Tag: Cooperation

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

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.

Scientific Publication

Why anti-corruption strategies may backfire

One of the defining attributes of humans is that we are champion cooperators, surpassing levels of cooperation far beyond what is observed in other species across the animal kingdom. Understanding how cooperation is sustained, particularly in large-scale societies, remains a central question for both evolutionary scientists and policy makers.

Social scientists frequently use behavioural game theory to model cooperation in laboratory settings. These experiments suggest that ‘institutional punishment’ can be used to sustain cooperation in large groups- a set up analogous to the role governments play in wider society. In the real-world however, corruption can undermine the effectiveness of such institutions.

In July’s edition of the journal Nature Human Behaviour, Michael Muthukrishna and his colleagues Patrick Francois, Shayan Pourahmadi and Joe Henrich published an experimental study which rather cleverly incorporated corruption into a classic behavioural economic game.

Corruption remains widespread worldwide, yet unevenly distributed. The authors cite estimates from the World Bank, stating US$1 trillion is paid in bribes alone each year. However, levels of corruption vary considerably across geographies. For example, estimates suggest that in Kenya 8 out of 10 interactions with public officials require a bribe. Conversely, indices suggest Denmark has the lowest level of corruption, and the average Dane may never pay a bribe in their lifetime.

Transparency International state that more than 6 billion people live in countries with a serious corruption problem. The costs of corruption range from reduced welfare programmes, to death from collapsed buildings. In other words, corruption can kill.

Michael Muthukrishna’s work suggests that corruption is largely inevitable due to our evolved psychological dispositions; the challenge is apparently to find the conditions where corruption and its detrimental impacts can be minimised. As Muthukrishna is quoted saying in an LSE press release for the paper:

Corruption is actually a form of cooperation rooted in our history, and easier to explain than a functioning, modern state. Modern states represent an unprecedented scale of cooperation that is always under threat by smaller scales of cooperation. What we call ‘corruption’ is a smaller scale of cooperation undermining a larger-scale.

Playing Bribes

What follows is an overview of the studies’ experimental design and results. If this is of little interest, I suggest skipping to the section titled ‘Backfire effect’.

To model corruption, the authors modified a behavioural economic game called the ‘institutional punishment game’. The participants were anonymous, and came from countries with varying levels of corruption. Overall, 274 participants took part in the study. The participants were provided with an endowment, which they could divide between themselves and a public pool. The public pool is multiplied by some amount and then divided equally among the players, regardless of their contributions.

The institutional punishment game is designed so that it is in every player’s self-interest to let others contribute to the public goods pool, whilst contributing nothing oneself. However, the gain for the group overall is highest if everybody contributes the maximum possible. Each round one group member is randomly assigned the leader, who can allocate punishments using taxes extracted from other players.

The ‘bribery game’ that Muthukrishna and his colleagues developed is the same as the basic game, except that each player had the ability to bribe the leader. Therefore, the leader could see both each players’ contributions to the public pool, and also the amount each player gave to them personally. The experimenters manipulated the ‘pool multiplier’ (a proxy for economic potential) and the ‘punishment multiplier’ (the power of the leader to punish).

For each player’s move, the leader could decide to do nothing, accept the bribe offered, or punish the player by taking away their points. Any points offered to the leader that he or she rejected were returned to the group member who made the offer. Group members could see only the leader’s actions towards them and their payoff, but not the leader’s actions towards other group members.

Compared to with the basic public goods game, the addition of bribes caused a large decrease in public good provisioning (a decline of 25%).

Leaders with a stronger punishment multiplier at their disposal (referred to as ‘strong leaders’) were approximately twice as likely to accept bribes and were three times less likely to do nothing (such as punish free-riders). As expected by the authors, more power led to more corrupt behaviour.

Having generated corruption, the authors introduced transparency to the bribery game. In the ‘partial transparency’ condition, group members could see not only the leader’s actions towards them, but also the leader’s own contributions to the public pool. However, they did not see the leader’s actions to other group members. In the ‘full transparency’ condition, information on each member and the leader’s subsequent actions was made fully available (that is, individual group members contributions to the pool, bribes offered to the leader, and the leader’s subsequent actions in each case).

Although the costs of bribery were seen in all contexts, the detrimental effects were most pronounced in the poor economic conditions.

The experiments demonstrated that corruption mitigation effectively increased contributions when leaders were strong or the economic potential was rich. When leaders were weak (that is, their punitive powers were low and economic potential was poor), the apparent corruption mitigation strategy of full transparency had no effect, and partial transparency actually further decreased contributions to levels lower than that of the standard bribery game.

Backfire effect

This set of experiments indicates that corruption mitigation strategies help in some contexts, but elsewhere may cause the situation to deteriorate and can therefore backfire. As stated by the Muthukrishna and his colleagues; “proposed panaceas, such as transparency, may actually be harmful in some contexts.”

The findings are not surprising from a social psychological perspective, and support a vast literature on the impacts of social norms on behaviour. Transparency and exposure to institutional corruption may enforce the norm that most people are engaging in corrupt behaviours, and that such behaviour is permissible (or that one needs to also engage in such dealings to succeed). Why partial transparency had a more detrimental impact than full transparency when leaders were weak is not made clear however.

Remarkably, the authors found that participants who had grown up in more corrupt countries were more willing to accept bribes. The most plausible explanation presented is that exposure to corruption whilst growing up led to these social norms being internalized, which manifested in these individuals’ behaviour during the experiments.

It’s important to note that this is only one experimental study looking into anti-corruption strategies, and that caution is required when extending these research findings to practice. As stated by the authors; “Laboratory work on the causes and cures of corruption must inform and be informed by real-world investigations of corruption from around the globe.”

This aside, Muthukrishna and his colleagues’ research challenges widely held assumptions about how best to reduce corruption, and may help explain why the ‘cures for corruption’ that have proved successful in rich countries may not work elsewhere. To paraphrase the late Louis Brandeis, ‘sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants’, yet this may depend on climatic conditions and the prevalence of pathogens.

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Written by Max Beilby for Darwinian Business

Click here to read to full paper.

References

Muthukrishna, M., Francois, P., Pourahmadi, S., & Henrich, J. (2017). Corrupting cooperation and how anti-corruption strategies may backfire. Nature Human Behaviour.

Milinski, M. (2017). Economics: Corruption made visible. Nature Human Behaviour.

When Less is Best (LSE, 2017); Available here

Corruption Perceptions Index 2015 (Transparency International, 2015); Available here 

Image credit: George Marks/Getty Images.

Scientific Publication

Charismatic Leadership Through the Lens of Evolution

One of the defining features of human psychology is our extraordinary prosociality. How can cooperation and prosocial behaviour be maintained, despite the immediate temptations to free-ride and deflect?

In a paper published in the September edition of the journal Evolution & Human Behavior, organisational psychologists Allen Grabo and Mark van Vugt explore the origins and functions of charismatic leadership.

Charismatic leaders have played a prominent role throughout history, and yet a definition of what charismatic leadership actually is remains elusive.

The authors argue that the ultimate function of charismatic leadership is to effectively promote and sustain prosocial behaviour within groups. Using the terminology of evolutionary psychology, the authors contend charismatic leadership is “[…] a signalling process in which a leader conveys their ability to solve urgent coordination and cooperation challenges in groups”.

They continue:

This process is context-dependent, but fundamentally consists of (1) attracting attention to recruit followers, (2) making use of extraordinary rhetorical abilities and knowledge of cultural symbols and rituals to inspire and offer a vision, (3) minimizing the perceived risks of cooperation, and (4) aligning these followers toward shared goals.

Grabo and van Vugt suggest charismatic leadership helps foster group cohesion, even as populations grow larger and less kin-based than those of our hunter-gather ancestors.

The Charismatic Prosociality Hypothesis

Three studies were conducted to test the ‘charismatic prosociality hypothesis’. The authors recruited participants online, and used charismatic stimuli and experimental economic games to test it.

For the first two studies, the researchers capitalised on the wealth of TED talks available, and identified videos which viewers found similarly interesting but were presented by speakers scoring high or low in charisma. Participants watched either a high or  low charisma scoring TED talk, before participating in experimental economic games: the ‘Dictator‘ and ‘Trust‘ Games.

Participants who had watched the more charismatic TED talk gave more in the Dictator Game than the participants in the non-charismatic condition. For those playing the Trust Game, the Trustees behaved more pro-socially  (returned more of an initial amount sent by the first player) in the charismatic condition, versus the non-charismatic condition.

To test the generalizability of the effects observed in the initial studies, the authors made use of an entirely different ‘charismatic manipulation’. The authors instead primed participants by asking them to imagine a charismatic (or non-charismatic) individual, and to write a short description about this person. Afterwards, the primed respondents participated in the experimental economic games. The authors added ‘The Stag Hunt‘ Game, which measures cooperation in a more abstract way than the strict allocation of money.

The increased prosocial behaviour observed  in the high charisma condition within the Dictator and Trust games was replicated with the prime. In the Stag Game, participants in the charismatic condition were more likely to cooperate than those in the non-charismatic condition.

Overall, the findings provide initial evidence for the theory of charismatic leadership being an instrument to galvanise cooperation and prosociality among strangers.

A limitation of the research methodology arguably further supports the hypothesis: that the studies were confined to online experiments. One would expect significantly stronger prosocial effects when people are exposed to charismatic leaders in naturalistic settings.

The Dark Side of Charismatic Leadership

Of course, the authors focused on the positive aspects of charismatic leadership. Charisma has a dark side, which Grabo and van Vugt acknowledge.

The present article focuses exclusively on the positive effects of charismatic leadership, but this is by no means the entire story. In fact, there is much more to be said about the “dark side” of charismatic leadership, the dangers which can result when a leader takes advantage of the extreme devotion and commitment of followers for selfish or immoral reasons by signaling dishonestly their intentions to benefit the group. History is full of examples of individuals, such as cult members or suicide bombers, who were unable to abandon their commitment to a charismatic leader even in the face of conflicting information, with disastrous outcomes. One way of understanding such actions is to view them as the results of an evolved “psychological immune system” which functions to defend firmly held convictions against change by novel information. While such a system might have been beneficial for group cohesion in the past – when contact with outgroup members was rare and perhaps more dangerous – it is perhaps best considered an evolutionary mismatch in the modern world.

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Click here to read the full paper

Post written  by  Max Beilby for Darwinian Business

You can read Max’s review of Mark van Vugt and Anjana Ahuja’s book  Selected: Why some people lead, why others follow, and why it matters here 

 

Book Notes

ATCG: Evolutionary Predictions for Organizational Cooperation

What follows is an overview of Michael Price (Brunel University, London) and Dominic Johnson’s (Edinburgh University) ‘Adaptionist Theory of Cooperation in Groups’, as outlined in Gad Saad’s (2011) Evolutionary Psychology in the Business Sciences. 

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To help explain organizational cooperation from an evolutionary perspective, Price and Johnson developed the ‘Adaptionist Theory of Cooperation in Groups’- abbreviated to ATCG.

The acronym has double meaning- any hardcore science nerds will note that ATCG is also the acronym of the four bases of DNA (adenine, thymine, cytosine, and guanine). The authors note this conveniently highlights the theory’s biological foundations.

The reasoning behind an evolutionary perspective of group cooperation is this; “Managers could  more efficiently promote cooperation within their organizations if they had greater understanding of how evolution designed people to cooperate.” (p. 95)

The authors synthesised evolutionary research from an individual-level adaptationist perspective into a coherent theory of group cooperation. The basic premise is that people cooperate in groups to maximize their individual fitness (their ability to survive and reproduce).

ATCG takes into account ethnographic and archaeological evidence which suggests that in environments where humans evolved, cooperating in groups (whether for hunting, warfare, shelter construction, predator defence, etc) provided individuals benefits they could not have obtained by themselves. For example, group cooperation not only ensured more meat produce for less effort exerted compared to hunting alone, but also reduced the risk of starvation (as catches were pooled and distributed evenly among hunters).

The benefits of group cooperation transcend reciprocation from fellow cooperators (‘reciprocal altruism’). ATCG also implies the benefits of cooperation can involve much more than just a share of the first-order benefits, such as more meat. Price and Johnson note that cooperation also enhances individuals’ social status (‘competitive altruism’). For example, a skilled hunter would be highly valued by the group, which would attract many kinds of resources, which would thus make the hunter more attractive to females.

This is not just theoretical: field studies demonstrate that hunting skills is associated with social status and reproductive success in hunter gather societies (see Smith, 2004).

Group Cooperation in Organizations

Price and Johnson argue that modern organizations use these benefits to increase group cooperation:

“The method of motivating employees that is used in most organizations is to offer them social status in exchange for their help in producing the first-order resource. And just as in the ancestral past, higher status contributors – those on whom production most depends – attract greater economic compensation, in order to convince them to remain in the organization and to continue to contribute.” (p. 100)

Interestingly, the authors question whether cooperation is always a good thing. For example, the authors cite classic group decision making research which demonstrate that ‘nominal’ groups (aggregated ideas of individuals working alone) generate superior ideas than groups of interacting individuals.

A key issue regarding group cooperation is an ancient human dilemma: the free rider problem. Especially with larger groups, there is always the temptation of minimizing outputs whilst letting other group members do the hard work (also known as ‘slacking’).

In order to motivate employers to behave in group beneficial ways, Price and Johnson suggest allocating rewards fairly, and to allow employees to compete for these rewards by contributing in ways that most benefit the organization:

“If an employee makes a contribution that benefits the organization, for example by introducing a product improvement or new marketing strategy, a manager should never assume that the employee was selflessly motivated or is indifferent about being recognized and rewarded for this contribution, even if that employee modestly plays down the extent of his or her own contribution. If an employee does not receive some individual-level benefit that is commensurate with the value of his or her contribution, the employee will probably feel angry and exploited and lose motivation to cooperate…” (p. 105).

A key assumption of ATCG is that in order to cooperate adaptively, group members must ensure that their ‘benefit-to-contribution ratios’ are no smaller than those of co-members. In other words, that their efforts do not exceed that of fellow group members. If they do, these need to be compensated accordingly.

Frequency Dependence

And here we get to the heart of the issue: the ‘frequency dependence’ of cooperation.

What is the best strategy for an individual is dependent on that of other group members: whether they are free-riding, reciprocating, or unconditionally cooperating.

In a population made up predominantly of free-riders, the superior strategy from an individual perspective is to avoid all free-riders and to identify and collaborate with fellow cooperators. If the population is dominated by reciprocators, it makes the most sense to unconditionally cooperate- as you get all the benefits of cooperation and also minimize the costs of verification and checking. However if the population is dominated by unconditional cooperators, the population is inevitably invaded by free-riders- because cheaters can exploit their over-trusting cooperativeness.

According to ATCG, there is such a thing as being too trusting.

You can also think of frequency-dependence as a game of paper, rock scissors. The successful strategy depends on the strategy pursued by others.

ATCG proposes many novel predictions, over and above traditional organizational psychology theories such as equity theory. For example, ATCG predicts is that individuals who have more to gain from engaging in competition will be relatively pro-equity, rather than pro-equality. Similarly, sex differences regarding cooperation are highlighted. As men usually gain more reproductive benefits from social status than women, ATCG acknowledges that males tend to have a greater desire to compete.

Male competitiveness is also a key driver of group cooperation. Mark Van Vugt and his colleagues’ experimental research demonstrated that males increased their in-group cooperation significantly in response to competition from rival groups, whereas females were relatively unaffected by this competition.

Group Cooperation ≠ Group Selection

What is noticeable is how dismissive the authors are about group selection. Price and Johnson argue that group selection theory adds no advantages or predictive power above individual-level selection. But is this true?

Biologist David Sloan Wilson and his colleagues managed to challenge several decades worth of research on group decision making by applying a group selection perspective to the subject matter.  Contrary to conventional group decision making research suggesting that groups reach sub-optimal decisions as compared to that of individuals, DS Wilson’s innovative research illustrated that groups out-compete individuals when the complexity of the task increases- as would be expected from group selection (and common sense).

Noticeably, Price and Johnson didn’t cite this research.

More fundamentally, can the rise of empires, nation states and multinational corporations over the last 10,000 years be explained as by-products of reciprocal altruism?  Probably not.

Rather, ‘Cultural Multilevel Selection’ provides greater explanatory power regarding the rise of human civilisations.

Think of the hundreds of millions of servicemen that died defending their country throughout history. Staring death in the face, did these soldiers really calculate their ‘benefit-to-contribution ratios’ of engaging in lethal combat?

Arguably ‘pure altruism’ does exist, although it is probably a slither of humanity. As  Jonathan Haidt states in The Righteous Mind, we humans are ‘90% chimp and 10% bee’.

There are infrequent but highly impactful situations where individuals will sacrifice their  welfare for the benefit of the group, and new research suggests when and why this happens: when a society faces an existential threat from a rival group.

Of course, this is in the context of group survival and military combat. Organizations such as corporations are unlikely to elicit such altruistic behaviour.

One can envision a ‘Multilevel  Adaptionist Theory of Cooperation in Groups’, which incorporates these diverse findings into a coherent theory.

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Written by Max Beilby

Click here to buy a copy of Evolutionary Psychology in the Business Sciences.

 

References

Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion. Vintage.

Smith, E. A. (2004). Why do good hunters have higher reproductive success?. Human Nature, 15(4), 343-364.

Turchin, P. (2015). Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. Beresta Books

Van Vugt, M., & Ahuja, A. (2011). Naturally selected: The evolutionary science of leadership. HarperBusiness.

Van Vugt, M., De Cremer, D., & Janssen, D. P. (2007). Gender differences in cooperation and competition: the Male-Warrior hypothesis. Psychological science, 18(1), 19-23.

Wilson, D. S., Timmel, J. J., & Miller, R. R. (2004). Cognitive cooperation. Human Nature, 15(3), 225-250.

Wilson, D. S., Van Vugt, M., & O’Gorman, R. (2008). Multilevel selection theory and major evolutionary transitions: implications for psychological science. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17(1), 6-9.