The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think (7 page)

Self-Protection Subself: The Night Watchman

Although human beings can be helpful to others, they have always posed a danger to one another as well.
Criminologists examining skull fragments from earlier human societies and anthropologists studying other cultures around the globe have discovered that homicide is not something invented in modern American society.
On the contrary, our ancestors lived in groups with homicide rates that make Detroit or inner-city Los Angeles look tame by comparison.
And even when the bad guys weren’t out to kill you, they often tried to steal your belongings, carry off your spouse or child, or burn down your village.
Our ancestors had to successfully avoid threats posed by other predatory individuals.

Threats of violence have hardly disappeared in the modern world.
In the United States in 2008, there were over 16,000 reported murders and 830,000 aggravated assaults.
And every day the news highlights yet another story of mass violence flaring up in yet another spot around the world.
Everyday citizens (as well as gangsters and soldiers) go to great lengths to try to insulate themselves from such violence by investing in motion sensors, infrared detectors, guard dogs, and burglar alarms for their homes—not to mention paying hundreds of dollars in annual fees to have those systems monitored day and night.
The wealthier live in gated communities and hire night watchmen; the less well-off invest in multiple locks for their doors and bars for their windows.

Some people take a more active role in their self-defense, buying firearms that range from the smaller-scale Glock 17C pistol with night sites ($542 plus shipping, in case you’re wondering) to a Barrett .50-caliber semiautomatic sniper rifle (available online for $11,699, complete with ten-round magazine, scope, and monopod).
Though you may not have invested in your own firearms, you have, if you pay taxes, likely bought a few for the national military.
The 2011 US budget included $60 billion for “protection” and another $964 billion for “defense.”
With a population of 311 million people, that averages out to $3,294.60 spent by every man, woman, and child for government
protection.
That does not include the additional taxes you pay to support your local police, incidentally.

Along with our colleagues, we’ve conducted a great deal of research on the self-protection subself.
We find that your paranoid inner self can be primed not only by real or perceived physical danger but also by angry expressions on the faces of strangers, thoughts about members of other races and religions, scary movies, or the local evening news broadcast, which often starts with a gruesome crime.
And speaking of the night-watchman aspect, simply being in a dark room can activate your self-protection subself.

In the advertising study mentioned earlier, the self-protection subself motivated people to want to blend in with the crowd, and it led them to be particularly swayed by the opinions of others.
In another study, we asked people whether they preferred a Mercedes-Benz or BMW.
When the self-protection subself was activated, people chose the same brand that the majority of others preferred, regardless of which brand it was.
If they learned that most other people preferred the Beamer, that’s what they wanted.
If others liked the Benz, then the Benz was their top choice.

Activating our inner night watchman makes us vigilant.
It leads us to ask questions like, Is that band of nasty-looking guys who just walked over the hill going to steal something from me or burn down my hut?
In studies conducted with Jon Maner, Vaughn Becker, and some of our other colleagues, we have found that activating the self-protection subself leads people to see men from other groups as angry, even when their expressions are perfectly neutral.
This natural proclivity toward vigilance and paranoia inclines people to invest resources to avoid weakness or vulnerability, while placing high value on attaining strength or associating themselves with a powerful numerical majority.
Above all, the self-protection subself wants to be safe from any potential physical danger.

Disease-Avoidance Subself: The Compulsive Hypochondriac

Biologists estimate that infectious diseases carried by other humans played a critical role in human evolution.
In the 1300s, the bubonic
plague killed up to 50 percent of the populations of Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Two centuries later, descendants of those Europeans who survived the plague traveled to the Americas, carrying along diseases such as smallpox, measles, and typhoid, which killed over 75 percent of the population of Mexico.
More recently, the 1918 Spanish flu killed between 40 and 100 million people worldwide.

Modern humans have developed technologies to control several diseases and to limit their spread—from smearing sanitary wipes over the handles of supermarket carts to pasteurizing milk and sterilizing medical implements, for example.
But beware!
All those people you pass on the street are transporting contagious and sometimes virulent microorganisms, lurking in wait for any moment of contact, which could provide an opportunity for those potentially life-threatening microbes to jump from that stranger onto you.
The World Health Organization estimates that every year, infectious diseases, including influenza, tuberculosis, and AIDS, take the lives of 15 million people (that’s more than the total population of every man, woman, and child living in New York City; Boston; Philadelphia; Washington, DC; Chicago; Miami; and Seattle combined).

One result of this ever-present threat has been the evolution of a highly sophisticated biological immune system—an array of bodily defenses designed to defend against the threat of disease.
Another is the evolution of our disease-avoidance subself, or what psychologist Mark Schaller calls a “behavioral immune system”—a set of prophylactic psychological mechanisms designed to help us avoid infection in the first place.

The disease-avoidance subself is activated by things like the sound of other people sneezing and coughing, the sight of skin lesions, and foul smells.
This subself can even be primed by thinking about people from exotic faraway places such as Sri Lanka and Ethiopia as opposed to Hawaii or London.
This makes some sense given that we are unlikely to have resistance to exotic diseases carried by people from those exotic places, any of whom might be an unwitting smuggler of some disease that could be fatal to us.

When our inner compulsive hypochondriac has been primed, we act in ways designed to thwart pathogen transmission.
Because other
humans can carry diseases, this subself leads people to avoid contact by becoming more introverted and less tolerant of foreigners—folks from exotic places that might harbor even more exotic microbes.
Research by Carlos Navarrete and Dan Fessler finds that women become particularly afraid of foreigners in the first trimester of pregnancy, the precise time when developing fetuses are most susceptible to serious problems if mom catches a disease.
Above all, the disease-avoidance subself wants to be safe from anything associated with pathogens.

Affiliation Subself: The Team Player

Other people bring threats and disease, but they are also the source of the most important benefits in our lives.
To be evolutionarily successful, our ancient ancestors needed to get along with other folks.
Anthropologists who study hunter-gatherer groups (of the sort our ancestors evolved in) have found that making friends and forming alliances are essential to evolutionary success.
For example, anthropologists Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado went deep into the rain forests of South America to study a group called the Aché, carefully recording which members of the tribe shared food with one another.
They found that in such groups friends provide a natural insurance policy against starvation.
Without refrigeration, one family cannot eat a whole pig, but a group of families sharing their catches can pool their risk and stand a better chance of making it through tough times.

Friends don’t just share food; they also teach one another valuable skills, like how to fish, cook, and build a hut.
Friends team up to move things that are too big for one person to carry, and they provide safety in numbers when the bad guys come around.

The need for friends and allies didn’t end when our predecessors moved out of the bush and took up residence in the big city.
We modern urbanites still invest heavily in building and maintaining our friendships.
As we write this book, for example, Facebook has already passed 1 billion active users, who devote endless hours to passing on clever newspaper articles or new songs, reading about their friends’ children’s accomplishments, and choosing the correct comment (“Oh, how cute!
You must be so proud, Jenny!”).
And let’s not forget the time,
energy, and money invested in iPhones and other devices people use to text friends while driving home in heavy traffic or to share a picture of their cat’s lunch with their 300 closest companions.
The majority of our graduate students spend over $1,000 a year on their iPhones, despite having annual incomes in the $15,000 range.
Even in the modern era, friends provide more than just digital support.
We need them when we want to move a couch, when our car breaks down and we need a ride, if we’d like a place to crash while driving across the country, or if we could use some advice about how to raise a child.

The affiliation subself is triggered by anything that cues friendship, like when your old college roommate sends a Christmas card, when you’re thinking about inviting a neighbor for dinner, or when your coworker picks up the tab for lunch.
This subself is also active when friendships are threatened.
If you’re feeling lonely, rejected, or exploited, the affiliation subself takes the helm.
When the inner team player is primed, people spend more money on products that connect them with other people (like a wristband sporting their university logo) rather than on products normally consumed alone (like a box of Oreo cookies).
This subself also spurs us to do things that we might not like but that a friend enjoys, like smiling happily through a painfully silly movie that our friend thinks is brilliant (“Umm, no, I can’t understand why the critics panned
Junior
either.
What could be more hilarious than Arnold Schwarzenegger playing a pregnant gynecologist?”).
Above all, the affiliation subself wants to be liked and treated as a friend.

Status Subself: The Go-Getter

Besides dealing with the challenge of getting along with their fellow group members, our ancestors also needed to manage the very different challenge of gaining and maintaining status within their groups.
Getting some respect from others has always brought a host of benefits, and this arrangement didn’t start with human beings.
Dominant baboons get first crack at food and the best spot at the watering hole, and dominant male chimps get to mate with the most desirable females.
Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky, who followed the same baboon
troop for several years, found that high-status animals show fewer signs of physiological stress than their group mates at the bottom of the totem pole.

The benefits of status continue to apply in the modern world, where the boss gets the big corner office, a special parking spot for his Lexus, a first-class seat on the plane, and an expense account to dine in the best restaurants.
As a consequence, people go to great lengths to impress others with their status, shelling out inordinate amounts of money for Gucci shoes, Armani suits, Rolex watches, BMWs, and $500 dinners at The French Laundry.
What economist Robert Frank calls “luxury fever” infects purchases at all levels, including $300 shoes, $10,000 outdoor grills, $20,000 Sub-Zero freezers, and $2 million McMansions, not to mention personal jets and supersized yachts.
Back in the middle-class suburbs, teenagers, who are in a critical phase of establishing their position in the status hierarchy, often pressure their parents to pay more than twice as much as necessary for shoes, pants, and backpacks so as not to lose face by sporting last year’s fashions.

Other animals gain and maintain status mainly by force—by being willing and able to carry out acts of aggression against other members of their groups.
This is sometimes true for humans as well, as in the case of gang leaders and military dictators.
But as anthropological psychologists Joe Henrich and Francisco Gil-White observed, humans can also achieve status through prestige, by earning others’ respect without using force or power.
In the modern world, a person can gain status by having access to desirable information and the ability to use it in ways that make him or her desirable to others.
Think of Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, or Mother Teresa, each of whom might lose a fight with the guy who cuts the lawn but nevertheless earned enough prestige to make the world turn with the snap of a finger.

The status subself is attuned to where we stand in the hierarchy and who is above and below us.
When the inner go-getter is in charge, we are prone to place special value on being associated with successful others and to regard other people’s disrespect as especially costly.
When we activated this subself in one of our studies, we found that a seemingly trivial insult could spark an aggressive outburst.
For instance, if someone spills some water on you without apologizing, the status subself is
quick to trigger a fistfight (for men) and vengeful attempts to exclude the offender from social groups (for women).
Above all, the status subself wants to be respected and needs to have reason to respect others.

Mate-Acquisition Subself: The Swinging Single

Making friends, evading all the slings and arrows of marauding bad guys, and dodging billions of deadly bacteria and viruses will count for naught (at least in evolutionary terms) if a person does not manage to find someone willing to help transport his or her genes into the next generation.
Finding a mate can be difficult, and some percentage of each generation fails to become anyone’s ancestor.
But we know for certain that every one of your ancestors, and ours, got this step right.