, but that
too went nowhere. Now, as the Vann prosecution slogs its way through
the courts, everyone involved in the case is under a gag order,
prevented from speculating publicly about whether any of the victims
Hargrove noted in 2010 might also have been killed by Vann. “There are
at least seven women who died after I tried to convince the Gary police
that they had a serial killer,” Hargrove says. “He was a pretty bad
one.”
Hargrove has his eye on other possible killers, too.
“I think there are a great many uncaught serial killers out there,” he
declares. “I think most cities have at least a few.”
* * *
We’re in a moment when, after decades of decreases nationally in the
overall crime rate, the murder rate has begun creeping upward in many
major U.S. cities. For two years running, homicides in major cities
jumped on average more than 10 percent. (Those increases aren’t uniform,
of course: Chicago leapt from 485 reported killings in 2015 to 762 in
2016, while the number of murders dipped in New York and Baltimore.)
President Trump, in the campaign and since, has vowed to usher in a new
era of law and order, hammering away on Twitter at Chicago’s “carnage”
in particular.
Threats of federal intervention aside, it will be
difficult to fix the problem of high murder rates without first
addressing clearance rates. So it’s fortuitous, perhaps, that we are
living in an age in which the analysis of data is supposed to help us
decipher, detect, and predict everything from the results of
presidential elections to the performance of baseball players. The
data-focused approach to problem-solving was brought to life for a lot
of people by Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, which introduced the
non-baseball-nerd public to the statistical evaluation of Major Leaguers
and made a hero of Billy Beane, an executive with the Oakland A’s. Law
enforcement would seem to be a fertile area for data to be helpful: In
the 1990s the New York Police Department famously used data to more
shrewdly deploy its officers to where the crimes were, and its CompStat
system became the standard for other departments around the country.
What Hargrove has managed to do goes a few orders of
magnitude beyond that. His innovation was to teach a computer to spot
trends in unsolved murders, using publicly available information that no
one, including anyone in law enforcement, had used before. This makes
him, in a manner of speaking, the Billy Beane of murder. His work shines
light on a question that’s gone unanswered for too long: Why, exactly,
aren’t the police getting any better at solving murder? And how can we
even dream of reversing any upticks in the homicide rate while so many
killers remain out on the streets?
Hargrove’s home office in Alexandria, Va.
It took a few years for Hargrove’s editors at
Scripps to agree to give him enough time to lose himself in the FBI’s
homicide data. With help from a University of Missouri grad student,
Hargrove first dumped the homicide report into statistics software in
2008. He spent months trying to develop an algorithm that would identify
unsolved cases with enough commonalities to suggest the same murderer.
Eventually, he decided to reverse-engineer the algorithm by testing his
ideas against one well-known case, that of Gary Ridgway, the so-called
Green River Killer, who confessed to killing 48 women over two decades
in the Seattle area. Hargrove thought that if he could devise an
algorithm that turned up the Green River Killer’s victims, he’d know he
was on the right track.
“We found a hundred things that didn’t work,” he
recalls. Finally, he settled on four characteristics for what’s called a
cluster analysis: geography, sex, age group, and method of killing. For
gender, he stuck with women, since they make up the vast majority of
multiple-murder victims who aren’t connected to gang-related activity.
When he used women between the ages of 20 and 50—the cohort most
commonly targeted by serial killers—the algorithm lit up like a slot
machine. “It became clear that this thing was working,” he says. “In
fact, it was working too well.”
The Green River Killer came up right away in this
algorithm. That was good news. Hargrove’s algorithm also pulled up 77
unsolved murders in Los Angeles, which he learned were attributed to
several different killers the police were pursuing (including the
so-called Southside Slayer and, most recently, the Grim Sleeper), and
64 unsolved murders of women in Phoenix.
Then there was a second group of possible serial
killers, those unrecognized by local police. “The whole point of the
algorithm was to find the low-hanging fruit, the obvious clusters,”
Hargrove says. “But there were dozens and dozens of them all over the
country.”
In 2015, Scripps spun off the last of its
newspapers, and Hargrove and the other print reporters lost their jobs.
“The only guy who left with a skip was me,” he says. Hargrove, who was
59 at the time and had worked at the company for 37 years, qualified for
a large severance and a nice pension, leaving him well-covered. Now he
had enough time to go all in on his data project. He founded the Murder Accountability Project, or MAP, a tiny nonprofit seeking to make FBI murder data more widely and easily available.
Using Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests,
MAP has tried to chase down data from the many municipalities and
counties that weren’t supplying their murder data to the FBI, out of
bureaucratic laziness, a lack of manpower, or perhaps just rank
incompetence. MAP has already assembled case details on 638,454
homicides from 1980 through 2014, including 23,219 cases that hadn’t
been reported to the FBI. This is the most complete list of case-level
details of U.S. murders available anywhere, and the group’s website has
open-sourced all of it. Anyone with statistical analysis software,
available for free online, can start looking, across jurisdictions, for
serial killers. Anyone can compare convicted killers’ timelines against
the timing of unsolved murders to determine if a connection is
plausible. “You can call up your hometown and look and see if you see
anything suspicious,” Hargrove says. “If you’re the father of a murdered
daughter, you can call up her record, and you can see if there might be
other records that match. We wanted to be able to crowdsource murder.”
* * *
The police have never been great at leveraging the power of their own
statistics. Police culture is notably paper-based, scattered, and
siloed, and departments aren’t always receptive to technological
innovation. The National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database gives
police access to information such as fugitive warrants, stolen property,
and missing persons, but it’s not searchable for unsolved killings. The
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Violent Death
Reporting System compiles death-certificate-based information for
homicide victims in 32 states, but, again, can’t be searched for
uncleared cases. Some states have their own homicide databases, but they
can’t see the data from other states, so linkage blindness persists.
In the 1990s the FBI created another voluntary
reporting database, this one specifically for violent and sexual crimes,
called the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, or ViCAP. It never
succeeded, either, primarily because it’s voluntary, making it easy for
police departments to ignore. “Most law enforcement agencies don’t have a
real solid understanding of what the purpose of ViCAP is,” says Gregory
Cooper, who ran the program for three years. “The frustration is, I’ve
got a car, but no one’s putting any gas in it.” Hargrove calls ViCAP “an
experiment that was never properly funded, and most police departments
never really bought into the idea.”
All of this contributes to, or at least fails to
mitigate, the trend in the Uniform Crime Report and its Supplementary
Homicide Report. Hargrove’s analysis of that data shows that the
clearance rate, already so low compared with what it was decades ago,
dropped from 64.5 percent in 2014 to 61.5 percent in 2015. That
translates into 6,043 murder cases in 2015 that didn’t result in
arrests. He picked apart those findings and learned that large cities
tend to have worse clearance rates than small towns, perhaps because
major cases are more rare in less populated areas and therefore tend to
get special attention. (This might at least partially explain why about
75 percent of Canada’s 500 to 600 homicides each year are cleared.)
Hargrove also learned that not all big cities are
the same when it comes to murder. “The variance is breathtaking,” he
says. Los Angeles, New York, and Houston are well above the average
clearance rates—in the low to mid-70s. The bottom of the class includes
New Orleans, Detroit, and St. Louis, all bumping along in the mid-40s.
Police in large cities with stubbornly high murder
rates point the finger at gang- and drug-related killings, and the
reluctance of witnesses to come forward to identify the murderers. “The
biggest problem is that everyone knows everyone,” Chester, Pa., Police
Commissioner Darren Alston told the Philadelphia Daily News in
September. (Chester’s homicide rate outstrips all other U.S.
cities’—and is more than double that of nearby Philadelphia.) City
residents, in turn, point to a lack of trust in the police. But one
other obvious problem is resources. “We fund homicide investigations
like we fund education—it comes down to a local tax,” Hargrove says.
“When an economy fails enough and we just have to start firing cops, we
see everything going to hell.”
MAP tracks staffing trends on its website, too.
Hargrove notes that Flint, Mich., and Dayton, Ohio, have seen their
clearance rates fall more than 30 percentage points since the 1990s,
coinciding with huge reductions in police manpower (330 to 185 officers
in Flint; 500 to 394 in Dayton). When Hargrove’s group filed a FOIA
request to get homicide data about a suspected serial killer in Detroit,
the response was that the police lacked the budget to fulfill the
request. “What do you do when a city says, ‘We’re too broke to even try
to pull the records?’ ” Hargrove says. “I joke that what we’ve done is
to create what amounts to a failed government detector.”
There is a case to be made, though, that clearance
rates aren’t just a function of a police department’s staffing.
Priorities and management also figure heavily. In 2000, Charles
Wellford, a criminologist at the University of Maryland, published a
seminal paper
in which he identified the commonalities for departments that do
effective murder clearance. No. 1 on that list was ensuring that cops
are able to chase leads in the critical early hours after a murder, even
if that means earning overtime pay. Wellford’s current research looks
closely at the amount of money spent per officer, the amount spent per
case, and the percentage of detectives on the force. Clearance rates,
Wellford says, “are very much determined by priorities and resources.
I’m beyond thinking that’s an open question. The question now for me is:
How can we use the resources departments have to improve what they’re
doing in clearing serious crimes?”
The most discouraging thing Hargrove has learned
since starting his organization is how many police departments around
the country not only ignore the FBI’s data but also don’t bother sharing
their data with the FBI at all. Among the offenders: the state of
Illinois, which MAP has sued for the information. Hargrove recently
reported that homicides were more likely to go unsolved in Illinois in
2015 than in any other state: Only 37.3 percent of the 756 homicides
were cleared. That dreadful clearance rate would seem to go a long way
toward explaining Chicago’s notoriously climbing homicide rate, just as
the president and others start searching for solutions.
* * *
From his experience with the Gary police, Hargrove learned the first big
lesson of data: If it’s bad news, not everyone wants to see the
numbers. Lately, he’s taken to forcing the issue. Together with MAP Vice
Chairman Eric Witzig, a retired FBI investigator who worked with ViCAP,
Hargrove has conducted teaching sessions with homicide detectives at
meetings of the International Homicide Investigators Association and at
the FBI’s Training Division in Quantico, Va. Hargrove gets the attention
of the detectives in the room by using the JonBenét Ramsey case as a
test for the database. The detectives watch as he selects “Colorado”
under state, “strangulation” under weapon, “female” under victim’s sex,
and “6” under victim’s age. Colorado has only one such case, JonBenét.
But then Hargrove broadens the criterion to include strangulations of
girls ages 5 through 10, and a second Colorado case pops up: Melanie
Sturm, a 10-year-old girl found strangled in Colorado Springs in 1985.
Then he broadens it nationwide and finds 27 unsolved cases, 11 of them
in Western states. He shows them how easy it is to download this
information into a list. It’s like something from CSI. “I
believe every law enforcement agency should be made aware of and utilize
this program’s database,” Janet Oliva, president of the FBI’s
International Criminal Investigative Analysis Fellowship, told Hargrove.
The police in Atlanta are working with MAP now to
trace a long string of unsolved murders. But elsewhere, there’s still
some skepticism about the power of transparent data to serve the public
good. For one thing, it’s expensive. “This is an open debate,” Hargrove
says. “Things are getting so bad out there financially that the mayors
are wondering, ‘Does it make sense for me to spend my resources on
solving crimes against the dead when I’ve got the living who need help,
too?’ ” Why not just grab the easy cases—the cases with witnesses,
ballistics, and DNA—and put the hard ones on the back burner?
The answer, at least intuitively, would seem to be
that at least some of these murderers will kill again. But if that were
true, it ought to affect the murder rate. Sure enough, using his
database, Hargrove has confirmed that this is the case. Pulling up
information from 218 metropolitan jurisdictions in the 2014 Uniform
Crime Report, he found that in the places with poor clearance rates, the
homicide rate was almost double that of places where the clearance rate
was better—from 9.6 homicides to 17.9 per 100,000 people.
“It makes perfect sense,” Hargrove says. “If you
leave the killers to walk the street, why wouldn’t that cause more
killings? The answer is, it does.”
Others have reached the same conclusions in different ways. In Ghettoside,
a powerful examination of the unsolved-murder epidemic in Los Angeles,
author Jill Leovy raises the notion that solving murder cases
legitimizes the social order, undermining the ad hoc phenomenon of
“street justice” that emerges in lawless areas and makes people feel
powerless. So much attention has been paid to police racial bias cases
that another sort of injustice—lack of thorough policing—gets
overlooked. “It’s not enough to just stop doing the wrong kind of
policing,” Mark Funkhouser, a former mayor of Kansas City, Mo., and now
publisher of the magazine Governing, wrote in 2016. “It’s vital that we do much more of the right kind.”
A number of studies over the years show that strong
community policing and giving high priority to casework can raise
clearance rates, independently of workload and budget. This is where
management comes in. “When Michael Nutter campaigned for mayor of
Philadelphia in 2007, he was saying, ‘I’ll make solving major crimes a
major issue in my administration,’ ” Hargrove says. “Well, damned if
they didn’t elect him and damned if he didn’t do just that.” Over two
years, Philadelphia raised its homicide clearances from 56 percent to 75
percent.
Hargrove at home.
In Santa Ana, Calif., the clearance rate climbed
from about 28 percent in 1993 to almost 100 percent in 2013, after a new
police chief created a special homicide unit for gangs and attracted
anonymous donations to offer higher rewards for tips leading to arrests.
In Oakland, where clearance rates dropped to 30 percent in 2012, the
police worked with the FBI to add five agents to the department’s squad
of 10 full-time homicide investigators; in 2015 the clearance rate rose
to 60 percent. MAP has joined forces with a local TV news station to
shine a light on other underperforming police departments in the Bay
Area.
“I don’t want to blast a particular politician,”
Hargrove says, “but it’s been my experience that when you ask a police
chief or a mayor in a well-performing police jurisdiction what their
clearance rate is, the mayor and the police chief can snap those figures
off, because they’re paying attention.”
As are the police in Austin. Vann, the Gary
murderer, was caught not long after moving back to Indiana from Texas,
where he’d spent a number of years. While Hargrove never heard back from
the Gary police, he did hear from the police in Austin. “They said, ‘We
need to know whether he could’ve killed anyone here.’ ”
Hargrove sent the Austin police data on every
strangulation death in Texas. It looked like Vann had kept his nose
clean; Hargrove couldn’t see any cases there that matched his pattern.
“They must have agreed,” Hargrove says, “so that’s a kind of
consultation.” The first, perhaps, of many.
