The Social Ape

Image courtesy

"We spend almost all our time attempting to change behaviour through overt persuasion - while paying no attention to influencing the other, barely conscious ways in which people behave." Rory Sutherland

Of all the marcomms (and vaguely related) books I've read over the past few years there have been a few that have really stuck in my mind (Convergence Culture perhaps, Purple Cow, Here Comes Everybody), but I think the one that has probably stood out the most for me is HERD, from Mark Earls. I think because it speaks of a fundamental truth that the ad industry rarely acknowledges - that people do what they do because of other people.

Early on in Herd, Mark talks about how primates are first and foremost social creatures and how this is our core evolutionary strategy. New Scientist recently linked to this fascinating essay by anthropologist Brian Hare and his wife, journalist Vanessa Woods, (also included in the 'What's Next? Dispatches On The Future of Science' book) which suggests that rather than it being intelligence that led to social behaviour, it was social behaviour that paved the way for the evolution of human intelligence.

Hare and Wood talk about what's called the theory of mind - the ability to think about what others are thinking about. Under the age of four, children can't model what others think - they think everyone knows what they know (example: give a four year old a packet of gum and ask her what's inside it she'll say 'gum'. Open it up and show her that inside is a pencil rather than gum. Ask her what her mother, who's waiting outside, will think is inside and she'll say 'gum' because she knows her mother hasn't seen the pencil. But children under the age of four will generally say their mother thinks there's a pencil inside because they cannot escape the pull of the real world)

A theory of mind allows for complex social behaviours (such as the formation of institutions, strategies, government). Experiments conducted by Hare with chimpanzees shows that in some contexts chimps possess the ability to think about what others are thinking, like in the ability to be deceptive in order to get food. But in other contexts they lack such an awareness and lack the ability to interpret simple human non-verbal communicative gestures, like pointing, which suggests that use of gestural communication of this type was something that humans developed after their lineage split from our common evolutionary ancestor.

The curious thing though is that some animals, like dogs, are very good at interpreting such gestural communication (think about how good a dog is at watching your body language when you're throwing a ball for them). Yet experiments done by Hare on wolves showed that they were no better than chimpanzees at acting on human behaviour. But puppies who'd had very little human contact were still able to. This suggests that since they split from their wolf ancestor and became domesticated over time, dogs have evolved to act on human social cues.

In the 50's and 60's, Russian scientist Dmitri Belyaev conducted a series of genetics experiments on silver foxes, putting one group under severe selection pressure - culling those that showed aggression towards experimenters, allowing those that approached them to live - and allowing another control group to breed randomly in regard to how they interacted with humans. Within only 40 generations the selected foxes had begun to show evolutionary change: behaviourally becoming friendly towards humans, wagging their tails, licking people's faces, and even physically changing as their ears became floppier, tails more curly, coats lost their camouflage, skulls became smaller - in short, looks and behaviour more akin to a domesticated dog. And the test foxes could read human body language just like a dog. The point being, that the foxes were not bred to be smarter, merely more friendly, but through that had developed skills by replacing a fear of humans with a desire to interact with them.

So Hare and Wood suggest that something similar could have happened in human evolution:

"Instead of getting a jump start with the most intelligent hominids surviving to produce the next generation, as is often suggested, it may have been the more sociable hominids - because they were better at solving problems together - who achieved a higher level of fitness and allowed selection to favor more sopisticated problem-solving over time. Humans got their smarts only because we got friendlier first."

If co-operation is a 'cornerstone of human acheivement', it is human's uniquely high level of social tolerance that has likely created it. New Scientist quotes Harvard University neuroscientist Jason Mitchell:

"The most drammatic innovation introduced with the rollout of our species is not the prowess of 'individual' minds, but the ability to harness that power across many individuals"

It is our unique level of spontaneous collaboration and co-operation that make us human. Ideas which capitalise on this are uniquely powerful. After all, people aren't so different, no matter where you are.

HT to Adland Suit for the video link

Comments

[BenAS]

Does this mean I can stop training at the gym. As it is no longer "survival of the fittest".

Instead I need to go to the pub with friends as it is "survival of the most social".

[@scottRcrawford]

Best part of the post is the similarity in the expressions of the two photos. Nice bang to the point.

[Subbu]

Man is a social animal takes on a new meaning. Btw, you might want to check this article http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=monkey-imitation-affiliation-evolution-social-cooperation

[Mark]

Thanks, for the props, Dude. Clearly, I think you're bang on!

[John Dodds]

Rebecca Saxe is doing a lot of work on this and shows that the part of the brain that allows us to think about other people's thoughts is less active in young children.

[tim]

In reading Mark Earls' book I recognise I am one of those people who do not totally agree with the concept that we are purely social animals - it smacks of pure Darwinism to me. Whilst I agree we socially relate there is a case for the individual. If you read the work of Frankl, to quote the sleeve of "The Doctor & the Soul", he "...retained the belief that the most important freedom of all is the freedom to determine one's own spiritual well-being."

A dramatic example would, I believe, be our own death-bed - it will be the finality of that experience that will drive home the fact that for all our social relations we are left with our self.

It is in that context we can see the challenges of the internet and how we relate to known people and unknown folk through the intermediation of Facebook, Myspace, Twitter etc. using in some instances the technology of video cameras. It is fascinating to see Michael Wesch's work at Kansas, especially the initial reactions of individuals speaking to camera - without a clear social signal of who they are speaking to they are left with the raw sense of themselves. I would suggest that this is what might be considered for many, "a threshold experience" as they move to a true awakening of a sense of self. Michael Wesch in his blog piece pointed this out when he said,
"Hallway conversations [@ Personal Democracy Forum] were different than your typical conversations. Instead of lots of people saying, “You know, somebody should … ” there were lots of people saying, “So I did this, this, and this, and now I’m working on doing this, this, and this and we should collaborate … ” In other words, it was a bunch of people blessed with what I once heard Yochai Benkler and Henry Jenkins call “critical optimism.”

So we go from "others" in the social "should" to individuals feeling empowered to do something, "I did". To say that it is all social misses the point that it is only through individual's (first) acting in a social context does that social context comes alive.

[Chief Kitsilano]

The eye, the ear, the nose and the heart blend mixtures of the light, the air, and feelings, to produce human truth.

[Something Designer]

Very interesting article, good work - thanks for sharing! www.somethingdesigner.co.uk

[Dino Dogan]

I love that a musician is able to demonstrate this concept without saying a word. It would take most people 40 minutes to get the point across, and he did it in five notes. Awesome.

Also, I dont think that humans as social animals and humans as individuals is mutually exclusive. Why does it always have to be one or the other? Whatever happened to the middle way? I say we can be both and until someone can prove it to me that they have to be mutually exclusive Im afraid I will have to reject the premise.

I write a lot about human evolution as it relates to our relationship with dogs - our last connection with nature, and seeing this article was really refreshing.

Dino
http://dogandogs.com