Human Morality and Sociality

Evolutionary and Comparative Perspectives

Henrik Hogh-Olesen, Christophe Boesch, Leda Cosmides

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781350312579
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Persönlichkeit in der Psychologie

Human nature is enigmatic. Are we cruel, selfish creatures or good merciful Samaritans? This book takes you on a journey into the complexities of human mind and kind, from altruism, sharing, and large-scale cooperation, to cheating, distrust, and warfare. What are the building blocks of morality and sociality? Featuring contributions from leading researchers, such as Christophe Boesch, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Azar Gat, Dennis Krebs, Ara Norenzayan, and Frans B. M. de Waal, this fascinating interdisciplinary reader draws on evolutionary and comparative perspectives, and is essential reading for any students interested in the unique characteristics that define humanity and society.

1

Human Mind – Human Kind: An Introduction

Henrik Høgh-Olesen

In the hands of philosophers, human nature has proven to be a slippery thing. Are we cruel, selfish creatures or good, merciful Samaritans? And what is the natural condition of humanity? Is humanity the primeval state of “warre of every man against every man,” that Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) pictured in his great work Leviathan (1651), deeming us to “solitary, poor, nasty and short” lives, or is it closer to the blissful pastoral envisioned by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) in his Discurse sur L´ineqalite (1755) roughly a hundred years later, in which man, the noble savage, governed by innate compassion, lives peacefully among his fellow kinsmen? Are we wolves – Homo homini lupus – bloody on tooth and claw as the rest of nature, or lambs peacefully grazing the pastures together?

Perhaps it is time to raise our mutual tolerance of ambiguity and accept that the answer may be slightly more complex than the above stereotypes suggest. Asking if humans are good or bad, selfish or caring, peaceful or hostile equates to asking if light is particles or waves. The answer is, “Yes.” Physical entities can have contradictory properties, but some of these contradictions are complementary, as modern physics has shown (Bohr 1999), and both characteristics coexist simultaneously, even if we can only perceive and measure one at a time.

Another thing to remember is that nature is all about functionality and adaptive fitness, and as such beyond good and bad, or any other socially constructed duality for that matter. Additionally, many aspects of human sociality and morality have to be captured and understood in this complex, functional and complementary way in order to make sense. Humans are neither egoists nor altruists in the absolute. Instead we are exactly as selfish and self-sacrificing as it has evolutionarily paid off for us to be!

The essays collected in this volume share this understanding, just as they share an evolutionary and comparative approach to the study of human mind and kind. To understand how a capacity as morality evolved – i.e., to understand what it was for, and how it was helpful in optimizing the organisms’ survival and general fitness – helps us to understand what morality is. And if we wish to understand what is uniquely human, why not take a closer look at the other creatures around us, both inside and outside the primate line, and compare similarities and differences?

The ambition has not been to create an “all inclusive” volume like a textbook in the traditional sense in which no study is left untouched. Instead the idea was to compile a stimulating and hopefully thought-provoking reader that brings students and scholars face-to-face with some of the main protagonists of the field by offering their outlooks and perspectives on human morality and sociality.

Psychology has never been a unified science, collected under one paradigmatic hat, as for example physics, and different paradigms – covering the whole range from realist to social constructionist perspectives – coexist, even often in the same department.

During some periods, major movements have dictated the agenda and led the masses, and in the history of psychology we usually refer to the major paradigmatic “forces” that have dominated the field.

Behaviorism, psychoanalysis and humanistic psychology constituted the first three forces. Now, after some 30 years interregnum, a fourth unifying force, which integrates an evolutionary and cognitive angle to the study of man, has emerged strong and vital, generating hypotheses, boosting research and inspiring interdisciplinary collaborations on a scale not seen before.

Some may look at this force as a delta of minor streams spreading from the spring of Darwinian thinking, and there are differences between “socio-biology,” “human behavioral ecology,” “ gene-culture coevolution,” “memetics,” “evolutionary psychology broad and narrow,” etc., as there were between “Watsonian,” “Pavlovian” and “Skinnerian” behaviorism and between “humanistic” and “existential” psychology.

However, let us not indulge in “the narcissism of the little difference,” as Freud put it. It is not the aim of this book to stress the variations of the basic theme. The different “regiments” in this force may wave different colors (and it is mutually stimulating that they do), but it is still the same force united in a common evolutionary understanding.

Scope and Outline

A solitary organism has no need for moral rules, nor does a creature living among others without mutual dependency. Humans, however, have evolved from a long lineage of social-hierarchical and interdependent animals, for which life in groups are not an option but a survival strategy. We simply are each other’s means to the common goals, and as such are a species whose sociality and morality are communicating vessels. It is meaningless to treat one without the other.

We are also animals with large brains. Hominine brain size has increased more than 250 percent in less than 3 million years, and much of this increase has occurred within the past 500,000 years (Flinn, Geary, and Ward 2005). A multitude of selective forces (ecology, climate, foraging, tool use, predators, etc.) may have influenced this increase, and among these, perhaps first and foremost the force of our own social relations: The necessity of dealing continually with conspecifics in social circumstances that became ever more complex as the human line evolved. Nothing would select more potently for increased encephalization and social cognition than such an intra-specific, coevolutionary arms race in which success was dependent on skills in social competition (Alexander 1987; Dunbar 1998).

Furthermore, human nature is complex and the idea is not just to understand and comparatively analyze our altruistic and pro-social inclinations, from in-group helping, caring and sharing, to solidarity and large-scale collaboration with unrelated strangers, but also to examine the complementary, “darker” sides of our sociality, such as free-riding, cheating, cheater-detection and punishment, distrust and stranger hostility, and last but not least, inter-group conflicts and warfare.

In Chapter 2 Dennis Krebs opens the discussions by challenging the logic behind traditional biological theory: Does it necessarily follow that anything that has evolved by natural selection should be selfish, as biologists from Huxley (1893) to Williams (1989) and Dawkins (1989) hold, and does a disposition really have to be “unselfish” in order to qualify as moral?

What if both premises are wrong, and what does it actually mean when something is “selfish”? This mischievous concept is used by biologists, psychologists, theologians, and ordinary people alike, but unfortunately, not in the same way.

In a careful analysis, Krebs clarifies this conceptual mess and shows us (1) that moral inclinations can be naturally selected; (2) that psychologically unselfish dispositions can be genetically selfish and enhance the fitness of those who emit them; and (3) that even in many cases, where “good manners” are taught and culturally tutored, social learning and cultural indoctrination are often mediated by evolved mechanisms, rendering people more susceptible to some forms rather than others.

These views are further consolidated in Chapter 3 as Frans de Waal presents evidence of the continuity between humans and other primates and shows how some of the building blocks of morality – such as reconciliation, empathy, reciprocity and a sense of fairness – are older than our species and a natural outgrowth of the social instincts that we share with other group-living animals.

Later on, these comparisons are used by de Waal to make the important distinction between morality proper and social conventions. To an obligatory gregarious species as ours, morality is a group-oriented phenomenon primarily related to Helping or (not) Hurting others. Anything unrelated to the two H´s (such as bare breasts in prime time TV, or headscarves to cover women’s hair) falls outside of morality and into the domain of social conventions couched in moral language.

Religion tops the list of species-specific human universals, and to many people religion is seen, as the God-given, or socially constructed, antidote to our alleged venomous nature. The contributions in this book take another stand, allowing moral building blocks and pro-social inclinations to be part of our natural endowment. But, of course, religion has a part to play in the staging of human morality and sociality, not least by way of its ability to facilitate social cohesion and large-scale, high-risk cooperation among unrelated strangers, as we shall see.

In Chapter 4 Ara Norenzayan guides us into this strange suite of propensities called religion, and shows us some of their adaptive characteristics.

On the one hand, social organisms are motivated to engage in fitness-maximizing behaviors that are often detrimental to other conspecifics and, on the other hand, group-living collapses if too many reap the benefits of it without contributing to the group. So whom do we trust, and how do we spot a fair collaborator?

Genuine religious sentiments, emotions, and participation in time-consuming religious rituals may serve as “costly signals” – which may show that a person has stamina, perseverance, and is conscious and concerned about rules –, which may curb the free-rider problem inherent in collaboration among strangers. And just as two eyespots installed over the moneybox will enhance the payments in a self-administered beer sale, the installation of a morally concerned and omni-present supernatural agent, in the mindset of a group of humans, will help the members of this group to pay their social dues, as Norenzayan’s fascinating studies show. Experimentally induced religious thoughts reduce rates of cheating and increase altruistic behavior among anonymous strangers. And cross-cultural evidence suggests an association between the presence of morally concerned deities and large group size in humans, so religion may serve as a cohesive force in our in-group relations (Norenzayan here; Norenzayan and Shariff 2008).

But we have other devices to help us with the recurrent problems of cheating and exploitation.

In Chapter 5 Michael B. Petersen, Aaron Sell, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides show us that humans have evolved psychological adaptations that allow us (1) to detect and respond to cheating conspecifics; (2) to evaluate the prospective return of continued association with the perpetrator; and (3) to react with punitive and/or conciliatory strategies, calibrated according to the anticipated future net value of our association with the exploiter.

Humans are score-keepers, and our interactions are regulated by “welfare trade-off ratios,” which are internal regulatory variables that set the threshold for acceptable cost-benefit transactions between us and others, and which index the degree to which we are willing to trade-off our own welfare against others when we take action.

We also have to take into account that in the small groups in which our ancestors evolved, some perpetrators were more valuable to our mutual survival than others, and this programmed calculus apparently still plays a part in modern humans’ spontaneous moral intuitions and political attitudes toward punishment and criminal justice. Making us more disposed to forgive and apply reparative strategies, when the transgressor is perceived as valuable. Moreover, what goes for in-group members certainly does not apply to outsiders.

Not even religious pro-sociality is extended indiscriminately. The drawback of intra-group collaboration is inter-group competition and conflict, and very often the same mechanisms involved in intra-group altruism may also facilitate inter-group antagonism and war between groups.

Anthropologist have long thought that war was uniquely human, and more or less absent until we became sedentary, territorial agriculturalists that accumulated resources and developed high population densities (Keeley 1997; Kelly 2007), but primatologists have shown that we do not have to settle down, grow vegetables, and be possessive in order to fight wars. Of the more than 10 million animal species that exist, one other species, besides our own, has been documented to show male-initiated coalitions that raid neighboring territories and carry through lethal attacks on out-group members of their own kind, and this other species is our closest relatives: the chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes).

Jane Goodall (1979) was the first to describe the dramatic warlike fights that occurred between chimpanzee communities in her study site, the Gombe National Park in Tanzania. Over a period of 4 years she watched a group split into two fractions after which one fraction systematically killed all the males and some of the females in the other fraction.

In Chapter 6 Christophe Boesch presents us with a fresh field study of inter-group fights and violence of four neighboring chimpanzee communities in the Tai National Park, Côte d`Ivoire.

Direct aggression between groups has been observed in species such as lions, African wild dogs, wolves, and a range of monkeys; these physical confrontations, however, do not appear to be premeditated, coalitional, or collaborative.

War is distinguished from ordinary conflicts and physical brawls, carried out in the heat of the moment, by exactly these insignias. War is planned, organized, and coordinated. It entails a division of labor that goes beyond one based on age and gender alone, and implies the envisioned harm on others, and the purposeful act of taking up means in order to accomplish this goal (Kelly 2007).

War’s most elementary form is the raid, in which a small group enters enemy territory undetected in order to ambush, kill, or harm unsuspecting, isolated individuals, and then withdraws to their own ground after their mission has been accomplished. So far, this distinct coalitional behavioral pattern has only been observed in humans and chimpanzees.

Boesch’s observations document these fascinating inter-specific similarities and indicate that there may be differences in inter-group violence between chimpanzee populat...