Others before me have taken this approach to try to elucidate aspects of human nature and behavior. Evolutionary psychologists have shown that humans possess social propensities that have been shaped by natural and sexual selection. For example, the differences in the characteristics that men and women find attractive in a potential long-term romantic partner are likely to be the product of sexual selection.7 Similarly, economists have established that the choices we make in a variety of not only financial but also social circumstances can be explained by rational models based on the assumption that we maximize the benefits and minimize the costs of such decisions. Freakonomics, the best-selling book by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, offers examples of this approach.8 Finally, primatologists have proved that humans are similar to chimpanzees in that human males, like chimpanzee males, are generally more physically aggressive and violent than females; as eloquently discussed by Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson in their 1996 book Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, it is likely that both humans and chimpanzees inherited this sex difference in aggressiveness from their common primate ancestors.9
What I aim to do in this book is to show that the adaptiveness of our behavior and its evolutionary legacy extend to both the most mundane and the most specialized aspects of modern social life. We often assume that our behavior in everyday situations simply reflects our unique personalities, the choices we freely make, or the influence of our environment. In reality, people around the world, living in very different environments and exposed to very different cultures, behave the same way in these situations. We don’t recognize these similarities in part because we are often unaware of our own behavior and in part because we don’t pay too much attention to what others do.
For the past twenty years, I have observed human beings in all sorts of social situations, applying to my own species the scientific rigor with which I study other primates. I have gone undercover to report on tics and strange ritual behaviors practiced—often without knowing why—by my species and to examine the curious unspoken customs that govern our behavior in public and in private. I have looked specifically for those behavior patterns and customs that would seem to be governed by nothing but free will but that are so similar from person to person that they reveal much more than individual choices at work. These behaviors, the legacies of our primate past, do not lie hidden—they play out on the surface of our lives, yet are so instinctual, so “natural” to us that we don’t notice them. But I have noticed.
To detect the “games” people play in everyday social interactions, it is necessary to become an excellent detective: one must observe human interaction not only closely but without being too overt or obvious. To understand the rules that govern primate games, it is also necessary to know the scientific principles that ethologists, psychologists, economists, and other behavioral scientists have discovered in their quest to unravel the complexities of behavior. Armed with these skills and principles, I have tried to show how the primate past influences our decisions and actions in ways we often do not perceive or understand.
We may think we have outgrown the conditions that govern the lives of other primates. We no longer live in the jungle and swing between trees; instead, our homes are in or around large cities, and we drive cars, wear clothes, spend years in formal education, and communicate electronically. Yet technology and clothes cannot disguise the inheritance of our primate past. They have simply changed the arena in which we act out age-old rituals, making the games that human primates play more arbitrary perhaps, but no less powerful.10
Chapter 1
Dilemmas in the Elevator
The Cavemen’s Legacy
In one of the scariest scenes in Brian De Palma’s 1980 film Dressed to Kill, Kate Miller (played by actress Angie Dickinson) is in the elevator, on her way up to the seventh floor. When the elevator stops and the door opens, the killer—a man wearing a woman’s wig, dark sunglasses, and a black coat—walks in, a razor in his hand. Kate raises her hand to protect her face, but the killer slashes it with the razor blade and continues to hack away at her until the elevator reaches the ground floor, where the door reopens and the two people who have called the elevator see Kate’s body on the floor, covered with blood.
In the movies, more people are probably murdered in elevators than in any other closed space—perhaps with the exception of the shower. In reality, the probability of being the victim of a deadly attack in an elevator is virtually zero. Yet the way people act toward others when they ride together in an elevator suggests that they have serious concerns about their safety. If the elevator is crowded, everybody stands still and stares at the ceiling, the floor, their watch, or the button panel as if they’ve never seen any of these items before. When two strangers ride together, they stand as far apart as possible and avoid facing each other directly, making eye contact, or making any sudden movements or noises.
You might think that strangers in an elevator are simply trying to be polite in a socially awkward situation, but the truth is that much of our elevator behavior is not the result of rational thinking. It’s an automatic, instinctive response to the situation. The threat of aggression is not real, yet our minds respond as if it were and produce behaviors that are meant to protect us. Elevators are relatively recent inventions, but the social challenges they pose are nothing new. The scenario of being in close proximity to others in a restricted space has been repeated innumerable times in the history of humankind.
Imagine two cavemen of the Paleolithic Age who happen to separately follow the tracks of a large bear into the same small, dark cave. There each discovers not a bear but another hungry caveman ominously waving his club—clearly an awkward situation that requires an exit strategy. In Paleolithic days, murder was an acceptable way to get out of socially awkward situations (the way we use an early morning doctor’s appointment today as an excuse to leave a dinner party early). In the cave, one of the cavemen whacks the other over the head with his club and the party’s over. Occasionally, the caveman’s chance encounter is with a female of the species, which makes it an opportunity for reproduction. But if a male caveman encounters another of his kind, it’s bad news. Similarly, when male chimpanzees in Uganda come across a stray male from another group, they slash his throat and rip his testicles off—in case he survives and has any future ambitions for reproduction.
Our minds evolved from the minds of these cavemen, and their minds, in turn, evolved from those of their primate ancestors—apes that looked a lot like chimpanzees. Although some of our mental abilities appeared relatively recently in our evolutionary history—like our capacity for abstract reasoning, language, love, or spirituality—the way our minds respond to potentially dangerous social situations is nothing new. Just as the way we feel pain in response to bodily injuries probably hasn’t changed in millions of years, the way primate minds respond to social threats hasn’t been modified very much either. On the contrary, evolution has been so conservative in this domain that the minds of humans, chimpanzees, and even macaque monkeys—whose ancestors began diverging from ours 25 million years ago—still show traces of the original blueprint.
The way people behave in elevators is not a popular topic for scientific research these days, but it was all the rage in the 1960s. An anthropologist named Edward T. Hall wrote a book in 1966 called The Hidden Dimension, in which he argued that when a person invades someone else’s personal space all kinds of trouble ensue.1 According to Hall, personal space is like an invisible bubble that people always carry around themselves. The radius of the bubble can be short or long, depending on the individual or the cultural norms of the society in which he or she lives. Noting that human personal space is the equivalent of an animal’s territory, Hall suggested that aggressive responses to violations of personal space represent attempts to defend one’s territory.
Given what we have learned about animal behavior since Hall wrote his book, the analogy between human personal space and an animal’s terri
tory is no longer useful. Territorial behavior is quite rare in primates and mostly confined to species that are only distantly related to humans, such as lemurs or New World monkeys. Moreover, humans do not aggressively defend the invisible bubble around themselves the way territorial animals defend the place where they live. What we do instead is take measures to protect ourselves from the risk of aggression whenever potentially dangerous individuals are close to us. Being next to another individual simply increases the probability of aggression, especially if this individual is a stranger. The relationship between close proximity and risk of aggression has been studied and is well understood in other primates, including species that do not defend territories, such as rhesus macaques and baboons.2 By recognizing the evolutionary continuity between the human mind and the minds of nonhuman primates, it becomes clear that people’s reaction to the presence of others in an elevator is simply a response to the risk of aggression.
The risk of being slashed by a maniacal murderer with a razor blade is not the only problem entailed by close proximity to strangers in restricted spaces. The anxiety associated with the anticipation of danger can be just as bad for our health as any physical injury resulting from actual aggression. People in elevators sometimes show stress-related behaviors: they scratch their head even if it’s not itching, they pick the cuticles around their fingernails, or they check their wristwatch compulsively even though they already know what time it is. Elevator stress is mild compared to the stress of being robbed at gunpoint, yet the difference between the two experiences is only a matter of degree. Just as our mind knows that aggression is dangerous and is prepared to take steps to avoid it, our mind also knows that stress is not good for us and is prepared to deal with that as well. This is true not only for strangers who find themselves alone in an elevator but also for monkeys trapped inside a small cage.
Figure 1.1. Cartoon courtesy of Jason Love.
Snapshots at jasonlove.com
“Just so you know: If this elevator breaks down, I have no problem cannibalizing your body for my survival.”
To Fight or Not to Fight
Imagine this situation. A rhesus macaque, which normally spends its days roaming in the jungle surrounded by fellow macaques, is suddenly introduced into a small cage by an undergraduate student eager to publish his first scientific article about monkey behavior. The ambitious student then introduces another rhesus macaque into the same cage—and waits and watches.
The risk of serious fighting between the monkeys is very high. The rules of macaque society are such that, whenever a monkey is close enough to another monkey that it can quickly grab and bite it, chances are good that this will happen.3 Furthermore, space restriction prevents the monkeys from running away if an attack is launched. Thus, in a small cage, aggression can be easily triggered—and once it’s started it cannot be easily stopped.
If the two monkeys have never met before, the risk of serious fighting rises even higher. Macaque monkeys don’t like strangers, so unless the other individual is a potential sexual partner, its presence could immediately elicit a hostile response. Furthermore—as we’ll see later—although the two monkeys could work together to reduce the tension, the fact that they don’t know each other makes it difficult for them to cooperate. The minds of the two people in the elevator process their situation using the same simple arithmetic: stranger + restricted space = trouble. An emotional alarm goes off immediately, as when we touch a flame with a finger and immediately feel the pain of being burned.
But if the risk of fighting in a restricted space is so high, why don’t monkeys—or people—just go ahead and fight?
People and monkeys generally have no trouble fighting with members of their own species, whether they be strangers, friends, or family. The times and places when fights take place, however, are rarely random. Whether we challenge a fellow army officer to a duel in the park or meet the local bully for a fistfight in the dark alley behind the high school, the logistics of the confrontation are carefully chosen in advance. Some benefits of agreeing on such details include opportunities to strike without being seen, to avoid retaliation, to limit the damage if defeated, or to receive support or protection from other individuals.
None of these benefits are available to people stuck in an elevator or to a pair of monkeys isolated in a cage. In these situations, there is no guarantee that victory can be achieved or that the costs of defeat can be controlled. There is a good chance that both parties will lose, and lose big. Among monkeys and Paleolithic cavemen, just as among modern humans, there are always losers who make wrong decisions and pick a fight in the wrong place. Natural selection, however, does not reward them. Over the evolutionary history of our species and that of other primates, the individuals with genetic predispositions for resisting the impulse to fight in the wrong place have had longer lives and produced more offspring than their indiscriminately belligerent counterparts. Consequently, the descendants of these wise individuals have genetically inherited behavioral strategies that allow them to avoid fighting in elevators or in small cages. These behavioral strategies appeared a long time ago in the evolutionary history of the Primate order, and they have worked so well for so long that natural selection has left them almost unchanged in our primate minds.
It turns out that when two rhesus macaques are trapped together in a small cage, they try everything they can to prevent a fight. Moving with caution, acting indifferent, and suppressing any behaviors that could trigger aggression are good short-term solutions to the problem. The monkeys sit in a corner and avoid any random movements; even a brief touch could be interpreted as the beginning of hostile action. Mutual eye contact is also dangerous because, in monkey language, staring is a threat. The monkeys look up in the air or at the ground, or they stare at some imaginary point outside the cage. But as time passes, sitting still and feigning indifference are no longer sufficient strategies to keep the situation under control. Tension builds between the monkeys, and sooner or later one of them will lose its temper. To avoid immediate aggression, and to reduce stress, an act of communication is needed to break the ice and make it clear to the other monkey that no harm is intended (or expected). Macaque monkeys bare their teeth to communicate fear and friendly intentions. If this “bared-teeth display”—the evolutionary precursor to the human smile—is well received, it can function as a prelude to grooming. One monkey brushes and cleans the other’s fur, gently massaging the skin while picking and eating parasites. This act can both relax and appease the other monkey, virtually eliminating the chance of an attack.
So, if you are a rhesus macaque and find yourself trapped in a small cage with another macaque, you know what to do: bare your teeth and start grooming.4 If you are a human and find yourself riding in an elevator with a stranger, in theory you could do the same thing (or the human equivalent thereof): smile and make small talk.
In practice, however, things are usually a little more complicated than that.
Dilemmas in the Elevator
When you walk into a crowded elevator, you may not have many options for action. Typically, you make a 180-degree turn and stand in front of the door with your back to the other people. Everybody else stands still and stares at the ceiling. Walking into an elevator occupied by only one other person is trickier. Should you acknowledge the other person? Feigning indifference is risky—it could be taken personally. Should you smile and say something pleasant? What if your friendly overture is misinterpreted or unwelcome? Should you puff yourself up and stare the stranger down to clarify who would win out in a potential confrontation? What if the other guy gets mad and turns into the Incredible Hulk? These are dilemmas that people living on the lower floors of high-rise buildings must face every morning on their way to work. They walk into the elevator and, chances are, someone else is already there.
Some time ago, I had the privilege of living on the twentieth floor of an apartment building in Chicago, where I not only enjoyed a view of Lake Michigan but also had th
e perfect opportunity to observe how people behave when they encounter others in a restricted space. Every morning the elevator made at least one stop on its way down from my floor and typically picked up one passenger. The building contained more than two thousand apartments, so almost every day I encountered someone I hadn’t previously met. Since observing behavior is what I do for a living, I couldn’t help paying attention to how each new stranger acted and filing it in my mental archive.
The following describes a typical interaction. The elevator stops on the fifteenth floor and a man in his thirties, unshaven and wearing sweats, walks into the elevator. The stranger looks at me for a nanosecond, then looks at the button panel. I’ve already pressed the ground-floor button, and it’s the only one that’s lit up. Two or three seconds go by—the time it takes him to make a decision. He presses the ground-floor button again, takes one step back, and stands in a corner while continuing to stare at the panel. It’s obvious to me that the stranger’s behavior is not the result of failure to notice that the button was lit, or simply habit (the same action repeated mechanically every day, without thinking). It’s clear that he has looked at the button panel, paused, and then deliberately pressed the ground-floor button again. Why has he done that?
Games Primates Play: An Undercover Investigation of the Evolution and Economics of Human Relationships Page 2
