CABRIDGE - Imagine a survival game in which you and your work colleagues are confronted by a squad of Capuchin monkeys. Both teams are thrown into the wild African forest without any equipment - no matches, knives, shoes, fish hooks, clothes, antibiotics, pots, ropes, weapons. One year later, the team with the most survivors is declared the winner. Which team would you bet on?
You might think that a team of people, given our superior intelligence, has an undeniable advantage. But do you or your colleagues know how to make a bow and arrow, a water container, weave nets, build a shelter? Do you know which plants are poisonous? Can you light a fire without matches? Can you make a fish hook or natural glue? Do you know how to protect yourself from large feline predators as well as snakes at night? You will probably answer most of these questions (if not all) “no”. This means that your team is likely to lose to a bunch of monkeys, and with a crushing score.
An obvious question arises. If we are not capable of surviving as hunter-gatherers in Africa, that is, on the continent where our species originated, how then were humans able to achieve such tremendous success compared to other animals and settle in almost every major ecosystem on Earth?
The key element of the answer is that we are a cultured species. Our unique psychological abilities allow us to learn from each other from generation to generation, which contributes to the cumulative cultural evolutionary process. This process leads to the emergence of increasingly complex and advanced technologies, languages, knowledge complexes, conceptual tools and adaptive heuristics. The power of this process is not in the individual mind itself, but in the reinterpretation of random observations, conclusions and mistakes that our mind makes.
This means that the rate of innovation is (at least in part) dependent on the size and interconnectedness of the community of minds contributing to the cultural evolutionary process. All other things being equal, larger and socially better connected groups will create more advanced tools, technologies and techniques, even if individually the members of such groups are less resourceful than those in a smaller and more isolated group.
This discovery is supported not only by strictly controlled laboratory experiments, but also by historical research. For example, about 10,000 years ago, a rise in ocean water transformed Tasmania from an Australian peninsula into an island. On the mainland, technological progress continued. And in Tasmania, hunter-gatherer groups began to lose (or were unable to invent) many useful technologies, such as bone tools, tailored clothing for cold weather, boomerangs, spear throwers, and long-term boats. When the Dutch arrived here in the 17th century, the Tasmanians possessed the most primitive technology ever encountered by European travelers.
In order to understand the social nature of man, it is necessary, first of all, to understand how culture determines our genetic evolution from the point of view of the formation of not only our psychology and anatomy, but also our social psychology, motivations, inclinations and perception. From this long process, in which survival and prosperity meant establishing and obeying local social rules, we emerged as very strong social learners.
The foundation of our ability to form united collectives, organizations and communities lies not in natural tendencies to cooperate, but in the specifics of those social norms that we learn, which we learn and which we demand from others. Although our natural motivations play a role, they are exploited, expanded or suppressed by social norms that form the institutional skeleton that enables our innate inclinations to act.
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This new perspective on human nature and society leads to several important conclusions.
First, as a cultured species, humans acquire ideas, beliefs, values and social norms from other members of their collectives using signals such as prestige, success, sex, dialect, ethnicity. We pay special attention (especially in conditions of uncertainty, time pressure or stress) to issues such as food, danger and violations of norms. Changing human behavior must begin with an awareness of our cultural nature, not our rationality.
Second, we gradually master the social norms acquired through the culture-based process of self-domestication (or self-domestication). Through the same process, we learn norms for judging and punishing others. These well-learned norms become the motivation that guides our actions. Thus, people's preferences, desires and motivations are not constant, which means that well-thought-out programs or sets of measures can change what appears to be automatic, intuitive and obvious.
Third, the strongest social norms are determined by specific features of our evolved psychology. For example, social norms of fairness towards foreigners are much more difficult to maintain and disseminate than norms requiring mothers to take care of their children.
Fourth, our ability to innovate depends on the size of our collective intelligence, which, in turn, depends on the ability of social norms to stimulate people to come up with new ideas and practices, share them and recombine them.
Fifth, there is a fundamental relationship between social institutions and psychology. Because different societies have different norms, institutions, languages, and technologies, they develop differences in reasoning, mental heuristics, motivations, and emotional responses. The imposition of imported institutions often leads to psychological and social inconsistencies, which, as a rule, lead to sad results.
Finally, humans lack a certain level of rationality, which is why we are terribly bad at designing effective institutions and organizations (at least for today). I hope that when we gain deeper insights into human nature and cultural evolution, this deficiency can be corrected. Until that happens, we should take pages from the textbook on cultural evolution and create systems that, through variation and selection, make institutions compete. In this way, we can get rid of the losers and keep the winners.
By exploring the richness of interaction and the simultaneous evolution of psychology, culture, biology, history and genetics, we gain the opportunity to draw very important conclusions about human psychology. This is not yet a well-trodden scientific path. It promises an exciting journey into uncharted intellectual lands for those of us seeking to understand the characteristics of our species.