Possessed
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Even in death, we could pass on our advantages. In most human societies that have ever existed, some form of inheritance takes place, though there are wide cultural variations. A survey of 16,000 people in fifteen countries conducted by HSBC Bank in 2013 revealed that, overall, 69% of respondents planned to leave a will, with the highest rates in India (86%) and Mexico (84%), whereas only 56% of US respondents and 57% of Canadian parents expected to give inheritances to their children.17 There are a number of reasons for this variation, including better social-security systems in the developed countries, but another primary factor is the cultural differences in family-oriented attitudes, with those in industrialized nations expressing more individual-oriented, short-term goals compared to the collectivist societies of other nations.
Attitudes towards inheritance are also changing as economic circumstances shift. A report by the Prudential insurance company in 2011 revealed that around half of UK adults expected to leave an inheritance to their children, but the percentage had halved again to around a quarter in 2016.18 ‘Spending the kids’ inheritance’ or ‘SKIing’ describes this generation of baby boomers who do not plan to leave the bulk of their money to their children, demonstrating that biology may not always win out when it comes to predicting human behaviour.
A more charitable reason for the decline of inheritance in the UK is that parents are already supporting their family members with hand-outs. Increasingly, the ‘bank of mum and dad’ is the only way that millennials can ever hope to own property. Significant financial gifts and loans from parents and relatives play an important role in helping younger family members to take important steps in adult life, including paying off debts, getting married and buying their first home. A report by the UK mortgage company Legal and General revealed that parents had loaned their children £6.7 billion in 2017, a 30 per cent increase from the previous year, making the bank of mum and dad equivalent to one of the top ten mortgage lenders.19 Today, the ability to get on the housing ladder is more to do with whether your parents own a home than it was a generation ago. This means that the situation can only get worse in the future, as the gap between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’ widens. Whether within our lifetime or after we die, most of us pass on our wealth to our children in one way or another.
Remarkably, biology also plays a role in this benevolence. It seems obvious to most parents to leave our wealth to our kids, but an analysis of inheritance trends reveals some surprising patterns. When we pass on our inheritance, bequests are greater for genetically related kin and spouses, compared to unrelated beneficiaries. The more genetically related, the more the bequest. That’s to be expected. However, not all children benefit equally, depending on whether they are male or female and whether the family is wealthy or not.
In the early 1970s, psychologist Robert Trivers and mathematician Dan Willard proposed an ingenious model to predict patterns of inheritance that vary with environmental circumstances. According to the Trivers–Willard hypothesis, there is a bias to favour male offspring when times are good but female children when times are hard.20 Wealthier families leave more money to sons than daughters, whereas the opposite pattern is found in poorer families. The reason being that in hard times, without the benefit of a welfare state, wealthy males are more likely to have more children that survive compared to males who are less well off. Wealthy males can attract more potential mates and invest in their offspring. Males can also produce many more offspring than females, so wealthier parents should bias their investment towards sons rather than daughters in order to produce the maximum number of grandchildren. However, poor daughters are more likely to have children than poor sons, so they represent a better investment for poorer families.
These various predictions were tested in an analysis of 1,000 Canadian wills selected at random. First, it was revealed that 92 per cent of the beneficiaries were relatives, while only 8 per cent were non-relatives.21 Spouses were the most likely beneficiaries, which makes a lot of sense as they are partners who in the majority of cases have a vested interest in the survival of any children that have resulted out of that partnership. The average amounts that were bequeathed mirrored the pattern of genetic relatedness, with around half of wealth given to relatives who were one-half related, around 10 per cent to relatives who were one-quarter related and only 1 per cent to relatives who were one-eighth related.
Children received more than a parent’s siblings, and the relative proportion given to sons and daughters depended on the size of the inheritance. Just as Trivers and Willard predicted, sons received twice as much as daughters for the wealthiest estates whereas this pattern was reversed in the poorest estates. When there were both brothers and sisters, fair distribution was the most common pattern, with no difference in 82 per cent of cases. However, there was a bias towards daughters in 7 per cent of cases and towards sons in 11 per cent, which does not look too different until you consider the size of the estate. In line with the Trivers–Willard hypothesis, those with a son bias were wealthier than those with no bias, and those with no bias were wealthier than those with a bias towards daughters. This pattern of parental favouritism is echoed in the value of gifts bought for children. A 2018 study of online purchases revealed that wealthier Chinese parents spent more on sons than daughters, whereas the opposite pattern was observed among less well-off parents. Parents in the middle economic bracket showed no preference for sons or daugthers.22
While spouses are by far the most likely beneficiaries of wills, it does depend upon who dies first. In a study of Californian wills dating back to 1890, men who died before their wives left the majority of their estate to their spouse.23 However, when wives died before their husbands they were more likely to cut their husband out of the will and give their wealth directly to the children. Again, there is a good biological reason for this. When a husband reaches an age where he is about to die, most wives are beyond reproductive age and unlikely to have further children. For the husband, it makes sense to make provision for the mother of his children. However, if a wife is about to die, her husband can go on to have another family with another woman, which is why dying mothers tend to leave their estate to their children rather than giving it to the husband and any potential wicked stepmother.
It’s not only the parents who make provision for the children. Other relatives have something to be gained when it comes to looking after offspring. For example, mothers can be 100 per cent sure that their children carry their genes, but fathers may not be the biological parent. Even today, according to the US National Opinion Research Center’s 2010 General Social Survey,24 the number of wives having extramarital affairs is around 15 per cent. In our ancient past, there would have been more uncertainty over paternity. Indeed, in some South American tribes the practice of ‘partible paternity’, where children are considered to have multiple fathers, existed because it was believed that conception depended on the accumulated semen of multiple males.25 One thing that is considered certain in all societies is that the child comes from the mother who gives birth. Therefore, the grandmother on the mother’s side can also be pretty sure that her genes are present in the grandchildren (unless they were switched at birth), whereas the grandfather on the mother’s side cannot be certain; he, too, may not be the father of his own daughter. The paternal grandparents have no such guarantees, as their son may be a cuckold and their grandchildren not genetically related to them in any way.
These varying degrees of biological relatedness and potential for deception manifest in the generosity of relatives. On average, maternal grandmothers invest more in grandchildren than do other grandparents, and grandparents invest more in their daughters’ children than in their sons’ children.26 For example, a recent survey of US parents with a child under five years of age asked about grandparental generosity and help with raising the children. As many of the grandparents in this study had remarried, it was possible to compare biological and step-grandparents. On average, biological grandmothers gave the
ir grandchildren $680 annually, compared to just a measly $56 from the step-grandmother.27 Maternal aunts and uncles also invest more in their nieces and nephews than paternal brothers and sisters.28 Even though paternity uncertainty is relatively low in modern society, these strategies of providing different levels of support represent an evolutionary legacy from a time before parents were certain who was the father.
ARE YOU GOING TO STAND BY AND DO NOTHING?
‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.’
Edmund Burke
In 1754, the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau noted that: ‘The first man, who, after enclosing a piece of ground, took it into his head to say, “This is mine,” and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.’29 This capacity to abide by rules freed individuals to expand their activities with the understanding that their ownership would be acknowledged and not challenged. Thus, a moral code (‘Thou shalt not steal’) was borne out of a primitive pragmatic solution. When you no longer have to keep your stuff in immediate possession under your watchful eye, you are freed up to spend your time accumulating more wealth. You can invade other territories and come back in the knowledge that your home will still be there.
Territorial behaviour is common in the animal world, with many species marking, patrolling and defending ‘property’. A variety of animals build nests and burrows that they defend. Hermit crabs fight over discarded seashells. Probably the most dramatic example of home construction is the beaver dam. In the winter, to protect themselves from predators and provide ready access to fish under the frozen ice of rivers and lakes, beavers build elaborate homes out of trees they fell by gnawing through the trunks. These are floated into position to create a structure with an underwater entrance set at just the right depth to prevent it freezing up. This sanctuary provides safety for their family. Beavers would not have evolved this behaviour if rivals had open access to this resource. If these habitats or territories are not defended, or they are abandoned, then there is very little to prevent others from taking possession. They are homes so long as they are possessed.30
Unlike possession, however, ownership is sophisticated because it requires the cognitive machinery to calculate whether a resource can be claimed and, if so, an understanding that ownership is retained even when the owner is not present. Like leaving your coat on a seat when you go off to get an ice-cream at the cinema. It depends on imagining the consequences of actions and planning for future contingencies. It requires anticipating retribution and punishment if you take what is not yours.
Enforcing ownership necessitates action with the associated potential costs. Before the advent of laws and policing, it would have meant fighting for what is yours. Protecting your possessions from theft is straightforward second-party retaliation that is going to benefit you directly. However, stable growth and civilization could not thrive with constant internal conflict. For ownership to work, there had to be mechanisms that defended the property of the weakest as well as of those who were temporarily absent. There had to be a policing system whereby potential thieves were discouraged from taking possession – namely, third-party punishment, where an individual comes to the defence of someone else’s property. Unlike second-party punishment, third-party punishers do not stand to gain directly, yet potentially suffer a cost to the benefit of others. This is going to be particularly necessary in large-scale communities where not everyone is known to each other and individuals rarely, if ever, encounter each other directly.
Many species engage in second-party defence of their property, but there is little evidence of third-party interventions among non-humans.31 Dominant chimpanzees and macaques have been observed to wade into fights among others, but this is more to do with maintaining the status quo of the group than assisting others in property disputes. When the opportunity for third-party punishment over the theft of food has been deliberately set up, chimpanzees do not help others but rather only defend or retaliate against theft of their own food.
In contrast, from an early age, human children will intervene to protect someone else’s property. Initially, two-year-olds only get upset if someone tries to take away their possessions and are less likely to kick up a fuss if it is someone else’s property that is being violated. But at three years old, children will complain if a naughty teddy bear attempts to take away someone else’s property.32 Such third-party enforcement is critically important to ownership as its power depends on individuals abiding by the rules even when the owner is not present. Turning a blind eye undermines the whole value of ownership. Societies and co-operation among groups would collapse without third-party punishment, which is why it is one of the defining features of ownership not observed among non-humans.
Why do children start to demonstrate an understanding of third-party punishment around their third birthday? One answer is a developing sense of others and their stuff. Crucially, this may be linked to what psychologists call a ‘theory of mind’, an intuitive capacity to mentally place one’s self in someone else’s shoes so as to understand their thoughts and behaviours. Theory of mind is one of the most studied research topics in human and non-human cognition because such mental capacity is so valuable in social interactions and for predicting what others will do. If you can read the mind of another, then you can anticipate their next move, or you can manipulate them by feeding them false information. There is evidence for rudimentary theory of mind in other species, but it is most sophisticated and common in humans from about three to four years of age.33 Prior to that, infants and toddlers do seem to register that others have minds, but they are not adept at reading them in the same way as older children. The strengthening of theory of mind around three years of age enables children to start considering others’ beliefs and attitudes concerning the things they own and the emotional consequences of loss, which is why they are willing to punish others who transgress. It makes it much easier to enforce social norms and the rules of ownership when one can appreciate others’ feelings.
Theft is a violation of ownership that is understood early in child development, but concepts of theft vary among adults. Members of hunter-gatherer societies have few personal possessions, which makes sense as they are constantly on the move and need to travel lightly. They do not consider it theft to help themselves to others’ possessions if they are not in use. They are therefore less likely to administer third-party punishment.34 It is not that they don’t understand ownership but rather that most possessions are owned by the group, and so if one member of the tribe is not using something then another is entitled to take temporary possession. This is known as ‘demand-sharing’: if you’ve got it and I need it, then give it to me. Even when they ask permission to use something, it is not because they acknowledge personal ownership but rather to establish that it is not in use. Don’t be surprised if you leave your shoes outside the tent when visiting a hunter-gatherer tribe to see someone walking around with them on the next day. After all, you were not using them.
Demand-sharing evolved as a strategy among hunter-gatherers who were constantly on the move. We know this from mathematical models that can simulate the efficiency of different strategies when it comes to how we used to live. Analysis reveals that demand-sharing families that continuously moved between camps in response to their energy income were better adapted to survive in the unpredictable environments typical of hunter-gatherers, while non-sharing families and sedentary families perished.35
There are very few traditional hunter-gatherer societies left today. Most humans live in the same place surrounded by many others where the risk of theft by strangers is a constant threat. The whole point of ownership is appreciating that resources cannot be freely taken when the owner is not about. As part of this social contract, we expect others to protect and respect our property rights. But consider the following scenario and answer honestly. What would you do if you saw a young man in his twenties, looking furtive, trying to
cut a security chain on a bike with a pair of bolt-cutters? When someone passes, the man stops and pretends that he is doing something else. I expect you would make a quick risk-benefit analysis: Maybe it is his bike? But why stop when being observed? Maybe he is a dangerous criminal? Somebody should stop him, but I am not sure I want to get involved.
When people witness an apparent theft, they often fail to confront individuals who are stealing. To illustrate this point, filmmaker Casey Neistat made a video of himself acting as if he was stealing a bike in various locations around New York in 2012 that has been watched by over 3 million YouTubers.36 It looked exactly like a theft and yet no one stopped him until he tried the stunt in the busy Union Square in New York with a power tool, at which point the police turned up. This reluctance by members of the public to get involved is an example of the so-called ‘bystander effect’, the phenomenon whereby adults do not offer help or assistance if others are present. The more people, the stronger the bystander effect, as if responsibility is diluted.
If ownership depends on third-party policing, how can we square the bystander effect with the need for intervention? Humans do not always protect the property of others. Consider household burglar alarms, a deterrent based on the assumption that a neighbour, security guard or police officer will be summoned quickly. In truth, this rarely happens. In the UK and US, almost all alarms that are triggered are false. In the UK, it is standard policy for the police not to respond to an unmonitored alarm unless a crime taking place is independently corroborated. Interviews with habitual thieves reveal that they generally do not consider alarms a major deterrent, in comparison to other security measures, as they know the police rarely turn up.37