The ‘don’t trust the boss’ gene?
Another in my series ‘pop evolutionary psychology for scientific imbeciles’. Or as someone put it to me the other day ’the charming thing about your blog, Matthew, is that while other people use theirs to display their knowledge, you use yours to parade your ignorance’.
There is a lot of research out there on how we are shaped by social norms. Take for example Mark Earls’ book ‘Herd’ which shows how following the crowd explains most human behaviour. It isn’t a surprise we’re like this. After all, other species do the same. Birds flock, bees swarm, when one sheep starts running they all do.
But human beings seem to have another, opposite, instinct. There appears to be a part of the brain which responds to the message; ‘don’t trust the boss’. It’s the part which lights up when – during a meeting discussing a plan from central Government, the council or company head office – someone stands up and alleges that the truth isn’t being told, or the decision has already been made, or ‘the secret plan is…’. It’s the part that makes us susceptible to conspiracy theories, despite the tenuous nature of the evidence underpinning them.
The reasons most frequently offered for this suspicion of authority are political and sociological: It represents a loss of trust or legitimacy and it is connected to a long term decline in deference and tradition in society. We also know that attitudes to authority are to some extent innate, with people having a more or less ‘authoritarian’ personality.
When we are deciding whether to follow or to rebel we try to base our response on rational judgment. But, it is often impracticable for us to find out enough to make an evidence-based judgment (think of how many of us now feel about climate change science) and both the compliance and resistance instincts have a strong emotional power. But while we have the compliance response in common with the rest of the animal kingdom, the resistance/suspicion reaction seems uniquely human.
It could be argued that it is entirely a cultural phenomenon. Sociologists, like Anthony Giddens, argue that the decline in deference is a key characteristic of modernity. But doesn’t the attraction of ‘don’t trust the boss’ feel like it has a deeper, more visceral, basis?. Like many other ‘natural’ instincts it can lead to bad judgement, eccentricity or madness if we have an excess. Paranoia can be a pathological version of ‘don’t trust the boss’.
Could it be that the possession of a certain level of natural suspicion towards authority – albeit unevenly distributed through the population – has played a vital evolutionary role? After all, in the hundreds of thousands of years of our evolution – when there weren’t many human beings around and our future flourishing was far from certain – there must have been plenty of leaders who were mad and dangerous: the kind of person who would lead their tribe to disaster or say God had demanded a mass suicide pact. Has the survival and evolution of the species rested on our innate ability to be suspicious of authority?
Of course, it will be argued that at some times in recent human history – think of the Third Reich – human beings seem to have abandoned this instinct. True enough but – as the theory predicts - this has led to disaster and, also, this is why authoritarian regimes adopt totalitarian methods: they know any dissenting voice will be likely to strike an emotional chord.
Of course, I am not quite so stupid as not to know that the question of authority and obedience has been the subject of much brilliant analysis from historians, philosophers, social psychologists, sociologists and political scientists (Hobbes, Adorno, Diamond, Arendt, Milgram to name just a few different perspectives) but what about the genetic/evolutionary account? Can someone refer me to the book (or, even better, the easily digestible article) I need to read?
Eureka!
As many current and former colleagues will confirm, it is a dangerous business presenting me with emerging research findings. Always eager to discover something newsworthy, and better at big concepts than methodological detail, I am prone to seize on tentative findings and turn them into a massive breakthrough in human understanding.
The dismayed research team has then to deal as best they can with the fallout as I charge around town, telling anyone who cares to listen that we have made a great discovery while each time expanding just a little bit further on what I was originally told. Within a short period any resemblance between the modest claim supported by the research and my towering hyperbole is mere coincidence.
So, I sensed a nervous frisson run through the team when yesterday I seized on a very early finding of our Connected Communities project, being undertaken in New Cross Gate. The researchers are now analysing the nearly 200 interviews which aim to map the social networks of local residents. The results confirm starkly the hypothesis that many people in disadvantaged areas have very limited social networks – for example a significant minority say not only that they don’t know anyone in authority but they don’t know anyone who knows anyone in authority.
But the finding upon which I alighted related to who and what are the main foci for networks. Not only are these centres – as we might predict - local institutions, like schools or Sure Start, or local public servants, like postmen or wardens, but a particular kind of person. It appears that those who say they most value neighbourliness are also those to whom most people connect.
This immediately put me in mind of two recent statements made at recent RSA Great Room events. First, there was David Halpern telling us that what appears to shape levels of happiness within nations is not so much their material circumstances as what they say most matters. So, for example, the Danes are the happiest people in the world partly because, uniquely, they say that ‘love’ is the most important component of contentment (unlike the miserable Bulgarians who say it is money). Second, there was the comment by the author of ‘Connected’, Nicholas Christakis, that there is a significant genetic component (around 40%) to explain why some people are better social networkers than others.
As the research team tried in vain to get me engaged with others aspects of their findings I was already air-born with my flight of fancy…..
It appears that some people bothvalue social networking (it is what makes them happy) and are adept at it. These people are potentially a massive resource for any community. There is no reason to believe that this character trait will be less prevalent in deprived communities than anywhere else. However, it may, for a whole variety for reasons, be the case that these people are not in positions where the community as a whole can best capitalise on these skills. (Indeed it may be that some of those in key formal positions of influence – the ones we tend to assume are the most important – are not themselves well-endowed with networking skills.)
Therefore, it should be a key plank of strategies to build community resilience that we identify who these people are and that we give them resources (for example, access to social media) so they can apply their skills. These are the people public authorities should engage when they are designing some or other policy intervention.
You might think this is a bold and interesting enough claim to be going on with, especially as it is based on analysing only about a quarter of the returns. But surely we can go that one step further. Doesn’t our research offer convincing proof of ‘the people gene’? If only we could find the people carrying the gene, support them, listen to them, make them be the leaders they were born to be, we could transform the resilience and capacity of every community.
The left would rejoice as deprivation was tackled, the right would celebrate the evidence that it is not in the actions of the state but in the capacities of civil society that the path to social renewal lies. The RSA would be seen to have been responsible for one of the most powerful findings in modern social science and its (surprisingly young-looking) Chief Executive would become a household name, winner of awards, friend of Presidents, feted at home and abroad for his leadership and wisdom, a regular on the One Show …..
‘Nurse, I think it may be time for Mr Taylor’s medicine.’
Citizenship politics – part 3
I fear readers will approach the final instalment of my three-parter on citizenship politics with all the enthusiasm of a vegan starting work placement in a steak pie factory. I had my doubts as to both the intellectual and entertainment value of these posts and as the comments have dried up (not that I’m not enormously grateful for those who have posted) my worst fears have been confirmed. Tomorrow I will gather up the pieces of my shattered self esteem and return to more palatable fare; some jokes about dogs perhaps?
Anyway, let’s get it over with. I said yesterday that I would respond to the criticism that citizenship politics was not a politics at all (so now I am offering my own response to my own criticism of my own ideas – John Donne was wrong; I am an island and they’ve just cancelled the weekly ferry).
From the perspective of citizenship politics, how do we respond to the the questions; ‘who are we?’, ‘who do we need to be?’ and ‘who should we be? Being mercifully brief here is my answer:
‘Who are we?’ Citizenship politics tends to emphasise the social nature of human beings and our species’ unique capacity for empathy and reciprocity. It argues that human beings are capable individually and collectively of functioning at a higher level and that this is the ultimate goal of human progress. But citizenship politics is not naively optimistic about human nature, indeed it recognises the frailties of individual judgement and the need to understand and to restrain our ‘animal spirits’.
‘Who do we need to be?’ Citizenship politics calls for a radical re framing of debate about production, consumption, and growth. A great challenge facing global humanity is how to continue to achieve economic progress within the ever more pressing limits of nature (climate change, biodiversity, finite resources). In relation to question of well-being, of the environment, of what David Halpern calls ‘the hidden wealth of nations’, citizenship politics means developing a more critical and holistic debate about the purposes and trade-offs of economic progress.
‘Who should we be?’ Citizenship politics returns to classical and enlightenment themes in urging an ambitious account of the good life well lived. This life is one in which we have freedoms and entitlements but where also full membership of society carries with the expectation of engagement in the public sphere, the aspiration to live as far as possible within the means available to all in a shrinking world, and a commitment to norms and behaviours which foster social reciprocity.
The practical question for citizenship politics is this: what are the ways of thinking, the circumstances and the policies which are most likely to promote sustainable and fulfilling ways of being for the 21st century. Which again calls to mind the criticism that citizenship politics is just a rather highfalutin way of describing what all politics ultimately is about.
But, as Will Davies reminded me in his comment yesterday, the way we present knowledge reflects the angle from which we look at the world. Citizenship politics is such an angle, one that involves stepping back, trying to make new connections between different ways of seeing, simultaneously trying to understand more deeply what is now going on for the human race while holding fast to the possibility of achieving something quite different. Maybe it is an angle that is better for looking than for doing – this is certainly the impression I get when I discuss these ideas with practical politicians. Then again, maybe the RSA can one day demonstrate what it means to apply these insights, values and ways of being across an organisation.
Now I’ve finished I find myself re-enthused. If only, dear reader, that was true of you too.
Citizenship politics – part 2
I am grateful for the constructive comments on my citizenship politics post, although I fear I’m a long way still from getting the idea more widely discussed. Today and tomorrow I want to explore the idea a bit more, including confronting its most obvious problems.
One issue to work through is whether citizenship politics is an approach to thinking or a set of beliefs. I have tended to present it as the former. Citizenship politics involves exploring together three sets of questions.
First, ‘who are we?’ kinds of questions. This is predominantly the domain of scientific and social scientific thinking. Neuroscience, social psychology, behavioural economics, evolutionary psychology, psychiatry, anthropology, sociology all have insights to offer us about what drives human behaviour. There is talk of a new science of human behaviour which, by combining disciplines and calling on powerful new data sets, will fulfil the ambitions of the founding fathers of social science and enable us to predict human behaviour as easily as we can predict the behaviour of chemical compounds. I doubt this. The complexity and reflexivity of human behaviour mean it will never be entirely predictable. But citizenship politics does involve the attempt to base social analysis and policy prescription on a realistic, evidence-based, account of what makes us tick.
Second, ‘who do we need to be?’ kinds of questions. This is the domain of economic thinking (as long as we define ‘economic’ broadly). The question here is what kind of behaviour is necessary from us if we are to achieve the twin goals of increasing human welfare and managing finite resources. I wrote on Friday about how John Kay made a great impression on me by asking some fascinating questions about the relationship between GDP growth and human autonomy (more on this tomorrow).
Third, ‘who should we be?’ kinds of questions. This is the domain of philosophy and ethics: what is the good life well lived?
By asking ‘who do we need to be to create the future we want?’ citizenship politics attempts to bring these three sets of questions together, understanding both that they are conceptually distinct and that a rounded case for any policy strategy should have some way of answering each.
I can think of at least three obvious ripostes to the case I have made so far. The first is that this is completely obvious; all I am doing is making explicit something which is implicit in all political arguments.
The converse criticism is that this is a counsel of perfection; we might aspire to a holistic, multi disciplinary way of thinking that moves debate to a higher level, but in the real world arguments and decisions have to be made on a more partial and tenuous basis.
Finally, it can be argued that arguing for a political case to meet certain analytical and explanatory criteria doesn’t qualify as ‘a politics’ at all. After all, on this basis, a rounded right wing argument might qualify while a limited left wing one wouldn’t and vice versa.
So tomorrow (if I can resist commenting on the Brown ‘bullying’ saga) I will describe what I see as the progressive stance in these three domains; who we are, who we need to be and who we should aspire to be.
I only hope that by then there is still someone out there reading.
Citizenship politics, citizenship economics
It boils down to this: policy and politics must start from the question of citizenship. This has been the core assertion running through my annual lectures, through this blog and through the strategy for the RSA. I am more and more convinced that this idea is the best basis for an intelligent, powerful, and urgently necessary debate about the choices society faces. But given that the demands of my job rule out finding the time and focus to write a book or even an extended pamphlet, how can I get this idea to the centre of current debate?
To recap – citizenship politics starts from the question ‘who do we need to be to create the kind of future we say we want’? When we look at this question we see a gap – what I have inelegantly called ‘the social aspiration gap’ – between our collective aspirations and our current trajectory.
This gap has three dimensions; three ways in which tomorrow’s citizens need, in aggregate, to be different to today’s. We need to be more engaged. It is only through mature engagement that we either give permission to our leaders to make right and responsible decisions for the long term and for the interests of all citizens, or that we accept that social progress rests, at least in part, on the decisions we make about our own lives.
We need to be more self reliant. We cannot help those who most need help, nor can we find fair and workable solutions to shared global and national challenges (such as climate change and international development) unless as many of us as possible, for as much of our lives as possible, meet our own needs as individuals and groups.
And we need to be pro-social, that is to say we need to behave in ways which strengthen the fabric of society and in particular the ties of reciprocity which underlie what David Halpern has recently called ‘the hidden wealth of nations’.
Importantly, citizenship politics has both a utilitarian and a normative rationale. The utilitarian case – made on grounds of economy, environment or mental well being – is that we simply cannot go on living like this. Debt (whether personal, corporate or public) is a powerful symbol of the unsustainable nature of contemporary lifestyles.
The normative case, which harkens back to the enlightenment origins of the RSA, is that to fulfil our potential as human begins we should be full members of society; which means we are engaged, self reliant and altruistic people.
The question for citizenship politics is this: ‘what decisions and what type of decision-making can best enable people to be the citizens they need to be to create the future to which we aspire?’
In answering this question there is plenty of scope for differences between left and right, concerning, for example, the role of the state and the importance of social equality. But both left and right should start, not from second order questions such as how can we maximise family income or economic growth, or even how can we achieve more equality, but with the first order question of future citizenship.
I have been inspired to return to these issues by hearing the economist and commentator John Kay speak at the Progressive Governance Conference in London this morning.
In a brilliant intervention he urged people to understand exactly what we should mean by economic growth. This, he said, is the process by which technological innovation and investment in physical and human capital create new choices for individuals and societies. But – and this is where the power of the argument lies – the route to more choices (for which we might more grandly say ‘freedom’ or ‘fulfilment’) lies not in ‘materialism’ – the producing and buying of more stuff – but in ‘lifestyle’. Quite apart from the way the crazed pursuit of more stuff has left us all indebted and our economy enfeebled, in aggregate as a society, what extra choices has most of the materialism of the last two decades really brought us?
Instead, says Kay, if we want to think about how growth creates choice take the example of food. The quality of the food most people eat in this country has improved dramatically in the last two decades. But not because we are eating more (obesity is generally a disease of the poor not the middle class) but because we spend more on better quality food. Improvements in the way we cook, in our knowledge, and our skills (stretching from Jamie Oliver to our own culinary efforts), have expanded the market and given us new choices and pleasures without relying on us consuming more resources. Kay argues that we could develop a similar model of lifestyle-enhancing economic growth in almost all areas of the economy.
This seems to me to form the basis for adding citizenship economics to citizenship politics. That is to say, an economics which starts from the idea that growth is there to enable and enhance fuller citizenship not simply to consume more stuff. The question ‘what kind of economy are we trying to grow’ is inextricably linked to the question ‘what kinds of people do we want and need to be’.
And, of course, all these questions require us to have a sophisticated understanding of how human beings work – which is why the RSA spends so much time discussing what neuroscience, behavioural sciences and the study of evolution tell us about what makes us tick as human beings.
We need a new paradigm to replace the failed and contradictory combination of unfettered markets, social individualism, overbearing statism, political triangulation and technological determinism that have been the key features of the last two decades.
That model is to be found in citizenship politics and citizenship economics.
What can I do to convince people?
Twitter @RSAMatthewRSA Bookshop
The RSA Bookshop, in partnership with Blackwell's the UK's leading academic bookseller, offers Fellows and friends an opportunity to purchase books and to explore our speakers’ ideas in greater detail. Visit the RSA Bookshop.