Scientific Publication

The hidden cost of power: How dominant leaders inadvertently promote unethical behaviour

In 2015, the revelation that Volkswagen had been gaming emissions tests shook the corporate world. The deception involved 11 million diesel cars being fitted with a ‘defeat device’, which masked the emissions released by these vehicles when they detected they were undergoing testing, but otherwise polluted at levels flagrantly beyond legal limits. Since being busted, Volkswagen has paid more than $39 billion in fines to compensate for this large-scale fraud, and the pollution released by these vehicles is believed to have significantly damaged the health of children exposed to it.

Martin Winterkorn, the then CEO of Volkswagen, who has since been ousted over this scandal, had elevated the company to the top of the auto industry, and was widely seen as a good leader. However, Winterkorn also carried a reputation for his controlling and intimidating demeanour. “There was always a distance, a fear”, a former Volkswagen executive confided, reliving the sense of dread he experienced when facing Winterkorn. “If he would come and visit or you had to go to him, your pulse would go up”.

The Volkswagen emissions scandal raises a critical question: can leaders’ management style, whilst not directly encouraging unethical behaviour, still inadvertently promote it? This sets the scene for a deeper exploration of leadership outlined in “More Than Meets the Eye: The Unintended Consequence of Leader Dominance Orientation on Subordinate Ethicality“, a paper authored by Doctor Garrett Brady and Professor Niro Sivanathan at London Business School, which was recently published in the journal Organizational Science.

Through a series of studies, Garrett Brady and Niro Sivanathan sought to understand the profound ways in which leaders’ behaviours and actions sway employees, and mould social norms within commercial entities. More specifically, their paper investigated how perceptions of the moral character of business leaders can shift the ethical foundations a company has been built on.

Brady and Sivanathan draw on the time-tested wisdom of evolutionary theory to make sense of such phenomena. Whilst we often attribute our species’ success to our innate intelligence, our superpower is really our razor sharp social skills. Over eons, the human brain has been sculpted by the forces of natural selection to help us navigate our social worlds, including forming alliances and succeeding in status games. Through their in-depth explorations into the origins and functions of leadership, evolutionary psychologists have circled in on two distinct paths that people pursue to climb the social ladder.

Firstly, there’s dominance—asserting one’s status through force, intimidation, and coercion. This type of leadership is ancient, and traces back millions of years through our primate heritage. Throughout the natural world, animals that are the most powerful and menacing fighters are usually granted high status (if you don’t believe me, watch David Attenborough’s latest documentary series).

In the tree of life, human and chimpanzee lineages split off from their common ancestor approximately 5 to 7 million years ago. Our shared evolutionary heritage explains why, like our primate cousins, we humans roam our social worlds being exquisitely sensitive to signs of dominance.

However, the story of leadership is not so straightforward when we home in on homosapiens. Unlike other animals, we humans are a cultural species. We need to be socialised, and critically depend on collective knows for our very survival (how long would you be able to survive if you found yourself lost and all alone in the wilderness?). As a result, we seek leaders with the knowledge and skills that our groups need to survive and thrive. This path to leadership is very different than what you typically see in a wildlife documentary, and is aptly called prestige.

Intriguingly, scientific research suggests both paths appear to be equally effective ways of gaining status. That is, one can climb to the top of the tree through primal dominance, or by inspiring others with prestige (although dominance has a shorter shelf-life, and appears to be counterproductive for women).

As with all things in life, there are trade-offs involved. Dominant leaders are often praised for acting swiftly and decisively, and they are also people’s choice when our groups are under attack (if your country was on the verge of being invaded, who would you rather have as your Commander in Chief, George W. Bush, or Angela Merkel?). That said, dominant leaders also come with a hefty price tag: demoralised employees, reduced creativity, and in turn, people clamouring to leave. Through their series of studies, Brady and Sivanathan reveal another hidden cost dominant leaders charge to their firms: dominant leaders’ desire to assert control can, unintentionally, encourage unethical behaviour to spread.

To detect the ripple effects of leaders’ dominance, Brady and Sivanathan used a range of scientific instruments available at their disposal. Initially, they surveyed a cohort of managers, based in India, and their direct reports. In total, 150 managers were surveyed, spanning 23 industries, along with 600 of their employees. What insights did this generate? Employees who reported into domineering managers stated that they were more likely to engage in unethical acts where they work (a candid admission, I know).

Extending this line of inquiry using a longitudinal study, Brady and Sivanathan surveyed 384 employees, twice, over a period of two weeks. By meticulously sifting through quantitative data, they documented a chain reaction of managers behaving in a domineering manner, where excessive dominance caused their teams not only to expect such behaviour from their leaders, but, consequently, to deem unethical actions committed by their team members as more permissible.

Perhaps employees’ anxieties and their sense of fairness explain this relationship between leaders’ dominance and the ethical conduct of their teams? Given authoritarian leaders like to rule with an iron fist, subordinates may engage in unethical practises because of the buckling pressure they are subject to, and the resentment boiling beneath their collars. Whilst Brady and Sivanathan did find evidence of people engaging in unethical behaviours at work out of indignation, they also found that perceptions of leaders’ dominance was strongly associated with employees saying that their leader is more likely to engage in unethical behaviour, and in turn, seeing such unethical actions as acceptable behaviour themselves.

To move beyond mere correlations, a clever experiment was set up. Brady and Sivanathan exposed their human guinea pigs (in this case, 550 Americans recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk) to a brief video of an actor welcoming a cohort of new joiners to their fictitious firm, varying their host’s degree of prestige or dominance. Those that watched the dominant leader bossing people around during this induction session concluded that their host lacked virtue. Crucially, they also believed that violating norms within this hypothetical work environment would be deemed more acceptable.

To make sure that their study was watertight, Brady and Sivanathan also conducted a laboratory experiment. 293 lucky individuals were invited to a laboratory based in the UK, and placed under the direction of a dominant or prestigious facilitator. They were made to believe that they were supporting research for a fake company, and were asked to correct some coding errors as quickly as possible. Unbeknown to the participants, several of these coding errors were impossible to solve. In support of their hypotheses, they found that participants being facilitated by a dominant leader lied more about the amount of coding errors they were able to solve, and were more likely to say that ‘lots of other people misreport the numbers’. Additional studies strengthened these observations, revealing that teams under the command of dominant leaders were more likely to act unethically, and to see such behaviour as the norm.

Brady and Sivanathan’s comprehensive studies suggests that leaders’ dominance is more than just a management style; it’s a powerful pulse that reverberates throughout the workplace. Leaders that project dominance can cast a shadow of questionable ethics, encouraging behaviours amongst their employees that mirror their hazy morals. In contrast, prestigious leaders, with their power to inspire people and genuine concern for the welfare of their group, may foster a more ethical climate.

What are the practical implications of their paper? By default, most companies looking to enhance the ethical conduct of their employees will roll-out interventions targeted at individuals, including bite-sized, solitary, ethics training. Whilst this may seem sensible on the surface, such initiatives are woefully adequate. In light of these research findings, business executives, compliance professionals, and their supervisors, need to zero in on social norms, and the complex interaction between leaders and the cultural evolution they set in motion. In other words, they need to deploy more sophisticated, and scientific, ‘behavioural risk management’.

Brady and Sivanathan encourage companies to install what they term a robust ‘ethical infrastructure’. “Boards may be aware of leaders they recognize as exerting influence via dominance. While they may be happy with these leaders’ work so far, they should take steps to combat potentially unfounded inferences that subordinates make.” Whilst reemphasising high ethical standards is important, a stronger statement would be to reign in these leaders in through executive coaching, or, if these efforts prove to be futile and more drastic action is deemed necessary, to ask them to leave.

The authors stress that their findings are confined to the workplace. However, it doesn’t take much imagination to see how these dynamics can manifest in other critical spheres of society, such as political governance and the military. Looking at the extreme end of the scale, human history is scarred by conflicts and atrocities often linked to the unchecked primal dominance of psychopathic leaders. Appreciating the stakes involved, Brady and Sivanathan’s research serves as a timely reminder for organisations to resist the allure of dominant leaders.

In summary, Brady and Sivanathan’s paper forces us to rethink who we should appoint to run our institutions. Such reflections are particularly important during times of uncertainty, where dominant figures frequently rise from the ashes to promise us law and order. The hidden costs of such leaders, including the potential for creating a work environment ripe for misconduct, is becoming increasingly evident.

Written by Max Beilby for Darwinian Business.

Image credit: Alexander Koerner/ Getty Images.

Book Review

The Cultural Evolution Revolution: Inside ‘A Theory of Everyone’, by Michael Muthukrishna

Rocked by a steady stream of failed replications and allegations of outrageous fraud, behavioural science stands at a crossroads. Ironically, the field of psychology finds itself slumped in a period of piercing introspection, being forced to answer tough questions.

Diagnoses abound, with blame being placed on perverse incentives in academia, statistical methods in dire need of rigour, and the media’s battle for our eyeballs. But a more fundamental, yet often overlooked, factor is the sturdiness of psychology’s theoretical foundations— or rather, its wobbliness.

Amidst the cloud of this uncertainty, Michael Muthukrishna steps forward with A Theory of Everyone: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going. In a bold play of the concept ‘a theory of everything’ from the weird world of physics, Muthukrishna, a professor of Economic Psychology at the London School of Economics, ambitiously aims to unify our understanding of human behaviour, culture, and society.

Michael Muthukrishna is a trailblazer in the field of psychology, having recently been recognised as a Rising Star by the Association for Psychological Science, Human Behavior and Evolution Society, and the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. With the precision of an optometrist, Michael brings into focus the intricacies of human uniqueness and the subtle forces of cultural evolution. His scientific work acts as a lens, magnifying our understanding of the evolutionary forces that mould our behaviour and drive cultural change.

Arguably, it was a young Michael being exposed to a rich tapestry of cultures that paved the way for his scientific accolades. Muthukrishna was born in Sri Lanka, and was also raised in Papua New Guinea, Australia, and Botswana. During these formative years, Michael witnessed first-hand the horrors of tribal warfare, including the blood spilled between the Tamils and Sinhalese, and the Sandline Affair, the violent coup of Papua New Guinea. But his childhood wasn’t all drama. Muthukrishna also recalls experiencing awe camping in the depths of in the Kalahari Desert, and the exhilaration of neighbouring South Africa abolishing apartheid. “When you live in so many places, you see how we differ and how we are connected. We swim in different shoals but we are fish in the same body of water.”

While applauding the achievements of popular science books like Yuval Harari’s Sapiens and Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, Muthukrishna frames A Theory of Everyone as their negative image. Rather than offering ‘The One Thing That Explains Everything’, Muthukrishna reveals a comprehensive framework that can unite a bewildering array of scientific theories, whilst detailing the evolutionary forces that shape all living things on planet Earth.

Just like living creatures, scientific disciplines also pass through key stages of development. Mirroring Newtonian physics, Galileo’s revolutions of astronomy, and Charles Darwin’s discovery of evolution by natural selection, Muthukrishna argues the social sciences are currently undergoing a similar revolution, making the awkward transition from a scrawny teenager to a mature adult.

The human and social sciences are going through puberty. Its curves are showing; its muscles are growing. We are in the midst of a scientific revolution on the scale of Newtonian and Einsteinian physics, the periodic table, and Darwinian evolution. This scientific revolution is a theory of human behavior that, when combined with theories of social evolution, is close to being a theory of everyone.

Which framework does Muthukrishna propose uniting the social sciences under? Dual Inheritance is a theory that outlines how we humans we have two lines of inheritance. No, I’m not referring to the money you’re expecting to inherit from your parents, but rather, the genes and cultural know-how you inherited from them, and the cultural software you’ve downloaded from the world around you.

Since the day bands of archaic humans learnt how to control fire, we’ve inadvertently created a feedback loop where genes and culture continuously shape one another. Sparking fire for cooking is a great example, and explains why we humans have pathetically small teeth and guts, but also abnormally large brains.

Cooking saved us from sitting there like gorillas chewing plants all day or needing four stomachs like a cow munching on grass. We reduced the size of our gut and lost a lot of muscle, saving us a lot of energy. We used that extra energy to fuel a larger brain. What did we do with that larger brain? We learned more useful stuff, including figuring out how to hunt larger, higher EROI [Energy Return on Investment] animals.

At the heart of this theory of everyone, Michael proclaims, is the quest to capture and control energy. All living beings are essentially in a struggle for survival, requiring an energy budget surplus to pay their exorbitant biological bills.

As stated by Michael:

All organisms, including humans, harness the energy around them – from the rays of the sun to the movement of the wind and water – to evolve. Humans have evolved an entirely new way of capturing and controlling energy through cultural evolution. But ultimately energy is at the heart of all that we do and all we can do.

Most of us take for granted the marvels of the modern world. We’re literally surrounded by unfathomably sophisticated technologies that most of us have no idea how they work. It’s as if we’ve been handed inventions created for us by intelligent aliens. But just as fish take for granted the water surrounding them, Michael reminds us how energy-intensive our modern lifestyles are, and how utterly dependent our civilisations currently are on fossil fuels.

As climate science has solidified and the perils of global warming have sharpened into focus, the recent surge in the availability of fossil fuels— thanks to the fracking boom— has muted voices warning of ‘peak oil’. Muthukrishna acknowledges that predictions made by the likes of Thomas Malthus and M. King Hubbert have repeatedly been cast into doubt by the march of technological progress. Yet, he cautions against complacency, pointing out that a technological plateau may loom where no further innovations can make fossil fuel extraction economically viable. “Technology seems to have saved us from the Malthusian trap and delayed Hubbert’s peak oil decline. But those technological advancements have been in the efficiency floor, not the energy ceiling.”

A sceptic could claim that Muthukrishna’s analysis is too reductionist. For example, Muthukrishna circles in on energy scarcity as the biggest threat to large-scale cooperation, and in turn, world peace. Whilst competition over scare resources is one of the main reasons why we fight, wars are messy business that have multiple, tangled causes, where ethnic tensions, balance of power politics, security dilemmas, and the human drives for glory, status and sex all playing leading roles in the outbreak of war. However, I believe Michael is broadly correct in pinpointing energy as one of the ultimate crises of our time. Whilst concerns over the security of our energy sources have been heightened in the Western world following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, so too have concerns about the cost of energy and the sustainability of our fossil-fuelled economies.

Cultural evolution surely encourages us to be humble in our understanding of how the world works. As the biologist Leslie Orgel famously quipped, “evolution is cleverer than you are”. Despite this, Michael proposes bold solutions to address some of the world’s most pressing problems. One of them is championing nuclear power, including pivotal development to make nuclear fusion a commercial reality. The mastery of nuclear fusion would be a major breakthrough for humanity, as it offers the prospect of cheap and inexhaustible energy without poisoning Mother Nature. And contrary to Bane’s brash threats in The Dark Knight, it is impossible to hijack fusion reactors and turn them into bombs. Ultimately, nuclear fusion could well be the technology that saves us from ourselves.

As stated by Muthukrishna:

Once we reach the next fusion-fueled energy level, we will enter a new era of peace and prosperity. It will make our current era, with all its conflicts, seem to our descendants as primitive and barbaric as we see the Middle Ages with its superstitions, witch burning, and horrifyingly brutal wars of conquest.

How can social scientists contribute to such moonshoot missions? Muthukrishna illuminates the way, reminding us that today’s distant planets become tomorrow’s landing sites, powered by the engine of innovation. “Innovation is a social process – a product of a collective brain. Once we realize this, we can become intentional in how we seek information and connect people to maximize the probability of good ideas emerging and spreading.”

This is not mere armchair intellectualising. Muthukrishna has worked with some of the world’s most disruptive companies, sharing his secrets of innovation to enhance their corporate strategies and help solve their thorniest commercial challenges. The cornerstone of these lessons is what Muthukrishna terms the ‘paradox of diversity’.

Much digital ink has been spilled in recent years on the benefits of diversity for promoting innovation, which Muthukrishna’s research backs up. However, it’s also the case that teams who are the least innovative are also the most diverse bunch. How can this be the case? Without a common set of values gluing groups together, Muthkrishna counters, the benefits of diversity crumble.

This seeming paradox of diversity occurs because diversity offers recombinatorial fuel for innovation, but is also, by definition, divisive. Without a common understanding, common goals, and common language, the flow of ideas in social networks is stymied, thus preventing recombination and reducing innovation. But diversity is the most powerful method of becoming more innovative.

Muthukrishna offers sound advice for resolving this paradox, proposing that, like motorists, we must abide by, and respect, a common set of norms to ensure a safe and pleasant journey.

The key to resolving the paradox of diversity is finding common ground on things we don’t share that get in the way of smooth communication. We can overcome these challenges with strategies such as optimal assimilation, translators and bridges, or division into subgroups, which retain diversity without harming communication and coordination.

Muthukrishna does not shy away from dangerous ideas or inconvenient truths. Acknowledging the treacherous terrain he traverses, Muthukrishna ventures into contentious debates on immigration, exploring what these points of friction mean for the fabric of democratic societies. Through these reflections, Muthukrishna stresses the importance of free speech, and the duty of scientists to be open and honest with the public. “Being forthright and truthful about even challenging topics is critical to trust in science. If you can’t trust scientists, you can’t trust science.”

In summary, Michael Muthukrishna’s A Theory of Everyone is more than just a psychology book; it’s a roadmap for understanding and improving our world. It challenges us to look beyond the surface, to rethink our assumptions about human uniqueness, and to embrace the complexities created, and explained, by cultural evolution. A Theory of Everyone is a clarion call for a new kind of understanding – one that may help us solve some of the biggest problems of our time.

Written by Max Beilby for Darwinian Business.

A Theory of Everyone: Who We Are, How We Got Here, and Where We’re Going is published by Basic Books. Click here to buy a copy.

Image credit: The Atlantic.

Book Review

The Social Brain, by Tracey Camilleri, Samantha Rockey & Robin Dunbar

Whether it’s the tragic death of Willy Loman in A Death of A Salesman, or Lester Burnham’s midlife crisis in American Beauty, a persistent theme in popular culture is a gnawing sense of alienation people feel running the modern day rat race.

If you’ve ever felt this way, you’re not alone. Given that we spend the vast majority of our adult lives working, it’s more than understandable why work can monopolise our mental real estate. And whilst work can mould our identities, boost our status and connect us with like-minded people, work by no means makes us immune to loneliness.

What is about working life that can make us feel so alienated and isolated, and what can we do to prevent it?

In The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups, the legendary psychologist Robin Dunbar joins forces with fellow Oxford University scholars, Tracey Camilleri and Samantha Rockey, where they apply Dunbar’s scientific discoveries to help us work more effectively, and ultimately, more humanely.

Robin spent the better part of two decades studying wild monkeys in Africa, to try and answer the ultimate question: why do some species develop their own societies? Initially, humans were only a fleeting interest to him. However, seeing our common ancestry reflected in our primate cousins forced Dunbar to look inwards.

In another world orbiting Oxford University’s academic universe, Tracey and Samantha were studying another exotic primate: business executives.

Through their executive education at Saïd Business School, Tracey and Samantha heard endlessly of business leaders complaining of feeling disconnected, and at times overwhelmed, by the nature of their work and the sheer size and scale of their businesses’ operations.

Perhaps the size of their groups was a factor, Tracey and Samantha wondered? The authors write:

When we think about teams and groups, we think about their functions and responsibilities and about developing their value to us and the talents of those involved. Only rarely do we stop to think about their size. Can a department be too big to function well? Can a team be the wrong size to cope with the task assigned to it? To what extent can the toxic cultures that sometimes grow up in organisations – the ‘us and them’ mentality – be explained by the size of the groups within them? At what point does a conversation become unmanageable?

To help shed light on these otherwise invisible forces, Tracey and Samantha roped Robin in to teach on their executive programme. Here, Robin gave the corporate bigwigs a rundown on how we humans are constrained by three fundamental factors when navigating our social worlds: the size of the human brain, the release of hormones, and, ultimately, our limited time on planet Earth.

“Many organisations, particularly large ones, ignore the fact that our psychology, as humans, is designed to cope with a very small-scale social world. And, as a consequence, they struggle to function well”, write the Oxford trio. They continue; “By incorporating a better understanding of human nature and its origins, we inevitably have a better chance of playing to its strengths and avoiding the consequences of its weaknesses.”

Named after the big man himself, Dunbar’s Number is the purported natural limit to the number of people with whom we can maintain meaningful relationships with. Informally, Dunbar’s Number is ‘the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them at a bar’. (Perhaps an updated definition is the number of people you would get scolded for unfollowing on Instagram.)

Having chased down wild monkeys in the heart of Africa, Dunbar discovered a correlation between the size of primates’ brains and their social groups (or, more specifically, the size of their brain’s neocortex, relative to the size of their brains overall. This is thought to be the ‘intelligent‘ part of the brain, which helps us navigate our social worlds). By taking the average size of the human brain’s neocortex and extrapolating the results of other primate species his team had gathered samples on, Dunbar proposed that humans can comfortably maintain around 150 stable relationships.

The first test of Dunbar’s Number was calculating the size of modern hunter-gatherer groups. Why? Because these hunter-gatherer societies reflect the communities humans spent millions of years living in before the advent of agriculture. Coincidently, these hunter-gatherer communities turned out to have an average size of almost 150.

San People Bush Walk, Kalahari Desert_ John C Bruckman

San Bushmen taking a stroll in the Kalahari Desert. The San People have lived in the Kalahari for approximately 20,000 years, making them the oldest inhabitants of Southern Africa. The average size of their bands is estimated to be 152. Image credit: John C. Bruckman

It’s not just brain imaging or yellowing anthropology books where Dunbar’s Number apparently pops up. For example, Dunbar’s team found that the number of people reached by the typical Brits’ Christmas card list was 154. And whilst you might think the infinite reach of social media would allow us to transcend such limits, surveys ran by Dunbar and his team found that the average number of friends Brits had on Facebook was between 155 and 183, which is in the ballpark predicted by the ‘Social Brain Hypothesis’.

According to Dunbar, our social networks are nested in ‘circles’ or ‘layers’, based on their level of intimacy, following rough powers of three: 5 people to whom we might turn for substantial emotional or financial support in a moment of devastating crisis (say, your romantic partner and close family members); 15 besties who you spend most of your spare time with; 50 good friends (the friends you would invite to your big birthday party), and 150 more casual friendships. Past these shores, you should be able to count up to 500 acquaintances, and you’ll be able to recognise roughly 1,500 people.

30 years of Dunbar’s scientific research suggests close-knit communities average roughly 150 people. Conversely, each layer of our social networks are roughly 3 times larger than the one inside it, determined by their level of closeness. Image credit: New Scientist

Scientists’ best estimate for the age of our species (assuming you’re a modern human) is now 300,000 years old. However, it was not until around 8,000 years ago that archaeologists spot villages of several hundred people cropping up, and not until 5,000 years ago that they count cities totalling tens of thousands of people. “The sea change brought about by living in permanent villages marked a distinct phase shift in the levels of structural stress that people had to cope with.”

Despite our great ancestors lives being far from rosy, Tracey, Samantha and Robin contend that, in humanity’s deep past, the frictions of social life were nixed by living in small, mobile bands. “If the stresses became too much, families were free to leave and find a more congenial group with whom to live. Permanent settlements made this solution impossible.” Once farming opened up Pandora’s Box, new forms of social organisation evolved, including warrior grades, priests, temples, moral codes, and the institution of marriage. “In short, we have been exposed to the stresses of large organisations only for the last few thousand years.”

So, what does this all mean? The main implication of Dunbar’s Number for the business world is that, if a group remains below 150 people, most matters can be dealt with on a largely informal basis. Once you pass 150 or so people, however, dark forces emerge that can destabilise groups. “It becomes more difficult to negotiate arrangements, information doesn’t flow well round the community, processes don’t work quite the way they were intended, silos build up that don’t communicate with each other, people start to be suspicious and less trusting of each other. Some kind of more formal management system becomes necessary to control relationships and transactions.”

Some titans of business seem to have intuitively grasped Dunbar’s Number. Most famously, Bill Gore, the founder of Gore, struggled when he shuffled his workers into their first factory.

One morning, when entering Gore’s newly minted plant, Bill became disoriented when he realised that he did not recognise a single person. In the 1980s, Bill Gore observed that, “when an organisation exceeds some limit, typically 150, people start thinking in terms of ‘they’ rather than ‘we’”. Factory workers couldn’t keep track of each other, and the sense of community Bill had worked so hard to build had gone. With this, Gore made the decision to cap his factories to a maximum of 150 employees. In these smaller factories, Dunbar shares, “everybody knew who was who. Who was the manager, who was the accountant, who made the sandwiches for lunch.”

Bill Gore (1958)

Wilbert L. (‘Bill’) and Genevieve (‘Vieve’) Gore launch W. L. Gore & Associates from the basement of their home in Newark, Delaware. 1st January, 1958. Image credit: Gore

It’s fair to say that Bill Gore was a maverick. Tracey, Samantha and Robin reflect on the dearth of leader’s heeding Gore’s lessons:

Unfortunately, far too many organisations – from businesses to schools to hospitals and government departments – have ignored the Gore lesson: Scale poses major challenges. As organisations succeed, they grow; in consequence, they inevitably develop fracture lines and inefficiencies that are a corollary of our limited abilities as humans to monitor and manage large numbers of relationships. As a result, many forever teeter on the edge of structural collapse, with a left hand that has no idea what the right hand is doing.

Interestingly, the Oxford trio concede that Gore’s policy of ‘150’ is not actually a fixed number. Debra France, the former head of learning and development at Gore, is quoted saying; “While our plants were originally set up as small units of 150, they’re now more like 250 – but probably with three shifts a day, so in reality the human unit is still small.”

Although not explicitly mentioned by the authors, debates are taking place in academic circles about the veracity of Dunbar’s Number. Remember Dunbar’s original study, exploring the correlation between primates’ brains and the size of their groups? Biologists stationed at Stockholm University recently tried to replicate Dunbar’s original correlations, using a larger dataset and more up-to-date statistical methods. Their analysis produced wildly different numbers depending on the statistical technique they used, and the uncertainty surrounding their estimates was “enormous”.

Other researchers have argued that the size of primates’ brains is best explained not by their social lives, but rather, what they eat. As fruit is harder to come by than abundant leaves (and therefore requires greater intelligence to obtain), the reasoning goes, having a bigger brain actually helps keep fruit chomper’s hunger at bay.

Despite these criticisms, there is clearly a limit to the number of relationships the human mind can manage. This varies considerably, presumably, by individuals’ intellectual horsepower and the complexity of their cultures, but a limit exists. And whilst brain imaging studies may be a little fuzzy, Dunbar and his collaborators have tried to measure the size of this ceiling using a range of different tools at their disposal.

Admittedly, calls to cleave a new business unit once the 150 mark has been breached is a tough sell. However, Tracey, Samantha and Robin also provide helpful guidance on forming teams that can be immediately implemented. Generally, work teams can comfortably range from 6 to 12 people, assuming everyone has a crystal clear understanding of their role. However, if chaos strikes and you need to make quick decisions during a moment of crisis, a team of 5 firefighters is most appropriate. Conversely, 50 is a good number for an expansive knowledge sharing session, so long as you have a attendant chair with a meeting agenda.

Whilst Dunbar’s Number gets a starring role in The Social Brain, it is not the only story. Having interviewed 50 eminent business leaders for their book, Tracey, Samantha and Robin share invaluable insights on how to help people survive and thrive in the wilderness of large corporations.

The wisdom distilled in The Social Brain boils down to one truism: organisations are not machines. Rather, organisations are collections of humans that possess a range of social superpowers, but also, mental limitations. “Management practices that have dominated thinking for the last century or so have invariably imagined organisations as akin to a clockwork mechanism. Improving the efficiency of an organisation is simply a matter of pressing the right buttons.”

Although industrialists of the 19th century made profound breakthroughs in increasing efficiency and scale by mechanistically dissecting management practices, the Oxford trio argue that the long shadow of the machine metaphor is now limiting human progress. “It’s not just that the machine metaphor is incorrect, either. It’s also harmful. In its construction of a world of predictable, robotic performance, it creates an assumption that, if human efforts fall short, the problem must lie with the individual concerned, not the system.”

Since the dawn of industrialisation, workers have lamented feeling mechanised, being reduced to mere cogs in a wheel. Today, as we grapple with the rapid evolution of artificial intelligence, our anxieties are rooted in artificial intelligence making us redundant.

Rather than replace us, let’s hope breakthroughs in machine intelligence will help us embrace our humanity.

Written by Max Beilby for Darwinian Business.

The Social Brain: The Psychology of Successful Groups is published by Penguin. Click here to buy a copy.

Book Review

Ritual, by Dimitris Xygalatas

Whether weddings, national parades or religious festivals, rituals present a puzzle. We stress their importance, reflecting on these services as some of life’s most cherished moments. And yet, when prompted, most of us can’t explain why we perform them. What explains their persistence, and this apparent contradiction?

In his new book Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living, trailblazing anthropologist Dimitris Xygalatas takes us on an electrifying tour of the world’s most exotic and extreme rituals. By fusing the latest breakthroughs in science and technology, Xygalatas presents a powerful new perspective on our most sacred ceremonies.

Ancient traditions

A native of Greece, rituals have fascinated Xygalatas since his early childhood. Flicking through his first copy of the National Geographic and learning about exotic cultures in faraway places sparked his curiosity, planting the seeds of his career in anthropology.

Ironically, Xygalatas started out as a ritual sceptic. “To me, the human obsession with ceremony seemed puzzling”, Xygalatas writes. “Why do so many strange traditions persist in the modern age of science, technology and secularisation?”

Xygalatas’s worldview was shaken when his father took him to his first football game. “For most of the game my father kept trying to lift me up so that I could watch the action. But that didn’t matter much to me. The most interesting part was what was happening in the terraces”. Forming a sea of black and white shirts, forty thousand football fans created a spectacle Dimitris would never forget. “As soon as the referee blew the first whistle, it was as though a jolt of electricity had run through the stadium . . . It was as though the crowd had become a single entity with a life of its own.”

According to Xygalatas, sports events like this mirror some of our most primitive ceremonies. “There is something about high-arousal rituals that seems to thrill groups of individuals and transform them into something greater than the sum of their parts.”

Even as the Western world loses its religion, Xygalatas argues that rituals remain rampant. “From knocking on word to uttering prayers, and from new year celebrations to presidential inaugurations, ritual permeates every important aspect of our private and public lives.”

Evidently, the human desire to congregate is ancient. From prehistoric hunter-gatherers to the urbanites of the 21st century, people across cultures and throughout history have felt compelled to form large crowds and participate in communal ceremonies.

The oldest known ritual is the funeral, where archaeologists have unearthed evidence of burials taking place over a hundred thousand years ago. However, humans do not hold a monopoly on rituals. Whether it’s the ritualised greetings of chimpanzees, frisky flamingos engaging in elaborate courtship rituals, or elephants trekking vast distances to pay respect to their dead, rituals have been spotted across the animal kingdom. That said, Xygalatas stresses the prevalence and extent of our ritualistic practices is uniquely human.

My findings, as well as convergent discoveries from a variety of scientific disciplines, reveal that ritual is rooted deep in our evolutionary history. In fact, it is as ancient as our species itself – and for good reason.

One camp of scientists argue that the gravitational pull of rituals is an evolutionary accident, and that our ritualistic behaviour is the result of misfiring mental systems that detect danger. Although the ‘mental glitch hypothesis’ should be taken seriously, Xygalatas argues the weight of evidence is stacked against it. “Evolution is not wasteful”, asserts Xygalatas. “Behaviours that are impractical or maladaptive do not tend to stick around forever.”

Social glue

So, what are the functions of rituals then? In essence, Xygalatas argues that rituals are cultural gadgets that help solve a raft of recurring challenges we modern humans face. These challenges include: finding a romantic partner, coping with the pain of losing a loved one, and instilling a sense of order in a chaotic world. Perhaps most importantly, rituals help solve the central challenge of getting large groups of fiercely tribal primates to cooperate.

Anthropologists have long explored the functions of traditions, amassing rich descriptions of the world’s most exotic rituals. Despite the groundwork they laid, Xygalatas points out that anthropologists rarely put their theories to the test.

Through his ingenious use of biometrics, Xygalatas reveals that rituals can now be detected in the human body. That is, by measuring how hard people’s hearts are pumping, and other aspects of their physiology.

Xygalatas first experimented with these gadgets in the Spanish village of San Pedro, Manrique. Held on the summer solstice, the ‘festival of San Juan’ floods their small village with visitors, who catch a glimpse of the locals walking bare foot across burning hot coal. Xygalatas got the idea when heard people repeatedly say that when they go out onto the stadium, ‘all three thousand people feel like one’. To Xygalatas, this sounded like what the eminent sociologist Emile Durkheim called ‘collective effervescence’— a pulse of energy that runs through a large crowd and transforms them into a cohesive unit. Perhaps these biometric sensors can capture this sense of oneness?

Clearly, this firewalking ritual evokes strong emotions—and the intensity of these emotions is felt by everyone. Xygalatas and his colleagues’ research revealed an extraordinary level of synchrony among people’s heart rates, both amongst the firewalkers and spectators.

Fire-walking isn’t just a challenge for participants. Spectators also feel the heat. Image credit: Dimtris Xygalatas

Ultimately, extreme rituals like the San Juan firewalk trigger a flood of stress and emotions, which in turn binds people together. “Each individual’s experience is affected and amplified by those of others, like a thousand streams of water merging to form a river that is faster and more powerful than any single stream could ever be.”

The dark side of rituals

Rituals are a source of magic, and like all potions, they can be used for good or ill.

Take degrading initiation rituals, also known as ‘hazing’ in the United States. As the crushing weight of pain and humiliation can only really be appreciated by those who have experienced such an ordeal, hazees quickly become comrades. This helps explain why societies at war perform much more brutal initiations, as these rituals instil cohesion at a time when solidarity is absolutely essential. However, Xygalatas suggests if we take these rituals out of context and perform them for no good reason (say, performed at a frat party for shits and giggles), they can be extremely harmful.

That said, there are a range of rituals that seem terrible on the surface, where Xygalatas and his research team have scratched to reveal these rituals’ hidden benefits. Exhibit A: the Thaipusam festival. Performed by millions of Tamil Hindus every year, the Thaipusam is one of the world’s oldest religious festival. The most extreme aspect of it is the Kavadi Attam, where devotees are repeatedly punctured with needles whilst carrying heavy shrines in a long procession to their holy temple (are you tempted?).

If you expect undergoing such hell would trash your health, you’re mistaken. Whilst the pilgrim’s wounds healed quickly, Xygalatas and his colleagues discovered their mental health was substantially improved through suffering this torment— where those who suffered the most experienced the greatest psychological benefits.

A sceptic would argue that there are other activities that offer similar benefits and carry far less risk. For example, intense exercise has been shown to be as effective as antidepressants in treating major depression. However, Xygalatas notes the conundrum of getting someone who’s suffering depression to summon the strength to go for a run. “Cultural rituals may help circumvent this problem by exerting external pressure to participate.”

Ritual feasts

Whilst exploring some of the world’s most exotic and extreme rituals, Xygalatas also reflects the more mundane moments in our lives, including the artificial landscape of the modern workplace.

There are sound ethical and legal reasons why you don’t want to subject your teams to extreme rituals (HR would not be pleased to hear of new hires having needles stuck in their backs). And whilst drinking is an easy way to alleviate anxiety in awkward social situations, the appropriateness of alcohol in work settings is increasingly being called into question. However, there are alternatives that are both suitable and effective.

Having lived in Denmark, Xygalatas documents what he deems peculiarities of Danish working practices. The Danes apparently work less than virtually all other nations in the world. Whilst this can help us understand why Danes are so happy, they certainly aren’t slackers. To the contrary, Danes are also amongst the most productive workers in the world. How on Earth is this possible?

Whilst numerous factors are probably involved, Xygalatas suspects Danish workplace rituals can explain their striking successes. “While at first glance the numerous rituals of the Danish workplace may have seemed odd or wasteful, as soon as I embraced them it became clear to me that they contributed something vital to the efficient, productive and enjoyable work environment.”

Although less time crunching spreadsheets can be perceived as wasting company resources, the Nordics appreciate the social benefits of team activities and communal feasts, and that these benefits more than outweigh the costs. “Eating together is an intimate act, usually reserved for close relatives and friends. Sharing food therefore symbolises community and helps strengthen bonds among colleagues”.

Focusing further afield than efficiency, Xygalatas suggests that communal feasts and team activities effectively harness the power of rituals, strengthening social bonds whilst also boosting morale. “What is more, work group rituals make work-related tasks feel more meaningful, which makes for a happier as well as more productive workforce.”

Of course, it’s not as easy to forge strong bonds amongst corporate workers, as does, say, devotees enduring backbreaking toil in a long procession to their holy temple. However, sprinkling the modern workplace with rituals can help the ordinary feel a little bit more meaningful and special.

Written by Max Beilby for Darwinian Business.

Ritual: How Seemingly Senseless Acts Make Life Worth Living is published by Profile Books. Click here to buy a copy.

Book Review

Not Born Yesterday, by Hugo Mercier

In 2017, Collins Dictionary crowned ‘fake news’ its word of the year.

Collins’ entry can be credited to two unforgettable events that defined 2016: the decision taken by the United Kingdom to leave the European Union, and the election of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States. Dismayed and disoriented by the outcome of these votes, elites on both sides of the Atlantic were quick to say misleading statistics and outright lies precipitated these political earthquakes.

Like the coronavirus itself, misinformation has also exploded during the pandemic. When COVID began permeating our borders, the head of the World Health Organisation warned that “we’re not just fighting a pandemic; we’re fighting an infodemic”.

This raises the question: how impactful is misinformation generally, and are we really as vulnerable to propaganda as pundits make us out to be?  Not quite, argues French cognitive scientist Hugo Mercier in his new book, Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust And What We Believe. Rather than being easily duped, Mercier argues that, ironically, we are not as gullible as we’ve been led to believe.

The case against gullibility

For many, Mercier’s argument will seem rather odd. Following the atrocities committed during World War Two, social psychologists have spent the past 70 years detailing the various ways we frail humans are vulnerable to social influence and persuasion. Some of social psychology’s most infamous experiments suggest that we are all natural conformists, forming our beliefs and altering our behaviour in order to fit in with the group and be in our bosses’ good books.

Despite the case for gullibility seeming an easy verdict, Mercier objects, stating that the case is far from settled. Rather than being gullible, Mercier argues, each of us come fully equipped with mental hardware, an ‘open vigilance’ system, that, most of the time, can correctly determine who we can trust, and what is ultimately true.

Viewed through the lens of evolutionary biology, Mercier argues that pure gullibility would be too easily taken advantage of by unscrupulous actors, and thus isn’t an evolutionarily stable strategy. “What should be clear in any cases is that we cannot afford to be gullible”, Mercier writes. “If we were, nothing would stop people from abusing their influence, to the point where we would be better off not paying any attention at all to what others say, leading to the prompt collapse of human communication and cooperation.”

Despite our bullshit detectors working well most of the time, Mercier argues that we’re prone to making mistakes when we’re navigating new environments that evolution hasn’t fully equipped us to deal with. What does this mean? Mercier argues that the prevalence of conspiracy theories and antiscientific beliefs can be explained, at least in part, by how intuitive these ideas are.

Take vaccines for example. Most of us have no clue how vaccines work, and the idea of injecting your healthy child with an alien substance can ring alarm bells. “All our intuitions about pathogens and contagion scream folly.” Despite the remarkable successes of vaccination programmes over the past century, communicating the effectiveness and safety of vaccines clearly remains one of the scientific communities’ thorniest issues. “In the absence of strong countervailing forces”, Mercier writes, “it doesn’t take much persuasion to turn someone into a creationist anti-vax conspiracy theorist.”

Mass persuasion

Mercier documents the astronomical funds paid for Western political campaigns, with the US presidential election taking centre stage. Given the mountains of money ploughed into these political campaigns, you would expect a commensurable return on investment. However, you may be short changed. Mercier argues that the scientific research on whether political campaigns can sway public opinion and win elections has produced surprisingly ambiguous results.

Rather than being able to socially engineer the masses’ political preferences, Mercier argues propagandists can only craft messages that already resonate with the public. “With a bit of work, they will be able to affect the audience at the margin, on issues for which the audience is ambivalent or had weak opinions to start with. Yet many have granted prophets the power to convert whole crowds, propagandists the ability to subvert entire nations, campaigners the skill to direct electoral outcomes, and advertisers the capacity to turn us all into mindless consumerists.”

Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister, is hailed as one of history’s master manipulators. Generally speaking, historians hold mixed views on the potency of Nazi propaganda. Provocatively, Mercier proclaims that essentially no persuasion took place in Nazi Germany. Rather, Mercier suggests that Hitler and his henchmen road on a ticket to heal the humiliations that Germany endured in the aftermath of World War One.

As stated by Mercier:

The power of demagogues to influence the masses has been widely exaggerated. . . If one steps back for a moment it soon becomes clear that what matters is the audience’s state of mind and material conditions, not the prophets’ power of persuasion. Once people are ready for extreme actions, some prophet will rise and provide the spark that lights the fire.

If propaganda is so staggeringly ineffective, why do millions of people living under authoritarian regimes act like they’ve been brainwashed? The answer, according to Mercier, is simple. Authoritarian regimes that plaster billboards with propaganda also closely surveil their citizens, and crush any whiff of dissent. Given their plight, it is entirely understandable why people living under repressive regimes would want to keep their mouths shut, out of fear for their personal and family’s safety.

Mercier hammers the point home:

Failure to perform the Nazi salute was perceived as a symbol of ‘political nonconformism’, a potential death sentence. In North Korea, any sign of discontent can send one’s entire family to prison camps. Under such threats, we cannot expect people to express their true feelings. Describing his life during the Cultural Revolution, a Chinese doctor remembers how “to survive in China you must reveal nothing to others”. Similarly, a North Korean coal miner acknowledged, “I know that this regime is to blame for our situation. My neighbour knows our regime is to blame. But we’re not stupid enough to talk about it.”

If repression explains acquiescence in authoritarian regimes, why do seas of people in freer societies also act like they’ve been indoctrinated? According to Mercier, professing bizarre beliefs isn’t necessarily a symptom of gullibility. Rather, jarring public declarations can serve as an oath of loyalty.

Take overinflated compliments. Mercier argues that domineering leaders don’t fish for compliments because they actually believe the lavish praise heaped onto them. Rather, excessive flattery can serve as a reliable signal of commitment to his or her reign. Counterintuitively, the more over the top and outrageous the flattery is, the more effective it can be. Why? Because the orator is demonstrating a willingness not only to burn serious social capital, but also to burn bridges with other groups they may be members of— thereby credibly signalling their allegiance to the cause.

It’s hard to believe that people would boldly pronounce absurd or repugnant views for these reasons, but loudly broadcasting outlandish views is precisely what is required to pledge one’s loyalty (say, that Hillary Clinton ran a child-sex ring out of a local pizzeria). With this, Mercier argues we shouldn’t always assume that people actually hold the batshit beliefs they regurgitate.

“People aren’t stupid”, Mercier writes. “As a rule, they avoid making self-incriminating statements for no reason. These statements serve a purpose, be it to redeem oneself or, on the contrary, to antagonise as many people as possible. By considering the functions of self-incriminating statements, we can react to them more appropriately.”

Psychological operations

With growing alarmism over the proliferation of misinformation, Mercier’s sceptical inquiry into credulity is both refreshing and somewhat reassuring. Rather than misinformation causing people to believe absurd things, Mercier argues that this account gets causality backwards. Internet trolls are not so much persuaded by misinformation, but rather, they consume and share it to attack and infuriate their political foes.

Although Mercier makes a strong case for the limited role gullibility plays in our digestion of information, I still have my doubts. Take disinformation pumped out by the Kremlin. Written before Putin launched his ‘special military operation’, Mercier claims that Russian propaganda in Ukraine succeeds modestly when preaching to the choir, and backfires when targeting Russia’s opponents. However, I suspect the Kremlin’s firehose of falsehoods has been more impactful than this.

Whilst it’s unlikely that the majority of Russians buy Putin’s torrent of lies, the core narrative that Western nations are the real aggressors in this war clearly holds sway in Russia. Mercier stresses that public opinion research conducted in autocratic regimes cannot be trusted (if you might be thrown in jail or murdered for criticising your government, I’m sure you’d also keep schtum). However, clever experiments allow people to indirectly express their true preferences. A month after Russian tanks began rolling into Ukraine, researchers using these innovative methods found widespread support for the invasion amongst Russians.

Perhaps there’s another layer of this onion that we need to peel. In his new book The Story Paradox, Jonathan Gottschall argues that it is stories that hold the main sway over our hearts and minds, rather than postulates of factual information. Whilst stories help bind groups of people together, Gottschall reveals the dark side of storytelling, warning that stories can fuel hostilities and tear societies apart. In contrast to factual claims, stories are a potent form of persuasion that pack lots of baggage into little packages, and therefore cannot be easily evaluated through fact checking.

One could argue that Mercier underestimates the dangers of modern information warfare. But of course, any attempt at questioning the veracity of open vigilance would make Mercier proud. If you try to argue against open vigilance, you lose the battle the moment you show up.

Rebuilding trust

Stepping back, what should we do with this knowledge? Before gossiping with a friend or hitting retweet, Mercier encourages us to ask ourselves what the practical consequences of sharing these rumours are, and whether the actions that follow would land us in hot water. By anticipating the consequences of our actions, we are less likely to be part of the problem. To be part of the solution, Mercier says we should penalise those who spread false rumours, or at the very least, deny them kudos for doing so.

Whilst social media giants have been getting a good bashing from politicians on both sides of the aisle, Mercier and his colleagues’ research suggests that, when it comes to the dissemination of misinformation, social media is not the problem per se. False rumours have been told since the dawn of human language, and there are arguably greater societal forces crashing over us that are powering political polarisation within Western democracies.

The take-home message of Not Born Yesterday is that, contrary to what many TED Talk gurus will tell you, influencing people is incredibly difficult. Far from being too trusting, Mercier argues that, generally speaking, we don’t trust enough. In other words, we tend to hold our guards up, where we’d benefit from lowering our defences more often than not. With this, Mercier encourages us to give the man in the street the benefit of a doubt, and to be more trusting of experts.

Of course, it takes two to tango. For experts’ opinions to carry weight, trust needs to be nurtured and sustained. To curb the spread of conspiracy theories, Mercier suggests the best strategy isn’t employing an army of fact-checkers, but rather, rebuilding trust in our key institutions (say, by passing strong laws against corruption). Trust is the glue that binds society together, and as the cliche goes, building a solid house starts with a strong foundation.

Written by Max Beilby for Darwinian Business.

Not Born Yesterday: The Science of Who We Trust And What We Believe is published by Princeton University Press. Click here to buy a copy.

Book Review

The Status Game, by Will Storr

Do you ever get a niggling feeling that other people are doing better than you? Don’t worry, we all do.

In his new book The Status Game: On Social Position and How We Use It, Will Storr reveals the hidden force that triggers much of our anxiety: social status. From our hunter-gatherer ancestors who roamed the African Savannah, to the office workers and internet communities of the 21st century, Storr argues that the human need for status is ancient, universal, and remains deeply ingrained in all of us.

Will Storr is an award-winning journalist and author, who also runs a successful writing course based on his last book, The Science of Storytelling. That Storr has now turned his attention to the psychology of status may initially raise some eyebrows. Storr clarifies that while The Science of Storytelling thrusts our ‘self-serving inner-hero’ into the spotlight, The Status Game reveals the status seeking ‘mechanism’ that lurks behind the scenes. “If the conscious experience is organised as a story, this book concerns the subconscious truth that lies beneath it”

In The Status Game, Storr clarifies that status seeking isn’t a frivolous activity: it’s intricately intertwined with our ultimate evolutionary goals. For all social creatures on planet Earth, high status brings abundance: finer food, more land, and more romantic opportunities (for men at least). “The higher we rise, the more likely we are to live, love and procreate. It’s the essence of human thriving. It’s the status game.”

The psychological toll of being at the bottom may be obvious. Less intuitive is how our rung on the social ladder affects our bodies. Like monkeys sitting atop their troop’s dominance hierarchy, high status men and women are generally healthier and live longer than their underlyings (although male baboons show that life at the top can be tough too). Painstaking studies conducted with British civil servants suggest this has less to do with the privileges that comes with affluence, but rather our relative rank. “To our brains, status is a resource as real as oxygen or water”, Storr writes. “When we lost it, we break.”

Success, virtue and dominance

In The Status Game, Storr reveals the doubled-edged nature of human status seeking, documenting how striving fuels the best and worst aspects of humanity. Whilst scientists and inventors wanting to make a name for themselves drives human progress, people’s desire to get ahead of the competition also results in murder, war, and even genocide. How do we make sense of status seeking’s mixed scorecard?

Unlike any other animal, we are fully fledged cultural species. We need to be socialised from the moment that we’re born, and we rely on collective wisdom for our survival (how long could you survive on your own in the wilderness?). As a result, we grant people with the expertise our group needs to succeed with high status—a path to success aptly called prestige.

Success and virtue games help explain the psychology of prestige. In success games, status is awarded for exceptional achievements that demonstrate skill and talent in established contests (think of professional sports and tech start-ups). In virtue games, status is awarded to people who are conspicuously moralistic, obedient, and dutiful (think of religious or royal institutions).  

Although prototypical forms of prestige have been identified in wildlife, such as elder elephants leading their herds to water, no other species has stretched the psychology of prestige as far as we humans have. As stated by Storr; “prestige is our most marvellous craving.”

Despite our species’ championing of prestige, we’ve never fully stamped out our primitive urge for dominance. That is, gaining status through intimidation, manipulation, and coercion. This type of leadership is ancient, and traces back millions of years to our primate heritage. In the tree of life, human and chimpanzee lineages split off from their common ancestor approximately 5 to 7 million years ago. With this, both primate species took with them a proclivity for dominance hierarchies, and a psychology hypersensitive to dominance.

As stated by Storr:

Whilst the prestige games of virtue and success have made us gentler and wiser animals, the superior modes of playing haven’t completely overwritten our bestial capacities. As psychologist professor Dan McAdams writes, ‘the human expectation that social status can be seized through brute force and intimidation, that the strongest and the biggest and boldest will lord it over the rank and file, is very old, awesomely intuitive and deeply ingrained. Its younger rival – prestige- was never able to dislodge dominance from the human mind.’

Intriguingly, prestige and dominance both appear to be equally effective ways of gaining status. That is, one can rise to the top either by being virtuous and attaining mastery, or by throwing one’s weight around. The crucial difference is that prestigious leaders have been freely chosen by their followers, whereas domineering players typically force people to respect them.

Playing with fire

Across cultures, manhood is widely seen as something that has to be earned, but can also easily be lost (when was the last time you heard someone be told to ‘woman up’?). Because of the precarious nature of manhood, Storr underscores how young men are particularly prone to violent status contests.

Men have a propensity for physical status contests built into their minds, muscles and bones. They’re overwhelmingly the perpetrators of murder, and comprise most of their victims, with around 90% of global homicides being committed by males, and 70% being their targets. In the majority of cases, killers are unemployed, unmarried, poorly educated and under 30. Their sense of status is fragile. In most places, the leading reasons given for killing are ‘status driven’, writes conflict researcher doctor Mike Martin, ‘the result of altercations over trivial disputes’.

Needless to say, not all young men are violent criminals, and culture plays a big role in regulating aggression. However, Storr zeros in on combination he believes blows the powder keg: having a grandiose personality and experiencing intense feelings of humiliation. What’s the connection? Being humiliated is to have your reputation shattered, where your status plummets publicly and in dramatic fashion. “Humiliation can be seen as the opposite of status, the hell to its heaven.”

In the most serious cases, Storr says we sink so far down the rankings that we’re no longer considered useful players. The only way to recover is to start afresh and rebuild from the ground up. However, there’s another option available for those who are slipping and can’t get themselves up: annihilation.

As the African proverb says, ‘the child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth’. If the game rejects you, you can return in dominance as a vengeful God, using deadly violence to force the game to attend to you in humility.

Talk of burning villages down may evoke images of The Joker, but young male ‘incels’ are no laughing matter. Storr provides a harrowing account of three mass murderers: the ‘co-ed’ serial killer Edmund Kemper, who remains one of America’s most notorious murderers; Elliot Rogers, who was responsible for the misogynistic terror attacks in Vista California; and ‘the Unabomber’, Ted Kaczynski. Through his combing of the forensic evidence, Storr reveals how each of these men were not only delusionally narcissistic (Storr avoids making armchair diagnoses and sticks to the term ‘grandiose’ instead), but were also subject to a crushing weight of humiliation.

From left to right: Elliot Rodger, Ed Kemper, and Ted Kaczynski. Image credit: Quillette (2021).

Of course, several other factors contributed to these men committing such heinous crimes, including the dire state of their mental health. However, Storr argues that mental illness is not a sufficient explanation, as almost everyone who suffers from such conditions are not hellbent on destroying their communities. As stated by Storr:

All three had a need for status that was unusually, perhaps pathologically fierce, and so the humiliations they suffered would’ve been all the more agonising . . . Feeling entitled to a place at the top of the game, they were driven to depravity by life at the bottom.

Learning from history

These powerful undercurrents of grandiosity and humiliation are not confined to dangerous criminals. Storr also spots this sense of entitlement and gnawing resentment in notorious acts of espionage, sabotage, and amongst extreme political movements. Most poignantly, Storr draws parallels with the rise of Nazi Germany.

In attempting to understand the successes of the Nazi Party, Storr implores us to be brave. “The Nazi catastrophe can’t be understood without acknowledgement of why the Germans came to worship their leader as a god”.

Before the outbreak of World War One, Storr claims Germany was the most prosperous nation in Europe (edging ahead of Britain), where Germans’ living standards had been soaring since the turn of the 20th century. When war was declared, the Germans were confident (perhaps overconfident) that this would be a quick victory for the home team.

In the aftermath of Germany’s shocking defeat, Germans expected that the terms of peace would be just. However, the strict provisions that were enforced through The Treaty of Versaille included: 1) accepting blame for starting the war; 2) agreeing to disarm, whilst handing over enormous amounts of military equipment; 3) surrendering vast tracts of land and German territories; and 4) paying today’s equivalent of almost three hundred billion pounds in damages. These terms were almost unanimously felt as a national humiliation.

That Germany had to foot the bill for everyone’s war helped trigger a wave of hyperinflation that was so disastrous, workers had to collect their wages with wheelbarrows. These humiliations multiplied themselves. When Germany inevitably fell behind on its reparation payments, France and Belgium occupied the Ruhr Valley, one of Germany’s major industrial engines. Once hyperinflation had finally been tamed, the Great Depression hit. Germany was plunged into a deeper state of desperation and despair.

According to Storr, Adolf Hitler road on a ticket of healing the humiliations that Germany had endured through the asture terms of the Treaty of Versailles. Although antisemitism was rife at the time, Storr argues Germans’ main priority was restoring what they deemed was Germany’s rightful place at the top.

Partly through effective propaganda, Hitler himself became highly symbolic of the resurgent Germany; By the logic of the status game, he became sacred, the literal equivalent of a God, a figure that symbolised all that his players valued and who, in effect, was their status.

A parade of Nazi flags at the 1934 Nazi Party Congress in Nuremburg, as exhibited in the Nazi propaganda film The Triumph of Will. Image credit: The Unaffiliated Critic (2017).

Genocide, Storr argues, is not just about the killing or ‘cleansing’ enemies. “They’re about healing the perpetrators’ wounded grandiosity with grotesque, therapeutic performances of dominance and humiliation.” The Holocaust, the Nazis’ systematic slaughtering of six million Jews across Europe, was scaled up when Germany’s war effort started going south, and continued right up until the end of the Second World War— just as Hitler’s house of cards was crumbling.

The Nazis, Storr proclaims, were just like Edmund Kemper, Elliot Rodger and Ted Kaczynski. “They told a self-serving story that explained their catastrophic lack of status justified its restoration in murderous attack”, Storr writes. “But it’s not just Germany that’s been possessed in this way. Nations the world over become dangerous when humiliated.”

Stepping back, what lessons should we take from The Status Game? By peering into the mind of murderers and murderous regimes, Storr reminds us of the ever present threat posed by tyranny. To make sure we’re not swept away by a visceral rush of dominance, Storr instructs us to continuously question if the groups we belong to are becoming too tight, too dogmatic, and too extreme. For example, Storr states if we’re ever made to feel that acts of violence are virtuous, that’s a red flag. “If we’re serious about ‘never again’ we must accept that tyranny isn’t a ‘left’ or a ‘right’ thing, it’s a human thing. It doesn’t arrive goose-stepping down streets in terrifying ranks, it seduces us with stories.”

Given our peers’ ability to warp our sense of reality, how do we actually know when our groups have become unhinged? The antidote, Storr argues, is to play several status games. In other words, to diversify risk and not put all your eggs in one basket. “People who appear brainwashed have invested too much of their identity in a single game”, Storr states. “If the game fails, or they become expelled, their identify– their very self– can disintegrate. No such risk can befall the player with a diversity of identities who plays diverse games.” Of course, being a member of many groups opens one’s eyes to different views, too.

Conversely, Storr advises us to practice warmth, competence and sincerity when navigating our status hierarchies. “When we’re warm, we imply we’re not going to use dominance; when sincere; we imply we’re going to play fairly; when competent, that we’re going to be valuable to the game itself”.

According to Storr, it’s all too easy to flash sparks of dominance in the heat of the moment, where we draw for force to influence others. However successful this may be initially, Storr stresses that overpowering people, through forms of intimidation or other means, isn’t a sustainable strategy. “The glowers, the sighs, the wails of complaint; such twitches of animalism might help us achieve some immediate goal, but they’ll also lead to our being de-ranked in the mind of others.”

Whilst reflecting on prestige’s sticking power, Storr points out that we all have status to give, and that the credit we can dole out is essentially limitless. “Creating small moments of prestige means always seeking opportunities to use it. Allowing others to feel statusful makes it more likely they’ll accept our influence.”

Like a herd of elephants being led to water, let us continue our miraculous journey and follow the winding path of prestige.

Written by Max Beilby for Darwinian Business.

The Status Game: On Social Position and How We Use It is published by William Collins. Click here to buy a copy.

*Post updated 11th January 2022

Book Review

Drunk, by Edward Slingerland

As workers across the corporate world have begun scuttering back into their offices, many of us are sneaking away with our comrades for a drink. Given the substantial hazards alcohol presents, what should our stance on drinking with our colleagues be?

In his new book Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilisation, Edward Slingerland, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of British Columbia, leaps to the defence of alcohol, arguing that the benefits of drinking have essentially been disregarded by public health experts and policy wonks.

Alcohol is evidently a lethal drug. The World Health Organisation blames alcohol for 3 million deaths every year. Not only does alcohol trash our health and strain our healthcare systems, alcohol-fuelled crime wreaks havoc in our communities and drains public finances. And behind the cold statistics of deaths and government spending, alcohol addiction has ruined many people’s lives and caused immense suffering within families. 

Defending drinking may appear crass to people concerned about harms inflicted by alcohol, including those of us who have suffered first-hand from the ills of alcoholism. However, Slingerland argues that only by stepping back and seeing drinking through the lens of evolution can we have a proper debate about the costs and benefits of drinking.

To date, scientists’ main explanation for our thirst for firewater has been either ‘hijack’ or ‘hangover’. The white jackets in the hijack camp claim alcohol parasitises our brains’ reward systems, whereas those endorsing the hangover theory see drinking as an ‘evolutionary mismatch’. That is, getting a little tipsy may have been beneficial for our distant ancestors. But in the modern world awash with cheap booze and happy hours, drinking has become deleterious.

Although plausible, Slingerland pours cold water (or rather, warm beer) on these explanations. “Evolution isn’t stupid”, Slingerland quips, where he argues that evolution can happen much faster than most people think. “If ethanol happens to pick our neurological pleasure lock, evolution should call in the locksmith. If our taste for drink is an evolutionary hangover, evolution should have long ago stocked up on the aspirin. It hasn’t”.

Like an expert mixologist, Slingerland melds evidence from disparate fields including archaeology, history, neuroscience and social psychology. Far from being an evolutionary mistake, Slingerland argues that chemical intoxication has helped humans overcome an array of social challenges. For example, drinking helps alleviate stress and anxiety, especially in awkward social situations. Similarly, Slingerland claims hitting the bottle helps build trust and cohesion amongst strangers, providing a quick and easy way to get ‘fiercely tribal primates’ to cooperate.

“Humans have been getting drunk for a really long time”, Slingerland writes. He points to this, along with the ubiquity of drinking across cultures, as the primary evidence for alcohol’s adaptiveness. “Images of imbibing and partying dominate the early archaeological record as much as they do twenty-first-century Instagram.”

Of course, religions such as Islam have come down hard on alcohol like a ton of bricks. Although Slingerland concedes that “in the cultural evolution game, Islam has been extremely successful”, he questions how strictly curbs on alcohol have actually been enforced in the Muslim world. Slingerland also emphasises the efforts to outright ban alcohol, whether in ancient China or more recently in the United States, have all essentially failed. “If a ban on alcohol were a cultural evolutionary killer app, you’d expect it to be more consistently enforced”.

Incredibly, Slingerland goes as far to argue that alcohol consumption played a starring role in the rise of large-scale human civilisations (known as the ‘beer before bread’ hypothesis). In support of this theory, archaeologists working in the Fertile Crescent have been surprised by their findings: the tools and grains they’ve unearthed seem more suited to brewing beer than for making bread. Slingerland argues the best explanation is that these hunter-gatherers were stocking up on the magic sauce for an epic religious experience. Although the jury is still out, this proposition challenges existing narratives about how agriculture got the ball of human civilisation rolling.

Our (at least) 9,000-year love affair with booze. Image credit: National Geographic.

Although other drugs also play a role in this story, Slingerland crowns alcohol as the ‘unchallenged king of intoxicants’. Whatever the benefits of other recreational drugs are, Slingerland claims none of these potions offer alcohol’s full suite of features.

As stated by Slingerland:

It’s challenging to negotiate a treaty whilst high on mushrooms; the cognitive effects of cannabis show a high degree of variability between people; And dancing all night without food or sleep makes it really hard to show up for work in the morning. A two-cocktail hangover is, in contrast, a relatively minor burden to bear. This is why alcohol tends to displace other intoxicants when introduced into a new cultural environment, and has gradually become ‘the world’s most popular drug’.

That alcohol serves as a social lubricant may not be an earth-shattering revelation. Another less obvious benefit of drinking is that it gets our creative juices flowing. Slingerland endorses the ancient trope that poetic inspiration can be found at the bottom of a bottle. Indeed, Slingerland’s idea to write Drunk was seeded whilst boozing with Google employees.

When it comes to communal bonding and creativity, Slingerland singles out the prefrontal cortex as the enemy. The prefrontal cortex is the most evolutionary novel part of the human brain, and is the motherboard of rational thinking. Slingerland says the prefrontal cortex is arguably what makes us human, but that it also trips us up.

To embody the tension between self-control and creativity, Slingerland draws on Greek mythology. Apollo, the son of God, symbolises rationality, order, and self-control. Conversely, Dionysus is the God of wine, drunkenness, chaos, and fertility. So, what’s the moral of the story? If we want to be more creative, we need to quieten our overly controlling prefrontal cortices. Slingerland argues that alcohol is perfectly adapted to mute the prefrontal cortex, giving us permission to be more open and present in the moment. In other words, allowing our inner child to reemerge.

Being human requires a careful balancing act between Apollo and Dionysus. We need to be able to tie our shoes, but also be occasionally distracted by the beautiful or interesting or new in our lives. Apollo, the sober grown up, can’t be in charge all of the time. Dionysus, like a hapless toddler, may have trouble getting his shoes on, but he sometimes manages to stumble on novel solutions that Apollo would never see. Intoxication technologies, alcohol paramount among them, have historically been one way we have managed to leave the door open for Dionysus.

‘Apollo and Dionysus’, by Leonid Ilyukhin. Image credit: Leonid Ilyukhin.

In summary, Drunk is both fascinating and hilariously fun. Exploring alcohol consumption through the lens of cultural evolution provides nuance and perspective on drinking that has so far been lacking. Combined with Slingerland’s sharp wit and exquisite writing, Drunk packs a punch.

As is always the case, there are quibbles one could raise. I’m sure sceptics will contest the adaptationist programme that Slingerland subscribes to. To elaborate, Slingerland points to the prevalence of drinking across cultures and throughout history as the primary evidence for alcohol being a cultural adaptation. However, could this reasoning not also be used to argue that trephining and bloodletting were ‘adaptive’ too? Understandably, scientific studies that directly measure the effects of alcohol on groups’ performance are sparse. More research in this space would presumably bolster Slingerland’s claims of alcohol’s benefits.

Slingerland mentions ‘Asian flushing’, where some people with Asian ancestry experience unpleasant side-effects when drinking. Possessing the gene responsible for alcohol flushing, ‘ADH1B’, dramatically lowers your odds of abusing alcohol. ADH1B has been kicking around the gene pool for at least 7,000 years, where Slingerland argues it should spread like wildfire if drinking was merely an evolutionary mistake. However, what’s interesting is that this gene is most common in areas of Asia where some of the earliest cases of drinking have been documented. So if Asia got the party started, perhaps evolution’s locksmiths are already on their way?

Ironically, Slingerland comes full circle and presents a revised version of the ‘hangover’ theory. The arrival of spirits dramatically raised the stakes of drinking, allowing anyone to consume a lethal amount of ethanol in just a few gulps. “It is very difficult to pass out from drinking beer or wine; it is nearly impossible to kill oneself,” Slingerland writes. “Once distilled liquors are in the mix, however, all bets are off.” Infused with the modern epidemic of loneliness and binge drinking cultures in the Northern hemisphere, Slingerland argues that spirits may fundamentally change alcohol’s balance sheet, moving alcohol from being a net-benefit to a net-harm.

Drunk is filled to the brim with references to the workplace. According to Slingerland, appreciating alcohol’s ancient roots can help us think more clearly about what role drinking should play in our professional lives.

Slingerland penned Drunk during the coronavirus pandemic, where he says it will take us years to fully understand how lockdowns and home working have impacted innovation. Slingerland observes that the length and scope of our conversations through Zoom have narrowed, where our discussions have become more regimented. “Video meetings are probably more efficient; But efficiency, the central value of Apollo, is the enemy of disruptive innovation.”

Parallel to the challenge of hybrid working is prioritising business travel in a post-pandemic world. According to Slingerland, the ultimate function of business travel mirrors our thirst for firewater. “Neither makes sense unless we discern the cooperation problems to which they are a response.” Whilst most of us are happy buying goods online from a faceless website, Slingerland says he’d hesitate to enter into a foreign business venture if he didn’t know who he was getting into bed with. “If I am entering into a long-term, complex venture with a company in Shanghai, where the impact of screwups or corner-cutting or backstabbing or simple fraud is multiplied a thousandfold, I need to know that the people I’m dealing with are fundamentally trustworthy.”

By coincidence, a key requisite for doing business in various countries is the drunken banquet. “In the modern world, with all of the remote communication technologies at our disposal, it should genuinely surprise us how often we need a good, old-fashioned, in-person drinking session before we feel comfortable about signing our name on the dotted line.” For Slingerland, folk wisdom that we’re more honest whilst drunk rings true. With our prefrontal cortex compromised, aspects of our personalities that we successfully suppress will inevitably burst to the fore. “You may seem like a nice person on the phone, but before I really trust that judgement I would be well advised to reevaluate you, in person, after a second glass of Chablis.”

President Richard Nixon and Premier Zhou Enlai toast the opening of US – China relations in Beijing, February 1972 . Image credit: Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum.

Whilst toasting to rituals like the drunken banquet, Slingerland doesn’t gloss over the worse aspects of drinking. For example, Slingerland warns of drinking cliques reinforcing the ‘old boy’s club’. Here, he reflects on his own university department’s pub sessions, where those who attended were virtually all men. “Female colleagues were welcome, indeed encouraged, to join, and occasionally did. But it was usually about as male-dominated as the Japanese water trade.” Although problematic, Slingerland argues the solution is not immediately obvious. “Given the demonstrable payoffs of this sort of alcohol-lubricated brainstorming, it seems counterproductive to declare that it should never happen. And yet there are obvious dangers of exclusion and inequity”.

Ultimately, Drunk is a love letter to the Greek god Dionysus. However, your Apollonian inner parent may ask if Dionysus is a lover you should really be courting.

Written by Max Beilby for Darwinian Business.

Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilisation is published by Little Brown Spark. Click here to buy a copy.

Book Review

The Social Instinct, by Nichola Raihani

The pandemic has been a stark reminder of just how much we rely on one another. Like plagues of the past, the novel coronavirus has exploited our social nature. But our sociality is also our Get Out of Jail Free card.

Billions of people complying with strict lockdowns and the race to roll-out COVID-19 vaccines in record time are examples of our extraordinary ability to cooperate. This begs the question: why do we cooperate with each other in the first place?

In her new book The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World, Nichola Raihani claims that this may be the most pressing scientific question of our time. To get to the bottom of this, Raihani takes us on an intellectual journey, chronicling some of planet Earth’s most successful social species.

The ‘we’ in ‘me’

Nichola Raihani is a professor of psychology at University College London, who actually trained as a zoologist (making her a rare breed of psychologist). Unearthing exactly what humans do and do not have in common with other animals has been the mainstay of Raihani’s scientific career.

Whether it’s the Taj Mahal or the International Space Station, staggering feats of human cooperation are clear for all of us to see. “Every human achievement we can think of, from the trifling to the truly magnificent, relies on cooperation”, Raihani writes. “From the most mundane of activities, like a morning commute, to our most tremendous achievements, such as sending rockets into space. Cooperation is our species’ superpower.”

Invisible to the naked eye is the vast array of cooperation that takes place at microscopic levels, even under our own skin. In The Social Instinct, Raihani reminds us that we are multicellular organisms, composed of trillions of cells working around the clock to keep us alive and kicking.

To let this sink in, Raihani invites us to look in the mirror and see ourselves as a Russian doll.

You are you on the outside, but this external appearance isn’t all there is. If you prise the outer shell open, you’ll find another version of you looking inside, which itself contains another version and another within. You are simultaneously an individual and a collective. Your body is made up of trillions of cells- around 37.2 trillion to be precise. For perspective that’s more than 5,000 times the number of people on earth. Most cell types contain forty-six chromosomes and each of these accommodates genes, ranging in number from a few hundred to many thousands.

From this perspective, Raihani argues that the most pivotal moments in human history were not the dawn of agriculture or the invention of the wheel. Rather, they were a coalescing of chance events millions of years ago that led to our multicellular existence.

This expansionist view of cooperation explains many wonders of the natural world, including how social insects appear to morph into superorganisms. Like separate parts of a car, the vast array of roles social insects play only really makes sense when we understand the overarching ‘vehicle’, which in this case is the insect’s colony. According to Raihani, social insects’ colonies mirror our multicellular bodies, where the Queen is akin to egg-producing ovaries, and the sterile workers resemble cells in our bodies responsible for general maintenance and repair.

Worker bees working hard. On hot days, some workers are tasked with collecting water and spraying it over combs to cool the hive down. Photo credit: London Economic Times.

Some public intellectuals also describe human societies as a form of superorganism, arguing that our ‘hive-like’ civilisations are the products of evolutionary forces clashing at higher levels of organisation. Despite the parallels, Raihani pours cold water on the idea that human groups resemble insect colonies. To make her case, Raihani draws lessons from everyone’s favourite business TV show: The Apprentice.

There is a fundamental difference between groups that are formed on the basis of high relatedness, and those whose members interests only align because of happenstance… On The Apprentice, goodwill rapidly evaporates when contestants find themselves in the losing team. When there is no rival team to unite against, a contestant’s tenure in the competition depends on their ability to outmanoeuvre their teammates. A familiar pattern usually results: people swiftly turn on one another, erstwhile allies become vicious rivals. Insults fly around the room, as contestants tried to absolve themselves of blame while incriminating their useless colleagues. When between-group competition is no longer relevant, then competition within the group becomes much more apparent. 

Although Raihani casts doubt on natural selection acting on groups of humans, she seems to tacitly endorse a new variant of the theory called ‘cultural group selection’. After all, how did a hominid species that evolved for life in small groups go on to build chiefdoms, nation states and corporations?

Social living

Others see our humanity reflected in the faces of our primate cousins. Chimpanzees and bonobos are our closet living relatives on the evolutionary tree of life, where we share over 98% of our DNA with them. The similarities between us and these great apes are striking. That said, Raihani convincingly argues that comparing ourselves to these primates can only reveal so much about us. How come?

Most of the food early humans ate had to be hunted or gathered, which is essentially impossible to do alone. Therefore, our distant ancestors had to band together if they wanted to avoid starvation. Other primate species didn’t face this pressure. Gorillas essentially live in ‘giant salad bowls’, and chimpanzees mainly snack on fruits. Their ‘fast food’ meant these primates didn’t need to collaborate to survive, which narrowed their evolutionary strategy. In contrast, we humans had no choice but to cooperate not only to eat, but to teach each other critical life skills and to raise our helpless infants.

In The Social Instinct, Raihani details the rich social lives of animals she’s studied intimately, such as the cleaner fish that roam the Great Barrier Reef. Although the similarities between us and these exotic creatures may not appear obvious, we apparently have a surprising amount in common: world-class cooperation. These cleaner fish essentially operate underwater ‘hairdressers’, where male and female cleaners frequently do business together. Raihani and her colleagues have shown that if a female cleaner mistreats a client by biting them in no-go areas, their male partners will punish them. Despite male cleaners acting like domineering arseholes (they also cheat), Raihani argues this sort of behaviour resembles ‘third party punishment’ in humans, which is one of the building blocks of large-scale societies.

A bluestreak cleaner wrasse giving an oriental sweetlip the spar treatment. Photo Credit: Boris Pamikov / Shutterstock.

Although The Social Instinct is in many respects a celebration of cooperation, it’s evident that competition can also lead to good in the world. For example, Raihani and her colleague Sarah Smith trawled through Just Giving’s fundraising pages of people running the London Marathon, with the hunch that Charles Darwin’s grand theory of sexual selection may help explain why people bother donating to charity in the first place. They found that if an attractive woman had previously received a generous donation from a man, other men would subsequently try to outcompete one other by posting larger donations on her fundraising page (I know, shocking).

This is what evolutionary psychologists call ‘competitive altruism’, where people behave altruistically because of the benefits that come with flaunting one’s virtue. Raihani suggests these tournaments are the human equivalent of the peacock’s tail. But instead of showing off their physical prowess, these men are signalling their generosity (or rather, they’re flashing their stacks of cash).

The renegades within

Just as competition can be a force for good, cooperation also has a dark side. Where there is cooperation, cheaters and shirkers lurk in the shadows. At the microscopic level, this truism can help us understand the scourge of cancer. Cancers are essentially renegades within our multicellular bodies. They are cheating cells that ignore instructions, refuse to cooperate, and proliferate to the detriment of our health.

Seen from another angle however, cancerous cells are actually cooperating with one another. Although cancers disrupt their cellular societies, they band together to further their own selfish interests, however suicidal their mission may be. This reveals the paradox of cooperation etched in The Social Instinct. “Cooperation and competition are simply two sides of the same coin”, Raihani writes. “What looks like cooperation through one lens will often be felt as competition through another.”

Scientists are converging on this understanding of cooperation as a way to outcompete rival groups. Although this theoretical breakthrough enriches our understanding of cooperation, it also reveals an uncomfortable truth: if cooperation is a way to get ahead, then a corollary of this is that cooperation usually has victims. “In fact, cooperation without victims is the most difficult kind to achieve”.

This truth bomb helps us make sense of the corruption that plagues societies across the world. We can view corruption as a form of cooperation where the goodies go to our nearest and dearest, which subsequently undermines the integrity of our formal institutions. Preferentially hiring a member of your family for a job or greasing the palm of an executive to secure a lucrative contract are both cooperative acts, Raihani argues, as they both involve helping and trust. But of course, it is society at large that ends up footing the bill.   

As stated by Raihani:

If someone were to ask you whether it would be acceptable to lie in court to exonerate a family member, what would you say? What about if you were asked whether you had a moral duty to hire the best candidate for a job rather than a less qualified friend? Answers to these sorts of questions are neither straight forward nor universally endorsed, because cooperating at one scale is often traded off against cooperation at another. Our sense of what is moral or immoral depends on how we feel these competing interests ought to be balanced. To put it put this another way, one might mistrust someone who ‘always helps his friends’. But a similarly damning accusation can be levelled at someone who ‘doesn’t help their friends’.

Eric and Donald Trump campaigning in Ashburn, Virginia, August 2, 2016. “Nepotism is kind of a factor of life,” Eric Trump said during an interview with Forbes. Photo credit: Evan Vucci/ Shutterstock.

These different scales of cooperation also help explain the setbacks of the global vaccination programme. Few politicians would disagree with COVAX’s maxim that ‘no one is safe until everyone is safe’. Yet rich countries have essentially gobbled up the globe’s supplies of COVID-19 vaccines, and are prioritising booster shots for their citizens over immunising the rest of the world. To put it another way, intense cooperation within their borders has come at the expense of poorer nations– which inadvertently prolongs the pandemic and makes all of us less safe.

This double-edged nature of cooperation, Raihani argues, is the essential ingredient and also the biggest threat to humanity’s success. “Our supreme commitment to cooperation is the key to solving the massive global problems we now face”, Raihani writes. “But it is our ability to cooperate that might also be our eventual downfall.”

Think global, act local

The human population will soon pass the 8 billion mark. This is an extraordinary achievement for a primate that is physically weak and not exceptionally bright either. Cooperation is undoubtedly a key element of our success, and Raihani credits our social instincts for our very existence. That said, our domination of planet Earth forces us to transcend our social instincts.

The problems humanity faces in the 21st century are daunting, and require greater global cooperation than has ever been mustered. Despite the chaos created by the novel coronavirus, Raihani states that pandemics are far from our only challenge. For example, global warming and the mass die-off of species are two devastating own goals that humanity has scored. And although the world’s nuclear stockpile has decreased dramatically since the peak of the Cold War, there are still enough nuclear weapons to blow ourselves to smithereens.

We have right to be concerned about the world our children will inherit. However, Raihani argues that we must not lose hope. Unlike any other creature on Earth, human ingenuity and adaptability allows us to work around the laws of nature and to crawl our way out of sticky social dilemmas. “We are not simply stuck with the games that nature gives us: we can change the rules.”

To overcome these seemingly insurmountable challenges, Raihani says we need to ‘think global and act local’. This catchphrase was coined by the late Elinor Ostrom, who challenged conventional economic thinking and proved that the ‘tragedy of the commons’ can be overcome with hybrid forms of governance. Acknowledging the magnitude of her contributions, Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics.

There is almost a fairy-tale to be told about cooperation, Raihani concludes. “If used well it will deliver riches, but in the wrong hands or used in the wrong ways, it will bring ruin”. The decisions our leaders make over the coming decades will determine if this story has a happy-ending, or serves as a cautionary tale for future civilisations.

Written by Max Beilby for Darwinian Business.

The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World is published by Penguin. Click here to buy a copy.

Podcast

No Best Way, with Stephen Colarelli

Here’s an episode I recorded with Stephen Colarelli for This View of Life podcast.

Stephen Colarelli is professor of psychology at Central Michigan University. His research explores how evolutionary theory can influence how we think about, conduct research on, and manage behaviour in organisations.

Steve and I discuss the application of evolutionary psychology to Human Resource Management. We cover Steve’s academic career, and his books No Best Way: An Evolutionary Perspective on Human Resource Management, and The Biological Foundations of Organizational Behavior (which Steve co-edited with his colleague Richard Arvey). We also explore the impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on the world of work.

Book Review

Strategic Instincts, by Dominic Johnson

Among political scientists, it’s widely believed that ‘cognitive biases’ (that is, quirks of the human mind) are not only detrimental, but responsible for some of history’s worst policy blunders. Whether it’s the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Chernobyl, or the Global Financial Crisis, it’s easy to think of colossal disasters that back this up. But is this really the whole story?

In his new book Strategic Instincts, Dominic Johnson, a Professor of International Relations at Oxford University, challenges this worldview, where he argues that seemingly irrational behaviour can, with the right dosage and in the right context, actually enhance performance in the arena of international politics.

Drawing on insights from the field of evolutionary psychology, Johnson makes the case that cognitive biases act as ‘strategic instincts’ that can provide politicians with a competitive edge in policy making— particularly in high stakes, and highly uncertain, military confrontations.

To test his theory, Johnson takes his readers on a tour of recent history, and places a trio of influential cognitive biases— overconfidence, the ‘fundamental attribution error’, and ingroup favouritism— under the microscope.

Fortune favours the bold

To start off our intellectual journey, Johnson turns the clock back to the 18th century and places us on the battlefield of the American War of Independence. By combing the historical and biographical accounts of the Revolutionary War, Johnson argues that the United States benefited in no small measure from a remarkable confidence— arguably overconfidence—that emanated from its charismatic founder, George Washington.

Before delving further, what does Johnson mean when he says George Washington was ‘overconfident’?A well-established finding from modern psychology is that mentally healthy people are generally overconfident (with men being particularly cocky). What this body of research suggests is that we individually tend to overestimate our abilities, as well as our control over life events, and we also underestimate our vulnerability to risk (although these are technically termed ‘positive illusions’, Johnson uses the catch-phrase ‘overconfidence’ for simplicity’s sake). In sum, we tend to think more highly of ourselves than who we really are.

Despite the substantial personal and social costs of pervasive positive illusions, Johnson argues overconfidence, in moderate amounts and in right context, can present a wealth of benefits. For example, those of us who are the most optimistically overconfident reap many benefits in life, including greater health and career success. Similarly, Johnson’s research outlines how overconfidence can give armies an upper hand on the battlefield.

According to Johnson, George Washington’s remarkable overconfidence encouraged him to fight and sustain the revolution against the British— despite the formidable odds stacked against him and his rebels. In the long and gruelling war in which Americans lost most of the military battles against the Red Coats (and struggled to even keep an army in the field), Johnson argues ambition and boldness paid off handsomely for Washington and his comrades.

As stated by Johnson:

Britain was the world’s leading military and economic power before and after the war. It was by no means yet in decline and was the odds-on favourite to win the war, or at least to end it on favourable terms. I suggest that Washington, in no small part by virtue of his great confidence, was able to turn the tables and seize victory from the jaws of defeat, an achievement epitomised by his daring raid across the Delaware. Joseph Ellis wrote that “the British commander, William How, could probably have won the war and ended the American Revolution in November of 1776 with more aggressive tactics. The Delaware crossing thus becomes a sudden reversal of fortune, as if an American mouse, chased hither and yon by a British cat, brazenly turned turns about and declares itself a lion”. And lions, not mice, win wars.

Washington’s bold crossing the icy Delaware river on Christmas night, 1776, in what many deem as the turning point of the war. Emanuel Leutze (1816-1868). Image credit: Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Know your enemy

Next, Johnson revisits the lead up to World War II, where he probes Britain’s perceptions of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s. Here, Johnson draws on the fundamental attribution error— a psychological quirk that journalist Robert Wright describes as ‘the most underappreciated cognitive bias’— to illustrate the logic of strategic instincts.

For those of us less familiar with the theory, what is the error exactly? The late Lee Ross coined the term ‘the fundamental attribution error’ back in the 1970s, in a scientific paper that has had an enduring impact on social psychology. When explaining the behaviour of other people, Ross and his intellectual descendants found that people generally place too much emphasis on their disposition (that is, on their innate personality traits and their essential ‘essence’). Conversely, people tend to put too little emphasis on the situation in explaining other’s behaviour (that is, on the circumstances that people find themselves in, and how this influences what they do).

What does this mean for international politics? Johnson clarifies that the fundamental attribution error doesn’t necessarily make us see other people’s behaviour as threatening, but it can make us see threatening behaviour as intentional. Similarly, Johnson claims that the fundamental attribution error can lead governments to be hyper vigilant and assume the worst from other states.

Intriguingly, Johnson makes the case for the fundamental attribution error’s absence in the lead up to World War II— and points to this as evidence for the cognitive bias’s effectiveness.

To elaborate, Britain’s appeasement of Hitler offers a reverse case where those in power behaved in contrast to what the fundamental attribution error would predict. At the time, the UK’s Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain strongly resisted making character judgements of Hitler, and instead emphasised the situation (where Chamberlain stressed the German desire to right the wrongs of the Treaty of Versailles, and to retain security over their remaining territory). Despite mounting evidence of Hitler’s ulterior motives, Chamberlain continued to give Hitler the benefit of the doubt— which Johnson claimed led to the disastrous policy of appeasement and the Munich crisis of 1938.

Neville Chamberlain at Heston Airport on his return from Munich after meeting with Hitler, September 1938. Chamberlain read out to the crowd the famous agreement, signed by Hitler, stating “the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again”. Later that day, during a speech outside 10 Downing Street, he declared “peace for our time”. Image credit: Central Press/Getty Images.

Johnson therefore raises an unusual, counterfactual question: where was the fundamental attribution error when the world needed it most? After all, there were actors waiting in the wings whose thinking did in fact align with the fundamental attribution error (not least Winston Churchill, who insisted that Hitler was acting out of intentions to aggressively expand German territory and redouble their military power). Had the fundamental attribution error been stronger and more widespread among Western politicians at the time, Johnson argues that Britain could have stood up to Hitler earlier and more effectively, which as a result, would have avoided the atrocities of World War II.

United we stand

Johnson also argues that ‘ingroup favouritism’ (also known as the ‘ingroup-outgroup bias’) serves as a strategic instinct. What is ingroup favouritism, and why does Johnson consider it to be so influential in the world of international politics? As part and parcel of our coalitional psychology, we humans have a powerful tendency to favour our own groups and its members, and disparage the ‘outgroup’. This bias is so strong and ubiquitous that ingroup favouritism is essentially the bread and butter of social psychology.

Needless to say, such prejudices can have horrific consequences. Johnson argues that throughout human history, the ingroup bias has contributed to the oppression of minority groups, inflamed ethnic conflict, and has been implicated in genocide.

However, Johnson claims that in smaller doses and in appropriate settings, ingroup favouritism can be relatively benign and ‘highly adaptive’. To elaborate, Johnson argues that ingroup favouritism increases cohesion as well as coordinated action against rival groups, which together can increase group’s survival and overall effectiveness.

To evaluate these claims, Johnson parachutes us back to the Pacific War between the United States and Japan. Through his combing of the historical artifacts, Johnson argues that the United States was able to persist and ultimately prevail in the long and brutal Pacific campaign against the Japanese partially due to ingroup favouritism helping bolster the war effort (that is, by increasing cohesion among military personnel, boosting support for the war among Americans at home, and by sealing the commitment of America’s political leaders).

Conversely, Johnson argues that the Japanese took outgroup animosity to extreme levels, which sowed the seeds of their downfall. (The Japanese certainly did not have a monopoly on dehumanisation. However, Johnson argues that Japan’s demonisation of Americans severely distorted their thinking, compromising their estimations of risk and ultimately their military strategy).

American infantrymen secure an area on Bougainville, Solomon Islands, in March 1944, after Japanese forces infiltrated their lines during the night. Image credit: AP Photo.

Overkill: The limits of strategic instincts

In Strategic Instincts, Johnson clearly acknowledges the dark side of these cognitive biases, especially when taken to excesses. That is, when overconfidence becomes hubris, when attribution errors manifests into paranoia, and when ingroup favouritism fuels discrimination and racism. As stated by Johnson; “the in-group/ out-group bias can obviously be a serious impediment to cooperation, peace, and equality between different groups, and we must strive to reduce or manage it wherever it has malicious effects.”

Johnson also points out the pitfalls of only psychologising instances where things go wrong. If we want a complete understanding of how cognitive biases impact our decision making, we must count both sides of the ledger. To this end, Johnson argues that an evolutionary perspective offers the crucial next step in incorporating psychological insights into the field of international politics.

One may question Johnson’s emphasis on competition and military conflict, rather than on international cooperation. Notwithstanding the oversight of international institutions including the United Nations, Johnson asserts that the world lacks a global ‘Leviathan’, and is therefore engulfed in competitive anarchy. Despite his Hobbesian worldview, Johnson stresses that global cooperation is possible, and he’s hopeful of humanity’s ability to overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges.

Johnson writes:

We need inspiration for solving the collective action problems at the global level more than ever. Here, the current challenges to the planet are especially daunting and difficult, ranging from expanding populations and dwindling resources to species extinction and climate change. Some inspirational confidence in the face of such challenges could make all the difference.

I think Johnson makes several compelling arguments in Strategic Instincts. That said, there are elements of the book that one could critique. What stood out the most for me is that the latest findings from the field of cultural evolution appear to be missing. Exhibit A: Although overconfidence is a well-established finding from the field of psychology, cultural evolutionary theorist Michael Muthukrishna and his colleagues have detailed significant cultural differences in how overconfidence manifests.

Much of the literature cited by Johnson has been conducted with North Americans and Western Europeans. However, we now know that these people are really WEIRD. That is, they are Western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic, which makes them psychological outliers among the world’s diverse inhabitants of humans. In other words, cognitive biases are not intrinsic human universals, but are prevalent to varying degrees, and manifest in different ways, across cultures.

These points aside, Johnson arguably makes a key contribution not only to the field of international relations, but to psychology itself. For various reasons, seeing cognitive biases as inherently detrimental has become the default assumption of many behavioural scientists. To challenge this prevailing view, Johnson eloquently illustrates how cognitive biases can confer advantages in politics— and what the implications of this are for everyday life.

Clash of the titans

What light can Strategic Instincts shed on global politics today? Johnson argues that the biggest question facing international relations may be rising tensions between the United States and China. Whilst the United States retains its hegemony in many spheres, Johnson implies that America’s dominance is quickly diminishing. If this trajectory continues, the implications are enormous. As stated by Johnson:

History tells a gloomy story about rising states. They have rarely risen peacefully, either because they begin a quest for expansion or because other states act to prevent from them doing so [sic], or from acquiring the ability to try. Normally, in such a context of rising tensions, overconfidence would be cited as an outright danger. The United States (or China) is likely to overestimate its own capabilities, exaggerate its own level of control over events, and maintain overoptimistic predictions about the future, all of which would seem to increase the probability of deterrence failure, crisis, and war.

Several intellectuals take comfort in the fact that war has been in steady decline since World War II (what Steven Pinker refers to as the ‘Long Peace’ in his book The Better Angels of Our Nature). However, Johnson clarifies that “while war may be in decline among states, competition is not”.

The modern world is infinitely complex, and experts are generally pretty terrible at predicting the future. That said, pundits point to an uncomfortably high chance of a confrontation between the United States and China over Taiwan in the medium-term.  

Beyond territorial expansion, Johnson clarifies that states are vying for strategic advantages in a myriad of ways. A good illustration of this is the new arms race sparked between the United States and China over artificial intelligence (AI).

Whilst evolutionary psychology excavates the remnants of our evolutionary past, AI researchers are taking insights from evolution to build the digital minds of tomorrow. Both countries are now ploughing large sums into artificial intelligence for military purposes, including the development and deployment of autonomous weapons. Whilst AI may prove to be a boon for humanity, experts warn that without proper oversight and regulation, humanity risks ‘losing control’ of AI.

Similarly, Johnson appears to be concerned about increasing technological and social complexity. As the scale and complexity of political interactions continues to increase, Johnson warns that mistakes and misunderstandings may become more difficult to avoid. In a multipolar world where the two military superpowers are continuously on red alert, the risks of accidental escalation looms large (with the mass deployment of automated weaponry, one may worry not so much about ‘artificial intelligence’, but of ‘artificial stupidity’).

Despite his sobering analysis, Johnson seems confident (perhaps overconfident?) that the United State’s strategic instincts will save the day:

Even if the disadvantages are genuine and likely to cause mistakes, the advantages could outweigh them, avoiding mistakes in the other direction that would be even more costly. It would be easy for a state to shrink back in the face of a rising power, anxious to avoid conflict and hesitant or unwilling to commit to the bold actions necessary to assert and preserve its position. This was certainly Chamberlain’s problem in the 1930s, and Britain paid the price— losing its empire, bankrupting the nation, and nearly suffering an invasion of his homeland as well. As we have seen, overconfidence can serve to increase ambition, resolve, and perseverance, helping to exploit opportunities, deter enemies, attract allies, and provide a competitive edge in strategic interactions. While drawbacks of overconfidence certainly remain in the mix, all of these advantages could conceivably help the United States consolidate and preserve its position vis-a-vis China in the coming years.

Here’s the 30 trillion-dollar question: will overconfidence help avert a large-scale military conflict between the United States and China, or will it inevitably lead to disaster?

Written by Max Beilby for Darwinian Business.

Strategic Instincts: The Adaptive Advantages of Cognitive Biases in International Politics is published by Princeton University Press. Click here to buy a copy.

Article updated on the 27th July 2021.