The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think

by Kenrick, Douglas T.

  Other animals gain and maintain status mainly by force—by being willing and able to carry out acts of aggression against other members of their groups. This is sometimes true for humans as well, as in the case of gang leaders and military dictators. But as anthropological psychologists Joe Henrich and Francisco Gil-White observed, humans can also achieve status through prestige, by earning others’ respect without using force or power. In the modern world, a person can gain status by having access to desirable information and the ability to use it in ways that make him or her desirable to others. Think of Bill Gates, Stephen Hawking, or Mother Teresa, each of whom might lose a fight with the guy who cuts the lawn but nevertheless earned enough prestige to make the world turn with the snap of a finger.

  The status subself is attuned to where we stand in the hierarchy and who is above and below us. When the inner go-getter is in charge, we are prone to place special value on being associated with successful others and to regard other people’s disrespect as especially costly. When we activated this subself in one of our studies, we found that a seemingly trivial insult could spark an aggressive outburst. For instance, if someone spills some water on you without apologizing, the status subself is quick to trigger a fistfight (for men) and vengeful attempts to exclude the offender from social groups (for women). Above all, the status subself wants to be respected and needs to have reason to respect others.

  Mate-Acquisition Subself: The Swinging Single

  Making friends, evading all the slings and arrows of marauding bad guys, and dodging billions of deadly bacteria and viruses will count for naught (at least in evolutionary terms) if a person does not manage to find someone willing to help transport his or her genes into the next generation. Finding a mate can be difficult, and some percentage of each generation fails to become anyone’s ancestor. But we know for certain that every one of your ancestors, and ours, got this step right.

  Deciding who might make a good potential partner is not enough, of course. You need to attract that person’s interest in you. If the person is highly desirable, other members of your own sex may be in the running as potential suitors, so you need to stand out from the competition. Hence, people spend lavishly on clothing, salon treatments, and gym memberships and devote time and energy to visiting local singles’ bars, churches, parks, Laundromats, concerts, and other public gathering places, in the hopes of meeting Mr. or Mrs. Right (or sometimes just Mr. or Ms. Right Now).

  In the book The Mating Mind, Geoffrey Miller argues that many behaviors that appear quite innocent are in fact attempts to demonstrate one’s value as a mate. These include playing music, writing poetry, and even volunteering at the local charity.

  The mate acquisition subself is primed by real or imagined potential mates. When we see sexy ads, read a romantic story, or even touch lingerie, our inner swinging single is quick to take charge. This subself is attuned to information about whether another person might make a good romantic partner, to our own allure to potential mates, and to what we might do to make ourselves more irresistible. In the advertising study mentioned earlier, this subself led people to want to be unique and get themselves noticed. For example, activating this subself led men to choose the opposite brand from what the majority of others preferred. If they learned that most other people preferred the BMW, they instead wanted the Benz. But if others liked the Benz, they wanted the BMW.

  The his and her versions of the mate-acquisition subself are somewhat different (as we will discuss in Chapter 8 on sexual economics). But for both men and women, the mate-acquisition subself seeks to behave in ways that make them more desirable to potential romantic partners.

  Mate-Retention Subself: The Good Spouse

  For 95 percent of all mammals, the mating game is a short-term affair: the females choose the most dominant or attractive local male, stand in line to receive his genes, and don’t worry about the fact that other females are waiting in the same queue. But for humans, gibbons, and a few other furry, warm-blooded species, females and males join forces to help care for the offspring. Although relatively rare among mammals, this sort of two-parent care is found elsewhere in the animal kingdom. It is common in birds, for example, whose newborn offspring are often very helpless and cannot survive without care from two parents. Consider those adorable waddling penguins, whose eggs would freeze if the male didn’t take his turn standing on them. Unlike most other infant mammals, human babies are more like fledgling birds: they are born helpless and physically immature and require immense care for many years.

  Some biologists believe that our large brains led us to develop a social system in which both partners help raise children. Because large brains require large fetus heads that need to squeeze into the world as soon as possible through painfully small openings, human babies are born early, well before they can fend for themselves. Whatever their evolutionary roots, bonds between men and women are universal across human societies. Hence, human mating involves another set of problems beyond acquiring a mate—getting along with that mate, sometimes for years, sometimes for decades, and sometimes till death do you part.

  The problems of keeping a mate, as some of us have learned, are very different from those involved in finding one in the first place. There are potential conflicts over sharing resources and child care, as well as the dangers of other people trying to steal one’s partner away. Lots of time, effort, and money go into maintaining relationships, from Valentine’s Day dinners and expensive gifts for Christmas, birthdays, and anniversaries, to business opportunities lost by partners taking expensive plane flights for romantic getaways or visits with in-laws living in the backwoods of Kentucky.

  The mate-retention subself is tuned in to information about whether your partner seems to be content or miserable, while also scanning the social horizon for potential interlopers who might be in the market to make your partner happier. This subself is activated by cues that celebrate or threaten a long-term relationship. If you’re reminiscing about the good times you’ve shared, if you notice that an anniversary is coming up, or if you catch an opposite-sex person eyeing your partner, the mate-retention subself takes the helm. Whereas priming the mate-acquisition subself leads people to pay more attention to attractive members of the opposite sex, priming the mate-retention subself leads people to pay more attention to attractive members of their own sex, who can represent a threat to their relationships. Above all, the mate-retention subself seeks to ensure that a long-term romantic relationship is going smoothly.

  Kin-Care Subself: The Nurturing Parent

  The evolutionary reason human parents are inclined to bond with one another is quite simple: it is good for their offspring. Studies of traditional societies have revealed that children without both parents are less likely to survive, and if they do, they don’t fare as well as those with two investing parents.

  In traditional societies, parents provide not only food, shelter, and protection but also knowledge—about how to find food, treat one’s friends, avoid being eaten by lions or ambushed by the bad guys downriver, and all the sundry problems faced in solving the other fundamental ancestral challenges. In the modern world, people still expend immense amounts of time, energy, and financial resources in raising their children. The costs of bringing up Junior go well beyond food and a bed to sleep in—the tab includes all those diapers, baby bottles, sippie cups, toddler clothes, babysitters, doctor visits, health insurance policies, toys, bigger clothes, bigger toys, summer camps, bicycles, and college tuition. In the United States, it costs, on average, between $205,960 and $475,680 to raise just one child (throw in a couple hundred thousand extra if Junior manages to get into an elite private college). As if that’s not enough, parents may then be asked to cough up for a big, fancy wedding and a honeymoon, which may result in grandchildren and the opportunity to spend hundreds of hours babysitting, to shell out still more money for gifts, and to help with everyday expenses.

  The kin-care subself not only takes command when you are around
your own children but may come into play even when you see someone else’s adorable baby or hear a child crying off in the distance. Note that this is not the subself that leads us to have children (the mate-acquisition subself takes care of that by motivating us to have sex). Instead, the kin-care subself motivates us to help out our offspring, younger siblings, cousins, nieces, nephews, or grandchildren. In the modern world, the kin-care system can also motivate giving to helpless strangers, such as starving children in Africa, or even taking care of puppies and kittens. Above all, the kin-care subself seeks to ensure that vulnerable youngsters in need receive proper care and attention.

  REMEMBERING THE SEVEN SUBSELVES BY CLIMBING THE DEVELOPMENTAL PYRAMID

  If you’ve ever taken a psychology course, you may remember Abraham Maslow’s famous pyramid of needs. Maslow pointed out that different human needs become relevant at different phases of our lives, with the lower levels of the pyramid lighting up at earlier ages than the higher steps. Each of our subselves is in charge of one fundamental evolutionary need that neatly fits into a modified version of the pyramid (see Figure 2.1). This pyramid also serves as a way to help remember the seven subselves. Envision each of your own subselves coming online as you moved through toddlerhood and adolescence to your current ripe old age.

  Figure 2.1. A hierarchy of evolved human needs

  Your self-protection subself arrived on the scene around age one, when you became wary of strangers and began clutching fearfully at your mother’s skirt hem if someone outside the family approached you. Your disease-avoidance subself clicked into action a bit later, when you started spitting out strange and novel foods with a look of utter disgust. As is obvious from the way they scornfully reject mommy’s carefully prepared meal or scream bloody murder at friendly old ladies who dare to greet them, little toddlers don’t give a hoot about public opinion. Not until your preschool years did your affiliation subself make its appearance, when you moved beyond parallel play and started seeking out new little friends.

  Before we have friends, we are oblivious to whether we do or don’t “get no respect.” But somewhere around the first or second grade, the status subself comes out of dormancy, and we begin to take umbrage if we’re dissed by the other little kiddies.

  For the first decade of our lives, we couldn’t care less about our romantic lives. But then the mate-acquisition subself is rudely awoken by a surge of hormones. Suddenly we begin obsessing over whether those formerly uninteresting creatures on the other side of the playground might or might not be interested in dating us. After we’ve managed to figure that one out and attract a partner worth keeping, the mate-retention subself is unwrapped from its cocoon. And of course, the kin-care subself doesn’t fully mature until we’ve not only found and kept a mate but produced a child.

  For Abraham Maslow, the top of the pyramid was the need for self-actualization—the desire to pursue one’s own artistic and creative impulses without regard to other people’s reactions. You might be surprised to find that we’ve knocked self-actualization off the top of our pyramid and replaced it with those mundane mammalian parenting motives. We do not deny that human beings are motivated to be creative and artistic. But a desire to self-actualize is not detached from our social goals; instead, it is directly linked to the deeper evolutionary goals of gaining status and acquiring a mate (think about how Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera each turned his creativity into a ticket into the arms of many beautiful women).

  Later in the book we take a closer look at the scientific evidence for the architectural refurbishment of Maslow’s pyramid, and we also examine how different people proceed through this developmental sequence in the pyramid at different speeds (see Chapter 6, “Living Fast and Dying Young”). But for now, let’s take a look at how our different subselves approach financial decisions.

  THE SUBSELVES MEET MONEY

  One of the authors of this book (Vlad, the former Communist bubble gum aficionado) once worked as an intern at Morgan Stanley, a giant international investment firm. His manager, who ran a multi-million-dollar fund, was a wily Vietnam War veteran who had acquired a taste for the finer things in life and liked fast cars and the sound of roaring engines. He thrived in the action-packed financial environment, blasting into work at 5 a.m. each day and taking pleasure in pulling the trigger on high-stakes decisions that could wipe him out or enshrine his hero status. It takes a certain bravado and confidence to take such large risks on a daily basis, and he was the kind of man who liked the adrenaline rush that came along with taking those calculated plunges.

  But this fund manager was different from other financial traders in one important regard. Although Wall Street types are known to work around the clock (money never sleeps, after all), this particular financier adhered strictly to the opposite policy: he refused to make investment decisions at home. This practice had less to do with his desire for rest and relaxation than with his keen strategic wisdom. After years in the industry, he realized an important split in his own personality. At the office he was a maverick who approached decisions with guns blazing, but at home he was a family man with a loving wife, small children, and a cuddly puppy. The financial choices he made in the confines of his family world were much more cautious than the ones he made at the office. The same risky investment opportunity that seemed sound and calculated at work looked too precarious at home. To stay successful at his job, he had to take immense risk, but the parent in him simply couldn’t take such chances.

  This fund manager understood something critical about the divided nature of human nature: different subselves are activated in different social situations. This has important implications not just for investing but also for understanding the seemingly irrational biases that plague our minds.

  REVERSING LOSS AVERSION

  Let’s take another look at the phenomenon of loss aversion—the tendency for people to weigh losses more heavily than gains. This seemingly irrational bias was discovered by behavioral economists, those fun-loving laboratory researchers who love to expose our foibles (they’re the guys wearing those Rolling Stones T-shirts with the red tongue hanging out underneath their white lab coats). Loss aversion is one of those things that led to a lot of head scratching among rational economists, the sharply dressed number crunchers. From the classic rational perspective, loss aversion is mathematically irrational: $100 ought to be worth $100, regardless of whether it’s coming or going. But at a psychological level, people are more moved by a loss than by a gain of an identical amount.

  An evolutionary perspective provides two insights into puzzling phenomena like loss aversion. The first is that many of our cognitive and behavioral biases have deeper evolutionary functions. Recall that the seemingly irrational bias of loss aversion is not only found in humans in all corners of the globe but also shared by other primates (like those coin-wielding, apple-purchasing capuchin monkeys). Loss aversion makes sense from an evolutionary perspective, to the extent that this bias would have helped our ancestors solve some fundamental evolutionary challenges. For instance, loss aversion might be adaptive for solving the evolutionary problem of protecting ourselves from danger. When in danger our ancestors may have benefitted especially from avoiding losses so as to retain their lives or limbs.

  An evolutionary perspective also provides a second important insight. By understanding the adaptive function of a given tendency, we are in a better position to predict when that tendency will be strong and when it won’t. This second insight could chip away at a cornerstone assumption of classic economics—that people have stable preferences. The idea is that we’re supposed to behave consistently from one situation to another. You should be loss averse at this moment, in an hour, tomorrow, and the day after. Some have even stated a precise number when it comes to the stability of loss aversion: a person should experience a loss as 2.75 times more psychologically impactful than a gain of the same magnitude.

  But the idea of subselves suggests a radically different way of thinking about h
ow people behave across situations. Rather than being one monolithically consistent decision maker, we are—led by our subselves—predictably inconsistent. If a particular bias, like loss aversion, were adaptive for solving a particular ancestral problem, we would expect this bias to ebb and flow according to the evolutionary goal currently most important to a person. We would thus expect people to be strongly loss averse in some situations but not in others.

  Along with our colleagues Jessica Li and Steve Neuberg, we set out to test this possibility in a series of experiments. As other researchers had done in past studies demonstrating loss aversion, we asked people how they would feel if they gained $100 or lost $100. Before people answered these questions, though, they first read a short story designed to activate either the self-protection or the mate-acquisition subself.

  If you were being primed for self-protection, you would read a story imagining yourself alone in your house at night. You hear suspicious noises outside your window. At first, you dismiss them as merely rustlings of the night winds, but as things progress, it becomes clear that someone has broken into your house. You call out, and no one replies, but then you hear footsteps right outside your bedroom. You pick up the phone to make an emergency call, but the line has been cut. Finally, the intruder lets out an evil cackle, then turns the handle to your bedroom door. The scenario ends as you see his shadow appear ominously in your doorway.