Human beings are – the world over – preoccupied with social interaction, with what people have said, what they might have been thinking, whether they were kind, off-hand, rude . . ., why they behaved as they did, what their motivations were, and how we should respond. All that social processing depends on the acquisition of a basic set of social skills such as the ability to recognize and distinguish between faces, to use language, to infer each other’s thoughts and feelings from body language, to recognize each other’s peculiarities, to understand and heed what are acceptable and unacceptable ways of behaving in our society, to recognize and manage the impressions others form of us, and of course a basic ability to make friends and to handle conflict. But the reasons why our brains have developed as social organs to handle social interaction is not just to provide amusement, but because of the paramount importance of getting our social relationships right. That is why we mind about them. The reason why other people can be heaven or hell is because they have the potential to be our worst rivals and competitors as well as to be our best source of co-operation, care and security.
OUR DUAL INHERITANCE
Different forms of social organization provide different selective environments. Characteristics which are successful in one setting may not be so in another. As a result, human beings have had to develop different mental tool-kits which equip them to operate both in dominance hierarchies and in egalitarian societies. Dominance and affiliative strategies are part of our deep psychological make-up. Through them we know how to make and keep friends, how to compete for status, and when each of these two contrasting social strategies is appropriate.
Dominance strategies are almost certainly pre-human in origin. They would not have been appropriate to life in the predominantly egalitarian societies of Stone Age human hunters and gatherers. In pre-human dominance hierarchies we not only developed characteristics which help attain and express high status, but also strategies for making the best of low status if that turns out to be our lot. The danger, particularly for males in some species, is that low social status is an evolutionary dead end. To avoid that, a certain amount of risk-taking and opportunism may be desirable.
Competing effectively for status requires much more than a desire for high social status and an aversion to low status. It requires a high degree of attentiveness to status differentials and the ability to make accurate social comparisons of strength and status: it is important to be able to distinguish accurately between winnable and unwinnable status conflicts. In many species life and limb often depend on knowing when to back off and when to challenge a dominant animal for rank. Maximizing status depends on being seen as superior. This is fertile psychological ground for the development and expression of forms of downward prejudice, discrimination and snobbishness intended to express superiority. And the more we feel devalued by those above us and the fewer status resources we have to fall back on, the greater will be the desire to regain some sense of self-worth by asserting superiority over any more vulnerable groups. This is likely to be the source of the so-called ‘bicycling reaction’ mentioned in Chapter 12 – so called because it is as if people bow to their superiors while kicking down on inferiors.
Although it is often thought that the pursuit of status is a particularly masculine characteristic, we should not forget how much this is likely to be a response to the female preference for high-status males. As Henry Kissinger said: ‘Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.’
Despite the modern impression of the permanence and universality of inequality, in the time-scale of human history and prehistory, it is the current highly unequal societies which are exceptional. For over 90 per cent of our existence as human beings we lived, almost exclusively, in highly egalitarian societies. For perhaps as much as the last two million years, covering the vast majority of the time we have been ‘anatomically modern’ (that is to say, looking much as we do now), human beings lived in remarkably egalitarian hunting and gathering – or foraging – groups.332–335 Modern inequality arose and spread with the development of agriculture. The characteristics which would have been selected as successful in more egalitarian societies would have been very different from those selected in dominance hierarchies.
Rather than reflecting an evolutionary outbreak of selflessness, studies of modern and recent hunter-gatherer societies suggest that they maintained equality not only through the institutions of food sharing and reciprocal gift exchange, but also through what have been called ‘counter-dominance strategies’.331 Sharing was what has been described as ‘vigilant sharing’, with people watching to see that they got their fair share. The counter-dominance strategies through which these societies maintained their equality functioned almost as alliances of everyone against anyone whose behaviour threatened people’s sense of their own autonomy and equality. The suggestion is that these strategies may have developed as a generalized form of the kind of alliances which primatologists often describe being formed between two or three animals to enable them to gang up on and depose the dominant male. Observational studies of modern and recent foraging societies suggest that counter-dominance strategies normally involve anything from teasing and ridicule to ostracism and violence, which are turned against anyone who tries to dominate others. An important point about these societies is that they show that the selfish desires of individuals for greater wealth and preeminence can be contained or diverted to less socially damaging forms of expression.
A number of psychological characteristics would have been selected to help us manage in egalitarian societies. These are likely to include our strong conception and valuation of fairness, which makes it easier for people to reach agreement without conflict when sharing scarce resources. Visible even in young children, our concern for fairness sometimes seems so strong that we might wonder how it is that social systems with great inequality are tolerated. Similarly, the sense of indebtedness (now recognized as universal in human societies) which we experience after having received a gift, serves to prompt reciprocity and prevent freeloading, so sustaining friendship. As the experimental economic games which we discussed showed, there is also evidence that we can feel sufficiently infuriated by unfairness that we are willing to punish, even at some personal cost to ourselves.
Another characteristic which is perhaps important is our tendency to feel a common sense of identity and interdependence with those with whom we share food and other resources as equals. They form the in-group, the ‘us’, with whom we empathize and share a sense of identity. In various religious institutions and political organizations sharing has been used to create a sense of brotherhood or sisterhood, and whether we say a society has an ‘extended’ or ‘nuclear’ family system is a matter of the extent of the sharing group – whether more distant relations have a call on each other’s resources. Writing in the middle of the nineteenth century, de Tocqueville believed that substantial differences in material living standards between people was a formidable barrier to empathy.23 As we saw in Chapter 4, he thought the differences in material conditions prevented the French nobility from empathizing with the sufferings of the peasantry, and also explained why American slave owners were so unaffected by the suffering of their slaves. He also thought the strong community life he saw among whites on his visit to the USA in 1830 was a reflection of what he called ‘the equality of conditions’.
A very important source of the close social integration in an egalitarian community is the sense of self-realization we can get when we successfully meet others’ needs. This is often seen as a mysterious quality, almost as if it were above explanation. It comes of course from our need to feel valued by others. We gain a sense of being valued when we do things which others appreciate. The best way of ensuring that we remained included in the co-operative hunting and gathering group and reducing the risk of being cast out, ostracized, and preyed upon, was to do things which people appreciated. Nowadays, whether it is cooking a nice meal, telling jokes or providing for people’s needs in other ways, it
can give rise to a sense of self-worth. It is this capacity – now most visible in parent-THE ing – which, long before the development of market mechanisms and wage labour, enabled humans – almost uniquely – to gain the benefits of a division of labour and specialization within cooperative groups of interdependent individuals.
We have then social strategies to deal with very different kinds of social organization. At one extreme, dominance hierarchies are about self-advancement and status competition. Individuals have to be self-reliant and other people are encountered mainly as rivals for food and mates. At the other extreme is mutual interdependence and co-operation, in which each person’s security depends on the quality of their relationships with others, and a sense of self-worth comes less from status than from the contribution made to the wellbeing of others. Rather than the overt pursuit of material self-interest, affiliative strategies depend on mutuality, reciprocity and the capacity for empathy and emotional bonding.
In practice, of course, god and mammon coexist in every society and the territory of each varies depending on the sphere of life, the economic system and on individual differences.
EARLY EXPERIENCE
So different are the kinds of society which humans have had to cope with that the processes which adapt us to deal with any given social system start very early in life. Growing up in a society where you must be prepared to treat others with suspicion, watch your back and fight for what you can get, requires very different skills from those needed in a society where you depend on empathy, reciprocity and co-operation. Psychologists and others have always told us that the nature of a child’s early life affects the development of their personality and the kind of people they grow up to be in adult life. Examples of a special capacity in early life to adapt to local environmental circumstances exist throughout animal and even plant life. In humans, stress responses and processes shaping our emotional and mental characteristics go through a kind of tuning, or programming, process which starts in the womb and continues through early childhood. The levels of stress which women experience in pregnancy are passed on to affect the development of babies before birth. Stress hormones cross the placental barrier and affect the baby’s hormone levels and growth in the womb.
Also important in influencing children’s development is the stress they experience themselves in infancy. The quality of care and nurture, the quality of attachment and how much conflict there is, all affect stress hormones and the child’s emotional and cognitive development. Although not yet identified in humans, sensitive periods in early life may sometimes involve ‘epigenetic’ processes by which early exposures and experience may switch particular genes on or off to pattern development in the longer term. Differences in nursing behaviour in mother rats have been shown to affect gene expression in their offspring, so providing ways of adapting to the environment in the light of early experience.336
In the past, there was a strong tendency simply to regard children who had had a very stressful early life as ‘damaged’. But it looks increasingly as if what is happening is that early experience is being used to adapt the child to deal with contrasting kinds of social reality. The emotional make-up which prepares you to live in a society in which you have to fend for yourself, watch your back and fight for every bit you can get, is very different from what is needed if you grow up in a society in which (to take the opposite extreme) you depend on empathy, reciprocity and co-operation, and in which your security depends on maintaining good relations with others. Children who experience more stress in early life may be more aggressive, less empathetic, and probably better at dealing with conflict. In effect, early life serves to provide a taster of the quality of social relations you are likely to have to cope with in adulthood.
So important are these processes that we need to see parenting as part of a system for passing on the adult’s experience of adversity to the child. When people talk of poor parenting, or say people lack parenting skills, the truth is often that the way parents treat their children actually serves to pass on their experience of adversity to the child. Although this is usually an unconscious process, in which the parent simply feels short-tempered, depressed or at their wit’s end, it is sometimes also conscious. In a recent court case, three women were found to have encouraged their toddlers to fight – goading them to hit each other in the face and to kick a sibling who had fallen to the ground.337 The children’s grandmother showed no remorse, insisting that it ‘would harden them up’. Given their experience of life, that was clearly what they thought was needed. Many studies have shown that forms of behaviour experienced in childhood tend to be mirrored in adulthood. Children who have, for example, experienced violence or abuse are more likely to become abusing and violent when they reach adulthood.
The effects of early experience are long-lasting. Children stressed in early life, or whose mothers were stressed during pregnancy, are more likely to suffer in middle and old age from a number of stress-related diseases – including heart disease, diabetes and stroke. The result is that some of the effects of widening income differences in a society may not be short-lived. Increased inequality means that more families suffer the strains of living on relatively low incomes, and numerous studies have shown the damaging effects on child development. When parents experience more adversity, family life suffers, and the children grow up less empathetic but ready to deal with more antagonistic relationships.
Many of the problems which we have seen to be related to inequality involve adult responses to status competition. But we have also found that a number of problems affecting children are related to inequality. These include juvenile conflict, poor peer relationships and educational performance at school, childhood obesity, infant mortality and teenage pregnancy. Problems such as these are likely to reflect the way the stresses of a more unequal society – of low social status – have penetrated family life and relationships. Inequality is associated with less good outcomes of many kinds because it leads to a deterioration in the quality of relationships. An important part of the reason why countries such as Sweden, Finland and Norway score well on the UNICEF index of child wellbeing is that their welfare systems have kept rates of relative poverty low among families.
MIRROR NEURONS AND EMPATHY
To view the pursuit of greater equality as a process of shoe-horning societies into an uncomfortably tight-fitting shoe reflects a failure to recognize our human social potential. If we understood our social needs and susceptibilities we would see that a less unequal society causes dramatically lower rates of ill-health and social problems because it provides us with a better-fitting shoe.
Mirror neurons are a striking example of how our biology establishes us as deeply social beings. When we watch someone doing something, mirror neurons in our brains fire as if to produce the same actions.338 The system is likely to have developed to serve learning by imitation. Watching a person doing a particular sequence of actions – one research paper uses the example of a curtsey – as an external observer, does not tell you how to do it yourself nearly as well as if your brain was acting as if you were making the same movements in sympathy. To do the same thing you need to experience it from inside.
Usually, of course, there is no visible sign of the internal processes of identification that enable us to put ourselves inside each other’s actions. However, the electrical activity triggered by these specialized neurons is detectable in the muscles. It has been suggested that similar processes might be behind our ability to empathize with each other and even behind the way people sometimes flinch while watching a film if they see pain inflicted on someone else. We react as if it was happening to us.
Though equipped with the potential to empathize very closely with others, how much we develop and use this potential is again affected by early childhood.
OXYTOCIN AND TRUST
Another example of how our biology dovetails with the nature of social relations involves a hormone called oxytocin and its effects on our willingness to trust
each other. In Chapter 4 we saw that people in more unequal societies were much less likely to trust each other. Trust is of course an important ingredient in any society, but it becomes essential in modern developed societies with a high degree of interdependence.
In many different species, oxytocin affects social attachment and bonding, both bonding between mother and child, and pair-bonding between sexual partners. Its production is stimulated by physical contact during sexual intercourse, in childbirth and in breastfeeding where it controls milk let-down. However, in a number of mammalian species, including humans, it also has a role in social interaction more generally, affecting approach and avoidance behaviour.
The effects of oxytocin on people’s willingness to trust each other was tested in an experiment involving a trust game.339 The results showed that those given oxytocin were much more likely to trust their partner. In similar experiments it was found that these effects worked both ways round: not only does receiving oxytocin make people more likely to trust, but being trusted also leads to increases in oxytocin. These effects were found even when the only evidence of trust or mistrust between people was the numerical decisions communicated through computer terminals.340
CO-OPERATIVE PLEASURE AND PAINFUL EXCLUSION
Other experiments have shown how the sense of co-operation stimulates the reward centres in the brain. The experience of mutual co-operation, even in the absence of face-to-face contact or real communication, leads reliably to stimulation of the reward centres. The researchers suggested that the neural reward networks serve to encourage reciprocity and mutuality while resisting the temptation to act selfishly.341
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