Good Reasons for Bad Feelings

by Randolph M. Nesse

  Such strategies are not all love and roses. Gangs that demand protection money are using a commitment strategy. They don’t want to burn down restaurants, but to convince business owners that they will do such an irrational thing, they must occasionally do it. Commitment explains behaviors that other theories of cooperation can’t.94

  Closed groups that demand substantial sacrifices from members make commitment strategies safer and extraordinary altruistic behaviors possible. Many religious groups require extensive study and sacrifice before membership is granted. Such groups emphasize the importance of helping because of emotional and moral commitment, not self-interest. If you tell the leader of a church that you want to join because you would like to get help when you get sick, you will likely be told that you just don’t get it; members are expected to help others willingly from their hearts, not because they want to get something. The paradox is that those whose helping is motivated by commitment often get more help when they need it than those who negotiate explicit contracts.

  Social psychologists contrast “communal relationships,” based on emotional commitments, with “instrumental relationships,” based on exchange.95 Sly researchers have set up experiments that call attention to how friends trade favors; the participants protest and object to having their actions portrayed as trying to get something. They want to view their friend’s actions, and their own, as motivated by caring and commitment.

  The perils of analyzing exchanges in communal relationships were brought home to me when I was being taught how to do marital therapy by analyzing resource exchanges between spouses. We helped spouses make lists of what each spouse contributed to the relationship and then helped them negotiate a new contract that specified who would contribute what. The therapy brought couples closer, but mainly, it seemed to me, because of their shared conviction that the would-be therapists knew nothing about how real marriages actually work.

  Psychotherapy relationships are instrumental because a fee is paid in exchange for help. However, they generate feelings of commitment that are often crucial to their success. This is why negotiating the appropriate distance between therapist and patient is a constant source of tension. I wonder if the distinction between formal and informal forms of address in many languages signals whether a relationship is based on emotional commitment or instrumental exchange. I ask my patients to call me Dr. Nesse.

  Social Selection

  Commitment explains some things, but others still don’t fit. Tendencies to genuinely moral behavior persist in our genomes. An exceptionally attractive young woman provided loyal care for her husband after he slipped off a roof and had permanent brain damage that left him severely disabled. Some people devote their lives to helping others selflessly. Many people take great satisfaction from volunteering to feed the hungry, build houses, or tutor students. Some avoid eating meat in moral protest against the way animals are treated. And many wash out containers carefully and pay extra to get them recycled. Moral behavior is everywhere.

  Morality requires following rules instead of calculating what most benefits the self. It does not guarantee a benefit in return. It can give emotional satisfactions, such as pride in doing what is right, but where does pride come from? Moral actions are expensive. What else has natural selection shaped that is expensive? Peacocks’ tails. That line of thinking took me back, again and again, to articles by the theoretical biologist Mary Jane West-Eberhard about “social selection.”96,97

  She found a solution that I think helps explain our moral capacities and extraordinary social sensitivity: because individuals pick the best available partners, those who do what it takes to be a preferred partner get big benefits. The benefits of being preferred as a sexual partner shape extremely expensive displays such as the peacock’s tail. If, as evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller has suggested, people prefer altruistic sexual partners, that would select for altruism directly.98 West-Eberhard pointed out that sexual selection is a subcategory of social selection, and that individuals preferred as social partners also get big benefits because they get the best possible partners.

  “Social selection” is not an ideal term because it has different meanings in different fields. “Partner choice” is closer to the core idea, but choosing partners is only part of the story; rejecting or punishing partners is also important.99,100 “Partner selection and rejection” captures the essence of an evolutionary process that has made us capable of goodness. People with tendencies to help their friends generously are preferred as social partners, so they get the best partners and all the attendant fitness advantages.101 This process may have been crucial for making humans extraordinarily cooperative and capable of creating culture.102

  For most species, close social partners other than relatives are either nonexistent or nearly interchangeable. That was probably the case for our human ancestors until some tipping point in the past hundred thousand years, when selecting especially capable, generous partners began to give advantages. The benefits of having relationships with the best possible partners shaped tendencies to generosity and loyalty. West-Eberhard described how the process of social selection could enter a runaway phase in which a preference for partners with certain traits gives advantages to those who have those traits, giving even more advantages to those who choose carefully. The resulting prosocial traits are as expensive and dramatic as a peacock’s tail.

  Social psychologists have found evidence for “competitive altruism.”103,104 People spend extraordinary amounts of time and money to display selfless altruism. Cynics attribute this to sly manipulation strategies, noting the charitable donations made by swindlers such as Bernie Madoff. However, altruism is often real, sometimes even without any expectation of reward, except for the feeling of pride for being a good person—and perhaps the hope that it will lead to better partners. There is even recent evidence that less generous people try to protect their reputations by attacking others who are especially generous.105

  The renowned anthropologist Sarah Hrdy has suggested that all of this may have gotten started when mothers began cooperating to care for children.106 A human mother can have twice as many babies in a decade than a chimpanzee can, not because human mothers are more efficient foragers but because cooperation networks provide help and resources that allow a much shorter interval between offspring.

  Related ideas have been developed in several fields using several designations. David Sloan Wilson uses trait-group models to describe a process that makes cooperation possible.107 In economics and biology, the role of partner choice has been explored and developed by Peter Hammerstein and Ronald Noë, among others.108 A related process can even explain the symbiosis of plant roots and associated bacterial nodules.109,110 The nodules capture nitrogen from the air and make it available for the plant, and the plant provides nutrition the bacteria need to grow. A nodule that tries to take a plant’s resources without providing fixed nitrogen is dropped. A plant that tries to take the fixed nitrogen without providing nutrition gets abandoned by the bacteria. Cooperation is enforced by partner selection and rejection.

  Flowers illustrate the expense of competing to be chosen. Large, colorful, fragrant blooms with nectar and pollen use valuable calories that could otherwise be put into leaves, roots, and seeds. However, big spending is essential because blossoms compete to be chosen by pollinators.

  Social selection models explain how selfish choices can create strong selection for generous individuals. Individuals with the most to offer choose the best available partners, thus automatically bestowing fitness benefits on the most generous individuals in a group. The process is a version of Adam Smith’s invisible hand.111 Self-interested choices made by merchandise creators and consumers create an economy that produces more goods for all at the lowest cost in the proportions needed. Self-interested partner choices shape biological capacities for moral passions and genuinely moral behavior that make deep cooperation possible for human social groups
.

  Like all good ideas, social selection is not completely new. Two hundred years before Darwin wrote, the Scottish philosopher Thomas Hobbes described the fate of fools who advocate breaking promises in his Third Law of Nature: “That men performe their Covenants made.”

  The Foole hath sayd in his heart, there is no such thing as Justice; and . . . there could be no reason, why every man might not do [whatever he wanted to]: and therefore also to make, or not make; keep, or not keep Covenants. . . . From such reasoning as this, Successfull wickedenesse hath obtained the name of Vertue. . . . [However,] [h]e therefore that breaketh his Covenant . . . cannot be received into any Society, that unite themselves for Peace and Defence, but by the errour of them that receive him . . . if he be left, or cast out of Society, he perisheth.112

  Such fools still abound, emboldened by thinking that selfish genes must make selfish people and enabled by mass societies that allow anonymity and movement between groups.

  People prefer partners with plenty of resources. So to get the best possible partners, people show off their resources along with their generosity. Here, too, extreme traits are obvious. Anthropologists describe potlatch ceremonies in which wealthy individuals destroy prized possessions to prove they can afford the loss. Related conspicuous consumption drives much of the economy.113 Fancy cars and sneakers aren’t much better than cheaper ones, but they are expensive, and therefore honest, signals of wealth. Ten-thousand-square-foot homes are rarely fully used, but they create connections with others who also can consume equally conspicuously.

  More in tune with everyday life, everyone wants to be someone, to be valued and appreciated for their special contributions and expertise. This makes every arena competitive. In sports this is overt; in music and drama only slightly less so. Bird-watching seems egalitarian, until you actually listen in as twitchers talk. Model train enthusiasts wield their specialized knowledge with the flair of Supreme Court lawyers. People can’t help it; they turn every pastime into a competition. These competitions make life wonderful and interesting and provide meaning, occupation, and camaraderie for almost everyone.

  I once spent a pleasant morning with Sarah Hrdy watching a flock of wild turkeys. The toms walked a few paces, then fanned out their huge tails, walked a bit more, and did it again. It seemed as silly as it was impressive. But we humans spend our days creating similar displays, not just to impress mates but to show that we are desirable social partners. Our constant efforts to impress and please others make life rich with interest and potentially full of meaning and love.

  Social Anxiety and Self-Esteem

  Social selection has big implications for mental disorders. When I began treating patients, many wanted help to make them less sensitive to what other people thought about them. It was the 1970s zeitgeist: I’m okay, you’re okay, let’s shed stifling social conventions and follow our bliss. Escaping conformity seemed like a laudable goal. I did my best to help patients achieve those aims, usually with only modest success.

  As I came to understand how partner selection shapes relationships, I gradually recognized why social anxiety is overwhelmingly common. Natural selection shaped us to care enormously about what other people think about our resources, abilities, and character. This is what self-esteem is all about. We constantly monitor how much others value us. Low self-esteem is a signal to try harder to please others.114,115 However, trying harder to please others often conflicts with competing for status, creating plenty of conflicts that you hear about in psychotherapy.

  Big life decisions about whom to marry, whom to work for, whom to hire, or whom to admit to a social group all involve careful assessments. We try to select honest, cooperative, generous people with plenty of resources who will work hard to benefit us and our group. The benefits that go to those chosen help explain the extraordinary potential cooperativeness of humans compared with any other species. This is what makes life bearable, and even good and wonderful, for many people.

  However, some people make apparently heartfelt promises that are revealed to be mere manipulation the moment they get what they want. Some people hear about guilt or social anxiety and don’t know what people are talking about, any more than a color-blind person can grasp the experience of “green.” Such sociopaths aren’t bothered by such aversive emotions, and they have no compunctions about manipulating, cheating, lying, and taking advantage of others. Those who are crude about it tend to be excluded from social groups, sometimes by being locked away in prison. Subtler sociopaths use their skills to exploit victim after victim.

  Such tendencies are highly heritable, but they persist. An article by the evolutionary psychologist Linda Mealey suggested that the genetic tendency to cheat would become more common in groups where most people were exploitable cooperators but would decrease in groups where cheaters are prevalent. The two forces would stabilize to maintain a certain ratio of cheaters to cooperators.116 I’ve never found this argument persuasive; full-fledged sociopaths are extruded from small societies or killed,117 and many have signs of minor brain damage.118 Mealey’s theory certainly is provocative, however. It becomes more compelling in mass society, where people can move between groups, leaving bad reputations behind.

  Sociopaths are a danger not only because they exploit people but because they undermine trust. The experience of betrayal changes people. Betrayal by a parent can create distrust of everyone for a lifetime, distrust that makes deep relationships impossible. Several patients over the course of my career have told me spontaneously, at the end of many months of therapy, that they had never really trusted anyone before. Such comments are not just gratifying, they reflect a crucial core ingredient of therapeutic success. Experiencing a trusting relationship and acceptance despite their flaws gives people a vision of what they and their relationships can become. It can give them the courage to change their self-protective, self-defeating ways. It can open them to new relationships that offer new life paths and opportunities. Short-term treatments can’t provide anything similar. Changing beliefs about the self and other people requires developing long-term authentic personal relationships.

  For most people, genuine caring is intrinsic to relationships with parents, siblings, and spouses. It also extends to friends and sometimes especially intensely to dogs and cats.119 We care about our pets because they care about us—as well they should after thousands of years of domestication by social selection. Even before systematic breeding, people preferred some dogs and cats to others. Preferred pets got more food, shelter, and opportunities to breed. A few hundred generations later, our pets exemplify exactly what we most value: they are loving, loyal, affectionate, adorable, and eager to obey—well, dogs at least. On occasion patients have told me that a parent loved the family dog more than them. I used to assume that meant the parent was truly terrible, but gradually I have come to realize that sometimes it reflects the depth of a relationship with a very special partner from a domesticated species bred to be the exact kind of partner we most prefer.

  We humans have also been domesticated thanks to choices made by other humans.120,121,122,123 We choose partners and friends who are honest, trustworthy, kind, generous, and, when possible, wealthy and powerful. People with extremes of those qualities get partners with similar qualities, to their mutual advantage. This process creates “the nonrandom assortment of altruistic genes” that Stuart West recognized as the core ingredient for natural selection to shape the capacity for altruism.124 We are the beneficiaries, but we also bear the costs. Social anxiety and constant concern about what others think about us are the price we pay for deep relationships. Our capacity to feel grief is another.

  Grief

  It always seemed to me that grief could be useful, but I did not think deeply about the question until I took on a large research project. When I started a new position at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research, I met with the director. He asked me what project would most advance my
research—blue sky, anything. I told him I wanted to understand what low mood is for and that the best way to study that would be to find people who had little capacity for experiencing grief and see what goes wrong in their lives. The study would obviously be impossible, I explained, because it would have to assess people before the loss of a loved one and again after.

  The director paused, gave me a quizzical look, and said, “What if I told you that the world’s largest prospective study of bereavement has already been completed, that the data are in a computer awaiting analysis, and that the original researchers have all moved on to other places and projects?” I instantly realized the incredible privilege and opportunity—and my obligation to engage in years of effort to analyze the data.

  He sent me to James House, the noted sociologist who had helped design the original project. He said the study had included a random sample of thousands of couples of retirement age who were interviewed for hours to measure thousands of variables. The researchers had then checked the obituaries every month. When a study subject passed away, they contacted the surviving spouse to request an interview that covered every aspect of bereavement, depression, health, and social and physical functioning. These follow-up interviews were conducted at six months, eighteen months, and forty-eight months after the loss.

  The data set was a gold mine. Most research projects on grief ask people to recollect what health and relationships were like before the loss, but such data are untrustworthy because memories are unreliable and influenced by the loss. The Changing Lives of Older Couples (CLOC) project studied people in extraordinary depth before any loss occurred.125

  I spent the next three years organizing a research team and getting funding to analyze the data. Others had devoted whole careers to understanding grief. Some of the best, especially psychologists Camille Wortman and George Bonanno, were generous enough to join the project and provide essential guidance. A young sociologist, Deborah Carr, became my research partner; her effort and expertise were essential to the project’s success.