Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck

by Amy Alkon

Anthropologist Robert Trivers explains in his famous 1971 paper on reciprocal altruism that our sense of outrage at cheaters and rule-breakers probably developed when our ancestors started living cooperatively in small, stable hunter-gatherer bands. In an environment where group members survive by trading food and favors, there’s a need to guard against the shifty-ass cheaters whose idea of reciprocity is give-and-take—you give; they take. To keep the two-legged rats at bay, our psychology evolved to include a cheater detection and punishment department, logging who owes what to whom and dispatching that information to the enforcement division, our emotions. When somebody’s done us a good deed, guilt wells up in us, reminding us that we’d better hop to it and repay their kindness. In response to a take-take-taker, anger rises in us, messaging us that somebody seems overdue for a beatdown. Trivers calls the rage we evolved to feel in response to an injustice “moralistic aggression” and notes that it’s often way out of proportion to the offense committed.