Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

Frans de Waal has found in his groundbreaking studies of primate politics that with the rise of the capacity of lower-status individuals to form coalitions, “alpha” males and females must rely on social intelligence to acquire and retain their privileged positions. Pure intimidation displays—chest pounding, random fang-bearing charges, throwing stones, and din making—are and were still stock-in-trade for alpha chimps and bonobos and our human predecessors, but new skills were required. Higher-status primates spend a great deal of their day smoothing over the rough edges of their group’s social existence. They are the ones who are likely to mediate conflicts, for example by bringing adversaries into physical contact with one another and encouraging grooming activities that reduce conflict. They are the ones who make sure that more equitable allocations of resources occur.

My own research with humans paints a similar picture. We have studied who quickly rises in male and female hierarchies in groups of children and young adults. We find that it is not the domineering, muscle-flexing, fear-inspiring, backstabbing types who gain elevated status in the eyes of their peers (apologies to Machiavelli). Instead, it is the socially intelligent individuals who advance the interests of other group members (in the service of their own self-interest) who rise in social hierarchies. Power goes to those who are socially engaged. It is the young adults and children who brim with social energy, who bring people together, who can tell a good joke or tease in ways that playfully identify inappropriate actions, or soothe another in distress, who end up at the top. The literature on socially rejected children finds that bullies, who resort to aggression, throwing their weight around, and raw forms of intimidation and dominance, in point of fact, are outcasts and low in the social hierarchy. Power and status are inevitable facets of hominid social life but are founded on social intelligence more than Social Darwinism.

THE PERPETUAL CONFLICT OF BEING

 

Lest you suspect that our Cro-Magnon anthropologist suffers from a Pollyanaish view of her own kind—a universal bias of most human groups—it is wise to consider her fourth generalization. Here she would observe that almost every waking second of early hominid social life is pervaded by continual and often painful conflict.

There would be discussion of obvious within-sex conflicts, for example, over mates and resources. Early hominid social organization increasingly came to revolve around the competition between males for access to females. The same applies to females, who, as Darwin long ago surmised, adorn and beautify themselves in an arms race of beauty to attract resource-rich mates.

This logic of competing interests extends to parent-offspring relations, as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy brilliantly shows in Mother Nature. Offspring make competing demands upon parents. As a result, parents are required to make strategic and often disarmingly utilitarian judgments about which offspring to devote resources to, and, in extreme circumstancs such as famine (or in today’s political climate, civil war), which to abandon.

This parent-offspring conflict even extends to mother-fetus relations, as Harvard evolutionary biologist David Haig has demonstrated at the genetic and physiological levels. Many of the pathologies of human pregnancy—hypertension and diabetes, for example—have been newly understood from the perspective of the fetus’s making self-serving demands upon the mother’s supply of nutrients, at considerable cost to the mother.

Siblings are not safe from perpetual, and occasionally mortal, conflict. I remember late one night preparing for a lecture on family dynamics and moral development, having just put my daughters, Natalie, then 4, and Serafina, then 2, to bed. As they peacefully slept in their splayed-out positions, as if dropped out of space onto their beds next to one another, I encountered a fact that left me in shoulder-slumping laughter and tears. In an observational study of American families, four-and two-year-old siblings were observed to engage in conflicts—eye poking, name calling, hair pulling, toy grabbing, arm biting, cheek scratching—every eleven minutes of waking existence.