by Robin Hanson
Both Machiavelli and Castiglione are right, in their own ways. The two strategies they outline are both useful for succeeding in politics. It’s important to note, however, that although Castiglione’s methods are less overtly competitive, they nevertheless stem from similar incentives. Not every courtier can be the king’s favorite; one man’s fortune is his rival’s setback. So it is ultimately the same drive—wanting to win at life’s various competitions—that motivates both the scheming sociopath and the charming courtier.
STRUCTURAL SIMILARITIES
These three games—sex, politics, and social status—aren’t perfectly distinct, of course. They overlap and share intermediate goals. Sometimes the prizes of one game become instruments in another. To succeed in the mating game, for example, it often pays to have high status and political clout—while an attractive mate can, in turn, raise one’s social status.
The three games also share some important structural similarities. As we’ve mentioned, they’re all competitive games where not everyone can win, and where unfettered competition has the potential to get nasty. This is especially true of both sex and social status in that there are only so many mates and friends to go around. But it’s also true of politics. Despite the fact that it’s possible to cooperate, politically, in ways that “enlarge the pie” for everyone, this is the exception rather than the rule—especially for our distant ancestors. In most contexts, for one coalition to succeed, others must fail. Importantly, however, members within a coalition can earn themselves a larger slice of pie by cooperating—a fact that makes politics such an intoxicating game.
The other important similarity is that each game requires two complementary skill sets: the ability to evaluate potential partners and the ability to attract good partners. In sex, the partners we’re looking for are mates. In social status, we’re looking for friends and associates. And in politics, we’re looking for allies, people to team up with.
When we evaluate others, we’re trying to estimate their value as partners, and so we’re looking for certain traits or qualities. In our mates, we want those with good genes who will make good parents. In our friends and associates, we want those who have skills, resources, and compatible personalities—and the more loyal they are to us, the better. And we’re looking for similar qualities in our political allies, since they’re basically friends chosen for a specific purpose.
At the same time, in order to attract partners, we need to advertise our own traits—the same ones we’re looking for in others. By displaying, accentuating, and even exaggerating these desirable traits, we raise our own value, helping to ensure that we’ll be chosen by more and/or higher-quality mates, more and/or higher-status friends, and better coalitions. All of these competitions thereby result in arms races. Just as the redwoods are competing for light from the sun, we’re competing for the “light” of attention and affection from potential mates, friends, and allies. And in each game, the way to win is to stand out over one’s rivals.
In this context, the advice in Matthew 7:1—”Judge not, lest you be judged”—is difficult to follow. It goes against the grain of every evolved instinct we have, which is to judge others readily, while at the same time advertising ourselves so that we may be judged by others. To understand the competitive side of human nature, we would do well to turn Matthew 7:1 on its head: “Judge freely, and accept that you too will be judged.”24
SIGNALS AND SIGNALING
Both of these tasks—judging and being judged—are mediated by signals.
A signal, in evolutionary biology,25 is anything used to communicate or convey information. Unblemished skin or fur, for example, is a signal of a healthy organism; compare a prize-winning beagle to a mangy mutt. A growl is a signal of aggression—and the growl’s depth is a signal of the creature’s size.
Signals are said to be honest when they reliably correspond to an underlying trait or fact about the sender. Otherwise they are dishonest or deceptive.
The temptation to deceive is ubiquitous. Deception allows an agent to reap benefits without incurring costs. (See Chapter 5 for more on deception.) That’s why the best signals—the most honest ones—are expensive.26 More precisely, they are differentially expensive: costly to produce, but even more costly to fake.27 A lion’s loud, deep growl, for example, is an honest signal of a large body cavity, because it’s impossible for a small creature, like a mouse, to make the same sound.
Sometimes it’s even necessary to do something risky or wasteful in order to prove that you have a desirable trait. This is known as the handicap principle.28 It explains why species with good defense mechanisms, like skunks and poison dart frogs, evolve high-contrast colors: unless it can defend itself, an animal that stands out quickly becomes another animal’s lunch. For a nonbiological example, consider the difference between blue jeans and dress pants. Jeans are durable and don’t need to be washed every day, whereas dress pants demand a bit more in terms of upkeep—which is precisely why they’re considered more formal attire.
In the human social realm, honest signaling and the handicap principle are best reflected in the dictum, “Actions speak louder than words.”29 The problem with words is that they cost almost nothing; talk is usually too cheap. Which is a more honest signal of your value to a company: being told “great job!” or getting a raise?
We rely heavily on honest signals in the competitive arenas we’ve been discussing—that is, whenever we try to evaluate others as potential mates, friends, and allies. Loyal friends can distinguish themselves from fair-weather friends by visiting you in the hospital, for example. Healthy mates can distinguish themselves from unhealthy ones by going to the gym or running a marathon. Initiates who get gang tattoos thereby commit themselves to the gang in a way that no verbal pledge could hope to accomplish. Of course, we also use these honest signals whenever we wish to advertise our own value as a friend, mate, or teammate.
Note that we don’t always need to be conscious of the signals we’re sending and receiving. We may have evolved an instinct to make art, for example, as a means of advertising our artistic skills and free time (survival surplus)—but that’s not necessarily what we’re thinking about as we whittle a sculpture from a piece of driftwood. We may simply be thinking about the beauty of the sculpture (for more on art, see Chapter 11). Nevertheless, the deeper logic of many of our strangest and most unique behaviors may lie in their value as signals.30
One thing that makes signaling hard to analyze, in practice, is the phenomenon of countersignaling. For example, consider how someone can be either an enemy, a casual friend, or a close friend. Casual friends want to distinguish themselves from enemies, and they might use signals of warmth and friendliness—things like smiles, hugs, and remembering small details about each other. Meanwhile, close friends want to distinguish themselves from casual friends, and one of the ways they can do it is by being unfriendly, at least on the surface. When a close friend forgets his wallet and can’t pay for lunch, you might call him an idiot. This works only when you’re so confident of your friendship that you can (playfully) insult him, without worrying that it will jeopardize your friendship. This isn’t something a casual friend can get away with as easily, and it may even serve to bring close friends closer together.
Thus signals are often arranged into a hierarchy, from non-signals to signals to counter-signals. Outsiders to an interaction may not always be able to distinguish non-signals from counter-signals. But insiders usually know how to interpret them, if only on an intuitive level.
When signals are used in competitive games, like sex, status, and politics, an arms race often results. In order to outdo the other competitors, each participant tries to send the strongest possible signal. This can result in some truly spectacular achievements: Bach’s concertos, Gauguin’s paintings, Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays, Rockefeller’s philanthropic foundation, and Einstein’s theories of relativity. And sometimes, like the redwoods, humans too compete to reach for the sky, whether by c
limbing Mount Everest, building pyramids and skyscrapers, or launching rockets to the moon.
LOOKING AHEAD
As we think about our own ancestry and how we were shaped by it, it pays to keep the redwoods in mind. Faced with intense intra-species competition, they literally rose to the occasion, out of the darkness and into the light. So too with many of our most exaggerated features.
The problem with competitive struggles, however, is that they’re enormously wasteful. The redwoods are so much taller than they need to be. If only they could coordinate not to all grow so tall—if they could institute a “height cap” at 100 feet (30 meters), say—the whole species would be better off. All the energy that they currently waste racing upward, they could instead invest in other pursuits, like making more pinecones in order to spread further, perhaps into new territory. Competition, in this case, holds the entire species back.
Unfortunately, the redwoods aren’t capable of coordinating to enforce a height cap, and natural selection can’t help them either. There’s no equilibrium where all trees curtail their growth “for the good of the species.” If a population of redwoods were somehow restraining themselves, it would take only a few mutations for one of the trees to break ranks and grab all the sunlight for itself. This rogue tree would then soak in more energy from the sun, and thereby outcompete its rivals and leave more descendants, ensuring that the next generation of redwoods would be even more rivalrous and competitive—until eventually they were all back to being as tall as they are today.
But our species is different. Unlike other natural processes, we can look ahead. And we’ve developed ways to avoid wasteful competition, by coordinating our actions using norms and norm enforcement—a topic we turn to in the next chapter.
3
Norms
Most of us have been in a situation like this: You’re standing in line to buy a movie ticket, chatting quietly with a friend and minding your own business, when a group of strangers casually angles in ahead of you. Instantly, you flush with adrenaline. Your heart starts racing and you can feel the heat surge up your neck and into your face. “Did they really just cut in line?” you ask yourself as you brace for the moment-of-truth decision: Confront them, or let it slide?1
On the one hand, their behavior doesn’t materially affect your life. It won’t take more than an extra minute to get your movie ticket. Plus you’ll never see these strangers again. And what if they’re the violent sort? What if one of them picks a fight? What if they have a knife or a gun? Having to spend one extra minute in line doesn’t justify any of this risk.
But on the other hand, they cheated! You can’t let them walk all over you. What kind of self-respecting person lets others cut in line and get away with it?
This dilemma, and the strong physiological reaction that accompanies it, is part of a behavioral toolkit that’s universal among humans, something we’ve inherited from our forager ancestors. Our behaviors and reactions may not always make sense in a modern context, but they evolved because our ancestors confronted situations like this all the time, and what was useful for them is still (mostly) useful for us, especially when we’re facing people we know rather than strangers on the street.
As we saw in the previous chapter, redwood trees are trapped in unfettered competition with each other. Under natural selection, there’s no way for them to curtail their growth “for the good of the species.” But humans are different. Unlike the rest of nature, we can sometimes see ahead and coordinate to avoid unnecessary competition. This is one of our species’ superpowers—that we’re occasionally able to turn wasteful competition into productive cooperation. Instead of always bull-rushing to the front of a line, for example, we can wait patiently and orderly. But as the occasional line-cutter reminds us, there’s always a temptation to cheat, and maintaining order isn’t always easy.
For sociologists and anthropologists, conventions like queueing are known as norms. They’re the rules or standards about how members of a community should behave. They range from loose, informal guidelines, like what to wear to a cocktail party, all the way to explicit, strictly enforced laws, like needing a license to drive on public roads. Table manners, sportsmanship, maritime law, the U.S. Tax Code, Robert’s Rules of Order, and the use of “inside voices” at a library—these are but a few examples of the variety of norms that have proliferated in human cultures. And as we’ll see in coming chapters, the desire to skirt and subvert norms is one of the key reasons we deceive ourselves about our own intentions.
Human groups develop norms because they (typically) benefit the majority of people in the group. Now, some norms, especially top-down laws, can be oppressive or extractive and an overall detriment to the societies that enforce them. But most norms—especially of the bottom-up, grassroots variety—are beneficial; they’re one of the main ways we suppress competition and promote cooperation. In other words, we hold ourselves back, collectively, for our own good.
In Debt, the anthropologist David Graeber tells the story of Tei Reinga, a Maori villager and “notorious glutton” who used to wander up and down the New Zealand coast, badgering the local fishermen by asking for the best portions of their catch. Since it’s impolite in Maori culture (as in many cultures) to refuse a direct request for food, the fishermen would oblige—but with ever-increasing reluctance. And so as Reinga continued to ask for food, their resentment grew until “one day, people decided enough was enough and killed him.”
This story is extreme, to say the least, but it illustrates how norm-following and norm-enforcement can be a very high-stakes game. Reinga flouted an important norm (against freeloading) and eventually paid dearly for it. But just as tellingly, the fishermen who put him to death felt so duty-bound by a different norm (the norm of food-sharing) that they followed it even to the point of building up murderous resentment. “Couldn’t you just have said no to Reinga’s requests?!” we want to shout at the villagers. But similarly we should ask ourselves, “Can’t we just let it go when someone cuts in line?” These instincts run deep.
Most norms, of course, aren’t enforced on pain of death. In general, the punishment will be tailored to the crime. When you forget to zip up your fly, for example, no one’s going to arrest you for public indecency; they’re just going to snicker. For minor transgressions, then, we have an arsenal of soft sanctions we try to use before escalating to more serious forms of punishment. Instead of lashing out physically at a transgressor, we might roll our eyes or flash a disapproving scowl. If body language doesn’t work, we might ask the transgressor to stop (politely or otherwise) or yell and demand an apology, perhaps in front of others.
But the threat of some kind of punishment must always be present, or a “norm” is little more than hot air. “Covenants,” says Thomas Hobbes, “without the sword, are but words.”2 Similarly, you can’t have enforcement without creating a de facto norm, regardless of whether you’re willing to admit that it’s a norm or not. In cults of personality, for example, such as those that formed around Mao Zedong or Steve Jobs, criticizing the leader is often frowned upon, and punished even by people other than the leaders themselves even if “criticizing the leader” isn’t officially forbidden. The essence of a norm, then, lies not in the words we use to describe it, but in which behaviors get punished and what form the punishment takes.
OUR FORAGER ANCESTORS
Humans were the first animals on Earth to develop true norms. And even though we currently live in a world with a great variety of norms, including strict laws enforced by a complex legal system, our world (and our minds) grew out of an earlier, simpler world and still bears many features from that earlier period. For this reason, it’s helpful to get acquainted with our species’ upbringing.
Foraging, also known as hunting and gathering, is the lifestyle our ancestors practiced until the agricultural revolution starting around 10,000 b.c. Now, the portrait we’re about to paint of the foraging lifestyle is actually a portrait of modern foragers, peoples who have m
aintained this way of life into the 20th and 21st centuries. Such groups are rare; perhaps as few as 20 are known to anthropologists. And no doubt they have been influenced by modernity in various ways, whether through contact with settled civilizations or simply by being relegated to environments that are unprofitable for farming, trading, and other “civilized” purposes. Even so, the data about this way of life is consistent enough, and corroborated by enough archaeological evidence and reasoning, for us to develop at least a rough sketch of how our ancestors probably lived.3
Foragers live a nomadic life in bands of 20 to 50 individuals. “Foraging,” here, refers to their way of getting food—that is, extracting it from the natural environment, rather than by farming or herding. Most of their calories come from gathering fruit, nuts, and vegetables, but many groups supplement these gatherings with calories from fishing, hunting, and occasionally scavenging. Despite its prominence in the public imagination, big-game hunting is rarely the main source of calories.