CHAPTER 11 SELF-DOMESTICATIONRead more at location 3634
Note: 11@@@@@@@@@@@@@@INTERNALIZZAZIONE DELLE NORME SOCIALI TRAMITE LA CULTURA. I MARCHI DELLA CULTURA. COORDINAMENTO. MARCHIARE LE XSONE NO FAKE. RAZZA&ETNIA. ALTRUISMO CULTURALE. GUERRA PRO SOCIAL Edit
Finally, Max wakes up, and it’s his turn to have a go at the objects. He uses the unfamiliar objects in perfectly sensible ways, but in ways that are different from how the model used them. This is the key moment in the experiment. The researchers carefully record the child’s reaction to Max as he uses the objects in divergent ways. Most children immediately protested against Max’s “aberrant” actionsRead more at location 3649
The psychologist Mike Tomasello and his collaborators have performed many experiments like these, all of which tell the same story.1 By observing others, young children spontaneously infer context-specific rules for social life and assume these rules are norms—rules that others should obey.Read more at location 3658
Deviations and deviants make children angry and motivate them to instill proper behavior in others.Read more at location 3661
The children’s peculiar motivations to reprimand Max’s actions are not imitated from adults in the experiment because no adult ever reprimands MaxRead more at location 3663
We live in a world governed by social rules,Read more at location 3666
Many of these rules are arbitrary, or seem arbitraryRead more at location 3668
that fostered success in intergroup competition.Read more at location 3675
From the gene’s-eye view, survival and reproduction would have increasingly depended on the abilities of one’s bearer (the individual) to acquire and navigate a social landscapeRead more at location 3675
Typically, in small-scale societies, as in many communities, the sanctioning of norm violators begins with gossip and public criticism, often through joking by specific relatives (as with Kula), and then intensifies to damage marital prospects and reduce access to trading and exchange partners.Read more at location 3678
wolves were domesticated into dogs by killing those that wouldn’t obey and refused to be trained,Read more at location 3681
When someone, for example, repeatedly fails to contribute to village feasts or community labor, or violates food or incest taboos, the person’s reputation suffers. A Yasawan’s reputation is like a shield that protects them from exploitation or harm by others,Read more at location 3684
Norm violators have their property (e.g., plates, matches, tools) stolen and destroyed while they are away fishing or visiting relatives in other villages;Read more at location 3687
Despite their selfish motivations, these actions sustain social norms, including cooperative ones,Read more at location 3691
Over our evolutionary history, the sanctions for norm violations and the rewards for norm compliance have driven a process of self domestication that has endowed our species with a norm psychology that has several components. First, to more effectively acquire the local norms, humans intuitively assume that the social world is rule governed, even if they don’t yet know the rules. The violation of these rules could and should have negative consequences. This outcome means that the behavior of others can be interpreted as being influenced by social rules.Read more at location 3698
at a young age, we readily develop cognitive abilities and motivations for spotting norm violations and avoiding or exploiting norm violators, as well as for monitoring and maintaining our own reputations.Read more at location 3702
Second, when we learn norms we, at least partially, internalize them as goalsRead more at location 3704
These rules aren’t about cooperation or helping others; they are just context-specific rules. Nevertheless, kids automatically infer that they are social norms and get mad when they are violated.Read more at location 3710
On preset rounds, the model wins some tokens and donates some of these token to the charity jar. Children experience one of three situations: (1) a generous person who puts lots of tokens in the charity jar, (2) a stingy person who puts only a few tokens in the jar, or (3) no demonstration. After the demonstration is complete, the child is left alone to play the bowling game and to donate to charity, if he or she wants. The results of many versions of this experiment demonstrate four key findings. First, children spontaneously imitated the model, becoming either more generous or more selfish depending on which model they saw.Read more at location 3717
Second, beyond merely the effects on their donations, children also imitated other aspects of the model’s behavior, including the model’s verbal statements.Read more at location 3723
Third, the effect of exposure to a model—generous or stingy—endures for weeks or months in retests.Read more at location 3725
But the effect does not extend to quite different contexts, those that don’t resembleRead more at location 3726
Finally, children readily imitate standards for self-reward or self-punishment and readily impose those standards on others.Read more at location 3727
Overall, children are not culturally learning to be altruistic in some general or dispositional sense; they are acquiring norms about proper behavior in the bowling game context, and those behaviors include proper donation sizes.Read more at location 3731
Many valuable insights about social norms and psychology come from the use of economic games. Properly interpreted, economic games are valuable toolsRead more at location 3740
economic games include the Prisoner’s Dilemma, Ultimatum Game, and Dictator Game.Read more at location 3742
After some preliminaries, the computer screen informs you that your ID has been randomly assigned to interact with another person in the room, but neither you nor this person will ever know the other’s identity.Read more at location 3745
As the proposer, it’s your job to divide $100 between you and the other person by making an offer between $0 and $100 (in increments of $1) to the responder, who knows everything, except your identity. The responder then has two choices: they can either accept your offer or reject it. If the responder accepts, he or she will receive your offer, and you get the remainder. If the responder rejects, you both get nothing (no money). This means you’ll go home with only your show-up fee.Read more at location 3749
If humans were money-maximizers, Ultimatum Game experiments should reveal many low offers and few rejections of nonzero offers. Not surprisingly, it turns out that this never happens in any human society.Read more at location 3757
By contrast, experiments with primates show little or no evidence of motivations besides narrow self-interest in dealing with strangers. Chimpanzees, for example, never reject in the Ultimatum Game.10Read more at location 3758
Interestingly, among people over about the age of 25, this willingness to offer 50% is mostly not driven by concerns about being rejected.Read more at location 3762
To explore this, we can turn the Ultimatum Game into a Dictator Game by removing the possibility of rejection.Read more at location 3763
If people were strictly self-interested, the proposer would give nothing to the otherRead more at location 3765
But, rather than giving $0, most Western adults continue to give half. This outcome suggests that people have an internalized equality norm toward strangers,Read more at location 3765
game play varies dramatically across societies. In modern industrialized societies, these experiments often measure social norms that regulate impersonal exchange and other social interactions, and evolved culturally to facilitate mutually beneficial interactions in large-scale societies with lots of strangers and anonymous interactions.Read more at location 3772
By contrast, the smallest-scale human societies tend not to offer very much nor reject low offers because they lack social norms for monetary exchanges with strangers or anonymous others.Read more at location 3775
However, when games are played repeatedly in the laboratory, participants begin to develop “lab-specific” social norms as they adapt to a new context.Read more at location 3777
Internalized social norms help guide us through complex social environments, allowing people to automatically—withoutRead more at location 3780
In this classic cooperative dilemma, individuals are placed into groups with three strangers for a single interaction. Each person gets $4 to start. Without knowing what others will do, they have to contribute between 0 and $4 to a common project. Whatever enters the project is doubled and then distributed equally among all four group members, regardless of what they contributed.Read more at location 3785
those aiming to maximize their payoff should contribute zero. However, most educated Westerners agree that—if asked—players should contribute all the money to the common project.Read more at location 3793
David Rand and his colleagues examined the relationship between the time people spent making their contribution decisions and the size of their contributions. Figure 11.2 shows one of Dave’s findings: the more rapidly participants made their decision, the higher their contribution wasRead more at location 3798
Dave ran participants through the same experiment again, but this time rather than letting them take however long they wanted, people were randomly put into one of three different treatments. They were alternatively (1) forced to answer in less than 10 seconds, (2) unconstrained as before, or (3) forced to delay their decision for 10 seconds and asked to reflect on it.Read more at location 3804
Not only do people from some societies get angry when they receive a low offer, but also the participants are quicker when deciding to reject low offers.Read more at location 3812
The power of norms in economic games first impressed me in 1995 when I was administering the Ultimatum Game among the Matsigenka, in the Peruvian Amazon. Lacking strong social norms specifying equality toward strangers in monetary exchanges, these people were happy to be offered any money in the game, didn’t expect proposers to offer half, and weren’t inclined to punish proposers for low offers.Read more at location 3821
these sentiments are common in the smallest-scale human societies.Read more at location 3824
in Amsterdam, Erik noticed that people waited at the “walk/don’t walk” lights on the street, even at broad intersections when no cars were in sight.Read more at location 3826
After this “rule-following” game, participants played economic games, like the Ultimatum, Dictator, and Public Goods Games. The results confirmed Erik’s suspicions: the amount of time people waited at the lights was associated with making more equal offers in the Dictator Game, contributing more in the Public Goods Game, and punishing low offers more frequently in the Ultimatum Game.Read more at location 3832
As both Adam Smith and Friedrich Hayek argued long before Erik and me, it’s our automatic norm following—not our self-interest or our cool rational calculation of future consequences—that often makes us do the “right thing” and allows our societies to work.Read more at location 3837
The effects of internalizing norms can be seen in our brains when economic games are combined with tools from neuroscience.Read more at location 3841
When people cooperate, give to charity, or punish norm violators in locally prescribed ways, the “rewards circuits” in their brains fire up.Read more at location 3842
Neurologically speaking, people “like” to comply with norms and punish norm violators.Read more at location 3844
Neurologically, lying requires most people, though presumably not lawyers or car salesmen (just kidding), to override their automatic or unreflective reactions by engaging those brain regions responsible for cognitive control and abstract reasoning.Read more at location 3847
violating a social norm requires mental effort and “higher” cognition.Read more at location 3848
Why would natural selection have built us to be norm internalizers?Read more at location 3853
helps us to more effectively and efficiently navigate our social world, a world in which some of the most frequent and dangerous pitfalls involve violating norms.Read more at location 3853
avoid short-term temptations, reduce cognitive or attentional loads, or more persuasively communicate our true social commitments to others.Read more at location 3855
I explained how cultural learning could overcome an innate aversion to chili peppers and other spices in order to reduce the dangers of meat-borne pathogens.Read more at location 3856
both children and adults are more skilled at solving logic problems when the latter are contextualized as norm violations.Read more at location 3862
In both stories, they are told about some mice that go out to play in the evening. Some of these mice tend to squeak while playing, which attracts the neighborhood cat, who comes and tries to catch them. In one version, the children hear a descriptive claim, which states that all squeaky mice stay in the house in the evening. In the other version, they are told about a social norm prescribing that all squeaky mice must stay in the house. Now for the test. The children are placed in front of the mouse house, with ten yellow rubber mice inside the house. They are also shown that “squeaky” and “quiet” mice can only be distinguished by squeezing the mice and listening for a squeak. Then, evening arrives at the mouse house, and four mice leave the house to play in the backyard. Depending on which version of the story they heard, children were tasked either with (1) checking to see if the descriptive claim was true or (2) locating norm violators. The answer is the same in both cases: you have to check all the mice in the backyard, not in the house. Checking the mice in the house tells you little, since quiet mice might be in the house in either case, and you don’t know how many of each kind of mice there are. When checking for norm violations, most three- and four-year-olds decided to check the mice in the backyard. However, when verifying the descriptive statement, most of the children did not think to check the backyard mice.19 This suggests that setting up the task to cue norm psychology made the children better at solving the logic problem.Read more at location 3867
individuals demonstrate or signal their subordinate status to a dominant group member.Read more at location 3881
However, as the anthropologist Dan Fessler has persuasively argued, shame in humans emerges when someone violates a social normRead more at location 3883
Norm violators display shame to their communities for communicative reasons that parallel those that drive subordinates to display shame in the presence of more dominant animals.Read more at location 3885
shame display reaf-firms their acceptance of the local social order.Read more at location 3886
The same kind of coevolutionary process may have provided some of the basic mental tools for assigning reputations to individuals as well as certain default settings and motivations for judging things like harm, fairness, and status.Read more at location 3889
babies prefer puppets who hurt previously antisocial persons (those spotted harming other puppets) over those who help antisocial types.Read more at location 3896
babies already possess some of the key reputational and motivational elements that sustain social normsRead more at location 3899
we became norm learners with prosocial biases, norm adherers internalizing key motivations,Read more at location 3902
When a group of chimpanzees bumps into a lone individual from a neighboring group, hostility erupts immediatelyRead more at location 3904
If the group is large enough, they will likely attack and kill the unlucky traveler.Read more at location 3905
Tribal members, or co-ethnics, share a dialect or language and often many other obvious markers of membership,Read more at location 3908
Less obvious is that co-ethnics tend to share a set of social norms, beliefs, and worldviews that govern their livesRead more at location 3909
In many human societies past and present, lone travelers could easily find themselves fleeing for their lives because they have encountered a large party of strangers—as I discussed among the Inuit.Read more at location 3912
Here’s the idea: cultural evolution gave rise to a variety of different social norms, so different groups became increasingly characterized by different practices and expectations about such things as marriage, exchange, sharing, and rituals. Then, natural selection acting on genes responded to this world governed by social norms by endowing individuals with the cognitive abilities and motivations to help them better navigate and adaptively learn.Read more at location 3918
For example, a boy and girl from different ethnic groups might fall in love and carry on a romance for years only to find out that a marriage is impossible, since his family demands a dowry but her family is looking for a bride priceRead more at location 3926
However, social norms are tricky because they are often hidden from view until it’s too late.Read more at location 3929
For example, you might marry a lovely man from the Horn of Africa, only to find out years later that he had your eight-year-old daughter ritually circumcised while visiting his family.Read more at location 3930
disgusted by the idea of clitoris-bearing women. In this part of Africa, as well as in the Middle East, female genital cutting is a longstanding tradition and is associated with purity and fertility.Read more at location 3932
the cultural transmission pathways of social norms are often the same as those for other more observable markers, like language, dialect, or tattooing practices.Read more at location 3935
The best markers are those that are difficult to fake.Read more at location 3938
For example, a Gentile physician living in Manhattan might place a mezuzah outside her office in hopes of attracting or retaining more (Jewish) patients.Read more at location 3940
language and dialect are better markers because they are not easy to get right unless one grows up in a certain place or within a certain social group.Read more at location 3943
We’ve already seen (in chapter 4) the evidence that infants and young children preferentially learn tool use and food preferences from those who share their language or dialect.Read more at location 3946
At 5 to 6 months of age, infants preferentially watch those who share mom’s accent.Read more at location 3950
my wife, Natalie, was conducting her PhD dissertation research among Chaldeans in Michigan. Chaldean immigrants from Northern Iraq have been gradually clustering in metropolitan Detroit over the last century. By the late 1990s, this ethnic group had come to dominate the small-grocery-store business sector of the city. By forming tight social networks, hiring mostly relatives or fellow Chaldeans, and preferentially using Chaldean doctors, lawyers, and other professionals, this group has consistently prospered in an often-challenging economic environment (it’s Detroit).Read more at location 3954
Speaking Chaldean, the language spoken by Jesus, as any Chaldean will remind you, is very important for establishing one’s Chaldean identity.Read more at location 3959
By using a variety of techniques on infants, such as strapping boards to the head, people have created distinctive and beautiful (to them) cranial forms, including flat, round, and conically shaped heads.Read more at location 3966
Because cranial reformation must begin in infancy and requires serious investments by one’s family, it’s nearly impossible to fake this cueRead more at location 3968
In this world, knowing a person’s dialect would have allowed one to predict with some confidence many other aspects of his or her preferences, motivations, and beliefs, because dialects get transmitted along the same learning pathways as social norms, beliefs, and worldviews.Read more at location 3975
determining their markers, and making generalizations about their members using category-based inductionRead more at location 3977
if you learn something about one member of a group—for example, he doesn’t eat pigs—you tend to assume that this applies to all members.Read more at location 3978
Cognitive scientists call these abilities our folksociological capacities.Read more at location 3981
Max speaks native-accented German, but Henri speaks French-accented German. Young German children protested much more when Max—their co-ethnic as cued by accent—plays the game differently from the model than when Henri did.Read more at location 3984
First, intergroup competition will tend to favor the spread of any tricks for expanding what members of a group perceive as their tribe.Read more at location 3989
Second, this approach means that the in-group versus out-group view taken by psychologists misses a key point: not all groups are equally salient or thought about in the same way. Civil wars, for example, strongly trace to ethnically or religiously marked differences, and not to class, income, or political ideology.31 This is so because our minds are prepared to carve the social world into ethnic groups, but not into classes or ideologies.Read more at location 3991
psychological machinery that underpins how we think about “race” actually evolved to parse ethnicity, not race.Read more at location 3996
Ethnic-group membership is assigned based on culturally transmitted markers, like language or dialect.Read more at location 3997
racial groups are marked and assigned according to perceived morphological traits, like skin color or hair form, which are genetically transmitted.Read more at location 3998
racial cues can automatically and unconsciously “trick” our psychology into thinking that different ethnic groups exist.Read more at location 4001
Underlining this point is the fact that racial cues do not have cognitive priority over ethnic cues: when children or adults encounter a situation in which accent or language indicate “same ethnicity” but skin color indicates “different race,” the ethnolinguistic markers trump the racial markers.Read more at location 4003
children pick as a friend someone of a different race who speaks their dialectRead more at location 4005
Why Kin-Based Altruism and Reciprocity Are So Strong in HumansRead more at location 4014
what’s interesting is how potent kinship and reciprocity are in humans compared to other species.Read more at location 4017
For kin-based altruism to emerge, individuals have to be able to identify when and whom to help;Read more at location 4019
The cultural evolution of social norms can strengthen the power of kin-based altruism by creating social norms that point to specific situations and relatives who need help.Read more at location 4022
Brothers will be naturally inclined to help each other, but brothers monitored by a community possessing norms about brotherly responsibilities will be even more inclined to help each other.Read more at location 4024
sanctions for norm violations can then strengthen natural selection’sRead more at location 4025
Social norms can galvanize reciprocity in ways that make it more enduring and applicable to more domains.Read more at location 4028
Failure to meet my obligations will impact my reputation broadly. In one well-studied case among the Gebusi, in New Guinea, my failure to meet my sister exchange obligations would increase the chances that I would, at some future date, be found guilty of witchcraft and then executed by the community.Read more at location 4033
if I defect on our reciprocity relationship, I risk not only the end of our relationship but possibly my own end.Read more at location 4036
People from communities that had experienced more war-related violence, even if their own households had not experienced any violence, property loss, or displacement, were more likely to cooperate with their fellow villagers in the Public Goods Game.Read more at location 4048
None of the communities unaffected by the war established new local organizations, such as farming cooperatives or women’s groups. By contrast, 40% of those communities affected by the war had subsequently established new organizations.Read more at location 4053
During hundreds of thousands of years, intergroup competition spread an immense diversity of social norms that galvanized groups to defend their communities; created risk-sharing networks to deal with environmental shocks like drought, floods, and famines;Read more at location 4058
the survival of individuals and their groups increasingly depended on adhering to those group-beneficial social norms, especially when war loomed,Read more at location 4060
intergroup competition favors cultural practices that monitor individuals more closely and sanction norm violatorsRead more at location 4063
cues of intergroup competition should promote greater solidarityRead more at location 4067
Though historians have long speculated that war influences our prosocial motivations, several recent studies, including my opening account of the Nepal work, have now rigorously documentedRead more at location 4069
The results reveal that the experience of war has its maximum impact on sociality during a developmental window that opens during middle childhood, at roughly age 7, and remains open into early adulthood (roughly age 20). If war is experienced during this age range, it sharpens people’s motivations to adhere to their egalitarian norms, but only for their in-groups.Read more at location 4090
findings suggest that the experience of World War II in their developmental window may have forged America’s Greatest Generation, permanently elevating their national commitment and public spirit.Read more at location 4101
when disaster threatens and uncertainty reigns, people cling more tightly to their community’s social norms, including their rituals and supernatural beliefs, because it’s these social norms that have long allowed human communities to adhere, cooperate, and survive.Read more at location 4104
This process gives rise to our collective brains.Read more at location 4111
