Games Primates Play: An Undercover Investigation of the Evolution and Economics of Human Relationships

by Dario Maestripieri

  Competing in the Dark

  THE NEW YORK CITY BLACKOUT OF 1977

  On July 13, 1977, at about 8:30 P.M., damage to power lines and relay stations caused by multiple lightning strikes plunged a large part of New York City into a complete electricity blackout that would last for about twenty-four hours.18 When the lights went out and millions of people were left in the dark, a crime wave the size of a tsunami hit the city, particularly in its poorest neighborhoods. With the darkness guaranteeing anonymity and hindering police intervention, people looted stores, burglarized apartments, smashed windows, and set fire to entire blocks of buildings. In one night, over fifteen hundred stores were looted throughout the city. Theft and property damage were also accompanied by violent crimes: people were robbed and shot on the streets and in their homes, women were raped, and over five hundred police officers were injured. By the end of the following day, when electricity was finally restored, over four thousand people had been arrested—the largest mass arrest in the history of New York City. The number of people who committed crimes that night but didn’t get caught, however, was probably much larger.

  Clearly, not all of the people who looted stores or robbed, raped, or killed someone that night were career criminals. Many of them probably had no criminal record. There is an Italian proverb, L’occasione fa l’uomo ladro, that means, “Opportunity turns man into a thief.” This proverb implies that the world is not divided into bad people who steal and good people who don’t, but rather that, given the right circumstances, anybody can turn into a thief—even a murderer. According to another Italian proverb (I proverbi sono la saggezza dei popoli), “proverbs are people’s collective wisdom.” They reveal some fundamental truth about human nature, but usually come with no explanation attached. To explain why “opportunity turns man into a thief,” we need rational models of behavior.

  The economic and evolutionary biological models tell us that stealing is basically a selfish act of competition in which individuals benefit at the expense of others. In a “good” opportunity, the benefits are high and the costs are low. To make stealing costly, society has laws that protect people and their property and punishment for those who break them. Obeying these laws, like the laws that impose taxes on all citizens, is equivalent to being forced to contribute one’s tokens to the public pool in a public goods game. There is a price to pay for not contributing—or worse, for stealing tokens from the public pool. When the price is eliminated, the benefit of cheating is no longer offset by a cost.

  The anonymity and immunity afforded by darkness prompt people to break the social contract and unleash their selfish and competitive tendencies at the expense of others—both individuals and society as a whole. Usually, the people who do so are the ones who stand to benefit the most—the poor and the oppressed. (Millionaires don’t need to loot an appliance store to obtain a new TV set.) These are the people who feel that in the cooperative game enforced by the social contract they get the short end of the stick.

  Competition, whether regulated by rules such as in sports or by laws against crime, is as integral a part of human nature as cooperation, and fluctuations in the ratio between the benefits and costs of competition can unleash harmful behavior that is normally restrained. Since it’s mostly poor and uneducated people who sit in jails, does that mean that the human biological propensity to defect in a cooperation game when it’s advantageous to do so is stronger in these people? Do education, wealth, and job stability protect us from our potentially harmful competitive tendencies and make us more likely to play by the rules even when it’s advantageous to break them? I don’t think so. The well educated and the wealthy have the same tendency as everyone else to defect under the right circumstances, but this tendency is expressed in different contexts. To give an example, being in the dark and protected by anonymity unleashes the harmful competitive tendencies of one particularly well-educated group of people: university professors.

  ANONYMOUS PEER REVIEW

  Many important decisions concerning the political, legal, and economic life of a country, as well as the health and well-being of its citizens, are influenced by intellectual advances made in disciplines such as political science and law, economics and sociology, biology and medicine. Progress in these disciplines, in turn, depends on funding to conduct research and on the publication of research findings in journals and books. Grants and publications also benefit the universities in which the research is conducted. In the United States, when professors obtain a large research grant from the government, more than half of it goes directly into their university’s pockets. In the United Kingdom, the more professors publish articles in prestigious journals, the more their university is funded by the government. Not surprisingly, professors who are highly successful in securing funding and in publishing are sought after by universities and rewarded with quick promotions and high salaries. The pursuit of knowledge, once the occupation of scholars writing books with pen and paper at home, has now become big business, and many large universities increasingly operate like corporations.

  Needless to say, given how much is at stake, publishing articles and obtaining research grants have become very competitive activities; only a small fraction of articles submitted to journals are accepted for publication, and an even smaller fraction of grant applications are funded. Who decides which are accepted? Politicians? Special experts hired by the government? No, it’s the professors themselves. Using a process called peer review, they read each other’s work and recommend acceptance or rejection. Thus, when a reviewer recommends acceptance, he or she is not only promoting a worthy enterprise that can help society and improve the future of humankind, but is also boosting the author’s career and inflating his or her bank account. Conversely, the consequences of having a paper or a grant application rejected can be devastating for a researcher, both psychologically and financially. As in any human affair in which people negotiate with one another the outcome of their endeavors, personal interests figure prominently in the review of intellectual and scholarly work, and human nature can get in the way of making objective judgments and decisions.

  Whoever invented peer review—I’ll call this person “the Inventor”—must have realized that every time an article or a grant application is reviewed, the reviewer’s recommendation to accept or reject the author’s work is equivalent to a cooperating or defecting move in a standard Prisoner’s Dilemma Game. If the professors review each other’s work multiple times over the course of their careers, the game is played repeatedly with frequent role reversals. The reviewer makes the first move with his or her recommendation to accept or reject the author’s work. If the author plays tit-for-tat, as expected, he or she will match the reviewer’s move the next time they interact and their roles are reversed.

  The Inventor must have realized that if professors played these games with each other, decisions made in the peer review process would simply track the behavior of the players, regardless of merit. This would be a disaster; mediocre individuals could have spectacular academic careers, and a great deal of taxpayer money could be wasted on not-so-serious research projects. Worse than that, asymmetries in the frequency with which the two players take the reviewer or the author role (for example, a senior professor might review the work of a young colleague much more often than the other way around), or in the consequences of their recommendations (for example, a single recommendation by a reviewer might affect an author’s entire career), might lead to attempts to influence decisions. An author might try to encourage or reward a positive recommendation through bribery, or use intimidation or violence to discourage or punish a negative recommendation. And university professors do occasionally resort to violence to punish peers for their rejection: not too long ago, a biology professor in Alabama whose tenure application was rejected by her colleagues shot and killed three of them.19

  Protecting the reviewers and keeping them safe from the wrath of rejected authors was a primary concern of the Inventor, who though
t that this could be effectively accomplished by keeping the reviewer’s identity anonymous. This way, the reviewer wouldn’t have to worry about playing tit-for-tat and would be immune to bribery attempts and fear of punishment. The Inventor assumed that once the reviewer was freed from all external influences, he or she would make honest and objective recommendations about the author’s work because it would be the right thing to do (and because he or she had signed an agreement to that effect). Being so concerned about how human nature would influence the author’s behavior, the Inventor overlooked the fact that reviewers are human beings too, and that any human being who is given the power to make decisions about another’s work, career, and financial success under conditions of anonymity is very tempted to use this power to his or her own advantage.

  The problem is that, although professors are more qualified than anyone else to review each other’s work, they also belong to the same community and compete for limited resources such as grants, publications, and high-status positions. Altruistic motives to advance the goals of the community—centered on producing high-quality and important work—inevitably mix with selfish motives to advance their personal agenda at the expense of competitors. Models from economics and evolutionary biology show us that the relative prominence of these altruistic and selfish motives depends, again, on the balance of the benefits and costs of cooperation and competition. Anonymity dramatically alters this cost-benefit balance in favor of competition, because anonymity reduces the benefits one can obtain through cooperation (reducing incentives to cooperate) and virtually eliminates the costs of competition (providing incentives to engage in selfish behavior).

  To understand this better, recall that people are more inclined to cooperate with others and to contribute to their community if doing so enhances their good reputation and increases their prospects for future personal gains. In the peer review system, objective and honest reviews of other people’s work benefit the community as a whole, but anonymity deprives the reviewer of the opportunity to gain a good reputation through cooperative behavior. In addition to reducing the indirect benefits of cooperation, reviewer anonymity also greatly reduces the costs of competition. Economic and evolutionary models predict that if individuals are given the opportunity to hurt their competitors without paying a price—without being punished for it—they are likely to do so. People’s behavior during the 1977 New York City blackout is consistent with these models. The same happens during wartime when soldiers invade another country and commit crimes against civilians, or following natural disasters such as earthquakes or major hurricanes, which cause a breakdown of the law enforcement system with a consequent spike in crimes. Is the behavior of anonymous reviewers also consistent with these models? When darkness falls, do university professors murder their colleagues and loot their property?

  OPPORTUNITY TURNS THE REVIEWER INTO A COMPETITOR

  Investigating the effects of reviewer anonymity on the peer review process gives us a window into human nature. Among other things, university professors do a great deal of research on their own behavior, and the peer review system has been the subject of hundreds of studies. Sadly, the results of these studies and anecdotal evidence from our colleagues tell us that anonymous reviewers sometimes do indeed loot the intellectual property of the authors whose work they review (when they steal ideas from these authors and delay the publication of their work to give themselves time to redo it and claim it as their own) and also sometimes damage or destroy the reviewed authors’ property for good (when they suppress the publication of their articles or the funding of their grant applications with harsh negative criticism). In addition to property theft and property damage, anonymous reviewers can also be guilty of crimes against the person—which may amount to professional “murder”—such as when they recommend that a colleague’s application for tenure be rejected.

  A few years ago I requested funds to conduct a particular research project by submitting a grant application to the National Science Foundation (NSF), a U.S. government agency that funds a lot of scientific research. When the NSF receives a grant application from a professor, it asks professors in the same field at other universities to provide anonymous reviews and recommend acceptance or rejection. The reviewers are carefully instructed by the NSF to comment on the scientific merit of the proposal and its potential impact on society at large without making any personal comments on the author or the author’s work in general. This recommendation notwithstanding, one anonymous review of my application began with a statement along these lines: “The author [that would be me] received a lot of funding from the National Institutes of Health [another government funding agency] in the past, and if he thinks he is going to get money from the NSF too, he is wrong.” So much for limiting comments to the proposal’s scientific merit.

  Receiving an anonymous review with undeservedly harsh criticism and personal attacks (we call them ad hominem, from Latin) is a psychologically traumatic experience that hurts a researcher beyond the professional damage caused by the rejection itself. To survive the anonymous peer review system and make it in academia, a researcher must develop a thick skin and the ability to shrug off rejection and the career setbacks that come along with it. I have been rejected hundreds of times in my career and like to think that my skin has grown thick in the process, but receiving harsh anonymous reviews still makes me want to quit my job and take up gardening instead. Plants can be much safer and more reassuring to be around than people.

  Clearly, not everyone uses the anonymous peer review system to shoot down their competitors, or at least, not all the time. Many rejections are well deserved, provide constructive criticism, and help the author learn how to produce better-quality work. More often, the anonymous reviews of an article or grant application are a mixed bag, containing both good ones and bad ones. A study conducted by two British doctors, Peter Rothwell and Christopher Martyn, and published in 2000 in the journal Brain showed that agreement between independent reviewers as to whether manuscripts should be accepted, revised, or rejected was not significantly greater than that expected by chance.20 If a manuscript of mine receives three anonymous reviews, it will often be the case that one says the article is fabulous, one says it’s just okay, and the third says it’s the worst piece of junk ever written. (Note: This mainly happens to good articles; bad articles usually get three negative reviews.) At some journals, a manuscript with mixed reviews still has a chance at publication, whereas at journals that reject most of their manuscripts a strong negative review is the kiss of death, especially if it comes from an influential senior professor, as is often the case.

  Trying to publish papers and obtain grants through the anonymous peer review system is like walking through a minefield: the land mines are everywhere, and each step you take is bound to set one off. Most of the land mines are small, however, and the explosions don’t cause deadly injuries. You’ll be able to resume the march after getting back on your feet and licking your wounds. However, the continuous blows, along with the anxiety, fear, and anger that follow each explosion, can take a psychological toll and impose a significant cost in time and resources as you are forced to proceed slowly, zigzagging left and right, and even to take a few steps backwards more often than not.

  Every now and then, you encounter people in academia who have tried to beat the system by establishing a safe corridor through the minefield that allows them to proceed straight, at a steady speed, avoiding the stress and pain of the continuous explosions. Some of these folks have published hundreds of articles in their long careers, but most of those articles have appeared in just one or two journals, where they never receive a rejection by virtue of their personal connections with the journal’s editors. I’ve watched some of these folks become overconfident in their success and decide to step out of their safe corridor and submit a manuscript to a different journal. Invariably, they hit a land mine and are blown up just like everyone else.

  VAMPIRES VERSUS WEREWOLVES

 
It should be clear by now that there is a great deal of subjectivity in the peer review process; reviewer anonymity allows people with an ax to grind to shoot down their competitors with impunity. But human beings don’t compete only on a one-on-one basis. They also belong to groups and compete to advance the interests of their group over those of other groups. In the business of research and academia, competition may involve people from different countries and pits men against women, old against young, professors from large research universities against those from small colleges, researchers doing human research against those who use animals, and researchers who study monkeys against those who work with laboratory rats. So, when a reviewer and an author belong to different groups, the anonymous review provides an opportunity for the reviewer to score points against a competitor group. I am a Monkey-Man, and when I submit a grant application for peer review, I am terrified that it might fall into the hands of the Rat-People. They want to exterminate all of us, regardless of who we are (because our animals are cooler than theirs), and they want all of the funding for animal research to go to them. It’s like the Vampires and Werewolves in the Twilight series. That these struggles happen in real life and not just in the minds of paranoid professors has been shown by many studies of the peer review system.