Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind

by Mark Pagel

  If the properties of self-organization tell us how it is we can produce large societies and develop within them merely by following local rules, they cannot tell us why we allow them to grow so large and be led by so few. So we need to know why large societies of people in their millions or even billions have been useful when our pattern and our instincts throughout our history have been to live in small tribal societies. The answers will follow from the other two characteristics of these self-organizing systems mentioned earlier. One is that they can often become more efficient as they grow larger; the other is that they frequently acquire smaller structures within the larger whole.

  THE ECONOMIES OF SCALING

  ECONOMIES OF scale arise when some things change faster or slower than some measure of the population, such as the number of people. If they change faster and it is something you want, or they change more slowly and it is something you want to avoid, these are both good outcomes. Prior to the invention of agriculture, all human groups were hunter-gatherers. It is a reasonable guess that there were few economies of scale in hunter-gatherer groups, at least once the group got beyond some minimum size that made it viable to survive. This minimum size might be the number of people required to ensure that there is a variety of skills in the group and sufficient numbers such that if someone is injured or dies, others can step in and take their place. With fewer than this number, the group not only loses some its skills, it is also vulnerable to chance events and bad luck. The minimum size might also be influenced by the numbers needed to compete with or fight other groups.

  When a hunter-gatherer group got much larger than this minimal size, it might actually have become less efficient. Imagine the land surrounding the hunter-gatherer group’s village or settlement as spreading out in an expanding circle. (We don’t suppose that the territory literally forms a circle, it is just that this makes the example easy to imagine.) Everything the group needs to survive must be obtained from that circle: hunters must find sufficient game, foragers must find sufficient plants, and everyone must find water and materials for constructing shelters. Evolutionary biologists call this “central place foraging,” and it is a good description of most hunter-gatherers. As the numbers of people in a hunter-gatherer group increases, the old circle will no longer provide enough in the way of resources, and so people will have to range out over a wider area. This means that now everyone, on average, has to walk just that little bit further every day to acquire the food and resources they need. As groups get very large, this daily foraging or hunting route might get so long that it makes more sense to divide the settlement into two, placing a new one some distance away from the first.

  This simple limitation of central place foraging might be why there were never any large-scale hunter-gatherer societies, at least as far as anyone knows: hunting-and-gathering positively works against any attempts to centralize and enlarge society. But compare this situation to what happens once agriculture, horticulture, or perhaps fishing technology is invented. Now everyone can produce at least some of what they need from a relatively small area of land. It is even possible that a subset of people can produce sufficient food for the remainder of the group, exchanging the food they make for goods the others provide. The group can then increase in size without requiring that each new person go further to find what they need to live.

  With food production industrialized this way, societies can benefit from other economies of scale that seem to arise naturally within larger groups. Modern cities are in many ways more efficient than collections of smaller towns or villages that might together have the same overall number of people. Measures of wealth creation, such as wages and gross domestic product, but also inventions and patents, increase more rapidly than population size: cities seem disproportionately either to attract or produce creative people and industries. On the other hand, measures of infrastructure, such as numbers of gas stations, the length of electrical cables, and road surface area increase more slowly than population size; this is good as it means that in these ways cities are more efficient. So consistent are the economies of scale in cities that some tout them as the emerging “green” centers of the modern world. They may in one place belch out huge quantities of pollution, but it is a smaller quantity than were the city to be broken into a smaller collection of towns and villages.

  Economies of scale dilute one of the chief reasons we first saw for a society to split into two: that individuals can promote their long-term reproductive success better by dividing a group than by staying together. Indeed, economies of scale provide an incentive to remain together, yielding more wealth and resources, and reducing important risks. Large numbers of people mean there are more backups should someone be lost or injured, and the economies of scale might mean that the society can afford an army. A centralized society can distribute food efficiently and it can devote resources—resources that it has because of economies of scale—to curb violence, maintain order, or protect people from fraud or theft. In short, these larger societies can establish institutions on the back of their economies of scale because these economies mean there is more wealth to go around. People are quite happy for it to be used collectively because they benefit from it.

  We can be sure the incentives from these various economies of scale must have been large or at least steady enough to accumulate to large amounts, because as soon as humans started living in larger societies, they would suffer from two kinds of predation. One was predation from other humans who wanted to sack and plunder towns for their wealth. Archaeological digs show that as soon as large settlements began to form, sometime around 10,000 years ago, so too did defensive walls. Perhaps the most famous story in Western literature—Homer’s Iliad—could be summarized as the story of a particularly thick defensive wall. Early town builders also sought out positions in the landscape—for example, on top of a hill or cliff—that granted a natural defensive advantage, even though hilltops were inconvenient for most other things, such as collecting water.

  The second kind of predation came from within society as higher densities of people meant greater transmission of infectious diseases. It is a simple rule of epidemiology that greater densities of people can support not only more diseases but nastier ones. All a disease needs to do to survive and grow in a population is infect more than one additional person before the body it is in dies or acquires immunity and kills the disease. When people live close together, diseases can be very nasty indeed and still achieve this magic number. Where people are further apart, diseases must become more benign: they have to keep you alive long enough that you will bump into enough people not yet infected to be certain of transmitting the infection to at least one of them. Anyone who has spent time in Africa knows that it is in large cities that you are most likely to get ill. Out in the sparse countryside one’s health often spontaneously and delightfully returns.

  Our determination to live in cities in spite of these costs shows that natural selection does not maximize well-being, but rather reproduction. Our cities survived because those who lived in them survived better and they produced more children. Had they not, cities would have vanished as quickly as they appeared, as people fled back to the Arcadian countryside. Still, economies of scale are not a free ride to prosperity. Calculations of the growth of cities suggest they rely on a steady stream of innovations to provide new economies as they need continually to reset their carrying capacities. This might be why historical records show that cities can change their sizes relative to other cities abruptly, either by growing on the back of some new innovation or by failing to innovate and collapsing. The collapse of the great Mayan civilizations and perhaps those of the Anasazi in the southwestern United States might have owed as much to a failure to produce technological innovations to increase food production as to any internal decline. But so long as technological innovations maintain economies of scale, it becomes a simple matter to grow the group into a larger society, and eventually into the large metropolitan cities of the modern worl
d.

  Even so, why have humans so willingly allowed themselves to be taken over in these large societies by a small number of leaders who often wear absurd costumes, demand taxes and the performance of ridiculous rituals, and make questionable claims to be connected to the gods? Large societies probably do benefit from some kinds of centralization and planning, despite the power of local rules to build them. They benefit from systems for distributing goods, systems for resolving disputes, and, not least, systems for organizing society around shared goals. If these are left to local rules, an ochlocracy or rule of the rabble can emerge, and when that happens, the economies of scale begin to leak away. The alternative is to allow for some degree of centralization; but once this happens, power ebbs away from the many and into the hands of the few closest to the apparatus of that centralization. It happens easily because most people are just following local rules anyway, and so long as the few can deliver on their promises to distribute wealth, curb violence, and reduce outside threats, they stand a chance of being retained. A different and provocative answer to this question arises from something we saw in chapters 7 and 9—that there is reason to expect that most of us are followers by nature anyway. Given the power of social learning, we expect that there will be only a small number of innovators among us. If this is true, and we can crudely translate innovators and imitators to leaders and followers, then many of us might be content to let someone else do the leading.

  These considerations can explain why we accept the few as our leaders. But what about their sometimes ridiculous or even bizarre rituals and costumes? Here we must remind ourselves that large societies don’t exist for the good of the masses, but because we as individuals get more out of them than we would from a smaller grouping or even no grouping at all. So, there is no expectation that the leaders that emerge in the new chiefdoms and nation-states will be fair-minded, equitable, or even moral. We expect that the most charismatic, socially shrewd, sociopathic, and powerful will rise to the top and do everything they can to enshrine their rule, even becoming kleptocrats along the way to whatever extent they can get away with it. Wearing the plumes of a rare bird, or in our modern world building obscenely large palaces—as Romania’s Nicolae Ceauşescu did in the middle of Bucharest in the latter part of the twentieth century, or in earlier cases such as the Alhambra, Versailles, or St. Peter’s in Rome—is a good advertisement that you have time, power, and resources to waste. This won’t be lost on people with our evolved psychology who instinctively recognize that some of that excess power might be used to protect them, but could also be turned on them in vicious acts of suppression. None of this should surprise us. One of the themes of this book is that the cooperative enterprise of society is always finely balanced between the benefits that derive from cooperation on the one hand and the benefits that derive from trying to subvert the system toward your own gain without being caught or overpowered.

  The spectacle of elderly, frail, sociopathic, and even senile leaders presiding over military dictatorships probably owes more to individuals and institutions protecting themselves than to any power the so-called leader might have. Dictators shrewdly surround themselves with sycophantic supporters—including their armies and police—and reward them with homes, access to food, and better freedom of movement than is available to others. These perquisites give the sycophants reason to keep their leader in power, and opponents who dare to poke their heads above the parapets are quickly whisked away, despatched, or disappeared. Wily dictators routinely provoke low-level factional disputes by denying any one group exclusive access to power, and so individuals know that once their leader falls, there will be a struggle for power among the various factions, with uncertain outcomes, or worse, death to the losers. Social institutions look after themselves because the people in them, like everyone else, have their self-interest in mind. This is true from the highest levels of government down through organizations and right into your local church or bridge club. If society is ticking over at some minimal level, it might be safer to put up with it than to try to replace it.

  For many people, the most compelling question about the disintegration of nation-states that coincided with the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union in 1989, or the unrest in many North African and Middle Eastern states in 2011, was why didn’t it happen sooner? But revolutions take lots of provocation, and you might just lose your life. If you jump ship too soon and join the opposition before its time, you will probably be tracked down and killed when the revolution fails. On the other hand, if you wait too long to join the opposition, you will be branded a traitor to the revolution and killed. No one will know when to make their move and no one will want to discuss the possibility with others, fearing they might be betrayed. The result is an unnerving and deadly version of the collective ignorance we saw in Chapter 7.

  VISCOSITY AND THE MAINTENANCE OF SMALL WORLDS

  WE HAVE seen throughout this book that the fundamental feature of human societies is our cooperation and ability to work together as a group. But we have also seen that this cooperation depends upon meeting people repeatedly and on knowing others’ reputations. Both of these features fall away rapidly in large groups. And yet at least two aspects of large social groups mean that this doesn’t happen nearly as fast as it might. One is that even in large societies, individuals are surprisingly well connected to each other; and the other is that people tend to move around far less than they could.

  In 1967, the psychologist Stanley Milgram sent a package to each of 160 randomly chosen people living in Omaha, Nebraska. He asked them to forward the package to a friend or acquaintance whom they thought would bring it closer to a particular final individual, a stockbroker working in Boston, Massachusetts. No one necessarily knew this stockbroker, and he wasn’t a famous local or national figure. The study came to be known as the “small world” experiment because on average the packages crossed the hands of only around six people, counting the first and last person, on the way to the stockbroker. This led to the popular notion of “six degrees of separation”—the idea that we are all separated from each other by no more than around six other people (later the subject of John Guare’s play by the same name). There were many criticisms of Milgram’s study, but later studies of e-mail and instant-messaging networks have confirmed his early results that the world is smaller than it might seem. You can get a sense of this idea yourself by imagining how you might get a message to someone you don’t know residing in some foreign land. Do you know anyone there? Do you know someone who might know someone there? Maybe try the embassy? The world begins to shrink as you consider the possibilities.

  Other features of our social networks, loosely thought of as our circle of friends, also support Milgram’s original findings. In many real social networks, the probability that two people chosen at random will have some link—perhaps friendship or belonging to the same club—is greatly increased if those two people have a mutual acquaintance. This is the same as saying that your friends are much more likely to know one another than two people chosen at random. We expect this sort of clustering and connectivity among people if they don’t move around too much. An analysis of over 1 million records of the movement of U.S. dollar bills using the “Where’s George?” Web site (the dollar bill features George Washington, the first American president) revealed that over half the time they turned up within six miles of where they had last been recorded. Even this short distance is probably an overestimate as the dollar bills would not always have been recorded by everyone who handled them.

  These measures tell us that our large societies are not very well mixed. Either we do not naturally move very far in our every day lives or people have tendencies toward what has been called social viscosity—the formation of smaller clubs, cliques, and other subgroupings. Whichever is correct, we tend to know those around us far better than we might expect from the size of the societies we live in, and this effectively reduces the size of those societies. No one actually live
s in a society of billions, or millions or thousands, or perhaps even hundreds, for that matter.

  Think about how many different people you see each day—people with whom you might have some interaction, not those you just pass in the street. Our tendency to social viscosity means our knowledge of each other is accurate; it makes it easier to trust in reciprocal exchanges; and we can be aware of each other’s reputations. This is probably why we have this tendency toward making groups-within-groups in the first place: it is a natural consequence of our ancient psychology for living in small groups. Even large social networks often display a peculiar architecture in which a few popular individuals have links to a large number of other people, while most people have far fewer links. These gregarious people provide short routes that can link many pairs of people, and thereby effectively reduce the size of the population, turning what is a wide world into a rather smaller one.

  If our social habits and instincts allow our societies to grow in an almost unlimited way, it shouldn’t surprise us that, historically, authoritarian and dictatorial regimes have succeeded in controlling people by removing the elements of the cooperative society on which these instincts act. Dictatorial regimes—the most obvious contemporary example being North Korea—remove trust between individuals, and this destroys cooperation, returning people to a dependent and psychologically infantile state. Once a secret police force or surveillance measures have penetrated the society so deeply that even family members betray one another, the fabric of the cooperative society collapses because reciprocity networks and personal reputations can no longer be relied on. People have little choice but to fall in line, seeking rewards directly from the state because it is the only source.