Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind (29 page)

The principle of information reveals more about our evolved psychology when we consider what it says about how we should behave when we don’t know much about another person. By “should” here, we mean behave in a way that will serve our interests. Not knowing the other person well means that
i
is less than 1. Following the rule, it says we should never cooperate when
i
= 0. From our definition of
i
, when
i
= 0, you have no information about the person, and this means you are just as likely to help a non-cooperator as a fellow cooperator. For example, parents often tell their children, “Don’t trust strangers.” There is no particular reason to believe that a stranger is someone who will take advantage of you (a stranger to you is, after all, familiar to someone else). But not knowing what strangers are like, this has probably been a useful rule to follow in our past, and it is the rule the principle of information predicts.

The situation that is most relevant to our everyday lives is when
i
lies somewhere between 0 and 1. When
i
is a small number, it tells us that we are not certain whether the person we are helping is a cooperator. A small
i
also makes it hard for
i
×
b
>
c
, and so the rule tells us to avoid cooperating with people we don’t know very much about. The reason is that in effect the benefit you provide has to be discounted by the likelihood that it might go to someone who does not share your altruistic disposition. A more optimistic view is that the rule tells us our best strategy is maybe to cooperate but only on small matters. That way if we are wrong about the person, they don’t gain much at our expense. This gives cooperation a way of gaining a foothold and then larger acts of cooperation can follow if the information you gain leads you to believe someone is a cooperator.

The principle of information can be seen as a psychological disposition that puts great emphasis on identifying traits in others that we think tell us something about the likelihood that they are a fellow cooperator. It might be why we are so sensitive to such things as how people dress or speak, and what their manners are like. These are not necessarily good indicators of what someone is really like, but natural selection will have favored any tendencies with a high enough accuracy rate that they have worked in the past. Our simple model tells us we don’t even have to be accurate; we just have to be more likely to help someone who is an altruist than someone who is not. Natural selection seems to be telling us that it might often be useful to “judge a book by its cover,” at least if that is all you have to go by. Of course, in any given circumstance, other factors can override these rules. But our all too easily felt prejudicial emotions might just be natural selection’s way of making sure we follow an evolutionary rule that worked for our ancestors. If in doubt, the rule says, it is better to avoid the risk. Prejudicial emotions have no place in the modern world, but wariness of strangers or of people unlike ourselves might have deep origins in the evolution of cooperation, not so different from what we saw with the fire ants.

Incidentally, evolutionary biologists will recognize the principle of information and its simple rule as the same one that governs our altruism toward relatives. One of the most famous rules of evolutionary biology is called Hamilton’s rule, named for the same William Hamilton who first thought up greenbeard genes. The rule says we should help relatives when
r
×
b
>
c
. Here
b
and
c
are the same as for greenbeards but
r
is now your genetic relatedness to someone else, rather than the “information” you have about them. By “relatedness” we mean roughly the percentage of genes you have in common by virtue of sharing parents, grandparents, or other ancestors. Hamilton’s rule tells us why siblings (
r
= 1/2) are more likely to help each other than they are to help their cousins (
r
= 1/8). Hamilton’s rule also tells us why strangers (assume
r
= 0) are unlikely to help each other, and why clones (such as the cells in your body,
r
= 1) are only too happy to assist each other.

In fact, the connection between the greenbeard principle of information and Hamilton’s rule is closer than we might expect. The quantity
i
in the principle of information can be thought of as your
relatedness
to someone else on the altruism gene (or idea) itself. The greenbeard is just a model of one gene or idea helping
its
relatives and the green beard is how it recognizes them! You might be unrelated to someone else on all your other genes, but you just might share this one gene (or idea). If we think about it, the familiar emotions of nationalism might be how our impulse to act altruistically toward certain others whom we think share our dispositions manifests itself. If this sounds familiar to some of the discussion in Chapter 2 about our “special and limited” form of cultural nepotism, that is so. The green beard is a way of identifying someone who is related to you at your altruism locus.

We should not be lulled by all this discussion of cooperation into thinking that the greenbeard style of altruism simply helps others. Our cooperation evolves because altruists effectively surround themselves with other altruists and thereby get back as much or more than they put in. In fact, the self-interested nature of greenbeard altruism is revealed most clearly when we realize that once cooperation spreads and becomes the norm in society, a new kind of cooperator can arise that is less discriminating than the greenbeards. This cooperator doesn’t look for others like itself, it just indiscriminately helps everyone. We can think of them as
Good Samaritans
—they are kind without first judging what someone else is like. If cooperation is widespread anyway, the Good Samaritans will fare no worse than the greenbeard altruists. Good Samaritans might even do slightly better by virtue of not wasting time and effort trying to work out who is a cooperator and who is not.

However, the Good Samaritans create a problem for the altruists who follow the greenbeard rule. The presence of Good Samaritans makes the society once again vulnerable to selfish or non-cooperating people who can flourish by taking advantage of Good Samaritans. These could even be other green beards who might have a tendency to cheat when they can get away with it. Selfish people will grow in numbers, but at the expense of the Good Samaritans, whose numbers will now dwindle. The greenbeard altruists on the other hand are less vulnerable, just so long as they continue to recognize each other even just a little bit better than they recognize the reemerged selfish cheaters. If they can recognize the cheats, they will once again drive them out, or at least down to low numbers. At this point Good Samaritans can reappear, and this cyclical process will go on forever, with societies always containing a majority of greenbeard cooperators, but some numbers also of Good Samaritans and selfish individuals.

This tells us two things. One is that greenbeard altruists—and by implications ourselves—are not so much “good guys” in white hats who help everyone as “shrewd guys” who direct their aid strategically. When it comes to cooperation, we are far more like venture capitalists than Good Samaritans. We are willing to invest in other altruists like ourselves because we derive returns from having them around. Our investment is in the society of cooperators, not in anyone in particular. Cooperation itself becomes something like a “common good,”—a resource, like common grazing land, that everyone benefits from but that must continually be replenished to avoid being used up. The second thing we learn is that our cultural setting will always strongly favor those who are vigilant about and good at detecting selfish cheats because they continually deplete the common good of the cooperative society. Good Samaritans may inadvertently imperil our societies by helping people who may not always be deserving of their aid. It is no secret that the Mother Teresas of the world are often treated with a hint of ambivalence, and this could be one reason why. Another we will come to later on.

REPUTATION AND THE GREEN BEARD

SO FAR,
we have ignored a nagging problem. If we are like venture capitalists when it comes to cooperation, how do we know whom to invest in? The idea of a green beard provides a useful image, but what if people could produce it without actually being a cooperator. These people would attract all the benefits of being a cooperator without ever having to pay the costs of being altruistic toward others. This is one of the failings of the greenbeard idea, and not just in the setting of human cooperation. If anyone can grow a green beard, then there is no way to tell altruists from selfish cheaters and altruism of the greenbeard variety will never evolve.

This criticism raises the problem of designing a signal—the green beard—that others can trust as a reliable and honest indicator that you are an altruist, and not a selfish social cheat. How
do
we know whom to cooperate with, apart from looking for clues of shared values? This is the same problem we encountered in Chapter 4 in trying to understand one possible role of extreme religious beliefs and practices. Our interest there was how observers can use these extreme acts to gauge someone’s commitment to a group. Amotz Zahavi’s handicap principle and Thorsten Veblen’s idea of conspicuous consumption showed us that it is precisely because some of the things that animals and people do are wasteful and even reckless that we know whatever they are doing says something believable about them.

For instance, a peacock’s giant tail tells us that he is healthy because it is so costly and wasteful to produce. Peahens know that only the fittest males can afford to make the biggest tails: less fit males can try but will probably die from the burdens of their giant tails. Similarly, we speculated that one possible function of religious belief was to signal your commitment to the group—religious beliefs and practices such as self-flagellation, memorizing scripture, or fasting can be costly, and for that reason can become believable signals. We also instinctively recognize Veblen’s idea in the conspicuous consumption of wealthy people. A huge diamond engagement ring or an expensive car have little functional value over other rings or cars, and that is precisely why they are good signals that someone is wealthy—how else could they have so much money to waste? They are useful signals because they are expensive ways of being useless.

Zahavi and Veblen even went a step further and often emphasized that the best signals were those that were directly relevant to what an animal was trying to tell you. One of Zahavi’s favorite examples was the “stotting” behavior of some gazelle species when being chased by lions. As the lion pursues the gazelle, the gazelle punctuates its escape with stots, a series of little pronks or prongs that involve jumping straight up into the air, legs stiff, and lifting all four feet off the ground. Why would they do such a ridiculous thing? Wouldn’t it be far better for the gazelle to put all its energy and time into running away? About the only worse things for the gazelle would be to stop running altogether, or turn around and run
at
the lion. Another of Zahavi’s examples is the curious behavior of the skylark, which when being pursued for its life by the predatory merlin seemingly looks over its shoulder and begins to sing.

All of these actions use up the very resource an animal needs to escape or protect itself, and that makes them informative about the animal’s abilities. The gazelle is telling the lion that it is such a fast runner it can afford to waste valuable time by jumping vertically into the air, and yet still get away. The skylark is telling the merlin that it can waste its precious breath. Both actions are directly relevant to what the animal is trying to signal to the pursuer—fast running, or strong lungs for flying. If they are lying about their abilities, these actions are the ones that will get them killed. And indeed, not all gazelles stot, nor do all skylarks sing at the approach of a merlin, but as Zahavi would expect, those that do are more likely to get away. To understand the gravity of stotting and singing while being chased, consider that next time you are chased by a mugger, you punctuate your escape with little jumps up into the air, and even occasionally burst into song. Veblen was fond of saying that gentlemen carried walking sticks to show that they could get by without the use of one of their hands. And of course if you are wealthy, what better way to show off how much money you have than to use it up on wasteful
grands projets
such as a folly in your garden, or a private art collection? Indeed, it is sometimes said that the perfect garden folly is the one that drives you bankrupt. Why? Because to go bankrupt shows you can make the money back some other day.

The handicap and conspicuous consumption theories tell us something remarkably simple and yet profound about how altruists can go about identifying other altruists. If you want to know who is an altruist, look at who is behaving most altruistically! Altruistic acts are by definition costly because they aid someone else at your expense. They can be reckless, such as jumping into a river to save someone’s life or pulling someone from a burning house. And they can be wasteful of your time and money. If earning the badge of altruist takes enough effort, then anyone who puts in the effort to do so is, by definition, an altruist.

This gives us insights into all the peculiar little acts of altruism that we routinely perform in society, such as holding doors, standing aside for people, giving up seats on buses or trains, helping the elderly, contributing to charity boxes, or even risking our lives to save animals. It is not just that we are “nice.” Once it is up to others to grant you the badge of being an altruist, altruists have no choice but to try to stand out from the crowd, and it falls on you to do whatever you can to convince your societal audience to grant you the label. The value of cooperation means that something of an altruism arms race arises, forcing would-be altruists to acquire “long tails” of altruism to compete with other altruists trying to do the same. To compete at the very highest levels in the altruism competition, we have to demonstrate something akin to altruistic conspicuous consumption—we have to become altruism
show-offs
—by doing all the usual things, but also by volunteering our time, joining local community projects, tithing to a church, helping others in distress, or making large contributions to philanthropic organizations.