Boehm makes a convincing case for saying that the change from relationships based on position within a dominance hierarchy to relationships based on equality led to the inception of morality as we would recognize it.218 Rather than having simply to keep on the right side of a dominant individual, the conditions which led to equality almost certainly meant that we all had to keep on the right side of each other. The development of a social morality was underpinned both by the sense of inclusion and security which went with participation in food sharing, gift exchange, co-operation and close community life, and by the counter-dominance strategies that threatened ostracism, exclusion or death to anyone showing persistent antisocial tendencies.
The American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins argues that in the absence of governments capable of enforcing peace between people, it was up to the members of these societies themselves to maintain good relations with each other by avoiding doing things which caused envy or resentment. Food sharing and gift exchange in these societies can be seen as a way of life involving substantial social investments to maintain cohesive relationships and avoid social divisions.210
Experimental evidence from modern primate research also suggests that the tendency towards co-operation and fairness reflects the desire to avoid the protests and antagonism which result from the unfair treatment of other members of the troop.226 Primatologist Frans de Waal suggests that this is why chimps will sometimes do things to help each other, and may prefer to share the food rewards used in experiments.
Perhaps because of the nature of modern market societies, people seem to need little or no evidence to convince themselves of our more antisocial tendencies, such as selfishness, possessiveness, egocentrism and status seeking. We are, however, much more reluctant to believe that we also have characteristics built into us which provide the basis for sharing and co-operation. The evidence on the nature of early human societies and the social behaviour of some non-human primates shows that our view of ourselves is in need of adjustment. Psychologists suggest, for example, that a sense of gratitude and feelings of indebtedness are human universals, occurring in all cultures.227, 228 These feelings are of course what prompts a return gift and a willingness to share; without them, people would be seen as freeloaders and attract hostility. The desire to reciprocate was the bedrock of systems of gift exchange which, like food sharing, provided the social cement of hunter-gatherer societies.229 As we saw earlier, Sahlins suggested that the exchange of gifts establishes a basic social compact between people.210
Experiments in behavioural economics show not only that we have a deeply ingrained willingness to share, but also that we have a preference for sharing. Take, for example, evidence that comes from experiments that have used what is called the ‘ultimatum game’. After participants have been randomly paired, one of each pair is given some money to split with his or her partner. They can divide it as generously or as meanly as they like – anything from keeping it all to giving it all to their partner and everything in between. The partner’s role is only to accept or reject the proposed division. If the partner rejects it, neither of them get any money, but if the division is accepted, they each get the amount proposed in the offer.
According to ideas of economic rationality, it would be rational to accept all offers, however small: you would then at least end up with something rather than nothing. But the most commonly proposed division turns out to be splitting the money 50:50.230 (Although this was the single most frequent division, the average division proposed was 60:40. This was because very few people offered more than a 50:50 split but some offered less.) These findings come from thirty-seven studies which used the ultimatum game in twenty-five different countries, countries at different stages of development and with very different cultures. (Despite this, there was little evidence that results were much influenced by cultural differences.)
One interesting finding was that people are willing to reject offers they think are unfair even when that means turning down the offer of at least some money. You might for instance reject an offer of only 20 per cent of the money from a proposer who wants to keep the remaining 80 per cent. In these experiments, the rejection of an offer like this could not be an attempt to signal that only more generous offers would be accepted in future: participants are told beforehand that they will not be paired with the same partner again. The willingness to suffer a loss in order to reject unfair offers, so denying money to the proposer, has been called ‘altruistic punishment’. Our tendency to act in this way, which includes our willingness to take revenge on wrong-doers even at a cost to ourselves, has been shown to be an important way in which co-operation is maintained and high standards of reciprocity upheld.231, 232
These and similar experiments are often cited as evidence that human beings don’t really act rationally to maximize personal gain in the way that economists often assume. Why we don’t is because our motivations are more fundamentally social than that, and have developed to serve social harmony. Through social selection, human psychology has been honed to seek the approval of others.
The results of the ultimatum game seem to suggest that, as well as wanting others to think well of us, we are more comfortable in ourselves when we behave in ways that gain the approval of other people. Robert Frank, an economist at Cornell University, has argued that to present the most convincing impression that we are trustworthy people who others should choose to co-operate with, we need first to convince ourselves that we are.231 He suggests that it is not enough to simply create an outward appearance of being honest and generous. Because people are, as he shows, very good at detecting whether others are trustworthy, they would see through that. Frank argues that to be really convincing, we must convince ourselves that we are trustworthy and unselfish, even in situations where there is no likely benefit to ourselves. That, he suggests, is why people do things like leave tips in restaurants, even when far from home.
THE IMPRINT OF INEQUALITY
The psychological imprint left by the different kinds of social organization in which our early ancestors evolved is not limited to the allocation of material goods. The ‘Dominance Behavioural System’ discussed in Chapter 2, which we use to deal with aspects of hierarchical social interactions, has its roots in animal ranking systems.70 As we saw in Chapters 2 and 3, a range of psychological problems involving responses to dominance and subordination increase with greater inequality.
Another particularly telling indication of the same legacy is evidence that bullying is much more common among children in more unequal societies. Although there is no internationally comparable data on bullying among adults, the World Health Organization’s Health Behaviour in School-aged Children survey does provide international data on children. As Figure 5.2 shows, there is a strong tendency for bullying to be much more common among children in more unequal societies.233 The proportion of children involved at least twice a month in bullying incidents is close to ten times as high in the more, compared to the less, unequal societies. Animal dominance hierarchies and bullying hierarchies are structurally similar: both rank individuals by strength, with the strongest at the top and the weakest at the bottom. Figure 5.2 suggests that children in more unequal societies are more likely to adopt similar kinds of behaviour to their dominance-orientated ancestors. Bullying is about competition for dominance, and the fact that it becomes more common in more unequal societies again suggests the involvement of evolved psychological responses to inequality linked directly to dominance strategies.
There are several other indications of responses to greater inequality which also look like evolved adaptations to dominance and subordination. One comes from a study which found that women in more unequal societies prefer more stereotypically masculinized men’s faces than women in more equal societies.234, 235 The study used an online survey to ask nearly five thousand heterosexual women in thirty countries to look at male faces in twenty pairs of photos. They simply had to say which face in each pair they found more attractive.
One photo in every pair had been run through a computer program which enhanced the masculinity of the face, for example by strengthening the jaw line. In the more unequal countries women had, as shown in Figure 5.3, a much stronger preference for the more masculine faces. This is particularly interesting because the research report also points out that ‘there is compelling evidence that women ascribe antisocial traits and behaviours to more masculine-looking men. They perceive more masculine-looking men as dishonest, uncooperative, and more interested in short-term than long-term relationships.’234 Women in more unequal societies seem to be biased towards men with the rugged masculine faces and characteristics which might get them nearer the top in a dominance hierarchy – a throwback to an evolved psychology appropriate to the power relations of ranking systems.
Figure 5.2: Children bully each other more in more unequal countries.233
Another research finding which looks as if it may originally have been partly an adaptation to the ranking systems of our pre-human past is the tendency for people lower in the status hierarchies of modern societies to have higher levels of a blood clotting factor called fibrinogen, which we described in Chapter 2. Fibrinogen makes blood clot faster, and blood concentrations increase when people are stressed. This is beneficial if the stressful situation might lead to injury: wounds stop bleeding faster if fibrinogen levels are higher. Higher fibrinogen levels would have served subordinates well if, in the dominance hierarchies of our pre-human forebears, they risked physical attack from their superiors.
Figure 5.3: Women in more unequal societies prefer more masculine faces.234, 236
To confirm that fibrinogen concentrations are indeed partly responses to the nature of social relations, more recent research has shown that people with good friendship networks have, as we would expect, lower fibrinogen levels.237 Fortunately we are no longer at risk of being bitten by those further up the social ladder. But the psychological stress of hierarchical relationships still makes our blood clot faster, just as supportive and unthreatening friendships do the opposite.
GETTING THE STRATEGY RIGHT
The ability to adapt our social strategy to suit different kinds of society became part of our genetic make-up because matching the strategy to the context has always been essential to survival and reproductive success. Individuals who behaved too generously in a dominance hierarchy were likely to be taken advantage of, just as those who were too self-serving in an egalitarian society risked ostracism. In societies with strong ranking systems, the threats to the survival of subordinates came not only from dominants but also from restricted reproductive opportunities and insufficient access to scarce resources. In contrast to the pressures towards self-advancement in dominance hierarchies, egalitarian societies provided both negative selective pressures, such as ostracism for antisocial behaviour, and positive selection for more co-operative characteristics. People who were less selfish and more generous and trustworthy would have been more popular as partners in co-operative activities as well as being preferred as mates.
Through these rewards and sanctions, egalitarian societies created a strong evolutionary pressure towards the development of more sociable characteristics in our evolved psychology. We have already seen a few examples of this inheritance: in the contrasting effects of hierarchy and friendship on blood clotting, in the fact that the social pain of exclusion engages the same parts of our brains as physical pain, in our tendency to eat together, in the religious symbolism of food sharing and in the derivation of words like ‘companion’. It is woven into the fabric of our lives. Take, for instance, our need to feel that we have a role or function in relation to others. We like to feel that others appreciate what we do and regard us as helpful. This can amount almost to a sense of self-realization in relation to others’ needs, whether as parents satisfying the needs of children or as individuals performing tasks which others value. Although modern wage-labour means that many employees feel unappreciated or exploited, unemployment is nevertheless still experienced partly as an assault on people’s sense of self-worth. Having no useful role in society can leave people feeling worthless. The desire to feel that we have a valued and appreciated role in relation to the needs of others would once have been our best guarantee against the risks of exclusion. By being useful to others, we maximized our security as members of the co-operative group.
It is often thought that values such as honesty, generosity and kindness were almost invented by, and remain dependent on, religion. But although religious convictions and teachings may help to sustain standards of kindness and generosity (despite sometimes also creating problems of intolerance), we can now see that prosocial characteristics were instilled in us during human prehistory by the evolutionary power of social selection in egalitarian societies. As anthropological accounts of recent hunter-gatherer societies suggest, the tendency to value unselfishness, generosity and kindness dates back into the distant mists of time. Although religious belief can add emphasis to these instincts, prosocial values are etched more deeply into our evolved psychology and are much older than any religious ideology that has arisen in the last few thousand years.
There is clear evidence from a number of animal species that apparently altruistic behaviour can become genetically encoded,238, 239 and evolutionary psychologists have given much thought to trying to understand the selective processes likely to be involved. Why do people risk their lives to help a total stranger who seems to be drowning? Why do so many people give anonymously to charities, or leave tips in restaurants in towns they will never visit again? This used to be considered a theoretical problem because if you have a genetic tendency to put yourself at risk to help others, or to share your food when it is scarce, then your genes are less likely to spread through the population. Group selection can only help spread characteristics that are already common in the group. But a tendency to be brave and put yourself at risk for others does not look likely to help your genes become more common than others in the local population. The individuals whose genes do best after war or conflict are, inevitably, the survivors, not those who died. Although some argued that these altruistic tendencies favour the survival of the group as a whole, group selection can only spread these characteristics once a substantial proportion of people in the population have them.
The power of Christopher Boehm’s work, described earlier in this chapter, lies in his recognition that it is the social rather than the natural environment that would have selected individuals with more prosocial behaviour. The positive selective pressure coming (particularly when choosing a mate) from the preferences of other members of the group for people who were more unselfish, combined with the negative pressure created by people discriminating against those who were antisocial, made a powerful selective combination. This fits with the conclusions of researchers who have identified an aversion to unfairness and a willingness to behave co-operatively even among some non-human primates. The evidence suggests that species which do show some apparently unselfish behaviour traits came to do so to avoid angry reprisals from members of their troop whom they failed to treat fairly or co-operatively.226
THE SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT AND EPIGENETICS
We have shown a number of indications of what look like built-in behavioural responses to more and less equal societies. The rapidly developing field of epigenetics shows just how fundamentally we are programmed to adapt to the kind of society in which we find ourselves.
Epigenetics is the study of the way in which the environment affects what genes do. Without altering the basic genetic code passed from generation to generation, a wide range of environmental stimuli have, nevertheless, been found to change gene expression – switching genes on or off – in ways which affect development and behaviour. In many different species, including humans, epigenetic changes enable organisms to develop differently in different circumstances. For example, worker bees and queen bees have exactly the same genes, but what those genes do is affected by whether larvae are provided with more or
less ‘royal jelly’. The jelly changes gene expression in larvae so that instead of becoming a short-lived, sterile worker, the bee develops into a much larger, egg-laying queen with a longer lifespan. In effect, development can be adjusted to experience.
In humans and other primates, experience in early life, including during foetal development before birth, fine tunes responses to stress. A dramatic illustration of the influences which stress during pregnancy can have on children’s development came from a study that showed it could do more damage to their emotional and intellectual development than exposure to potentially dangerous levels of radiation. Researchers studying a group of Belarusian children whose mothers had been exposed during pregnancy to radiation from the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear reactor disaster, found significant increases in developmental and cognitive impairment compared with children whose mothers had not been exposed to radiation.240 But the researchers were surprised to see that radiation exposure had less of an impact on intellectual functioning, speech, language and emotional disorders than the worries about exposure and the stress and disruption of the evacuation itself.
Although the important effects of early childhood experience on the course of a person’s later psychological development have long been recognized, research has only recently shown that the processes involved are substantially underpinned by epigenetic changes. Children who experience a lot of stress are likely to become more reactive to it, more anxious, and more vulnerable to depression later on.241
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