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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Kevin Simler
Read between
June 1 - June 23, 2018
“The worst problems for people,” says primatologist Dario Maestripieri, “almost always come from other people.”
“Interacting with an organism of approximately equal mental abilities whose motives are at times outright malevolent makes formidable and ever-escalating demands on cognition.”
we’re going to look at three of the most important “games” played by our ancestors: sex, social status, and politics.
the competitive aspect of courtship implies that both men and women will be keen to advertise themselves on the mating market.
“Our minds evolved not just as survival machines, but as courtship machines,
social status among humans actually comes in two flavors: dominance and prestige.
Dominance is the kind of status we get from being able to intimidate others (think Joseph Stalin), and on the low-status side is governed by fear and other avoidance instincts.
Prestige, however, is the kind of status we get from being an impressive human specimen (think Meryl Streep), and it’s governed by ad...
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our competitions for prestige often produce positive side effects such as art, science, and technological innovation.
prestige-seeking itself is more nearly a zero-sum game, which helps explain why we sometimes feel pangs of envy at even a close friend’s success.
what turns an otherwise rigid, almost robotic dominance hierarchy into something teeming with politics? In a word: coalitions.
Two-against-one maneuvering is what lends chimpanzee power struggles both their richness and their danger.
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.
Foragers tend to be patrilocal, meaning that men stay in their native band, typically for their entire lives, while women move to another when they come of age.
Men and women don’t typically mate for life, although they do practice years-long serial monogamy peppered with the occasional infidelity.
the father will help feed and raise his children for at least ...
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The most striking feature of the nomadic foraging lifestyle, distinguishing it both from the chimpanzee lifestyle and our modern way of life, is its fierce egalitarianism.
Relative to foragers, both chimps and farmers (and to a large extent industrial societies) are much more hierarchical and tolerant of direct authority and high degrees of overt inequality.
Egalitarianism among foragers is concerned primarily with preventing a single individual or coalition from dominating (and thereby making life miserable for) the rest of the group.
Farmers have norms supporting marriage, war, and property, as well as rough treatment of animals, lower classes, and slaves. To help enforce these new norms, farmers also had stronger norms of social conformity, as well as stronger religions with moralizing gods.
The incentives surrounding true norms are more complex. When we do something “wrong,” we have to worry about reprisal not just from the wronged party but also from third parties.
Collective enforcement, then, is the essence of norms. This is what enables the egalitarian political order so characteristic of the forager lifestyle.
if Boehm, Bingham, and the others are right, it was learning to use deadly weapons that was the inflection point in the trajectory of our species’ political behavior. Once our ancestors learned how to kill and punish each other collectively, nothing would be the same.
gossip is the way we coordinate on throwing someone out.
this was Axelrod’s great contribution—the model can be made to work in favor of the good guys with one simple addition: a norm of punishing anyone who doesn’t punish others. Axelrod called this the “meta-norm.”
But if you really want to win, here’s what Schelling advises. When you’re lined up facing your opponent, revving your engine, remove the steering wheel from your car and wave it at your opponent.
Sabotaging yourself works only when you’re playing against an opponent with a theory-of-mind.
“We hide reality from our conscious minds,” says Trivers, “the better to hide it from onlookers.”
Psychologically, then, politicians don’t so much “lie” as regurgitate their own self-deceptions.28 Both are ways of misleading others, but self-deceptions are a lot harder to catch and prosecute.
The Madman “I’m doing this no matter what,” says the Madman, “so stay outta my way!”
The Loyalist “Sure, I’ll go along with your beliefs,” says the Loyalist, thereby demonstrating commitment and hoping to earn trust in return.
The Cheerleader “I know this is true,” the Cheerleader says. “Come on, believe it with me!”
The Cheater “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” the Cheater says in response to an accusation. “My motives were pure.”
We assume that there is one person in each body, but in some ways we are each more like a committee whose members have been thrown together working at cross purposes.
Douglas Kenrick gives us seven “subselves”: Night Watchman, Compulsive Hypochondriac, Team Player, Go-Getter, Swinging Single, Good Spouse, and Nurturing Parent.
Self-discretion, then, consists of discretion among different brain parts. When part of the brain has to process a sensitive piece of information—wanting to get the upper hand in a particular interaction, for example—it doesn’t necessarily make a big conscious fuss about it. Instead, we might just feel vaguely uneasy
When we spend more time and attention dwelling on positive, self-flattering information, and less time and attention dwelling on shameful information, that’s self-discretion.
In summary, our minds are built to sabotage information in order to come out ahead in social games. When big parts of our minds are unaware of how we try to violate social norms, it’s more difficult for others to detect and prosecute those violations.
In Chapter 2, we saw how humans (and all other species for that matter) are locked in the game of natural selection, which often rewards selfish, competitive behavior. In Chapter 3, we looked at social norms and saw how they constrain our selfish impulses, but also how norms can be fragile and hard to enforce. In Chapter 4, we looked at the many and subtle ways that humans try to cheat by exploiting the fragility of norm enforcement, largely by being discreet about bad behavior. In Chapter 5, we took a closer look at the most subtle and intriguing of all these norm-evasion techniques:
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human brains contain a system he calls the “interpreter module.”9 The job of this module is to interpret or make sense of our experiences by constructing explanations: stories that integrate information about the past and present, and about oneself and the outside world. This interpreter works to the best of its abilities given the information available to it.
This has led many thinkers, including Dan Dennett, Jonathan Haidt, and Robert Kurzban, to give the interpreter module a more memorable name: the Press Secretary
“I do my best work,” says William Bailey, the fictional press secretary on TV’s The West Wing, “when I’m the least-informed person in the room.”
“You are not the king of your brain,” says Steven Kaas. “You are the creepy guy standing next to the king going, ‘A most judicious choice, sire.’ “
Despite the vast amount of information people have, their explanations about the causes of their responses are no more accurate than the explanations of a complete stranger who lives in the same culture.
The upshot is that every time we give a reason, there’s a risk we’re just making things up. Every “because” clause, every answer to a “Why?” question, every justification or explanation of a motive—every one of these is suspect. Not all will turn out to be rationalizations, but any of them could be, and a great many are.
For each pair, the subjects were asked to point to the face they found more attractive. What the subjects didn’t realize is that, after they pointed to their chosen photograph, the researcher used sleight of hand to slip them the other photograph, the one they didn’t choose.
Even under the best conditions—unlimited time to make the choice, pairs of women with different hair colors or styles—the subjects realized they had been deceived only about a third of the time.
In most trials, the subject’s Press Secretary was perfectly happy to rationalize a decision the subject didn’t actually make.19
“No, I can’t explain the dance to you. If I could say it, I wouldn’t have to dance it.”—Isadora Duncan
In contexts governed by dominance, eye contact is considered an act of aggression. It’s therefore the prerogative of the dominant to stare at whomever he or she pleases, while submissives must refrain from staring directly at the dominant.
