Minds Make Societies

How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create

Pascal Boyer

• Verlag: Yale University Press
• Jahr: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780300235173
• Thema: Psicologia
• Thema: Psicologia cognitiva e cognizione

A scientist integrates evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and more to explore the development and workings of human societies. "There is no good reason why human societies should not be described and explained with the same precision and success as the rest of nature." Thus argues evolutionary psychologist Pascal Boyer in this uniquely innovative book. Integrating recent insights from evolutionary biology, genetics, psychology, economics, and other fields, Boyer offers precise models of why humans engage in social behaviors such as forming families, tribes, and nations, or creating gender roles. In fascinating, thought-provoking passages, he explores questions such as: Why is there conflict between groups? Why do people believe low-value information such as rumors? Why are there religions? What is social justice? What explains morality? Boyer provides a new picture of cultural transmission that draws on the pragmatics of human communication, the constructive nature of memory in human brains, and human motivation for group formation and cooperation.

"Cool and captivating…It will change forever your understanding of society and culture."—Dan Sperber, co-author of The Enigma of Reason

"It is highly recommended…to researchers firmly settled within one of the many single disciplines in question. Not only will they encounter a wealth of information from the humanities, the social sciences and the natural sciences, but the book will also serve as an invitation to look beyond the horizons of their own fields."—Eveline Seghers, Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture

Six Problems in Search of
a New Science

ONE

What Is the Root of Group Conflict?

Why “Tribalism” Is Not an Urge but a Computation

OBSERVERS FROM OUTSIDE OUR SPECIES would certainly be struck by two facts about humans. They are extraordinarily good at forming groups, and they are just as good at fighting other groups. There is no species in which organisms can do so much through collective action. There are few species where so much collective effort is aimed at attacking other groups and defending the group from such attacks. No human population is immune from potential ethnic rivalry and conflict. These can escalate into full-blown civil war and genocide. It should suffice to mention racial antagonism in the United States, the history of pogroms in Europe, the murderous conflict following the dissolution of Yugoslavia, and the innumerable ethnic wars in Africa and their culmination in the Rwanda racial massacres to provide some idea of the scope and intensity of such conflicts.

We have names for the phenomenon, like “nationalism” and “tribalism,” suggesting a strong urge in human beings to side with their village, their clan, their nation, against the other side, strangers or foreigners. But saying that humans are strongly tribal does not explain anything. This is where seeing human behaviors from another species’ viewpoint, or from an evolutionary standpoint, can be of help, as this perspective raises “why?” questions, such as, Why are individuals committed to their group? Why do they persist in that commitment when it might be to their advantage to defect from their group? How can groups survive at all, as cohesive units, in the face of individual, divergent interests? Why are groups often locked in intractable conflicts even when all parties realize there is little profit to be expected from prolonged rivalry? Why do group conflicts, especially ethnic ones, often flare up in outbursts of extraordinary violence? How can that occur between groups that had coexisted in peace for decades or centuries? From an evolutionary perspective, having very high group solidarity and intergroup conflicts is just like having claws on your feet or antlers on top of your head—something that requires an explanation in terms of what it did for organisms over evolutionary time.

Invented Nations?

The idea of a nation implies that each state corresponds to a community of people united by traditions, cultural values, language, and the idea of a common past. This is obviously a very modern idea on an evolutionary scale. There have been modern humans for more than a hundred thousand years, but states are a recent invention, a few millennia at the most. But if we try to understand groups and group conflict, it makes sense to start with nations, because they highlight how humans find certain kinds of group identity both self-evident and compelling.

Many new nations appeared on the map of Europe in the nineteenth century, including Germany and Italy as unified polities, but also dissident fragments of previous empires, like Hungary and Serbia, as well as newcomers like Estonia. That was the age of the Romantic ideal of nations as polities based on a common culture and language, themselves the consequences of common descent. The idea was that states should correspond to those “natural” and “ancestral” communities—rather than empires put together by conquest, modern nations would be based on the natural affinity and solidarity of people with shared ancestry and traditions. Elite Romantic movements had emphasized supposedly specific cultural features found among the common folk and had described modern nations as the unfolding of these cultural traits. From this perspective, sometimes called “primordialist,” Serbia and Lithuania and Italy were already there, so to speak, as potential nations. What they had lacked, beforehand, was the political opportunity to constitute themselves as states.¹

Against this picture, some “modernist” historians and anthropologists argued that the nations were in many cases constructed by the states. That is to say, once you have a state you start noticing or emphasizing, or in some cases deliberately creating, some common features in the populations that live under that state. From that perspective, the anthropologist Ernest Gellner, for instance, described the emergence of nationalism in largely functional terms, as the outcome of modern industrial society, arguing that modern, bureaucratic states require a class of low- and mid-level clerks with administrative skills, as well as a common language for administration, and some plausible claims to legitimacy. In Gellner’s view, nation-states satisfy all of those needs. State-sponsored schooling trains the bureaucrats. The unification of a language out of disparate idioms (as happened for instance in Germany and Italy) supports communication. The state is all the more legitimate if it is seen to be founded on common cultural values and to include populations of common descent.² Myths of origin bolster the feeling of common destiny, anchoring the groups in a more or less fantasized past, a Golden Age to which the ethnic group could return once it regained sovereignty as a nation.³

This functional account suggested that most Romantic claims to ethnic authenticity were largely instrumental, that in fact many were made of whole cloth. That is to say, if the political goal was to unify a particular region and turn it into an efficient polity, one could always find a convenient myth of origin or some similarities between dialects to turn that region into an ethnicity with a common language, and therefore into a nation crying out to be born into political existence. For instance, some historians argue, there was no unified Norwegian language before the elites created it, and few people would have identified themselves as Estonian before their elites managed to carve out an independent Estonia. In the same vein, historians had great fun puncturing the “invented traditions” of some European nations, showing, for instance, that Scottish tartan and British royal rituals, commonly described as archaic and authentic, had been invented during the nineteenth century by people who assumed that any decent nation should possess relics of its past customs.⁴

This description of “constructed” nations, however, was much exaggerated—mostly because of its focus on a limited place and time, the European empires in the nineteenth century. In other places, and long before the emergence of modern bureaucratic states, people had seen an intuitive link between language, ethnicity, and polity. Despite the complexity of conflicts between regional states over millennia, Chinese people assumed that their empire should include all peoples of Han culture, and the Koreans and the Japanese thought the same way. In places as different as the Greek city-states and the Yoruba kingdoms, people had a notion of ethnic identity that was largely based on language and traditions, long before nationalism in the modern sense.⁵

This raises the question, Why are these commonalities so important? Why do they matter to people? Indeed, even if the “modernist” picture had been right, even if nations had actually been built by elites from disparate communities, we should ask, Why did people find those identities compelling? Why were they motivated to defend this (allegedly spurious) ethnic heritage? Why would the elites’ machinations actually convince the populace? The reasons why all this (to some extent) worked, why people found ethnicity convincing, cannot in fact be found in models of ethnicity. The answer lies in a much more general phenomenon, to do with the construction of collective action and stable groups.

Ethnification as Recruitment

Nations are often based on ethnicity, but ethnicity itself is a mystery, or it should be. Ethnicity is the notion that a certain group of people share common interests and should unite toward the realization of common goals, by virtue of shared traditions, often language, and in most cases descent. We should not think of ethnicity as a sign of political immaturity, as a primitive phenomenon characteristic of political order before large nations, democratic institutions, and modern communications. Ethnic conflict can reemerge in formerly unitary republics, populist nationalistic politicians often work their way to prominence through democratic channels, and mass communication has made xenophobia much easier to transmit. Far from being a transient phase in human history, ethnic strife seems to be a baseline to which social groups often revert.⁶ The mystery here is (or should be) that so many people, around the world, find this notion of an ethnic group natural and compelling.

When considering, say, the violent dislocation of Yugoslavia or the atrocities of Rwanda, we tend to see them as a combination of very specific historical accidents with long-lasting suspicion or grievances between groups. The historical accident is, in many cases, the disappearance or weakening of the legitimate state.⁷ That was the case, for instance, in most of central Africa in the 1980s, in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, in Somalia more recently. People in Rwanda or the Balkans had for many generations been nurturing deep grievances and a hatred of neighboring groups that was only ready to burst once constraints on people’s expression were relaxed. In the case of the Balkans, it would seem, authoritarian regimes (of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires) followed by totalitarian socialism were only temporary blocks on the slope leading to open confrontation.

This description is suggestive but also misleading, because descriptions of ethnic conflict often assume what ought to be explained, namely, that people already see themselves as members of groups with common goals and interests, and that they feel the motivation to support their own group against rivals. So ethnic strife occurs between collections of individuals that share interests and goals, know that they share those interests and goals, and are ready to commit themselves to some collective action in pursuance of these objectives. But social processes are not that simple, as conflicts between European groups illustrate.

For instance, there are and were clear ethnic categories in the Balkans, a place where people have identified themselves, for a long time, as, for example, Croat, Serb, Romanian, and so on. But that does not mean that such identities always and everywhere denote groups.⁸ Specialists of ethnic conflicts like Rogers Brubaker emphasize this distinction between ethnic categories and ethnic groups. People routinely use categories, the world over, as a way of partitioning the social world into different classes of people—you are a Serb and I am a Croat, these people are Londoners or Glaswegians, and so on. The existence of categories does not always mean that people in these different categories form groups, that is, a collection of people that act in concert toward common goals. In most circumstances, often for a very long time, people can maintain ethnic categories without ethnic groups.⁹

In some specific historical contexts, actual groups do coalesce—for example, when the Serbs think that the Croats are threatening and must be contained (or vice versa). And the emergence of groups out of categories is precisely what we should explain. In specific circumstances, people who belonged to different categories but lived in smooth coexistence, and could peacefully interact everyday, become staunch enemies and may engage in extremely violent behavior. As many outsiders comment in cases of ethnic conflicts, this development often comes as a surprise, even to many of the participants, who rightly saw their situation so far as an example of what Brubaker calls “ethnicity without groups.”¹⁰ A standard explanation for this change is to assume that the hostility was dormant, that people secretly harbored hostile feelings toward other groups, until someone or some event broached the ancient quarrel, as between the Capulets and Montagues. But this is all entirely ad hoc, and it ignores (or takes as self-evident) the very mechanism we should explain, that of recruitment for collective action.

As Brubaker points out, ethnicity is not a fact, it is a process that turns social categories, momentarily, into cohesive groups. And it is a cognitive process, whereby a mass of external information is interpreted in ethnicized terms, and the costs and benefits of participation are tweaked in a way that previous attitudes did not always predict.¹¹ How and why this happens should therefore be understood in terms of cognitive capacities and motivations. I think it can be explained only by abandoning the narrow domain of ethnicity for a while and considering the processes of group formation in much more general, evolutionary terms.

Are Humans “Groupish”?

Humans, as we all know, are strongly motivated to form and join social groups—that much is uncontroversial. That group living itself is beneficial, for some species, is not an evolutionary mystery. But what we need to explain is what particular skills and motivations were selected as a way of getting individuals to act efficiently in groups. Difficulties come up when we want to understand what the underlying psychology is, what explains “groupishness,” as Matt Ridley called it.¹² Over the past fifty years, a large social psychology literature has documented many aspects of this “in-group bias” in modern societies. It is not limited to just preferring members of one’s group but pervades many domains of cognition. For instance, people do not recall information about out-groups and in-groups in the same way. They are much more distressed by disagreements with in-groups than with out-groups. They empathize with in-groups more than out-groups, especially in the context of interaction with out-groups.¹³ People are not convinced by statements uttered with a foreign accent—indeed, even infants seem to distrust potential playmates with an unfamiliar accent.¹⁴ A host of studies document the physiological effects of interaction with out-groups, from cardiovascular to hormonal processes and stress reactions.¹⁵

Humans are so attached to forming groups that they seem to create group solidarity, and conflicts between groups, on the flimsiest of excuses. A salient aspect of groupishness is the contrast between the often tenuous link between members of the group, their actual connections, and strong motivations to defend the group and attack rival ones. History records many examples of this, like the famous Nika riots of 532 CE, in which supporters of rival chariot racing teams, the Blues and the Greens, attacked each other and then destroyed about half the city of Constantinople.¹⁶ European football supporters and sports aficionados the world over provide examples of this form of tribalism.¹⁷

From all this, social psychologists inferred that humans were, indeed, so spontaneously groupish or tribal that they would favor their group even if the group was entirely arbitrary, and even if groups were arbitrarily constructed by an experimenter. A spectacular demonstration of the phenomenon was Henri Tajfel’s “minimal group” paradigm, where people were assigned to two distinct groups, A and B, or blue and red, or any other meaningless label, on the basis of clearly arbitrary criteria. People grouped together had nothing particular in common; in fact they did not interact during the experiment. They were just told that they had been assigned to group A or B, and which group each other participant belonged to. After a while, in an ostensibly unrelated task, they were asked to allocate various goods and tokens among all participants. The result, replicated many times, was that people invariably tended to favor members of their own group. The effect remains the same, whatever the value of the goods, the familiarity of the task, or the cultural background of the participants. The phenomenon even extends to largely unconscious processes, as people without realizing it tend to sidle in the direction of in-groups ...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: Human Societies through the Lens of Nature
• Six Problems in Search of a New Science
• Conclusion: Cognition and Communication Create Traditions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgments
• Index