Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

by Robert M. Sapolsky

  Individual differences in how people feel about hierarchy help explain variation in the extent of Them-ing. This is shown in studies examining social-dominance orientation (SDO: how much someone values prestige and power) and right-wing authoritarianism (RWA: how much someone values centralized authority, the rule of law, and convention).75 High-SDO individuals show the greatest increases in automatic prejudices when feeling threatened; more acceptance of bias against low-status out-groups; if male, more tolerance of sexism. And as discussed, people high in SDO (and/or in RWA) are less bothered by hostile humor about out-groups.

  Related to our all being part of multiple Us/Them dichotomies is our simultaneous membership in multiple hierarchies.76 No surprise, people emphasize the importance of the hierarchy in which they rank highest—being captain of the company’s weekend softball team takes on more significance than the lousy, lowly nine-to-five job during the week. Particularly interesting are hierarchies that tend to map onto Us/Them categories (for example, when race and ethnicity overlap heavily with socioeconomic status). In those cases, those on top tend to emphasize the convergence of the hierarchies and the importance of assimilating the values of the core hierarchy (“Why can’t they all just call themselves ‘Americans’ instead of ‘Ethnicity-Americans’?”). Interestingly, this is a local phenomenon—whites tend to favor assimilationist, unitary adherence to national values while African Americans favor more pluralism; however, the opposite occurs concerning campus life and policies among white and African American students at traditionally black universities. We can keep two contradictory things in our heads at the same time if that works to our benefit.

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  Thus, in order to lessen the adverse effects of Us/Them-ing, a shopping list would include emphasizing individuation and shared attributes, perspective taking, more benign dichotomies, lessening hierarchical differences, and bringing people together on equal terms with shared goals. All to be revisited.

  CONCLUSIONS

  An analogy concerning health: Stress can be bad for you. We no longer die of smallpox or the plague and instead die of stress-related diseases of lifestyle, like heart disease or diabetes, where damage slowly accumulates over time. It is understood how stress can cause or worsen disease or make you more vulnerable to other risk factors. Much of this is even understood on the molecular level. Stress can even cause your immune system to abnormally target hair follicles, causing your hair to turn gray.

  All true. Yet stress researchers do not aim to eliminate, to “cure,” us of stress. It can’t be done, and even if it could, we wouldn’t want that—we love stress when it’s the right kind; we call it “stimulation.”

  The analogy is obvious. From massive, breathtaking barbarity to countless pinpricks of microaggression, Us versus Them has produced oceans of pain. Yet our generic goal is not to “cure” us of Us/Them dichotomizing. It can’t be done, unless your amygdala is destroyed, in which case everyone seems like an Us. But even if we could, we wouldn’t want to eliminate Us/Them-ing.

  I’m a fairly solitary person—after all, I’ve spent a significant amount of my life studying a different species from my own, living alone in a tent in Africa. Yet some of the most exquisitely happy moments of my life have come from feeling like an Us, feeling accepted and not alone, safe and understood, feeling part of something enveloping and larger than myself, filled with a sense of being on the right side and doing both well and good. There are even Us/Thems that I—eggheady, meek, and amorphously pacifistic—would be willing to kill or die for.77

  If we accept that there will always be sides, it’s a nontrivial to-do list item to always be on the side of angels. Distrust essentialism. Keep in mind that what seems like rationality is often just rationalization, playing catch-up with subterranean forces that we never suspect. Focus on the larger, shared goals. Practice perspective taking. Individuate, individuate, individuate. Recall the historical lessons of how often the truly malignant Thems keep themselves hidden and make third parties the fall guy.

  And in the meantime, give the right-of-way to people driving cars with the “Mean people suck” bumper sticker, and remind everyone that we’re all in it together against Lord Voldemort and the House Slytherin.

  Twelve

  Hierarchy, Obedience, and Resistance

  At first glance, this chapter simply complements the previous one. Us/Them-ing is about relations between groups and our automatic tendency to favor in-groups over out-groups. Similarly, hierarchies are about a type of relations within groups, our automatic tendency to favor people close in rank to us over those who are distant. Other themes repeat as well—the appearance of these tendencies early in life and in other species, and the intertwined cognitive and affective underpinnings.

  Moreover, Us/Them categorization and hierarchical position interact. In one study subjects gave racial designations to pictures of racially ambiguous individuals; those dressed in low-status attire were more likely to be categorized as black, high-status attire, white.1 Thus, among these American subjects, Us/Them dichotomizing by race and the hierarchy of socioeconomic status overlap.

  But as we’ll see, hierarchy heads in different directions from Us/Them-ing, and in uniquely human ways: Like other hierarchical species, we have alpha individuals, but unlike most others, we occasionally get to choose them. Moreover, they often are not merely highest ranking but also “lead,” attempting to maximize this thing called the common good. Furthermore, individuals vie for leadership with differing visions of how best to attain that common good—political ideologies. And finally, we express obedience both to an authority and to the idea of Authority.

  THE NATURE AND VARIETIES OF HIERARCHIES

  For starters, a hierarchy is a ranking system that formalizes unequal access to limited resources, ranging from meat to that nebulous thing called “prestige.” We begin by examining hierarchies in other species (with the proviso that not all social species have hierarchies).

  The textbook 1960s picture of hierarchies in other species was straightforward. A group forms a stable, linear hierarchy where the alpha individual dominates everyone, the beta individual dominates everyone except the alpha, gamma everyone except alpha and beta, and so on.

  Hierarchies establish a status quo by ritualizing inequalities. Two baboons encounter something good—say, a spot shaded from the sun. Without stable dominance relations, there’s a potentially injurious fight. Likewise over the figs in a fruiting tree an hour later, and for the chance to be groomed by someone after that, etc. Instead, fights rarely occur, and if a subordinate forgets his status, a “threat yawn”—a ritualistic display of canines—from the dominant male usually suffices.*,*2

  Why have ranking systems? The answer, circa 1960s, was Marlin Perkins group selection, where a species benefits from a stable social system in which everyone knows their place. This view was fostered by the primatological belief that in a hierarchy the alpha individual (i.e., the one who gets first dibs on anything good) was in some manner a “leader” who does something useful for the group. This was emphasized by the Harvard primatologist Irven DeVore, who reported that among savanna baboons, the alpha male led the troop in each day’s direction of foraging, led communal hunts, defended everyone against lions, disciplined the kids, changed the lightbulbs, etc. This turned out to be nonsense. Alpha males don’t know which direction to go (given that they transfer into troops as adolescents). No one follows them anyway; instead everyone follows the old females, who do know. Hunts are disorganized free-for-alls. And an alpha male might face down a lion to protect a kid—if the kid is probably his own. Otherwise, he’d grab the safest spot.

  Male baboon giving a (hopefully) intimidating threat yawn.

  When viewed without Perkins-colored glasses, the benefits of hierarchy are individualistic. Interactions that proclaim the status quo obviously help the upper crust. Meanwhile, for subordinates, better to not get a shady spot than to not get it aft
er receiving a canine slash. This is logical in a static, hereditary ranking system. In systems where ranks change, this caution must be balanced with occasionally challenging things—because the alpha male may be past his prime and getting by on bluff.

  This is a classic “pecking order” (a term derived from the hierarchical system of hens). Variations begin. A first concern is whether there’s actually a hierarchy, in the sense of gradations of rank. Instead, in some species (e.g., South American marmoset monkeys) there’s the alpha and there’s everyone else, with fairly equal relations.

  In species with gradations, there’s the issue of what a “rank” actually means. If your rank is number six in a hierarchy, in your mind are numbers one through five interchangeable guys you’d better kowtow to, while seven through infinity are undifferentiated peons? If so, it would be irrelevant to you if numbers two and three, or numbers nine and ten, were having tensions; rank gradations would be in the eyes of the primatologist, not the primate.

  In reality, such primates think about gradations of rank. For example, a baboon typically interacts differently with, say, the guy one step above him in rank than the one five steps above. Furthermore, primates note gradations that don’t directly concern them. Recall from chapter 10 how researchers recorded vocalizations of individuals in a troop, splicing them to invent social scenarios. Play a recording of number ten giving a dominance call and number one responding with a subordination call, and everyone pays attention: whoa, Bill Gates just panhandled a homeless guy.

  This can be abstracted further, as shown with ravens, which are outrageously smart birds. As with baboons, vocalizations implying dominance reversals command more attention than does the status quo. Remarkably, this even occurs for reversals between birds in a neighboring flock. Ravens discern dominance relations just by listening and are interested in hierarchical gossip about a different group.

  Next is the issue of variation within and among species as to what life is like having a particular rank. Does being high ranking merely mean that everyone keeps tabs on your mood or, at the other extreme, that no one else is getting enough calories to ovulate, lactate, or survive? How often do subordinates challenge dominant individuals? How readily do dominant individuals vent their frustrations on subordinates? How much do such subordinates have coping outlets (e.g., someone to groom with)?

  Then there is the issue of how high rank is attained. In many cases (e.g., female baboons, as noted) rank is inherited, a system with kin selection written all over it. In contrast, in other species/sexes (male baboons, for example) ranks shift over time, changing as a function of fights, showdowns, and Shakespearean melodrama, where rising in the hierarchy is about brawn, sharp canines, and winning the right fight.*

  Hurrah for clawing your way to the top, for sweaty, zero-sum, muscular capitalism. But what about the more interesting issue of how high rank, once attained, is maintained? As we’ll see, this has less to do with muscle than with social skills.

  This ushers in a key point—social competence is challenging, and this is reflected in the brain. The British anthropologist Robin Dunbar has shown that across various taxa (e.g., “birds,” “ungulates” or “primates”), the bigger the average size of the social group in the species, (a) the larger the brain, relative to total body size, and (b) the larger the neocortex, relative to total brain size. Dunbar’s influential “social brain hypothesis” posits that increases in social complexity and the evolutionary expansion of the neocortex have been linked. This link also occurs within species. Among some primates, group size can vary tenfold (depending on the richness of the ecosystem). This was modeled in a fascinating neuroimaging study, in which captive macaque monkeys were housed in different-sized groups; the bigger the group, the more thickening of the prefrontal cortex and the superior temporal gyrus, a cortical region involved in Theory of Mind, and the tighter the activity coupling between the two.*3

  Thus primate social complexity and big brains go together. This is shown further by examining fission-fusion species, where the size of the social group regularly changes dramatically. Baboons, for example, start and end the day in a large, coherent troop, whereas midday foraging occurs in small groups. As other examples, hyenas hunt in groups but scavenge individually, and wolves often do the opposite.

  Sociality is more complex in fission-fusion species. You must remember if someone’s rank differs when in a subgroup versus the entire group. Being away from someone all day makes it tempting to see if dominance relations have changed since breakfast.

  One study compared fission-fusion primates (chimps, bonobos, orangutans, spider monkeys) and non-fission-fusion (gorillas, capuchins, long-tailed macaques).4 Among these captive animals, fission-fusion species were better at frontocortical tasks and had larger neocortices relative to total brain size. Studies of corvids (crows, ravens, magpies, jackdaws) showed the same thing.

  Thus “rank” and “hierarchy” in other animals is anything but straightforward and varies considerably depending on the species, gender, and social group.

  RANK AND HIERARCHY IN HUMANS

  Human hierarchies resemble those of other species in many ways. For example, there’s the distinction between stable and unstable hierarchies—centuries of czarist rule versus the first inning of the Russian Revolution. As we’ll see below, those situations evoke different patterns of brain activation.

  Group size also matters—primate species with bigger social groups have larger cortices relative to the rest of the brain (with humans topping off both measures).5 If you graph the size of the neocortex against the average size of the social group across primate species, you get “Dunbar’s number,” the predicted average group size in traditional human cultures. It’s 150 people, and there’s much evidence supporting that prediction.

  This also plays out in the Western world, where the larger the size of someone’s social network (often calculated by the number of e-mail/texting relationships), the larger the vmPFC, orbital PFC, and amygdala, and the better the person’s Theory of Mind–related skills.6

  Do these brain regions expand when someone has a larger social network, or do larger sizes of these regions predispose people toward forming larger networks? Naturally, some of both.

  As with other species, human quality of life also varies with the consequences of rank inequalities—there’s a big difference between the powerful getting seated at a restaurant before you and the powerful getting to behead you if the fancy strikes them. Recall the study of thirty-seven countries showing that the more income inequality, the more preadolescent bullying in schools. In other words, countries with more brutal socioeconomic hierarchies produce children who enforce their own hierarchies more brutally.7

  Amid these cross-species similarities, there are unique things about humans, including the following.

  Membership in Multiple Hierarchies

  We belong to multiple hierarchies and can have very different ranks in them.* Naturally, this invites rationalization and system justification—deciding why hierarchies where we flounder are crap and the one where we reign really counts.

  Implicit in being part of multiple hierarchies is their potential overlap. Consider socioeconomic status, which encompasses both local and global hierarchies. I’m doing great socioeconomically—my car’s fancier than yours. I’m doing terribly—I’m not richer than Bill Gates.

  The Specialization of Some Ranking Systems

  A high-ranking chimp is generally good at related things. But humans can dwell in incredibly specialized hierarchies. Example: There’s a guy named Joey Chestnut who’s a god in one subculture—he’s the most successful competitive hot dog eater in history. However, whether Chestnut’s gift generalizes to other domains is unclear.

  Internal Standards

  This is the circumstance of having internal standards independent of the outside world. As an example, winning or losing at a team sport generally increases or decrease
s, respectively, testosterone levels in men. But things are subtler than that—testosterone more closely tracks winning through skill (rather than luck), and also more closely tracks individual (rather than team) performance.8

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  Thus, as usual, we are just like other animals but totally different. We now consider the biology of individual ranks.

  THE VIEW FROM THE TOP, THE VIEW FROM THE BOTTOM

  Detecting Rank

  Much as with our ability to detect Thems, we’re intensely interested in and adept at spotting rank differences. For example, forty milliseconds is all we need to reliably distinguish between a dominant face (with direct gaze) and a subordinate one (with averted gaze and lowered eyebrows). Status is also signaled in the body, albeit to a less accurate extent—dominance with an exposed torso with arms wide open, subordination with arms sheltering a bent torso, intent on invisibility. Again, we recognize those cues at automatic speeds.9