Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind (26 page)

Lewis and Clark met the Lakotas near what is now Pierre, South Dakota. They had with them an African-American slave called York who was part of the Corps of Discovery. The improbability of this meeting is difficult to overstate, bringing together as it did in this remote heartland of America in 1804 representatives of three of the most distantly related peoples on the planet, whose genetic and geographical paths had been diverging for most of the previous 50,000 years. York intrigued the Lakotas, but they resisted Lewis and Clark’s attempts to pacify them with medals and other gifts. The Lakotas eventually sparked a tense stand-off with arrows notched into bows on one side and guns pointed on the other. The stand-off was only defused, and bloodshed avoided, when a Lakota chief stood down his side. This chief had realized that peace with the expedition meant they could retain their control of trade into the western interior, channeling the goods these highly technologically advanced whites would supply. Looking from that moment decades into the future, we can now see that the Lakota chief had sealed his people’s fates by allowing Europeans in. But at that moment, his decision to cooperate rather than to fight ensured the Lakotas’ prosperity for years to come.

Where raw competition often leads to survival of the simplest and fastest, or the nastiest, cooperation born of conflicting interests can give rise to complex forms (just think of our species’ solution to the crisis of visual theft). Alliances, agreements, friendships, and coalitions can often pay their way by giving all of us more returns than we could have had by going down the path of outright competition. Eventually, institutions and even norms or expectations of behavior can emerge, all aimed at controlling the debilitating bouts of betrayal followed by counterbetrayal that inevitably occur without the guiding hand of cooperation to hold them in check. An optimist would say that the course of our recent history has been one of increasing interdependence, cooperation, and reduced violence around the world. Together, the institutions and the norms that emerge from interdependence can reach to the highest level of worldwide cooperation. In 2010, the nation of Greece was bailed out of a financial crisis by the alliance of nations known as the European Union, followed by a similar bailout of Ireland in 2011. These nations are all economic competitors but recognize that financial instability in Greece and Ireland is bad for everyone’s economy, for the simple reason that all of the economies of the European Union trade with each other—their fates are interdependent. Looking into the twenty-first century and the rise of India and China as economic powers, it will be dependence of everyone’s economies on trade with each other that will act as the best brake on conflict.

Conflicts of interest can often lead to uneasy allies. During President Lyndon Johnson’s 1964–68 term in office, relations with his director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, were tense. Hoover was increasingly using illegal wiretaps on telephones to gain precious evidence on other political leaders that could be used to coerce and blackmail them. Johnson worried that the wiretaps might even include his own phone and came close to sacking Hoover. But he decided against it, trenchantly concluding, “I would rather have him inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in.”

FOUR WAYS TO BE SOCIAL AND
THE SHADOW OF THE FUTURE

IN 1981,
Robert Axelrod and William Hamilton chose to phrase the case for cooperation differently from President Johnson, proclaiming: “Many of the benefits sought by living things are disproportionately available to cooperating groups.” They are right, but as we saw with the
God-Save-The-Queen
example, the trick of getting cooperation to work is somehow to contain the conflict before it consumes the riches that could otherwise be shared. This can prove surprisingly difficult to achieve and might be why, outside of our own species, cooperation beyond the family is comparatively rare in nature. Another problem is that there are really just four kinds of social behaviors or ways that two or more parties might behave toward one another, but only one of them benefits both parties:
altruism
,
selfishness
,
spite
, and
cooperation
.

If I rush out into the street to push you out of the way of an oncoming vehicle, I act
altruistically
. My altruism benefits you, but potentially at great cost to myself. We don’t expect altruism to flourish on its own, because one party benefits at the expense of another, and it was just this asymmetry that undermined the four simple strings offering assistance to each other. At the other extreme, I behave
selfishly
when I take advantage of your altruism. For instance, maybe I surreptitiously eat more of my share of our stored food. Selfish behavior is tantalizing because of its immediate benefits; but of course if everyone behaves selfishly, the shared food will quickly evaporate and the selfish players will be thrown into unending conflict.

Sometimes people behave
spitefully
, as when they do something that might be costly to themselves, in an attempt to hurt someone else even more. If I see you standing near the edge of a cliff, why should I not just push you off? I will rid myself of a potential competitor and at little cost to myself, perhaps just some torn clothing as you grasp at me when you go over the edge. This is an example we must take seriously because we know the thought that it could happen to us or that we might do it to someone else crosses our minds. In fact, in the 1990s in New York, travelers on the subway were still routinely warned not to get too near the edge, and not just for the obvious reason that a train might hit them. City authorities had judged there were a sufficient number of unpredictable people about who might not be able to resist the temptation to push someone off the edge.

But even though spite crosses people’s minds, it is unlikely to evolve because my spiteful actions toward you don’t just benefit me in getting rid of you as a competitor, they help everyone else who competes with you. My spiteful actions toward you then become acts of altruism toward these others—and that spite might be costly for me to perform. For this reason, spite is thought to be rare in nature, and so it is something of a puzzle why for many of us the thought of spiteful revenge is often attractive, and spite itself so sweet. One possibility we will see later in this chapter is that spite might have evolved as a way people can advertise to others that they are not the sorts of people who can be taken for granted. Our spite then pays its way by bringing us better outcomes in future encounters.

This leaves the fourth social behavior—
cooperation
—as when two parties exchange favors. This sounds attractive, but even cooperation is difficult to get established, since it is easy for one of the parties to succumb to temptation and not return the favor. Economists and evolutionary biologists use the so-called prisoner’s dilemma as a vivid metaphor to illustrate this point. The police round up two people suspected of being involved in a joint crime. They haven’t enough evidence to convict either one without a confession. They put them into separate jail cells and tell them both that if they confess and implicate the other one, they will be treated leniently. They are also told that if they don’t confess and their accomplice does, they will be treated harshly, with a long jail sentence. What would you do? You could be loyal (cooperative) and not say a word, and hope that your partner does the same, and you will both be released. On the other hand, you are worried that your partner will sell you down the road. So, you act first, implicating your partner in the crime. But of course your partner has done the same thing to you, and you both end up being convicted.

The prisoner’s dilemma teaches us that if Axelrod and Hamilton are right that cooperators enjoy the benefits of life disproportionately, then cooperation has to overcome a big problem. It is that if two people are only going to meet once, it will pay them to act selfishly. And worse, evolution has created tendencies and dispositions in us to recognize when this is true and to act on it. If I am starving and see some apples out of reach in a tree, I might ask you, a stranger passing by, if I can climb up on your shoulders to get them. But when I climb down, I might then run off, not offering any to you. Or, if I do offer them to you, you might grab them all and run off, not giving me any. It might not be the nice or polite thing to do, but it will often pay to be greedy like this. That is, unless you are going to see the person again. Now it might pay to cooperate in hopes that your partner will remember this and cooperate with you.

Robert Trivers formalized this idea in the early 1970s, calling it “reciprocal altruism,” and it involves a sort of promise of exchange between two unrelated parties. I help you now in exchange for help from you at a later time. If this exchange brings you both more than you could get on your own, then cooperation should flourish. Trivers also realized that even this simple act brings with it a truckload of possibilities for exploitation. The reason is that in every act of reciprocal exchange, initially only one of the two parties benefits, and does so at a cost to the other. The helper in these exchanges is taking a risk that the help will be returned. The dilemma this causes is nowhere better illustrated than in the scene from countless detective films when the good guys hand over money to bad guys in ransom for some wretched person who has been kidnapped. The good guys hold the suitcase containing the money just out of reach of the kidnappers, who in turn hold their hostage just out of reach of the good guys. They have to do this: how can the good guys know the bad guys won’t just take the money and run? How do the bad guys know the good guys have put the right amount of money in the suitcase?

For reciprocal altruism to work means that the person you decide to cooperate with also wants genuinely to cooperate with you. Trivers recognized this would create an entire evolved psychology of traits and emotions surrounding every exchange. These include friendship, gratitude, sympathy, guilt, a heightened sensitivity to cheaters, generosity, withholding of help to people who do not reciprocate, a sense of justice or fairness, and even forgiveness. Each of these either encourages us to enter into cooperative relationships or protects us once we do. The fragility of reciprocal altruism and the psychological complexity even its simple acts require might be why it is surprisingly difficult to find in nature, outside of humans. The best-known example in the animal kingdom is that of vampire bats, and even that one is controversial. Vampire bats have long lives and they spend them living in colonies in which they see the same individuals repeatedly. They prey on mammals and birds at night, obtaining a blood meal from bites they inflict with their sharp teeth. Sometimes a bat will fail to obtain a meal and return to the colony hungry. A missed meal is not a problem for a large animal such as a human, but can cause a small animal to starve to death in one night because their higher metabolic rates mean they burn through their reserves of energy quickly. Nevertheless, a well-fed vampire bat can afford to share some of its meal, and will, in some instances, regurgitate some of it to a starving one, keeping it alive.

Why help each other this way? Why not let the other die the better to reduce competition for future meals? The reason might be that vampire bats repeatedly confront a risky environment in which, on any given night, through no fault of their own, a meal might be hard to come by. In these circumstances, if I save you from starvation now by sharing some of my meal, you may live to help me another day when I have been unlucky. The example is controversial because the bats in a colony are often relatives and so the behaviors might be little more than help directed at kin. Still, the argument tells us that when we might see someone again it can pay to be kind, even at a cost to ourselves, rather than to compete or even fight, especially if that person might repay our kindness at a later time.

The expectation that you will see someone again can restrain your tendencies to cheat them, but that alone is not enough to promote reciprocity. Let’s imagine I know that after another ten rounds of exchanges in which I give you something and you give me something in return, we will never see each other again. After our ninth exchange, I quietly change my tactic. I will accept your offering but withhold mine. I have taken advantage of you, and unpleasant as my behavior is, it makes sense if I am trying to maximize my payoffs. But wait, if you also know that we are going to finish after ten rounds you will do the same to me, and on our tenth exchange both of us will betray the other’s trust. It gets worse. Knowing you will betray me on the tenth exchange, I will act before you and defect on the ninth. Of course, you will have done the same. So, we step back to our eighth exchange and the same thing happens, and this backward spiral goes right back to our first encounter. A fixed end point means that I will want to cheat you and worry that if I don’t, you might cheat me; so we will both cheat each other right back to the beginning.

Stable cooperation requires more than just the possibility of a future encounter. It depends upon extended and durable interactions, with no known end point. As soon as one party thinks it can do better by cutting and running, it will often pay it to do so, and the cooperative enterprise can quickly unravel. Robert Axelrod called this “the shadow of the future.” In an unexpected way, the future reaches back in time to influence our present behavior. We can see it as a loose or statistical way of linking the fates of two cooperators. The ease with which we appreciate the influence of this expectation and incorporate it into our own actions reminds us that many of our dispositions are those we expect of a species that has evolved to live for long periods of time around sets of people we might expect to see over and over. Of course, that is precisely what the structure of our cultural survival vehicles ensures, and this makes them a powerful source for promoting cooperation.

A sense of shortening of the shadow of the future causes us almost immediately to withdraw, even if imperceptibly, from friends who announce their intention to move away, or from work colleagues who might change jobs. It is also why lame-duck political figures are so weak. An acquaintance of mine, the head of a large research organization, once told me that for only about eighteen months of his four-year term as chief executive was he able to be effective. The first year, he said, was spent learning the ropes and gaining people’s confidence. The next eighteen months were reasonably fruitful. But with around eighteen months left, people started to withdraw, and knowing he would soon be replaced they became less fearful of his reproaches. It is a dilemma faced by prime ministers and presidents around the world—at least those that are elected—and it all comes back to “the shadow of the future.”