More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Will Storr
Read between
March 21 - April 2, 2022
receive acclaim from our people, we feel as if our lives have meaning and purpose
Reward
Rewarding
new lexicon of insult: gammon, cis, bro, Karen, TERF, mansplainer, manspreader, white, privileged, pale-male-stale.
New lexicon of woke
Status isn’t about being liked or accepted: these
Status is not...
When people defer to us, offer respect, admiration or praise, or allow us to influence them in some way, that’s status. It feels good. Feeling good about it is part of our human nature. It’s in our basic coding, our evolution, our DNA. And it doesn’t require a stupendous achievement like scoring a goal in the World Cup or blowing up the Death Star. We can feel the velvet touch of status repeatedly throughout the course of a single conversation or in the glance of a passing stranger.
we existed in mobile hunter-gatherer bands for far longer than this – at least one hundred thousand generations.
Hunter gathers for one hundred thousand generations
We are today as we’ve always been: tribal.
Tribal
‘the people most likely to survive to old age were those with solid face-to-face relationships’,
Face to face relationships
our inner monologue can turn on us, becoming hypercritical in a process known as self-subordination.
Self talk
The most powerful of these weapons is thought to be the moral bias. No matter what we do, and how dishonestly we play, the brain nudges us to conclude we’re ultimately a better person than most.
Moral bias
We
Money is to measure status
Researchers find our reward systems are activated most when we achieve relative rather than absolute rewards;
Relative versus absolute reward
Every culture has a distinct set of rules by which it wants its members to live. We’re judged by others, as we judge ourselves, by how well we play by them.
Every culture has a distinct set of rules
In one study, 86 per cent of Australians rated their job performance as ‘above average’;
86% of Australians rated their job performance as above average
Anyone who fancies changing the world would be well advised to study the power of these cues to influence human behaviour. The subconscious copy-flatter-conform behaviours they trigger can be extraordinarily effecting.
Model reward challenge
Humiliation has been described by researchers as ‘the nuclear bomb of the emotions’
Nuclear bomb of emotions
If business meetings were like this, with one winner’s spot for everyone to fight over, and performance rankings announced in bright lights for everyone to see – well, you can imagine.
Business versus sport
in team tugs of war, when individual performance is hidden, people pull about half as hard as when working alone, but ramp up their efforts when a crowd cheers them
Feedback
‘To strengthen an existing behaviour, reinforcers are most effective when they are unpredictable,’ Fogg wrote in 2003.
Rewarding behaviour
the most successful leaders are usually those with the ‘least compliant’ followers.
Psychologists have long known of our primal instinct for thinking better of our playmates. Humans have a bias for their own that’s universal, subconscious and triggered at the slightest provocation.
poverty alone doesn’t tend to lead to revolutions.
Nobody gets to choose exactly what kind of mind they have – whether they’re confident, shy, a genius, extroverted, or love boxing or literature or smoking weed or the politics of left or right. These things mostly happen to us depending on how our brains develop and what kinds of experiences we have.
What kind of mind we have
Researchers find ‘the jobs in which we spend a large portion of our lives and the prestige and income that comes from those jobs are at least partly influenced by the genes we inherit from our parents’.
In premodern societies, adolescence is thought to have been a ‘critical window for acquiring status’, much like the window we have in early childhood for acquiring language.
We mimic not just their behaviour but their beliefs. The better we believe, the higher we rise. And so faith, not truth, is incentivised.
Faith in the myths and prejudices of our tribe served to bond us together, co-ordinate our behaviour and motivate us to fight harder against enemies.
When brilliant people are motivated to find evidence to support their group’s false beliefs, they’re brilliant at finding it.
Moral ‘truths’ are acts of imagination. They’re ideas we play games with.
‘When a group of people make something sacred,’ writes the psychologist Professor Jonathan Haidt, they ‘lose the ability to think clearly about it.’
The model ....be careful not to make it "sacred"
When neuroscientist Professor Sarah Gimbel presented forty people with evidence their strongly held political beliefs were wrong, the response she observed in their brains was ‘very similar to what would happen if, say, you were walking through the forest and came across a bear’.
individuals who experienced combat with one another maintained stronger personal connections even forty years later.
brain scans show the mere anticipation of a transgressor being punished for rule-breaks is experienced as pleasurable.
A study of seventy million messages on the Chinese platform Weibo found the emotion that ‘travelled fastest and farthest through the social network’ was anger.
When warriors ramp up, in this way, they’re ‘not trying to arrive at the correct moral claim … What drives them is the desire to be the most morally impressive.’
they played a game that awarded prizes on the discovery of deviants – and they discovered deviants everywhere.
tyrants often start by telling you what you already believe.
One study of ninety-four wars since 1648 found 67 per cent were motivated by matters of national standing or revenge, with the next greatest factor – security – coming in at a distant 18 per cent.
Status depended on conforming not with mere belief, but active belief.
Dr Evelin Lindner has concluded that, ‘The most potent weapon of mass destruction’ is ‘the humiliated mind’.
incredible persistence is partly due to the fact that these virtue games were prone to self-replicate.
Still today, one in ten global marriages are between relatives including cousins.
The establishment of the Republic of Letters is a major event in human history. It earns its notch on the ruler of time alongside fire and campsites, gossip and reputation and rise of empires and conquering religions.
Every individual born didn’t have to learn everything for themselves afresh: knowledge
Human brains want to know, Who do I need to become to win rank?
Its players couldn’t know it, but the Republic of Letters was riding on ancient circuitry that had evolved to help co-operative hunter-gatherer tribes survive. By connecting our ability to accumulate knowledge to our desire for status, they’d discovered the future.
‘Humanity does not desire to be great, but to be beloved,’ he wrote in 1759.
Adam Smith
We are, in the twenty-first century, as we’ve always been: great apes hunting connection and status inside shared hallucinations.
our societies emphasise individual competence and achievement.
