How does this link to herding? Older, less evolved brain areas are common across the animal kingdom from lizards to apes, and associated with more instinctive, primitive emotional responses – including some of the System 1 fast-thinking styles. Perhaps these ancient impulses link to some of the unconscious motivations driving collective herding. Areas concentrated in our neo-cortex – associated with deeper, more logical thinking including high levels of cognitive functioning and sociality – have evolved more recently, alongside the evolution of our System 2 slow-thinking styles. These might explain tendencies towards self-interested herding. If so, then self-interested herding and collective herding may just be different forms of adaptive advantage, developed at different stages in our evolutionary history. Perhaps they are similar survival strategies, triggered by our evolved cooperative instincts and predisposing us towards joining and imitating groups.31
The importance of being docile
We have seen how animals, including ‘lower’ life forms such as slime moulds, sacrifice themselves, but why have self-sacrificial instincts evolved in humans? Herbert Simon, whose role in developing theories of heuristics we noted in the previous chapter, was also keen to explain why some people are more self-sacrificing than others. He thought that we could use the phenomenon of self-sacrifice to develop a better understanding of the evolution of pro-social instincts. Simon postulated that social groups work better when they include altruistic individuals who are conformist and suggestible in the face of group pressure. He formulated a mathematical model to show that these altruists are beneficial in evolutionary terms. Without a minimum proportion of altruists within our populations, our species cannot survive.
How did Simon explain his claim? He started by delineating a specific personality trait that self-sacrificing conformists share – what he called docility. Docile individuals are super-receptive to social influences. They have an emotional intelligence that enables them to learn from social information quickly. Docility is a form of social heuristic – a quick decision-making rule, linking to the herding heuristics we explored in the previous chapter. Docile individuals will believe many things without needing direct proof, and this enables them to absorb social information quickly and easily. We might argue that the docile people in our populations will be easily exploited by mendacious non-docile individuals, fostering tyranny and oppression. Simon was more optimistic, holding that docile people might be essential in helping groups to survive environmental challenges. The presence of docile conformists gives human populations an adaptive advantage, boosting our fitness for survival.32
The interesting thing about Simon’s concept of docility is that it is not in an individual’s selfish interests to be docile. Docile people may be good at assessing social information, but they are not doing it for their own sake. Herbert Simon’s concept of docility suggests that there are some psychological characteristics playing specific roles in ensuring the survival of social species. Simon’s model of docility illustrates that humans, alongside other mammals, have evolved as highly social species, and some of this can be explained via insights from evolutionary neuroscience.
Theory of mind
Our highly evolved social instincts, including our propensities to copy and herd, are linked to our capacity for theory of mind – that is, the inferences we make about the beliefs, feelings and actions of others. When our brains process social information, our responses may be formed not just from our direct experience of watching others, but also by our empathetic and imagined emotional responses. Neuroscientists have discovered that when we imagine other people’s experiences, particularly those close to us, our neural responses are much the same as if we’d experienced the events ourselves. Empathy has evolved to help us, as social animals, to understand and share emotions.
Neuroscientific studies show that these empathetic responses engage automatic emotion-processing circuits, some of which evolved long ago in evolutionary time. Tania Singer and her colleagues at the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience at University College London conducted one such study. Singer and her team invited sixteen twentysomething couples to their lab to participate in an empathy experiment. With their neural responses being monitored using fMRI brain scanning, all the participants were given mild electric shocks, and the women were also asked to observe the shocks being inflicted on their partners. The experimenters found that neural networks for pain were activated not only when the women themselves were being shocked but also when they saw their partners experiencing pain.33 One explanation for this could be that we have evolved to respond emotionally to the suffering of our close family and friends. Partly, this serves a learning function. In the process of empathising with others’ discomfort we can predict the consequences for ourselves of a similar experience.34 Our neural responses mirror the responses we would have if we were experiencing the same pain that we are observing in others. The researchers inferred that this empathy engages automatic, emotional processing mechanisms in areas such as the insula – a relatively old area of the brain, associated with the processing of a wide range of ‘valenced’ emotions, that is, emotions that have both a positive ‘good’ dimension and a negative ‘bad’ dimension. Negatively valenced emotions include fear, disgust and sadness. Positively valenced emotions include trust, love and happiness.
How do these behaviours link to the evolution of our own instincts to herd or rebel? As we saw in the previous chapter, neuroscientific evidence suggests that herding choices might reflect an interaction of System 1 quick thinking and System 2 slow thinking. System 1 and System 2 may also interact when our instincts to imitate are driven by a theory of mind.35 Social emotions such as empathy play a role. We imagine ourselves in someone else’s position and this allows us to understand what they are thinking and feeling. For example, a good teacher will put themselves in the mind of their students and imagine what confusion might be like for them. Perhaps teachers draw on their own earlier experiences as a student themselves, and then pitch their lesson to suit. We also use theory of mind to help ourselves. This process of ‘mentalising’ can help us to deal with situations in which information is unclear and incomplete. When driving on the motorway, for instance, our instincts for self-preservation motivate us to do all we can to avoid an accident. We use our high levels of social functioning, including our theory of mind capacities, to put ourselves in the mind of other drivers and drive accordingly, anticipating the decisions other drivers will make and so avoiding a crash.
How do our social instincts, such as theory of mind, link with our neural functioning? Neuroscientists have identified a specific area of the brain known as Brodmann area 10. This brain area is implicated in our ability to mentalise about the beliefs and actions of others. Significant activations of Brodmann area 10 have been observed in people playing games involving trust, cooperation and punishment. Deficits in this area are thought to have links with autism, a neurodevelopmental disorder associated with theory of mind constraints. Children on the autism spectrum, including those with Asperger syndrome (a milder form of autism), do not easily understand emotions and social cues.36 These limits on social comprehension seem to be associated with relatively high activations in the ventral prefrontal cortex for people with mild autism. Perhaps this suggests that people on the autism spectrum realise that their ability to empathise is constrained, and so exert cognitive effort in attempting to overcome this deficit.
Monkey mirrors
Theory of mind can explain why humans and monkeys have evolved common instincts to copy others. What drives these high levels of social functioning? More and more neuroscientists are studying how brain structures drive the high levels of social functioning that have evolved in social animals. What is actually happening physiologically when we copy others? Some neuroscientific studies have identified motor responses associated with empathetic inferences about others’ pain, for example using transcranial magnetic stimulation studies, which involve activating specific brain areas via
temporary magnetic stimulation.37 Specific neurons – von Economo neurons (sometimes known as spindle neurons) – have been identified by other economists in humans as well as monkeys, apes, whales, dolphins and elephants and are implicated in humans’ and other higher mammals’ social capabilities.38 Single neuron experiments on primates have captured a similar type of neuron linking our imitative instincts – the mirror neurons. In single neuron experiments, an electrode is inserted into a single neuron and measures the electro-physiological impulses passing through it. If these impulses are strong, then it can be inferred that the neuron is being used intensively. Mirror neurons are found in the pre-motor areas of the primate brain – less evolved areas than the prefrontal cortex, and not under primates’ conscious control. When a monkey observes another monkey engaged in an action – for example, grabbing a banana – then the observer monkey’s mirror neurons are activated in much the same way as if they were grabbing the banana themselves.39
Systems of mirror neurons – that is, mirror systems – have evolved in humans as well as monkeys, but their function is still a subject of speculation. By mirroring others’ behaviour perhaps we can implicitly understand copycats’ emotions and actions. This helps us to predict what drives others, and we can use this information to improve our own decisions. But it is difficult to get direct evidence of mirror system activity in humans because single-neuron experiments are extremely invasive. If we can infer from the primate experiments that human imitation reflects the same mirroring processes as detected in monkeys, then we have a potential link with herding. In humans, imitation learning mediated by mirror systems may be connected with the sophisticated social forms of learning, associated with phenomena such as language and culture.40 Mirror systems may also explain herding through social learning, one of our key explanations for self-interested herding.
Vulcans in a social media world
As we have seen through this chapter, many of our copycat behaviours are the outcome of evolutionary forces from millennia before we invented the modern technologies dominating our lives today.41 These evolved behaviours helped us to survive in the small social groups characteristic of primitive hunter-gatherer settings. They also helped us to learn more effectively, because in small groups, individuals were better able to observe and monitor their peers’ behaviour. Emotions, for example impulsivity, helped us to survive in harsh natural environments where basic resources were often scarce and perishable. Quick action was essential to avoid starvation. So, limbic structures in the brain evolved to encourage impulsive emotional responses, including impulsive collective herding.
Imitation allows good ideas and important information to move quickly through species of copycats.42 A similar phenomenon is observed at an emotional level. In both monkeys and humans, emotions can travel fast. Emotional contagion is observed in children when they cry, and in adults when caught in disaster scenarios. Mourners’ emotions – for example, those felt by the throngs that gathered outside Buckingham Palace after Princess Diana’s death, as described in the introduction – are another example of how emotions spread in mobs and crowds. These epidemic emotions may serve as an important survival mechanism. Emotions are driven by System 1 thinking and we process them quickly. Emotional contagion is beyond our conscious control and spreads through crowds involuntarily. Waves of emotion can rapidly wash over a group giving each individual a signal, for example to flee or fight. In this way, emotional contagion can help animals to survive by allowing rapid, unconscious responses without requiring any conscious coordination by any single individual – useful in emergency situations. Neuroscientist Ramsey Raafat and his colleagues have suggested that emotional contagion specifically, and social contagion more generally, may have evolutionary value because they enable emotions to ripple quickly through crowds of copycats, reinforcing societal norms.43
Are our primitive evolved instincts to copy and follow a problem? In simple hunter-gatherer communities, the likelihood of divergence between individual and group interests was small. Any individual exhibiting deviant behaviours would be quickly noticed and ostracised or excluded. Over the course of human history and with the growth of civilisation, however, individual and social interests have diverged, a divergence which has intensified with the rise of the twentieth- and twenty-first-century technologies, especially those associated with computerisation and globalisation. These have profound implications for our daily lives, but they have developed in a millisecond relative to evolutionary time. We have not had chance effectively to adapt our behaviour, including our herding tendencies, to modern institutions like markets and government, and modern artefacts such as money and computers.
Neuroscientist Jonathan Cohen takes an optimistic perspective on this tension between our evolved instincts and our modern world. Social influences are an essential aspect of our brains’ evolution. When we lived in smaller groups, the chances of repeated interaction were greater. As our social instincts evolved, we developed strong emotional responses to selfish and exploitative behaviour, and these protected us. Cohen’s view is that instinctive responses evolved for a purpose, and that even if that purpose has now been lost, the apparent misfit between our evolved behaviours and our technology-driven world may not be as destructive as we may fear. This is because our brains are ‘vulcanised’ – just as rubber can be vulcanised with sulphur to harden it and make it more resilient. Vulcanised human brains, according to Cohen, have evolved into a confederation of mechanisms, mostly cooperating but sometimes competing. The evolution of our prefrontal cortex has given us some resilience, allowing us to moderate the power of emotions across a range of decision-making domains.44
The distal causes of self-interested herding and collective herding may be similar, but the proximate causes are driven by different neural mechanisms, each developing at different points in our evolutionary history. Insights from evolutionary biology can help us to see that herding has evolved not to serve the purposes of lone individuals. From analyses of social animals we can see that self-sacrifice is a common mechanism, used by many animals to promote survival of the species.
How do these influences play out in our modern world? Destructive choices by one individual, or one small group of individuals, have seismically different impacts today than they would have had when Homo sapiens first evolved. In a primitive context, when tribes battled with each other, loss of life was small. Today, instincts for self-sacrifice favouring the interests of one group over another – such as in the context of global terrorism – can potentially have enormous and disastrous consequences for our species as a whole. At the extreme, countries with access to long-range weapons, including nuclear missiles, have the capacity to inflict death and destruction on a massive scale in the process of favouring their in-groups. Economically, globalisation, while allowing some groups to amass fortunes, has been associated with wide-ranging poverty and inequality for vast numbers of others.
Our evolved herding instincts can generate perverse outcomes in a technology-saturated world. New innovations have helped us to build virtual social connections around the globe, without the old-fashioned costs and sanctions that previously would have encouraged caution – though recent exposés of the unethical exploitation of personal data by some of these sites may change this landscape again. Social media have allowed the rapid transmission of information from copycat to copycat, so, in theory at least, we can now be much better informed about what is happening in the world from moment to moment. But have we become overconnected? Perhaps our extensive connections with different people around the globe magnify the dark sides of our copycat and contrarian natures? Fake news and cyber-bullying, funnelled through and facilitated by social media, mean that our evolved copying instincts spread very rapidly. The consequences are potentially enormous given the myriad interconnections between us enabled by modern technologies. What are the implications for herding and anti-herding today? To illuminate these tensions and how they play out in the modern world, the following
chapters analyse the diversity of copycat and contrarian characters and the conflicts between them that we can see every day.
5
Mavericks
So far, we have seen the many ways in which our lives are dominated by convention and imitation. Mavericks and contrarians are in a small minority most of the time. They often have traits that are rare and unusual and that sometimes can seem strange, even sinister. Yet many of us are drawn to mavericks, perhaps because we think they encapsulate something lacking in our own personalities and inclinations. Or perhaps we realise that herds of copycats can’t lead themselves, so we look to contrarians to lead us. We need contrarians to be in the minority, however, because too many of them would create chaos.
The psychosociologist and psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, whose ideas about crowd psychology we introduced in chapter 2, captures the spirit of the maverick, as well as some of our conflicted attitudes towards them. Politically, Reich was a radical. He joined the Austrian Communist Party in 1928. He advocated large-scale social change, including sexual liberation, as well as radical improvement in social conditions for the poor. His ideas were controversial and struck many as being strange and perverse. His personal life was chequered and complex. He was known – was infamous, in some circles – for his promotion of free love, allegedly coining the term ‘sexual revolution’. He is most notorious for advocating orgasm as the solution to social and psychological problems, going so far as to invent the ‘orgone energy accumulator’, a sort of cupboard to facilitate orgasmic experiences. The accumulators came in a range of designs and finishes, from carpet-lined to egg-shaped. (Movie buffs may remember Woody Allen’s parody of the orgone accumulator as the ‘orgasmatron’ in his 1973 science fiction comedy movie Sleeper.)
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