The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think

by Kenrick, Douglas T.

  If you were instead being primed for mate acquisition, you’d have read a story about being away on vacation and meeting someone to whom you are instantly attracted. Not only is this person attractive to you, but he or she also finds you irresistible, and the two of you keep finding excuses to be around one another for hours on end. Your feelings become more and more romantic, and the scenario ends as you share a passionate kiss.

  Both men and women who read the vacation story found it romantic and even sexually arousing. People who read the other story about the creepy break-in, on the other hand, experienced not the pleasure of sexual arousal but the foreboding of abject fear. What effect did priming fear versus romance have on people’s loss aversion? Activating the self-protection subself made people even more loss-averse than usual. For these individuals, losses loomed much larger than gains. This finding makes sense to the extent that loss aversion was adaptive for solving ancestral challenges related to survival. When dangers lurk, it pays to worry. We would expect our inner night watchman to be particularly loss averse.

  But while losses loomed large in the self-protection condition, something very different happened with those primed for mate acquisition. In fact, when this subself was running the show, loss aversion didn’t just disappear, it reversed itself for men, who became oblivious to losses and amped up the importance of gains.

  For men primed to attract a mate, then, gains loomed larger than losses. Why? Across the animal kingdom, failure to gain a mate puts mammalian males at critical risk of not being able to pass on their genes. Remember those young skateboarding blokes in Australia, who threw caution to the wind when a pretty young woman came to watch them perform. Potential gains in the mating domain loom large because ancestral males who were overly safe failed the most critical step in evolution.

  Whereas many biases have been considered stable, it turns out that biases like loss aversion vary dramatically from situation to situation—they can be amplified, turned off, and even inverted. These variations are neither arbitrary nor irrational; instead, they reflect the operation of our deeply rational subselves. Some subselves are loss averse, like our inner night watchman seeking to protect us from danger. But others are not, like men’s inner swinging-single subself seeking to find a mate. Predicting whether a person will be loss averse or not requires knowing which of the seven people in his or her head is currently at the controls.

  WHO WAS THE REAL MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.?

  When Martin Luther King Jr. acted very differently in different situations, was he being a hypocrite or suffering from a breakdown of his true, more rational self? And assuming that you do not always act in a perfectly consistent manner, are you a hypocrite?

  The idea of subselves suggests that there is more to hypocrisy than meets the eye. If each of us is really multiple people, then we should not be surprised by hypocrisy. It might be tempting (but wrong) to think of our subselves as playing different characters at different times, like when our demeanor at a Halloween party changes to match our costume. We all realize that sometimes we pretend to be someone we really are not. But subselves are not roles. The idea of role-playing presumes that there is a single “real” you when you get off the stage or take off the mask. But if you think about yourself as encompassing several different subselves, this single you is a mirage—an illusion created by your hyperrationalizing consciousness. The notion of subselves implies that there are many real yous, not one. The you with your friends, the you on a date, the you with your family, and the you striving for a promotion are all equally the real you.

  Some of your subselves have common objectives; befriending a neighbor could simultaneously serve affiliative, self-protective, and kin-care goals, for example. But some of your subselves have incompatible goals, pulling you in opposite directions. And when one subself is in charge, it doesn’t much care what your other off-duty subselves might normally desire. The self-protection subself compelling you to dine at a popular, well-lit restaurant doesn’t care that your idle mate-acquisition subself would rather explore the unique little out-of-the-way joint a few blocks down a dark street. When you are worried about the band of knife-wielding thugs who just walked around the corner, you are not thinking about romancing your date.

  The mate-retention subself and the mate-acquisition subself are especially likely to be at odds with one another. Just because someone’s mate-retention subself has chosen to wear a wedding ring and has sworn eternal faithfulness, that doesn’t mean that the mate-acquisition subself has also taken a vow of chastity. King exemplified the tension between these two subselves. When a powerful, high-status man is away from home and in the presence of adoring female admirers, not only is his inner good spouse likely to be off duty, but his inner swinging single is primed to jump into the driver’s seat. And when the swinging single starts pursuing its agenda, it doesn’t much care what the good spouse would do if it were in charge.

  This is not to say that subselves provide an excuse or a justification for immoral behavior. But they can explain why humans often behave like hypocrites: we have only one body, but our brains are inherently divided. The actions of our mate-acquisition subself often create dire consequences for our other subselves later, as when the new sexual partner feels jilted and calls a press conference. But as we saw in the study about reversing loss aversion, a man’s mate-acquisition subself is not especially qualified to judge potential losses when there are immediate gains on the horizon.

  NOW THAT we’ve properly introduced our subselves, we’ll look more closely at how they do business. We must warn you, though: if you’ve ever taken a business class, the next chapter might inspire you to throw away your textbook. To see why, we’ll first make a stop at Disneyland.

  3

  Home Economics Versus Wall Street Economics

  ON OCTOBER 16, 1923, Walt Disney and Roy O. Disney started a small business called the Disney Brothers Cartoon Studio. Walt was the cartoonist; Roy handled the finances. Working on a shoestring budget out of their Uncle Robert’s garage, the Disney boys operated on the edge of bankruptcy for over a decade, often borrowing money from their parents and other relatives.

  From the outset Walt dreamed big, sparing no expense to make the first talking animated film, then raising the bar even higher with the first cartoon in Technicolor. In 1937, they staked everything on creating the first feature-length animated film. Although immensely risky, the venture was a great success. Over seventy-five years later, we’ll guess you still know the film—it was called Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The brothers followed this triumph with a string of other now-classic films, including Pinocchio, Dumbo, Fantasia, and Bambi.

  Running a business together for many years, the brothers Disney had some bitter disagreements, many stemming from Walt’s big-dreaming perfectionism and complete lack of attention to money. For Snow White, Walt hired a giant team of animators, investing an excruciating three years and $1.5 million into the film (an unheard-of sum back in the Depression-ridden 1930s). Even after the film was finished, Walt wanted to spend another $300,000 in last-minute touch-ups—a move Roy forcefully blocked. Nevertheless, the two men stuck together through a lifetime of ups and downs, eventually expanding beyond the movie business, opening Disneyland in 1955 and Disney World in 1971, leaving behind a company that became the largest media conglomerate in the world.

  Fast-forward to 1984, when Michael Eisner arrived to take his new job as Disney’s chief executive. Although Walt and Roy had been gone for over a decade, the company still had the feel of a family business. Roy E. Disney, Roy O.’s son, was head of animation and vice chairman of the board of directors. Despite the company’s having grown to the size of a major corporation, Disney employees faced none of the massive between-production layoffs common in the film industry. Working at Disney was more like being part of a family than a corporation. Employees even took off an afternoon every week to play softball together.

  Forward again to 2003. After two decades of Eisner’s
leadership, the once warm and friendly family business that had given birth to Mickey Mouse, Sleepy, Sneezy, and Dopey had become a battlefield, devastated by legal and managerial feuds. Although Roy E. Disney had himself brought in Eisner, he openly criticized many of Eisner’s decisions. Eisner retaliated by hatching a plot to remove Roy from the board of directors. The messy feud was covered widely in the media, leaving some dark smudges on the company’s cherished warm and fuzzy family-oriented image, as well as its financial bottom line. Eisner was eventually demoted and then quit on bad terms.

  Given the billions of dollars at stake, why couldn’t Eisner and Roy E., who had once been friends, just follow the lead of the company’s famous founders and try harder to get along?

  Unless you’re a hermit, most of your crowning achievements and painful failures involve other people. Sometimes people’s efforts mesh beautifully, and result in something extraordinary, like Snow White. But negotiating the social world presents a minefield of potential conflicts, from nickel-and-dime flare-ups on the playground to billion-dollar explosions in the corporate boardroom. Why are some people successful negotiators, while others can’t seem to get on the same page with their colleagues?

  If we take a closer look at the rational economic rulebook for negotiation, we make a surprising discovery: rather than trying to maximize profits and minimize losses rationally, the most successful teams and CEOs operate by a very different set of rules—the ones used by our different subselves. This is useful to know because you will want to bring the right subself when you’re heading to the bargaining table.

  PLAYING GAMES

  Brutus and Caesar, Jung and Freud, and Lennon and McCartney all had famously productive partnerships, followed by infamously nasty splits. Even the closest of relationships are occasionally staging grounds for marital spats, sibling rivalries, and parent-child conflicts. Life is a series of fragile negotiations. Does a wife clean the kitchen uncomplainingly or initiate a possible argument over the distribution of domestic labor? Does a man pick up the restaurant tab for the fifth time in a row or ask his dating partner whether she is familiar with the concept of turn taking? Does a parent yield to a toddler’s screaming demands for a sugary treat at the market or say no and risk the possibility that the situation will escalate into an embarrassing full-blown public tantrum?

  Rational economists, the mathematically oriented business analysts, study these kinds of negotiations using a set of ideas called game theory. Game theory applies cold hard mathematical logic to otherwise messy decisions. For example, should you accept an initial salary offer from Acme Corporation or drive a harder bargain and take the chance that the Acme execs will offer the slot to someone else? By applying clean numerical values to the different outcomes, economists turn confusing dilemmas into precise mathematical problems. And we humans really like logical precision—so much so that eight different game theorists have been awarded Nobel Prizes.

  If you’ve ever taken a course in economics or social psychology, you’ve heard about the prisoner’s dilemma, a prototypical example of game theory in action. Imagine you are a crook. One day you and one of your criminal associates are arrested on suspicion of a crime, and you are held in separate rooms. The district attorney comes into your cell and offers you two options: you can remain silent or confess. By remaining silent, you will be cooperating with your partner on the standard criminal pact of silence, whereas by confessing, you will be defecting on your partner.

  So do you cooperate with your partner and keep mum, or do you defect and snitch? For both of you as a pair, you get the best joint outcome if both of you cooperate and say nothing. If the two of you keep your mouths shut, the worst you’ll get is a short prison sentence (the DA doesn’t have enough evidence to put both of you away for a long time). If both of you defect and snitch on each other, you’ll both get a substantially longer sentence.

  But the decision poses a dilemma: If you remain silent while your partner confesses, things will turn out really badly for you. You will be put behind bars for a long time, while your partner strikes a plea bargain and gets to walk away. On the other hand, if your partner remains loyal and stays quiet, but you choose to confess and give the DA evidence against him, you get to go free! Your outcome depends not only on what you do but also on what your fellow felon does, making this the kind of dilemma ideally suited for game theory.

  Researchers often study prisoners’ dilemmas in the laboratory, offering people different amounts of money for cooperating versus defecting. For example, if you and the other person in an experiment both choose to cooperate, you each get $5. But if you both defect on one another, you walk away with only $2. That might make it seem like cooperation is the best strategy, but it isn’t. If you choose to defect but your partner cooperates, you win $8, while the other guy gets $0. Of course, if the reverse happens (you cooperate but your partner defects), you’re the one who ends up with zilch—this is known as the “sucker’s payoff.”

  From the rational economist’s perspective, the most reasonable decision in this type of one-shot prisoner’s dilemma is to defect. Defecting is rational because it gives you a relatively better payoff regardless of what your partner decides to do. If you defect, you’ll be better off in the event that your partner either defects (you get $2 as opposed to $0) or cooperates (you get $8 instead of $5). According to the logical rules of game theory developed by rational economists, the rational choice is for people to defect on their partners because no one should choose to be the sucker.

  Although game theory is all very logical and precise, behavioral economists and other psychologists who have studied these kinds of dilemmas point out one little problem. Real people don’t play like rational economists say they should. Even in one-shot games with complete strangers who can’t see or hear one another, and who will never meet, real people often spontaneously decide to cooperate.

  We humans fail to behave rationally in all kinds of negotiations. In one economic game called the ultimatum game, you are given a sum of money (say, $100) that you need to split between yourself and another player. The other player has no say in how much you give, except that if he or she says, “No way,” to your offer, neither of you gets a penny. Rational economists have argued that your most reasonable choice would be to offer very little to the other player, maybe $1 for the other person and $99 for you. Why? Because if she says yes, she gets $1; if she says no, she gets $0. So, as long as she chooses rationally, you have her over a barrel. Yet people who are offered a $1 share of $100 usually respond with what rational economists would consider irrational spite, saying, “No thanks. I’ll take $0 instead!” In fact, not only do people making offers in the ultimatum game rarely act like rational economists say they should, but capitalistic Americans are surprisingly generous in their offers, often sharing equally with the other person (the one exception is that students of economics tend to play hardball, and consequently tend to leave the experiment with less money than less “rational” people).

  Behavioral economists, the laboratory decision scientists who have exposed our supposed defects, have dedicated thousands of pages in scientific journals to these kinds of “anomalies,” “fallacies,” and “paradoxes.” But do these violations of economic rationality really mean that humans are flawed? From the evolutionary psychologist’s perspective, there is something deeper going on.

  The rules of game theory developed by rational economists make good sense when the parties negotiating with each other are cold-blooded Econs, each seeking to maximize monetary returns. These rules work well in explaining how the Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola Corporations compete in the marketplace, how used automobiles are bought and sold on the open market, and how Wall Street traders exchange shares of stock or swap pork bellies on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. But humans are not cold-blooded Econs. Corporations, market pricing, and even economics itself are all evolutionarily novel phenomena—things our ancestors would never have encountered. What our ancestors did encounter was
their kith and kin. Even today, most people in the world still have most of their meaningful interactions with friends and family members. Rather than playing the rational economist’s game, we play a very different game when it comes to family.

  HOME ECONOMICS: THE KINSHIP GAME

  What would happen if you were playing the prisoner’s dilemma game, but the other prisoner was your clone? Nancy Segal has actually studied this very question. Segal is a behavioral geneticist at California State University, Fullerton, just up the road from Disneyland. Segal studies twins. She looks at the similarities and differences in twins’ preferences and behaviors, like whether twins separated at birth have similar personality traits when they are reunited thirty years later. Segal believes that studying the relationships between twins offers an unusual opportunity to study one of evolutionary biology’s most powerful principles: inclusive fitness. The idea is simple: because evolution favors behaviors that help an organism pass on its DNA, natural selection favors greater cooperation between organisms who share common genes. Since we share some of our genes with relatives, this means that helping a relative is, from a genetic perspective, almost as good as helping ourselves.

  The principle of inclusive fitness provides the scientific explanation for why blood is thicker than water. But the principle doesn’t just say that people will help family members more than strangers. It is much more precise: people will tend to give more help to those family members who share more genes with them. For example, if you’re going to run into a burning building to save another, the principle of inclusive fitness suggests that risking your own life will be genetically worthwhile if you can save two siblings (each sharing about half, or 0.5, of their genes with you), four nephews or nieces (each sharing one-quarter, or 0.25, of their genes with you), or eight cousins (each sharing one-eighth, or 0.125, of their genes with you).