Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life (16 page)

Safety needs also serve an obvious and essential survival function—protecting us from potential harm. Research by Arne Öhman and his colleagues has shown that the fear system, designed to rapidly respond to threats, comes preequipped with some of its own adaptively tuned wiring, just as the hunger system does. For example, it is difficult to condition a fear response to flowers or abstract paintings, but it is very easy to learn to fear a dog or a snake.

The benefits of social belongingness are not as direct and immediate as those for hunger and fear, but they are there. Our ancestors would have had a very hard time surviving without a network of friends. Evolutionary anthropologists Kim Hill and Magdalena Hurtado studied the Aché in Paraguay, who live in conditions much closer to those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. They found that tribe members shared food in a way that provided an insurance policy against starvation: I may bring home a wild pig this week but then have several weeks of bad luck; my neighbor may get lucky on a different week. If we share, we pool our risk.

To facilitate our alliances with other people, we seem to have evolved yet another set of hormonal and neurological systems. But
here Maslow did not go far enough in his modularity. He lumped romantic love, bonds between family members, and affiliation with groups into the same category, when in fact there are important functional and neurological differences among the biological systems that manage different kinds of relationships. Our dealings with family members, romantic partners, and friends are governed by distinct emotions and cognitive biases. For example, sexual arousal and sexual jealousy are distinctly designed to deal with the opportunities and threats that arise in romantic relationships, but not in relationships between children and parents. As another example, if a friend left me to clean up after I bought his food and prepared his dinner every day and then asked me to pay for his college education and buy him a car, I would quickly start looking for a new friend. But in my relationship with my two sons, I take it for granted that we will have just such a grossly uneven distribution of benefits and costs. And there is another reason to separate familial bonds, friendship, and romantic love in our hierarchy: They come to the fore at very different developmental periods.

What are the functional benefits of esteem needs? Getting others to hold you in high esteem translates into status in your group, and that translates into numerous benefits, such as privileged access to the watering hole and the raspberry bush. If you are a female, it means more goodies to pass on to your offspring. If you are a male, there is an additional benefit, for, as we have seen in earlier chapters, males with high status get access to more females; males with very low status may not get a mate at all. Hence all that showing off by males: painting thousands of artworks, like Pablo Picasso or Diego Rivera; writing volumes of poetry, like Pablo Neruda; composing catchy melodies, like John Lennon or Duke Ellington; or doing whatever else one happens to be good at.

Maslow's view of self-actualization was that it had no biological function. If we view self-actualization as an extension of esteem needs,
though, it has a clear function. If you perfect your music, art, or writing abilities, you can win respect and admiration from others, and all the benefits that come with them.

Besides his idea that some motives take mental priority over others, Maslow's theory had a developmental component. He assumed that our priorities shift over the life span, that we move up in the hierarchy as we mature. For example, when my younger son was an infant, he was only concerned with physiological needs. He wanted to be nursed, he wanted his diapers changed, and he was quite willing to scream until he got some service. He did not start worrying too much about affection until a few years later. Around the time he entered kindergarten, he began to surprise us by expressing a sudden interest in what other people wanted. And it was not until he made some friends that he began to worry about whether they respected him or not.

Maslow's theory sometimes blurred together cognitive priority (what takes precedence in our minds) and developmental priority (what comes first in our life spans). He presumed that the two kinds of priorities more or less move in synchrony with one another. But they may not. Physiological needs like hunger and thirst do in fact tend to show up early in development, as in the case of my hungry son. But other physiological needs, such as the hormonally driven desire for sexual satisfaction, do not even come on line until adolescence. (When my older son was in grammar school, he reacted to a song line about “two girls for every guy” with a “yuck”; when he was a senior in high school, he could not believe he had ever said that.) Even as adults, though, we can suppress sexual desire, as well as other physiological needs such as hunger, if we think other people will disapprove. So the developmental hierarchy need not correspond precisely to the
cognitive hierarchy. Moreover, our cognitive hierarchies might change at any point in our lives, depending on where we are and who is around. For example, when my older son is writing a screenplay and his artistic subself is in charge, he can go for hours ignoring physiological needs that would monopolize an infant's attention, but only up to a point—he always stops for a meal in time to avoid starvation. So a person's currently conscious priorities and the order in which fundamental motives develop are two issues worth keeping separate.

Biological theorists have developed a powerful set of ideas called life history theory, which has profound implications for thinking about the development of human motives. And those ideas explain not only why there are developmental priorities at the bottom of Maslow's hierarchy, but also why we have rebuilt the top sections.

Life history researchers try to answer questions like, Why do some creatures spend longer or shorter periods developing their bodies before they start reproducing? For example, one species of tenrec (a small mammal found in Madagascar) starts reproducing five weeks after it is born. Elephants, on the other hand, take decades to reach sexual maturity. Once an animal matures, does it devote all its resources to one short reproductive burst, like a salmon, or does it spread those reproductive efforts over several episodes spanning months or years, like a tortoise? Does the animal allocate resources to caring for its offspring after they are born, and if so, how much care does it invest before leaving the offspring to fend for themselves? Some fish spray their eggs on a river bottom, for example, and that is the end of family togetherness. Not only do human beings help their children for decades, but they often help raise their grandchildren.

Life history theory is at heart a theory about biological economics. A central assumption of the theory is that every animal has a limited budget of resources. So as the animal develops, there are always trade-offs in when and how to allocate those scarce resources. Life histories can be divided into two major phases, each involving different
trade-offs. The first phase focuses on somatic effort, which refers to the energy every animal must expend to build its body (in economic terms, it is like making investments in a biological bank account). The later emphasizes reproductive effort (spending that bank account in ways that will replicate the individual's genes). Reproductive effort for some animals, like us, can be further divided into mating and parental care.

As in Maslow's pyramid, life history tasks fall into a natural hierarchy. Somatic efforts are at the base, because an animal cannot mate until it builds an adult body, and it cannot invest in parenting until it finds a mate. In any species that reproduces more than once, as we do, these goal systems do not replace one another. Adult animals need to divide their current resources among somatic effort (eating, drinking, and protecting themselves), attracting and keeping mates, and caring for offspring. Given that resources are inherently finite, time and energy invested in one activity must be taken from others. Time spent looking for new mating opportunities is time not spent parenting.

Why don't all animals start reproducing as soon as they can, like tenrecs, and have as many offspring as possible? The answer is that the goal is to produce
viable
offspring, and that goal might not be accomplished if the animal produces too many too soon. What is an optimal investment of reproductive effort? That depends on the features of the particular species and the particular ecological constraints faced by that species. For large mammals like elephants, females are not physically capable of producing and nurturing offspring until they are several years old. And for elephants, as for any species providing parental care, having too many offspring too soon decreases the chances that any of them will survive.

Humans are nearer to elephants than to tenrecs in our developmental life histories. We naked apes do not reach sexual maturity for over a decade. We devote the long nonreproductive period to developing our bodies, and those bodies do not even bring secondary
sexual organs on line until we need them. During that time, we are also feeding energy to our information-hungry brains as we learn the critical social skills that enable us to establish a network of friends and gain some respect from the other people in that network. Even after we reach sexual maturity, we do not just run off to the mating grounds, like other mammals do; we spend several years seeking a mate. Our ancestors would have then turned most of their energies to parenting, caring for those slow-maturing, large-brained offspring, who were much more likely to thrive if they had two parents looking after them.

It is these ideas from life history theory that inspired us to add three separate motivational systems to Maslow's hierarchy: mate acquisition, mate retention, and parenting. In the new pyramid, survival and social goals provide the foundation for acquiring mates. Getting a mate provides a foundation for forming a long-term bond, and this in turn undergirds the goal of producing offspring and then successfully raising them.

Maslow distinguished his humanistic approach to psychology from psychoanalysis and behaviorism, the two other major perspectives of his time. He argued that the psychoanalytic approach was flawed in its obsession with the negative and pathological aspects of human behavior, viewing people as driven by suppressed feelings of hostility and sexual desires—often directed at their mothers. The behaviorist approach was limited, in Maslow's view, by its assumption that we can discover the general principles of human behavior by studying rats. Maslow believed that psychologists had ignored the many positive traits of humans (such as artistic creativity and scientific curiosity) because those were not to be found in rats or in people too depressed to get out of bed in the morning.

At first glance, it may seem that an evolutionary approach, à la Freud, adopts a view of humans as driven by base sexual and aggressive instincts and, à la Skinner, emphasizes the commonalities between humans and rats. But first glances can be deceiving. The modern evolutionary approach is actually compatible with the two points Maslow liked to emphasize: (1) Human psychology is different from that of other animals, and (2) psychologists need to understand the positive as well as the negative aspects of human behavior.

Although an evolutionary perspective recognizes sexual and competitive motivations as undeniable aspects of human nature, it also emphasizes the importance of cooperation, love, and parental concern for survival in human groups. Again, it is important to reiterate: Sex is only a small part of human reproduction. We human beings devote immense effort to long courtship periods, and even for the sexiest among us, courtship usually involves more hours spent in platonic activities than in copulation. After initial courtship, humans devote a great deal of energy to maintaining their bonds and raising their children. And for the last few decades of their lives, human beings may devote great quantities of energy to helping their grandchildren.

As I will describe in the next few chapters, reproductive goals are the ultimate driving force behind much that is positive in human nature, such as creating music and poetry, devoting oneself to charitable endeavors, or working to improve the world for the next generation. Developmental psychologists have found that as people age, they tend to become increasingly concerned with the welfare of other people. Thus, Maslow's idea of self-actualization (which often involves pursuing what brings personal pleasure) is just a self-centered step on the way to a much higher goal—taking care of other people.

So the renovated pyramid of motivation helps us see the tight linkages between topics as disparate as sex and self-actualization, clarifying the structural connections between the muddy bricks down by the
gutter and the shinier ones up near the stars. And it points us to a higher meaning of life, lifting us above our immediate cravings and into the firmament of social interconnectedness.

There is one point on which Maslow, Freud, and Skinner agreed: that people are usually unaware of the underlying causes of their behavior. On this point, I will join the chorus. Remember the birds that migrate when the days start getting shorter; they have no idea of the connection between their urge for going and how it links up to finding food, nesting sites, and their ultimate reproductive success. Likewise, although people are good at making up explanations for their behaviors, we certainly do not consciously experience the links between those behaviors and their ultimate functional goals. At the functional level, though, everything we do is intimately linked together. Eating, drinking, and staying out of dangerous neighborhoods at night serve the higher goal of surviving long enough to mate. Playing nice with others and striving for their respect serve the higher goal of finding mates, and finding mates and trying to stay together with those mates serve the higher goal of having children. Taking care of the children serves the higher goal of increasing our inclusive fitness. Those connections are not conscious and they do not need to be, any more than the connections among day length, migration, and inclusive fitness are conscious in a scarlet tanager.