Games Primates Play: An Undercover Investigation of the Evolution and Economics of Human Relationships

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Games Primates Play: An Undercover Investigation of the Evolution and Economics of Human Relationships Page 26

by Dario Maestripieri


  As the cleaner-client fish market illustrates, although the Prisoner’s Dilemma and biological market models seem to address different problems involved in cooperative interactions, in reality there are obvious connections between partner control and partner choice issues. Many recent studies conducted with human subjects have shown that when individuals are allowed to choose a partner, as opposed to being paired with a random individual, they tend to be more trusting and trustworthy, to be more cooperative in the two-player Prisoner’s Dilemma game, and to contribute more to the production of public goods.17 This happens when voluntary partner selection is permitted because people who have a tendency to cooperate choose each other and exclude defectors. However, if partner selection is competitive (in other words, market forces are operating), there is pressure on defectors to behave more cooperatively in order to be attractive in the market, to be chosen as partners, and therefore to be given an opportunity to play in the preferred circles where the benefits of cooperation can be obtained. This has led to the interesting idea that combining opportunities for partner choice with a competitive market can facilitate the emergence of prosocial behavior—that is, altruistic behavior that is costly to the individual but beneficial to the group. Before elaborating on this point, however, I want to illustrate another interesting human market—the book author–agent/publisher market.

  THE BOOK AUTHOR–AGENT/PUBLISHER MARKET

  Although publishing books is a cooperative enterprise unique to humans, it works according to the same laws of biological markets that operate in animal societies. In this market, there are two main classes of traders: people who write books (authors) and people who run publishing companies (publishers). The commodities offered by authors are their manuscripts, with all of their ideas, stories, facts, and illustrations. The commodities offered by publishers include the printing equipment necessary to turn a manuscript into many copies of a book, but also the resources to promote and distribute the book to various outlets. These two classes of traders must necessarily cooperate with one another to do business (although authors increasingly self-publish their books). In some cases, a third class of trader, the literary agent, acts as an intermediary between the author and the publisher. Agents represent authors and help them find publishers and negotiate a good deal with them. For the purposes of this discussion, agents and publishers serve a similar function, so I refer to them interchangeably.

  Within each class of trader, there is great variation in the quality of the commodity being offered, and therefore in the value of the trader as a potential cooperation partner. Among authors, there are those who write unpublishable gibberish and those who write best sellers that sell millions of copies; similarly, there are more and less desirable publishers and effective and ineffective agents. In the United States alone, hundreds of thousands of people churn out manuscripts every year, but most are never published. Only a small minority of manuscripts are turned into books, and a tiny fraction of them become best sellers. Despite the low probability of writing a best seller, people continue writing manuscripts for the same reason they play the lottery: book publishing is a winner-take-all market, and the appeal of becoming an instant millionaire prompts people to write books despite the odds.

  Not surprisingly, the market is skewed: authors greatly outnumber agents and publishers. In most cases, therefore, agents and publishers are the choosing classes and the authors are the chosen class. Authors compete with one another to find agents and publishers who are willing to trade with them, flooding their mailboxes with manuscripts and proposals that invariably promise to deliver a best seller. The vast majority of these works end up being rejected after a cursory examination. Agents and publishers, too, compete for access to a few best-selling authors who can make them a huge profit. Thus, there is competitive partner selection on both sides of the market, with a heavy skew against authors.

  As in any other biological market, the quality of commodities, and therefore the value of the traders, is determined by supply and demand, which can fluctuate over time. What determines market value for an author? One would be tempted to say the quality of the product, but that’s not always the case. For many reasons—some objective and understandable (the amount of advertisement and promotion of the book) and others arbitrary and uncontrollable (people’s reading preferences and societal trends)—some pretty bad books end up becoming best sellers while some marvelous works are never published or simply ignored. To give a few examples, according to the website Just My Best, Robert M. Pirsig’s novel Zen and the Art of Motor cycle Maintenance was initially rejected by 121 different publishers before becoming a huge best seller: more than 5 million copies were sold worldwide. When John Grisham’s novel A Time to Kill was rejected by fifteen publishers and thirty agents, Grisham ended up publishing it himself. Other, even more famous self-published books that garnered multiple rejections include Ulysses by James Joyce and Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. According to Just My Best:

  Stephen King’s first four novels were rejected. “This guy from Maine sent in this novel over the transom,” said Bill Thompson, his former editor at Doubleday. Mr. Thompson, sensing something there, asked to see subsequent novels, but still rejected the next three. However, King withstood the rejection, and Mr. Thompson finally bought the fifth novel, despite his colleagues’ lack of enthusiasm, for $2,500. It was called Carrie.18

  As these examples illustrate, agents and publishers do not necessarily base their acceptance or rejection decisions on quality. They make decisions based on the probability that the book will sell, and book quality alone is not a good predictor of success. Two other predictors of success for a book, and of the market value of its author, are better: whether a previous book by the same author was a best seller, and whether the book is on a topic in which there is a lot of interest. Once readers develop an interest in an author or a topic, the thinking goes, they will buy any books from that author or on that topic, regardless of quality.

  What determines quality for literary agents? It’s mostly their previous success and reputation. A few agents are extremely successful and therefore have high value as trading partners. For example, in the field of scientific books written for general audiences, one particular literary agent is considered very successful and is highly sought after by authors. As the representative of many best-selling authors, he is able to put up for auction among publishers almost any book he manages, knowing that publishers will try to outbid each other to secure these books. As a result, his authors receive very profitable advance payments, and their books are more likely to be successful. The quality of a publisher can have an important impact on the success of a book, and a publisher that has previous success in publishing best sellers, name recognition, and the financial resources to pay large advances and promote books is a high-quality publisher.

  Given the determinants of market value for an author, a first-time author who writes a book on a topic for which there is low demand is in bad shape. The main topic of my book Macachiavellian Intelligence: How Rhesus Macaques and Humans Have Conquered the World, the first scientific book for general audiences that I wrote, is the behavior of rhesus macaques—not a hot topic for the general public by any stretch of the imagination. Not surprisingly, I had trouble finding partners for cooperation among agents and publishers, so I traveled to publishing Bangkok: I moved into a different market where my endowments were more valuable—the academic book publishing market. University presses mainly publish scholarly books that cover narrow topics and are read by very few people. In addition, most university presses, lacking the financial resources, do little or no book promotion, and in the larger book publishing market this is the kiss of death. As a result, books published by university presses sell, on average, only a few hundred copies, and any book selling more than a thousand copies is considered successful and profitable. In the market of academic book publishing, a scientific book written for a general audience, which can easily sell more than a thousand
copies, is considered a valuable commodity, and professors who write such books are highly sought-after trading partners. In this new market, I did pretty well: despite my old age, my baldness, and my belly—I am speaking figuratively, of course—I was able to find a young and attractive wife after all.

  In the book publishing market, as in the primate grooming market, temporal fluctuations in supply and demand can dramatically change the value of certain commodities and of the traders who possess them. For example, twenty years ago books for general audiences about the relation between economics, psychology, and people’s behavior were not in demand at all and were therefore mainly published by university presses. The amazing success of Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, however, as well as books by Steven Pinker and Malcolm Gladwell, greatly increased the demand for this kind of book, and their market value increased dramatically. Agents and publishers became extremely interested all of a sudden in doing business with economics and psychology professors who could write books for general audiences. As the supply of these books increases and the demand decreases (owing to the fading of the novelty effect that was largely responsible for their success), more and more of these new books, some of which are superior in quality to their best-selling predecessors, will end up in the Bangkok market of academic publishing.

  Despite the fact that the book publishing market is driven by financial profit and not by other goals such as survival or reproduction, it is effectively a biological market like the mating markets in humans and animals and mutualistic markets involving organisms of different species. In the book publishing market, traders with commodities that differ in value shop for cooperation partners through competitive partner choice mechanisms and according to the laws of supply and demand. This market may be about turning objects (books) into money (and/or power and fame), but just like the business of scientific research, peer review, and grants and publications, it involves people negotiating with other people and therefore follows the models of competitive and cooperative social behavior developed by evolutionary biologists and economists.

  Now, let me return to the idea that the combination of opportunities for partner choice and a competitive market can facilitate the emergence of prosocial behavior. Evolutionary psychologist Yen-Sheng Chiang at the University of California–Irvine published an article in 2010 in which he reported the results of an interesting study showing that competitive partner selection facilitates the emergence of fairness when people play the Ultimatum Game, a two-player economic game similar to the Dictator Game described in Chapter 5.19 The first player (the “proposer”) makes an offer to divide a certain amount of money to the second player (the “respondent”), who then decides whether or not to accept the proposal. This study compared people’s behavior in two different situations: being able to choose their partner, and having their partner assigned randomly. Chiang wanted to know whether the offers made in the selected-partner situation were fairer than those in the situation in which partners were randomly assigned.

  The study involved fifty-eight undergraduate students at a large public university in northwestern America who were recruited and paired up to play the Ultimatum Game with one hundred chips (converted into real money after the experiment) to divide up. They played the game through networked computers. In the first five rounds—the standard treatment—subjects played an anonymous Ultimatum Game with partners who were randomly assigned by the computer and about whom they received no information. Starting in the sixth round, players entered a new situation—the partner selection treatment—for fifteen rounds. In each of the fifteen rounds subjects were given the history of play for each player in the other role and then asked to rank the players they would prefer to play with for the current round of the game.

  Not surprisingly, when given the opportunity to rank their preferences for other players, proposers ranked very highly responders who had shown high acceptance rates in the past and who had not recently rejected low offers, while responders preferred to be paired with proposers who had made high offers in recent history. In other words, both proposers and responders preferred to be paired with players who behaved altruistically (the Ultimatum Game is a zero-sum game—if one player gets more, the other player necessarily gets less), and they wanted to do it for selfish reasons, to maximize their profit. Since everybody liked the same individuals to play with, partner selection became a competitive process. Not everyone, however, could play with their preferred partner, and therefore both proposers and responders had to outbid competitors within their own class to be attractive in the market. In the partner selection treatment, proposers made, on average, fairer offers than in the standard treatment (46.28 versus 42.20 chips). So the experiment nicely illustrates how fairness can emerge out of selfishness when partner selection takes place in a competitive market.

  Ronald Noë has extended this idea even further.20 He argues that whenever single powerful individuals (for example, village chiefs, kings, warlords, or priests) or institutions (councils of elders or political parties) favor group members on the basis of their prosocial behavior—their tendency to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the group, that is, to be good “team players”—the evolution of prosocial and altruistic behavior in general is encouraged. During recent human evolution, the selection of altruistic individuals as team members may have taken place numerous times during the formation of hunting parties, raiding teams, military regiments, and the like. From an evolutionary standpoint, choosing an altruistic individual as a favorite partner for cooperation can be favored by natural selection only when it brings benefits to both the choosing individual and the chosen one. For example, the leader of the hunt should be able to obtain a larger amount of meat at the end of the day by choosing the right hunters for his party, and the chosen hunters should benefit more than those who are excluded. Similarly, when a team is formed with the goal of producing public goods, such as cleaning train stations or protecting the environment, the selection of members on the basis of characteristics that make them good team players (such as loyalty to the team, willingness to back up failing teammates, or fairness in sharing) can, in the long run, encourage the expression of prosocial behavior in all individuals.

  Noë remarks that such traits are still highly relevant in modern societies: “Being a team player is of paramount importance in the workplace, according to both employers and employees. Being perceived as a team player is considered to be more important than doing a good job, being intelligent, being creative, making money for the organization, and having many other good qualities.” Noë also suggests that the characteristics that make individuals good team players may be especially encouraged—and if they have a genetic basis, they could be favored by natural selection—in despotic societies ruled by a strong central power, such as a dictator, because in such societies individuals who respect authority and follow rules are rewarded, whereas individualistic personalities who challenge authority are penalized. However, Noë notes that team players can enjoy advantages in egalitarian societies as well, because in these societies they are often recruited and invited to join teams by other altruistic individuals. In all societies, humans are unique among animals in that our ability to report the performances of team members to the rest of the community increases the necessity to acquire a good reputation as a team player and reinforces partner preferences for altruistic individuals.

  Since team-playing traits handicap the individual who possesses them but benefit the group to which he or she belongs, such traits, if genetically determined, could evolve by group selection, a controversial evolutionary process in which natural selection favors behavioral traits that are costly to individuals but beneficial to their groups. Noë’s idea provides a mechanism for the evolution of prosocial behavior that does not require group selection. In his view, the costs of prosocial behavior to the individual (that is, the sacrifice he or she makes to benefit the group) are offset by the benefit of establishing a good reputation and of being cho
sen as a team member.

  The only problem with the proposed role of partner choice in the evolution of human prosocial behavior is that this mechanism can also work in the opposite direction. Powerful individuals and institutions that are in competition, or at war, with other powerful individuals and institutions can select partners who make great fighters: for instance, selfish, ruthless assassins and mercenaries who don’t hesitate to kill others for self-defense or personal profit. Since competition between groups probably played as important a role in human social evolution as cooperation within groups, partner choice for selfish, competitive, and aggressive individuals may have represented a powerful evolutionary force operating in opposition to the forces promoting the selection of altruistic and prosocial behavior.

  Chapter 9

  The Evolution of Human Social Behavior

  Evolutionary Baggage

  The biographies of famous artists, musicians, scientists, philosophers, spiritual leaders, and other remarkable individuals provide unique insights into human nature. The accomplishments of these individuals influenced the lives and work of millions of other people. Just think about how many human lives have been touched by Mozart and Picasso, Einstein and Darwin, Plato and Aristotle, or Gandhi and Mother Teresa of Calcutta. Yet, if one examines the social lives of many of these intellectual and spiritual overachievers, they come across as far less virtuous and remarkable than their “professional” legacies would have us believe.

 

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