I don’t think so. Although our high-tech way of communicating might seem to preclude a strong influence of our evolutionary past on the way we act, the rules regulating primate relationships resurface even when we sit down at our keyboards to catch up with friends or reply to work memos. For example, the concern with social status that characterizes the relationships of other primates such as macaques, baboons, and chimpanzees has not disappeared in cyberspace, but is simply expressed in a new and different form.
There are some clear patterns in the way we use email. First of all, email communication between people who know each other well occurs in “conversation” bouts in which several messages are exchanged back and forth over the course of minutes, hours, or a few days. Who starts and who ends the conversation, the time taken to reply, and the length of the transmissions are not random. Let me illustrate this point by taking as an example an email exchange with an imaginary graduate student in my research group whom I’ll call Jennifer. One day Jennifer—who has not seen me around for a while because I’ve been hiding in a coffee shop, trying to write a book without being interrupted—begins an email exchange by sending me a long message. It contains numerous questions and requests for information and for action (there is always something my students need from me). It’s quite clear that a response is needed with some urgency. Jennifer obviously put a lot of effort into writing this email—time, energy, and the cognitive resources expended in the production of grammatically correct sentences—but the cost of this initiative, so Jennifer hopes, will be offset by the great benefit that my reply will bring her. By hitting Send and beginning the conversation, Jennifer has made an investment that she hopes will bring a significant return.
From my perspective, writing to Jennifer entails a cost—I am being distracted from my book!—and little to no benefit, if we forget for a moment that I get paid a decent salary for advising students. So I procrastinate in responding to her email, and when I do finally respond, I compose a brief missive in which I provide all the requested information while keeping the word count as low as possible. Jennifer finds my reply encouraging—the investment is beginning to produce a return—and within seconds of hitting the Reply button, I receive another message from her, as long as the first, with more questions and requests. My conversation with Jennifer continues along this pattern: her emails progressively get quicker and longer, while mine get slower and shorter. After responding five times, I let Jennifer’s email number six sit indefinitely in my inbox without a reply. According to the rules and etiquette of email communication, a lack of response ends the conversation. In rare cases, a pushy student will attempt to resume the conversation by sending an email that begins, “I don’t know if you received my last email but in case you didn’t, this is what I wrote, . . . ,” followed by the text of the message I ignored. Jennifer, however, knows better, understands and respects the conventions of email, and patiently waits a few days before starting a new conversation on a different topic. The way emails are exchanged between professors and students is analogous to how it’s done in the workplace: similar exchanges occur between bosses and their direct reports. Employees often write unsolicited emails to their superiors, while the latter are not as communicative. They may not respond at all to unsolicited queries, reply with automated messages, or forward the email to their secretaries.
What students and professors have in common with employees and their superiors is a clear dominance relationship—one individual is dominant, the other is subordinate. The costs and benefits of exchanging emails are different for the dominant and subordinate parties, and as a result a distinctive pattern of email exchange emerges. Of course, it’s possible that professors and bosses simply have less time for email than students and employees. But I suspect that, at the end of the day, professors and supervisors spend as much time on email as everybody else. They write long and unsolicited emails too, just not to their students or employees. They write instead to someone—possibly a superior—from whom they want or need something. So this asymmetry is not a matter of time. It’s dominance: the subordinate writes more, the dominant less.
Consider an exchange of grooming between a dominant and a subordinate male chimpanzee.1 Imagine that the dominant chimpanzee is sitting in a corner by himself, minding his own business, when the subordinate approaches him, “smiles” a couple of times, and begins to groom him. The subordinate grooms the dominant for a long time, putting a lot of effort into it. It’s an investment that is meant to bring returns: grooming, tolerance, or support from the dominant. When the subordinate’s fingers become sore, he stops and requests to be groomed back. The dominant doesn’t immediately reciprocate; in fact, he doesn’t do anything at all until the subordinate, tired of waiting for reciprocation that doesn’t occur, resumes his grooming. After a few minutes, he stops again. This time the dominant waits for twenty seconds, then starts grooming the subordinate—but only for a few seconds! Then he stops and waits for the subordinate to get back to it.
Figure 2.1. Male chimpanzees grooming each other in Kibale National Park, Uganda. Photo courtesy of Dr. John Mitani.
The chimpanzees go back and forth like this a few times; their exchange of grooming is lopsided because the dominant takes longer and longer to reciprocate, and the grooming he does give gets shorter and shorter in duration. At some point, the dominant ends the conversation; he stops responding, gets up, and walks away. Recognize the pattern?
What’s more, when the dominance relationship between two male chimpanzees is reversed—the subordinate becomes dominant and the dominant becomes subordinate—this change is reflected in their grooming behavior as well. Now it’s the former dominant who does all the work, while the other barely reciprocates. Reversals of dominance are uncommon in the human workplace, but it’s not unusual for some dominance relationships to become more balanced and symmetrical over time. A former student of mine who, like Jennifer, used to write me long unsolicited emails, has become a professor in a top-notch university. Now when we exchange emails, either one of us is equally likely to start or end the conversation, and he shoots off one-line responses he never would have sent me before. His style of email has changed gradually over time as his career has advanced and he’s caught up with me.
Just as examining the grooming behavior of chimpanzees can give us an insight into their social strategies—for example, whether they attempt to increase their social status by befriending powerful individuals or by challenging the authority and privileges of the powerful—the way we use email can tell us something about our own status and potential for advancement. Show me your emails and I will tell you whether you are on a fast track to become a leader of your company, or whether it’s unlikely that you will have secretaries answering your emails anytime soon. To understand why dominance affects the exchange of human email and chimpanzee grooming the way it does, let’s backtrack for a moment and pick up where we left off in the previous chapter.
Social Relationships and Their Problems
An encounter in a restricted space with a stranger who may be hostile has represented a potentially life-threatening situation over millions of years of primate evolution, so it makes sense that our minds are predisposed to come up with appropriate protective responses. The representative feature of social interaction in our everyday lives, however, is not the chance encounter with a stranger in the elevator, but repeated interactions with people we know well: our family members, romantic partners, friends, and coworkers. We establish and maintain long-term relationships with these people and derive obvious benefits from them.
Although social relationships can be cooperative or competitive, good or bad, they all pose certain problems—problems that are far more common and pervasive than those posed by encounters with strangers. A problem that arises in all relationships is one of conflicting interests—individuals want to act in ways that benefit themselves at the expense of their partner. This is true for every human relationship, including those between parents
and children, siblings, romantic partners, friends, and coworkers. In theory (and maybe also in practice), the easiest way for two individuals to resolve a disagreement is to have a fight. The winner gets what he or she wants and the loser, well, loses. Disagreements between two parties can also be solved by negotiation leading to compromise.
The problem with both strategies is that these ways of settling disagreements can be very costly and are not always effective. Fighting can cause significant damage (both physical and psychological) to the parties involved and to their relationship—possibly leading to its dissolution—while negotiation can entail significant costs in time, energy, and cognitive and emotional resources (for example, constant worrying and rumination). Continuous fighting or negotiation also makes relationships unstable and stressful. Mother Nature—who shapes the minds and behavior of living organisms through natural selection—always tries to find cost-effective solutions to the problems these organisms encounter in their environments. Humans and many other primates live in complex societies in which even the closest and strongest social relationships feature strong competitive elements. Individuals with close social relationships interact regularly, and their interests clash multiple times a day. Yet I know of no primate species in which individuals fight or negotiate all the time. No, Mother Nature has found a better solution to the problem. It’s called dominance.
Two individuals in a relationship establish dominance with each other so that every time a potential disagreement arises, there is no need for fighting or negotiation. The outcome is always known in advance because it’s always the same: the dominant individual gets what he or she wants and the subordinate doesn’t. There is no risk of injury, no waste of time or energy or cognitive or emotional resources. The relationship is stable and predictable, which is good for mental health. The resolution of disagreements through dominance has a cost, of course, but as we’ll see later, this cost is paid entirely by the subordinate. If the dominant individual in the relationship is smart, however, he or she will help reduce the cost of losing by making sure the subordinate gets something out of it—or by giving the appearance that this is the case. Before we go deeper into a discussion of dominance, let me clarify that dominance is not the only mechanism for imposing one’s viewpoint and interests upon another individual. Other mechanisms for social control, such as coercion or blackmail, are available, but that’s material for another story.
Dominance Relationships in Humans and Other Animals
Dominance is an integral part of all human social relationships, beginning a few years after we are born. Infants don’t need dominance to control their parents; they cry and scream their heads off, and their parents will do anything to make the noise stop. The moment children begin to understand language, however, parents take advantage of the situation to establish dominance and tell their children what to do. They start giving orders, and when their children cry, parents tell them to shut up. Children remain subordinate to their parents for a few years, as is in their best interest—they are entirely dependent on their parents during this time and wouldn’t do well without their support. Children, of course, don’t particularly like being subordinate to their parents, but they lack the social skills—and usually the guts—to mount an effective rebellion. They sometimes try to use psychological warfare tactics that were effective at a younger age, like crying and fussing a lot, but older children have lost the leverage that made these tactics successful in the first place, such as blackmail—the threat to harm oneself.2 Too much crying can be harmful to a baby, whereas the crying of an eight-year-old can be safely ignored, at least for a while.
In the parent-child relationship, the real challenge to parental dominance begins in adolescence. By then children have realized that while baby tactics no longer work, they can do battle on the parents’ own turf. This is also the time when evolutionarily it’s in the children’s best interest to fight for their independence—challenging parents is adaptive for adolescents—so when they push they have Mother Nature backing them up. The struggle for dominance during adolescence doesn’t happen the same way in every parent-child relationship. Some parents make concessions to their children and become less authoritarian, but maintain their dominance over their children for the rest of their lives. Some children are successful in reverting the dominance relationship and start calling the shots; their parents acquiesce and accept their new subordinate role. Finally, in some cases, neither party wants to give in, dominance remains unresolved, and parents and children bicker for the rest of their lives—or simply stop speaking.
I mounted a serious challenge to my mother’s dominance when I moved out of my parents’ house to go to college. I am now forty-seven years old, but my seventy-eight-year-old mother still tries to tell me what clothes I should wear, what food I should eat, and where and when I should go on vacation. Clearly, these are trivial issues, and we don’t really fight about them. We don’t really fight over this or that: we fight over who should make decisions over this or that. That is, we fight over dominance. This happens despite the fact that we now live on different continents and see each other only once a year. (But we do exchange emails.)
Dominance between parents and children is by no means a uniquely human phenomenon. In all animal species in which off-spring maintain long-lasting ties with their parents—typically their mothers—these relationships have a strong dominance component. This is true for social insects such as ants and bees, where the queen mother dominates her daughters, as well as many vertebrates, including, of course, other primates. Rhesus macaques live for twenty to thirty years, and daughters spend most of their lives in close proximity to their mothers. As a rule, the mothers are dominant and the daughters subordinate, which makes their relationships very stable. However, when mothers become old and weak, some daughters decide that they’ve had enough of their mothers’ dominance, beat them up, and reverse the dominance relationship once and for all.3
Dominance is also a prominent aspect of relationships between siblings. Sibling conflict is widespread in the animal world, as described by zoologist Douglas Mock in his book More Than Kin and Less Than Kind: The Evolution of Family Conflict.4 In species as distantly related as pelicans and spotted hyenas, sibling conflict takes the extreme form of siblicide. Pelican mothers lay two eggs but can afford to raise only one chick, so as soon as the eggs hatch the chicks start fighting, with the result that one ends up killing the other. The same behavior is found in spotted hyenas—mothers give birth to twins, and one cub kills the other (or tries to) within hours or days of being born.
In other species, sibling conflict is not resolved through murder but through dominance. In bird species, parents bring food back to the nest and deposit it directly into the mouths of their begging chicks. Dominance between chicks may make the difference between receiving and not receiving food from the parent. For example, the three eggs laid by female egrets hatch asynchronously, so that the chick born from the egg that hatched first is always larger than the chicks born from the eggs that hatch later. The firstborn chick wins all the fights with its siblings, and when Mom and Dad return to the nest ready to regurgitate their food, the firstborn chick receives the bulk of it. The other two chicks have to fight among themselves for leftovers. Similarly, in mammals that produce offspring in litters, dominance between siblings determines how much milk they obtain from their mother. Piglets start fighting for dominance within a few hours after birth. Those that are born larger and stronger become dominant and occupy the anterior teats, which provide the most milk. The smaller piglets are forced to suck from the posterior teats, which produce less milk. These teat positions are maintained until weaning, with the result that the dominant piglets become larger and larger, and the subordinate piglets remain small. As in other walks of life, the rich get richer, and the poor. . . .
In humans, dominance between siblings is not limited to twins who compete for their mother’s milk. All siblings compete for their parents’ attention, as well
as other resources, and establishing dominance is a way to settle potential conflicts before they arise. In a pair of siblings, dominance may depend on differences in age, gender, or parental favoritism. In general, older siblings are dominant over younger ones by virtue of greater size, strength, and superior social skills. Relationships between preadolescent siblings who are close in age, however, are often characterized by a lot of fighting and dominance instability. Preadolescence is a time when competition for a parent’s attention is particularly intense, and it’s also the time when younger siblings can challenge their elders with some chance of success. Older siblings sense this, and much of the fighting between siblings involves aggression from the top down to maintain the dominance status quo. The most stable and long-lasting sibling relationships are those in which dominance is clearly established from the beginning and is never challenged—for instance, when one sibling is significantly older than the other. A friend of mine has a brother who is ten years younger than she is. They’ve always had a stable and close relationship, with little or no fighting. My friend has never felt threatened by her brother and therefore felt no need to do anything to maintain her dominance. Rather, as a result of how clear and stable their dominance relationship is, my friend has taken up a supportive and protective role toward her brother. They phone each other ten times a day!
Dominance between friends can be subtle or very obvious. In children it tends toward the latter. Children begin competing for status and trying to establish dominance over their peers as early as two years of age.5 Dominance between children is important because it may determine who gets the attention of an adult, a preferred partner, or access to toys and other valued resources. As soon as children make their first friend, they fight hard to become dominant in the relationship. (Children, especially boys, often use physical aggression to establish dominance.) In my elementary school years, I had a best friend, Massimo, with whom I played after school almost every day. We obviously liked each other a lot and enjoyed playing together, but we were also very competitive. One thing we regularly competed for was the attention of a third boy named Valerio. Every day Massimo and I wrestled like wildcats on the floor of my bedroom and tried to force each other to admit defeat. In Valerio’s presence, we would also tease and denigrate one another and attempt to play with Valerio while keeping each other out of the game.
Games Primates Play: An Undercover Investigation of the Evolution and Economics of Human Relationships Page 4
