The century of the brain?
Yesterday I posted on my favourite subject – the social aspiration gap. The question being how do we enable people to be the people they need to be to create the future they say they want? One consequence of this citizen-centric way of thinking is that policy makers need to think more deeply about human nature; what is it that makes us behave as we do?
Another prompt for this debate has been the decline – hastened by the 2008 economic crisis – of homo economicus; the idea that human behaviour can be sufficiently explained on the basis of utility maximising individuals operating with perfect information in a free market. Instead a combination of disciplines including social psychology, behavioural economics, neuroscience and anthropology have offered a more complex, subtle, reflexive model of human nature. Human beings are deeply social, innately capable of collaboration and altruism, predictably irrational (to use Dan Ariely’s phrase) and occasionally deluded. We are the only species than can think about thinking but we have prehistorically evolved brains trying to cope with a world that has arguably changed more in the last hundred years than the previous 200,000.
A great insight about the modern condition, offered by among others Anthony Giddens, is that we are increasingly reflexive. By this is meant that we tell ourselves a story about ourselves and that, rather than deferring to our fixed place in a religious or monarchical world view, we want to be the author of that story. I have suggested that in the 21st century we will add a new dimension of thinking: neurological reflexivity. The idea here is that in thinking about thinking we are aware of, and adapt to, our cognitive frailties. One concrete example of this is stickK.com which is helping thousands of people deal with innate human short-termism by encouraging them to pledge a sum of money (it works best if it is to a cause they don’t like) to be paid at the moment they break a self-improving pledge.
When I deliver speeches I often ask audience members whether they would like to be better people. I then advise them not on any account to buy self-help books – which are directed at their conscious will power (despite their ubiquity there is no evidence such books work). Instead, I urge, choose better friends and their virtuousness will soon rub off on you (which is, by the way, why surveys show religious people tend to be happier and more altruistic than poor atheists like me).
I am partly sharing all this with you because this seems to be a week for recapping on some core ideas but also as a plug for the first of my three part radio 4 series on brain and society ‘Brain Culture’ which goes out this afternoon at 16.00.
By the way if you want to get more deeply into the topical and sometimes heated debate about brains and behaviour I can recommend this appropriately thoughtful pamphlet by my colleague Dr Jonathon Rowson.
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?
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