Here’s what I think is going on in this situation. The stranger and I are both aware of each other’s presence—that’s undeniable. By pressing the button again, the stranger is refusing to acknowledge my nature as an intentional being—someone who has a goal (reaching the ground floor) and has already taken action to achieve it (pressing the button). Recognizing that other people have goals and desires and that their behavior is guided by the pursuit of these goals is a complex cognitive ability that arguably sets humans apart from all other animals, including monkeys and apes.5 This faculty comes to us as part of a mental package that also includes the capacity to empathize with our fellow human beings—to understand their feelings and feel their pain. Attributing goals and feelings to other people is what makes us recognize them as humans—a hallmark of personhood, if you wish—and we make the same attributions with our beloved pets. By pressing the ground-floor button again, the stranger has failed to acknowledge my status as a fellow human traveler with similar goals and engaged in goal-directed actions. His behavior dehumanizes me and, from his perspective, makes me safer and easier to deal with.
Another morning, another elevator ride, and another stranger joins me on the way down. This time it’s a gray-haired man wearing a business suit and toting a black leather briefcase. The man notes that the ground-floor button has already been pressed and does not press it again. He stands quietly across the elevator from me, his gaze going up and down along the edge of a wall panel. By refraining from pressing the button again, this stranger has implicitly acknowledged my presence and my previous actions. We are sharing not only the space within the elevator but also our goals. We are traveling to the ground floor together. Sharing goals is a crucial aspect of a social relationship. Parent-child bonds, friendship, and romantic love are all based on an acknowledgment that two individuals have the same goals and are willing to engage in actions to jointly pursue them. The stranger’s behavior is not an act of friendship or love, but it’s an important move that signals a friendly disposition.
Other aspects of the stranger’s behavior suggest that he is concerned about the situation, like anyone else would be. Staring at an imaginary point in space is an unnatural behavior that might attract another individual’s attention and get on his nerves. Horizontal gaze movements are dangerous in an elevator because they inevitably result in eye contact, unless they occur below the waistline—dangerous for other reasons. Vertical gaze movements along wall corners or door edges, however, like those of the man with the briefcase, are safe because they minimize the chance of having someone’s face in the visual field. If the stranger is feeling particularly tense that day, he might even smile at me. On a long elevator ride, however, indifference and awkward smiles would not be enough to keep the peace: the two people would have to start grooming. In other words, they would have to talk.
Games Monkeys Play
What determines whether two individuals respond to each other with hostility, indifference, or friendliness when they meet in a potentially risky situation like being trapped in a closed space? According to Shelley Taylor, a social psychologist at the University of California–Los Angeles and author of the book The Tending Instinct, gender makes a difference.6 Taylor proposes that males show a “fight-or-flight” response to social stress: they either run away, to avoid the stressor, or stay and fight. Females, on the other hand, “tend and befriend”: they stay put and behave nicely to try to win over the enemy.
Taylor is probably right. If two male macaque monkeys are trapped together in a cage with no opportunity for escape, there is a good chance that they will kill each other. Two female macaques in the same situation might instead try to be nice to each other and work together to diffuse the tension. However, this is what males and females may do on average—not all males and females behave in full conformity to Taylor’s hypothesis. In reality, the line that demarcates the male and female strategies is crossed all the time—in both directions.
The desire to gain a deeper understanding of the monkey mind—as well as to publish my first article—was what prompted me to design an experimental study of monkey behavior at the University of Rome many years ago. I was the originator of the aforementioned “elevator” experiment: having placed two macaques together in a small cage, where they barely had room to stand up and turn around, I videotaped their behavior for one hour. I used only females for the experiment because I was afraid that two male monkeys would fight and kill each other, and also because we had many more adult females than adult males in the lab. I tested over twenty-five pairs of monkeys. In about half the tests, the two monkeys knew each other, although they had lived apart for many months prior to the experiment. The other pairs were made up of individuals who had not met or seen each other before.7
When the monkeys who knew each other met in the cage, they initially looked uncomfortable but quickly figured out how to defuse the situation. They started grooming each other and continued to do so for most of the hour. They took turns so that by the end of the hour, each had given and received a similar amount of massaging. The continuous grooming reduced the tension between the monkeys and eliminated any risk of conflict—in the end, everyone seemed happy.
When the strangers were paired together, however, the tension in the cage was so thick that you could cut it with a knife. The monkeys glanced nervously in all directions and scratched themselves like crazy—a sign of anxiety in macaques. Although they took extra care to avoid any eye-to-eye contact, it looked as if they were surreptitiously sizing each other up and thinking, Is she bigger than I am? Is she mean? Can she really kick my butt? This would go on for several minutes. Then, in some pairs, one of the two monkeys—the one that presumably answered Yes to all three questions—would freak out and “smile” submissively to the other. She would start grooming while the other sat and enjoyed it. When the groomer’s fingers were so sore that she had to take a break, the other female would return the favor for a few seconds, but would then immediately stop and get comfortable for the next session. In the end, these unfamiliar pairs groomed almost as much as the familiar pairs, but the relationship was decidedly lopsided: one of the females did all the work, while the other simply reaped the benefits of the grooming.
There were also pairs of unfamiliar monkeys—about half of the total—in which neither monkey acted as if she was intimidated by the other. No submissive smiles were exchanged. Nothing happened for several minutes until, finally, one of them started grooming the other. This monkey stopped after a few seconds, however, and immediately lay down in front of the other or placed her leg, arm, or butt right in the other’s face—a request for grooming. The other monkey, in turn, did exactly the same thing: groomed for a few seconds and then requested reciprocation. Some didn’t bother to groom at all and simply asked for more grooming. The two monkeys played the game “you groom me–no you groom me” over and over, with the result that by the end of the hour they had exchanged little actual grooming. They appeared to be as uncomfortable and anxious as when the test started.
I was initially puzzled by these differences in behavior among the monkey pairs but became excited when I discovered that the monkeys’ behavior was perfectly explained by a branch of economics called game theory. Without being conscious of it, my monkeys were playing a game known among economists as the Prisoner’s Dilemma, which explains the exchange of altruistic behavior between two unrelated individuals.8
This model was originally developed in 1950 by two American mathematicians, Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher, while they were working for the Rand Corporation, and it was later formalized by another mathematician, Albert Tucker, who coined its name. The game is illustrated by this scenario. Two prisoners are interrogated in separate rooms for a crime they committed together. They are not allowed to communicate with each other. If both prisoners remain loyal and refuse to incriminate the other, they will each get a mild sentence of one year in jail. If one confesses and incriminates the other, the confessor will walk free
while the other receives a sentence of five years. However, if each incriminates the other, both prisoners will be sentenced to three years. The situation can be thought of as a game in which the two prisoners are the players and the years of the sentence are the payoffs. The game has two possible strategies: cooperating or defecting. As illustrated by the payoff matrix shown in Figure 1.2, the player who defects always gets a lighter sentence, no matter what the other one does. When player 1 defects, he gets a sentence of zero years if player 2 cooperates, and three years if player 2 defects. In contrast, when player 1 cooperates, he gets a sentence of one or five years, depending on player 2’s behavior. Although defecting is generally the best strategy, if both players cooperate they receive higher payoffs than if they both defect. Cooperating, therefore, is a winning strategy, but only when a player is certain that the other player will cooperate as well.
When the game is played only once—that is, each player is allowed only one move—and with a stranger, the chances of cooperation are slim. Since the two players don’t know each other, they have no reason to expect cooperation from the other. Moreover, since the game will not be played again, it is pointless to cooperate and expect future reciprocation. In this case, the best strategy is to defect. However, when the game is played repeatedly—also known as an “iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma”—there is an opportunity to keep track of the other player’s previous moves and to act accordingly. Computer simulations conducted in the late 1970s by Robert Axelrod, a political scientist and author of the book The Evolution of Cooperation, showed that under these circumstances the winning strategy is neither cooperating nor defecting, but a new strategy called “tit-for-tat.” In this strategy, player 1’s first move is to cooperate, and then to simply copy what player 2 has done in his previous move; if player 2 cooperates, player 1 cooperates as well. If player 2 defects, player 1 defects too. Axelrod suggested that tit-for-tat has three characteristics that make it a winning strategy: niceness (the tit-for-tat player is never the first to defect); retaliation (the tit-for-tat player is no fool and immediately retaliates against defection with another defection); and forgiveness (the tit-for-tat player remembers only one move back in time and “forgives” a player who defected in the past if his most recent move is to cooperate).
Figure 1.2. Example of a payoff matrix for the Prisoner’s Dilemma.
The dynamics of the Prisoner’s Dilemma can be significantly altered by two factors. One of them is kinship. If two individuals are family members, they may be willing to behave altruistically without expecting reciprocation. For example, a monkey mother would be happy to groom her young daughter for hours without obtaining any grooming in return. Monkeys and humans are happy to help relatives because they share their genes, and by behaving altruistically they increase the chances that their own genes will be maintained in the population. In addition to kinship, the dominance relationship between the two players can alter the dynamics of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. In this case, the individual who is subordinate is willing to behave altruistically toward the dominant individual, not in order to be reciprocated in the same currency, but in exchange for safety or protection. I explore this issue in more depth in Chapter 2.
My elevator experiment created a risky situation for the monkeys involved. The circumstances called for action to reduce the risk of aggression and to alleviate tension, and as we’ve seen, monkeys are predisposed to use grooming behavior to handle these situations. Grooming happens also to be an altruistic behavior that benefits the recipient and entails a cost in time and energy to the giver. The dynamics of grooming in the various experimental pairs demonstrated that the Prisoner’s Dilemma is a powerful model to explain the exchange of altruism, not only among people but among monkeys as well. All the monkeys in my experiment were unrelated to one another. If the two monkeys in the cage had met before, they responded to the situation as if they expected to meet again in the future. Both individuals in the familiar pairs played the cooperation strategy and got the most out of the situation. The monkeys in the unfamiliar pairs, however, acted as though they were playing the Prisoner’s Dilemma game only once: they had met the other player for the first time and had no reason to expect that they would meet again. In half of the pairs, there was a strong asymmetry in perceived power. The female who felt most vulnerable cooperated, presumably in hopes of exchanging grooming for safety. The other monkey took advantage of the situation and defected. In the other half of the pairs, in which there was no clear asymmetry in power or perceived vulnerability, both prisoners played tit-for-tat and ended up retaliating against each other’s defections or exchanging small amounts of grooming. At the end of the test, these monkeys looked stressed out—that hour together must have felt like an eternity.
Verbal Grooming
Riding in an elevator with someone else is not usually so stressful as to cause a heart attack. Although an instinctual alarm goes off in response to a perceived risk of aggression, the elevator ride is brief enough that simple indifference is an effective strategy to ensure safety. If elevator rides were one hour long, as in my monkey experiment, I would expect people to use social strategies to reduce the tension, such as smiling and making polite conversation. Insofar as these strategies require cooperation between two individuals, I would expect that the interactions between them would unfold according to the Prisoner’s Dilemma dynamics illustrated by the monkey experiment. Some of these dynamics can indeed be observed in everyday elevator interactions.
One morning, for example, I rode the elevator with a middle-aged man who seemed to be particularly intimidated by my presence. As I stepped in, he smiled nervously and started talking immediately. He talked nonstop and managed to relate his entire medical history, complete with symptoms, diagnoses, and treatments, before we reached the ground floor. I doubt that this man thought I was a doctor or that he expected to receive medical advice. Rather, he was more likely an insecure and emotionally vulnerable person who used massive verbal grooming to appease a perceived potential aggressor in a risky situation.
Not all my experiences are like this, of course. When I ride in an elevator with an attractive woman, I’m generally treated with indifference, and I have a hard time believing that response stems from fear or intimidation. When my girlfriend rides in an elevator with a man, he will often strike up a conversation with her and end up asking for her phone number. People’s responses to potential mating opportunities are just as predictable as their responses to potentially dangerous situations.
The beauty of human nature, however, is that although people’s average behavior can be scientifically predicted, there is a lot of unpredictable variation above and below the mean. Once, on the way up to my apartment, an old lady got in the elevator on the second floor, pressed all the buttons for the third through the twenty-second floors, and walked out on the third floor with a grin on her face.
Chapter 2
The Obsession with Dominance
An Ancient Use of a New Technology
When I wake up in the morning, my brain immediately needs coffee and my body needs sugar. After my biochemical needs have been satisfied, I’m ready to check my email. I log in to my account and find the inbox filled with new messages from family members, close friends, friends I haven’t heard from in years, coworkers, businessmen from Nigeria, and other strangers with names I can’t even pronounce. I feel overwhelmed. Email, as anyone with an Internet connection knows, makes life easier but can also be a major source of psychological stress. I start deleting unread messages. The first ones to go are those from people with obviously fake names announcing an unexpected—and unlikely—inheritance or lottery win. More authentic-seeming messages from strangers will be read later. I turn my attention to emails from people I know. I’m eager to read and reply to a few. Some of my responses are long and personal, others short and professional. I choose not to reply to some, letting them stew in my inbox for days until I’m overwhelmed by guilt. Then I write to some people who probably don�
��t expect to hear from me. Just as some people want something from me, I want something from others. As a good citizen of the global community, I make my own contribution to the clogging of inboxes around the world.
It’s hard to deny that email makes our work lives significantly easier and more efficient. Email, however, is not only about work. The truth is that, like most other people, I maintain social relationships via email. I exchange emails with my mother and sister in Italy, with friends all over the world, with colleagues and students, and with other people I know.
As someone who studies the social relationships of human beings and those of other primates, I often wonder whether the use of email and all of its derivatives—Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, to name a few—has altered human social relationships in some fundamental way. We humans have evolved to interact with others face-to-face. For millions of years before speech evolved, early humans and their primate ancestors maintained social relationships only with individuals they could see, hear, and touch. To negotiate the day-to-day problems of these social relationships, they used facial expressions, vocalizations, and a great deal of touching, grooming, hugging, and occasionally throwing a slap or a punch. Eye contact is important to nonhuman primates, and also to modern humans, as a gauge of whether another individual is friendly or hostile, dominant or subordinate, sexually attracted or not. But what has happened to all of these measures now that we negotiate social relationships through our computers? Social media users have found creative ways to communicate their moods with “emoticons”—smiling faces, winks, and frowns—to compensate for the fact that the reader may have no idea whether we are serious or joking when we say such things as: “Sometimes you really make me want to kill you.” Is that it? Emoticons do it all? The legacy of millions of years of negotiating social relationships face-to-face disappeared instantly the day Al Gore invented the Internet?
Games Primates Play: An Undercover Investigation of the Evolution and Economics of Human Relationships Page 3
