by Robin Hanson
What’s much harder to acknowledge are the competitions that threaten to drive wedges into otherwise cooperative relationships: sexual jealousy, status rivalry among friends, power struggles within a marriage, the temptation to cheat, politics in the workplace. Of course we acknowledge office politics in the abstract, but how often do we write about it on the company blog?
In general, we prefer explanations that make us look good, whether as individuals, families, communities, or nations. When it comes to our rivals, we’re perfectly happy to entertain unflattering theories about their behavior, as long as the mud we fling at them doesn’t spatter too much back at us.
These biases and psychological sore spots don’t mean it’s impossible for us to think clearly about competition, only that our job becomes more difficult. All else being equal, we’d prefer to look for the keys to human intelligence under the light of cooperation, a light that makes us look good. But if there’s reason to believe the keys are elsewhere, we need to take a deep breath, roll up our sleeves, and start looking under the harsh light of competition.
PARABLE OF THE REDWOODS
Kevin’s native California is home to the world’s tallest tree species: Sequoia sempervirens, or the coastal redwood.
The tallest living specimen towers a lofty 379 feet (115 meters) above the forest floor. Historically some may have been even taller, with evidence of redwoods reaching 400 feet (122 meters) and beyond. This is approximately the height at which capillary action ceases to work; any taller and a tree can’t get water from its roots to its topmost leaves. So redwoods are, in a sense, as tall as arboreally possible.1
Height, however, doesn’t come cheap, whether for a redwood or any other tree. It takes a lot of energy and material to grow upward and remain standing in the face of wind and gravity—energy and material that could otherwise be put into developing stronger roots, growing horizontally to collect more sunlight, or making and dispersing more seeds in the hope of having more offspring.
So why bother? Why do trees put so much effort into vertical growth?
It depends on the species. Some grow tall to disperse their seeds more effectively. Other species do it to protect their leaves from terrestrial tree-eaters, like the acacia tree trying to stay out of reach from the giraffe. But for most trees, height is all about getting more sun. A forest is an intensely competitive place, and sunlight is a scarce but critical resource. And even when you’re a redwood, the tallest of all tree species, you still have to worry about getting enough sun because you’re in a forest of other redwoods.
Often a species’ most important competitor is itself.
Thus the redwood is locked in an evolutionary arms race—or in this case, a “height race”—with itself. It grows tall because other redwoods are tall, and if it doesn’t throw most of its effort into growing upward as fast as possible, it will literally wither and die in the shadows of its rivals.
Suppose we came upon a solitary redwood in an open meadow, towering far, far above the other plants and animals—a lanky giant standing all alone, reaching aggressively for the sky. This would look strange, even wrong, because it’s not how nature usually does things. Why would a tree waste its energy growing so high above an open field? Wouldn’t it get outcompeted by a shorter variant that threw more of its energy into reproduction? Yes. And so we can reasonably infer that an open field isn’t the redwood’s native environment. Instead, it must have evolved in a dense forest. Its height makes perfect sense, but only given the right context.
Now consider the human being. Like the redwood, our species has a distinctive feature: a huge brain. But if we think of Homo sapiens like the lone redwood in the open meadow, towering in intelligence over an otherwise brain-dead field, then we’re liable to be puzzled. As shown in Figure 3, such intelligence would seem out of place, uncanny, unnecessary.
Figure 3. Human vs. Animal Intelligence
But of course, that’s not the right way to think about it. We didn’t evolve in the meadow (metaphorically speaking); we evolved in the dense forest. And like the redwood, we weren’t competing primarily against other species, but against ourselves, as shown in Figure 4.
Figure 4. Humans Competing in Intelligence
“The worst problems for people,” says primatologist Dario Maestripieri, “almost always come from other people.”2
The earliest Homo sapiens lived in small, tight-knit bands of 20 to 50 individuals. These bands were our “groves” or “forests,” in which we competed not for sunlight, but for resources more befitting a primate: food, sex, territory, social status. And we had to earn these things, in part, by outwitting and outshining our rivals.
This is what’s known in the literature as the social brain hypothesis, or sometimes the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis.3 It’s the idea that our ancestors got smart primarily in order to compete against each other in a variety of social and political scenarios.
“The way the brains of human beings have gotten bigger at an accelerating pace,” writes Matt Ridley in his book on evolutionary biology, The Red Queen, “implies that some such within-species arms race is at work.”4 Steven Pinker and Paul Bloom also emphasize intra-species competition as an evolutionary cause of our intelligence. In an influential 1990 article on language evolution, they write: “Interacting with an organism of approximately equal mental abilities whose motives are at times outright malevolent makes formidable and ever-escalating demands on cognition.”5
Robert Trivers goes even further. He argues that it was the arms race between lying and lie-detection that gave rise to our intelligence. “Both the detection of deception and often its propagation have been major forces favoring the evolution of intelligence. It is perhaps ironic that dishonesty has often been the file against which intellectual tools for truth have been sharpened.”6
Of course, the social brain hypothesis isn’t a complete account of how and why we evolved big brains.7 But most scholars agree that intra-species competition was an important factor in shaping the kind of intelligence our species developed.
Now if, as we’ve been arguing, people are biased toward emphasizing cooperation and downplaying competition, then it will serve us well to temporarily reverse this bias. In what follows, let’s emphasize and accentuate the more competitive aspects of our species’ history. In particular, we’re going to look at three of the most important “games” played by our ancestors: sex, social status, and politics.
SEX
A common tagline for natural selection is “survival of the fittest,” but survival actually takes a back seat to reproduction. Yes, it’s important not to get eaten by tigers. But consider that every creature alive today is the final link in an unbroken chain of ancestors who managed to reproduce—and yet many of those same ancestors died in the jaws of a predator (after they made some babies, of course). From the perspective of evolution, mating, not survival, is the name of the game.
Now, when discussing sex in our own species, it’s easy to get distracted (often to the point of fixation) on sex differences: how men and women pursue different sexual strategies. Yes, it’s true that there are biological differences between the sexes, and that they’re important for understanding many aspects of human behavior. But here (and throughout the book), we’re mostly going to be glossing over such differences.8 To motivate our choice to lump men and women together, consider that when a species is pair-bonded and monogamous, the incentives for males and females converge.9 Humans aren’t perfectly pair-bonded and monogamous, of course, but it’s a fair approximation. In fact, as Ridley says, “It is hard to overemphasize how unusual humans are in this respect.”10 Thus in sex, as in other areas of life, our approach will be to treat men and women as following the same general instincts, while perhaps giving them slightly different emphases.
Also remember that we’re focusing on the competitive aspects of sex. Cooperative child-rearing is essential, to be sure, but it isn’t our focus of attention here.
The main form
of sexual competition is the competition for mates. Locally, this is largely a zero-sum competition, because within a given community, there are only a fixed number of mates to go around. Thus each of the two sexes faces competition primarily from other members of their sex. Every woman who wants to (monogamously) mate with a high-quality man has to compete with all the other women, while every man who wants to mate with a woman has to be chosen by her, ahead of all his rivals.
As in other competitions, like the competition for sunlight among the redwoods, mate competition in a sexually reproducing species leads to an evolutionary arms race. This is illustrated most iconically by the peacock’s brilliant tail,11 which serves as an advertisement of its owner’s physical and genetic fitness. Similarly, among humans, the competitive aspect of courtship implies that both men and women will be keen to advertise themselves on the mating market. We want potential mates to know that we have good genes and that we’ll make good parents.
The logic of this isn’t particularly hard to understand, but the implications can be surprising. As Geoffrey Miller argues in The Mating Mind, “Our minds evolved not just as survival machines, but as courtship machines,” and many of our most distinctive behaviors serve reproductive rather than survival ends. There are good reasons to believe, for example, that our capacities for visual art, music, storytelling, and humor function in large part as elaborate mating displays, not unlike the peacock’s tail.
SOCIAL STATUS
Social status is traditionally defined as one’s rank or position within a group—where you stand on society’s totem pole. It’s a measure of respect and influence. The higher your status, the more other people will defer to you and the better they’ll tend to treat you.
As with the babblers we met in the previous chapter, social status among humans actually comes in two flavors: dominance and prestige.12 Dominance is the kind of status we get from being able to intimidate others (think Joseph Stalin), and on the low-status side is governed by fear and other avoidance instincts. Prestige, however, is the kind of status we get from being an impressive human specimen (think Meryl Streep), and it’s governed by admiration and other approach instincts. Of course, these two forms of status aren’t mutually exclusive; Steve Jobs, for example, exhibited both dominance and prestige. But the two forms are analytically distinct strategies with different biological expressions. They are, as some researchers have put it, the “two ways to the top.”13
Dominance is clearly the result of competition, which can often be vicious and destructive. It’s all about strength and power, the ability to control others through force. But because only one person can come out on top in a dominance hierarchy, that person often has to knock others down in order to climb up, then continue to fight off contenders after earning the top spot. Stalin, for example, was notoriously paranoid and insecure in his hold on power, and during the Great Purge, he was responsible, directly or indirectly, for more than 600,000 deaths.14
Prestige, meanwhile, seems much less competitive, at least on the surface.15 It’s all about respect, which can’t be taken by force, but rather must be freely conferred by admirers. Nevertheless, there’s only so much respect to go around. In this regard, prestige is like a popularity contest, similar to the kind found in high schools around the world (only perhaps not quite as vapid). We earn prestige not just by being rich, beautiful, and good at sports, but also by being funny, artistic, smart, well-spoken, charming, and kind. These are all relative qualities, however. Compared to most other animals, every human is a certifiable genius—but that fact does little to help us in competitions within our own species. Similarly, even the poorest members of today’s world are richer, by many material standards, than the kings and queens of yesteryear—and yet they remain at the bottom of the prestige ladder.
Another way to think about prestige is that it’s your “price” on the market for friendship and association (just as sexual attractiveness is your “price” on the mating market). As in all markets, price is driven by supply and demand. We all have a similar (and highly limited) supply of friendship to offer to others, but the demand for our friendship varies greatly from person to person. Highly prestigious individuals have many claims on their time and attention, many would-be friends lining up at their door. Less prestigious individuals, meanwhile, have fewer claims on their time and attention, and must therefore offer their friendship at a discount. And everyone, with an eye to raising their price, strives to make themselves more attractive as a friend or associate—by learning new skills, acquiring more and better tools, and polishing their charms.
Now, our competitions for prestige often produce positive side effects such as art, science, and technological innovation.16 But the prestige-seeking itself is more nearly a zero-sum game, which helps explain why we sometimes feel pangs of envy at even a close friend’s success.
POLITICS
Aristotle famously called humans “the political animal,” but it turns out, we aren’t the only species who merit that title.17
In 1982, primatologist Frans de Waal published his influential book Chimpanzee Politics, which made a splash by ascribing political motives to nonhuman animals.18 (It also introduced the word “Machiavellian” to the field of primatology.) De Waal’s core insight was that human power struggles are structurally analogous to those that take place among chimpanzees. With the appropriate translations, chimps’ political behaviors are intelligible to us; we recognize in them the same goals and motivations that we exhibit when we politick with our fellow humans.
What is it about the behavior of chimpanzees that inclines us to describe it as “political”? Like many other animals, chimps organize themselves into a dominance hierarchy, a more-or-less linear ordering from the strongest on top to the weakest on bottom, where stronger chimps make a habit of bullying the chimps below them in order to get better access to food, mates, and other opportunities. By itself, however, a dominance hierarchy is too simple and straightforward to warrant the label “politics.” Chickens too have a dominance hierarchy—a pecking order—but few would accuse a chicken of scheming like Machiavelli.
So what turns an otherwise rigid, almost robotic dominance hierarchy into something teeming with politics? In a word: coalitions. Allies who wield power together. Here’s de Waal again, from his later book Our Inner Ape:
Two-against-one maneuvering is what lends chimpanzee power struggles both their richness and their danger. Coalitions are key. No male can rule by himself, at least not for long.19
In other words, if you’re a male chimp in a community with other males, it’s not enough simply to be strong or even the strongest. You also need to gang up with a team of other strong males. You need the ability to identify, attract, and retain good allies, and you need to be savvy enough to navigate the tumult as coalitions form, dissolve, and clash all around you.
Coalitions are what makes politics so political. Without the ability to form teams and work together toward shared goals, a species’ “political” life will be stunted at the level of individual competition—every chicken for itself, pecking at every other chicken. But add just a dash of cooperation to the mix, and suddenly a species’ political life begins to bloom.
Scientists have documented coalition politics in a variety of species. Primates, clearly, are a political bunch, as are whales and dolphins, wolves and lions, elephants and meerkats.20 But we know of no species more political than our own. Just as human brains dwarf those of other species, both in size and in complexity, so too do our coalitions. These take many forms and go by many names. In government, coalitions appear as interest groups and political parties; in business, they are teams, companies, guilds, and trade associations. In high school, coalitions are called cliques or friends. On the street and in prison, they’re called gangs. Sometimes they’re simply called factions. They can be as small as two people voting a third off the island or as large as a globe-spanning religion. They have membership criteria (however formal or informal), the ability to
recruit new members, and the ability to kick out current members.
Coalition politics is something we spend a lot of time doing. Whenever we anguish over the guest list for a party, we’re playing politics. Whenever we join a church because we feel welcome there, or leave a job that isn’t rewarding enough, we’re following our political instincts. Finding and joining teams, dealing with the attendant headaches, and leaving them when necessary are behaviors that come as readily to us as pack-hunting to a wolf.21
Now, if you’ve read a biography of Henry Kissinger or Robert Moses, or watched Survivor or Game of Thrones, you know that coalition politics can get nasty. Winning tactics often include threats, counter-threats, betrayals, deceptions, and even violence; there’s a reason “politics” is often used as a dirty word. But it would be a huge mistake to think that politics is all arm-twisting and backstabbing. It’s also full of handshaking, backscratching, and even hugging.
This was an argument made by one of Niccolò Machiavelli’s lesser-known but equally astute contemporaries, Baldassare Castiglione. Both men wrote books about how to navigate the political waters of 16th-century Italian city-states. Machiavelli’s famous guidebook is The Prince, written for supreme rulers, while Castiglione wrote The Book of the Courtier for those of lesser nobility who sought favor at court. But although their subject matter is similar, in many ways, the two books are polar opposites. Machiavelli emphasizes the ruthless, amoral side of human politics, whereas Castiglione emphasizes the softer, more humane ways to curry favor. The ideal courtier, in Castiglione’s opinion, should be well mannered and possessed of social graces. He should be skilled in horsemanship, poetry, music, and dance.22 Rather than manipulating others through cunning and intimidation, the courtier should win their affections freely, through charm, flattery, and valuable companionship.23
