If human societies thrive when people cooperate and deteriorate under conflict, then after 100,000+ years of human evolution, why haven't anti-social behavioral traits been eliminated?
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Image Source: pixabay.com, License: CC0, Public Domain Introduction
In recent weeks, two phenomena have occupied my attention. Although these phenomena seem to be unrelated, I think there is a connection. The first phenomenon is the flood of celebrity sexual misconduct allegations that have permeated the news in the weeks since the NY Times' Harvey Weinstein exposé, and the second phenomenon is the abusive self and paid voting that happens here at steemit.
Unfortunately, I don't remember where, but some years ago, I read an article that asked a question that caught my attention, and which seems to link these two types of behavior. The question was something like this:
If human societies thrive when people cooperate and deteriorate under conflict, then after 100,000+ years of human evolution, why haven't anti-social behavioral traits been eliminated?
Today, I thought I'd do some reading to gain some insight into that question. In the following sections, I'll describe some of what I found. This is definitely not exhaustive coverage of the question, just what I've managed to pull together from a couple hours of web searches and reading. Topics that I'll cover in this essay will include a brief description of evolutionary psychology, descriptions of three models which have been used to study the question, namely Chicken (the "Hawk-Dove" game), the Prisoner's Dilemma, and Ultimatum games, then I'll close with some thoughts of my own.
What is evolutionary psychology?
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Image Source: pixabay.com, License: CC0, Public Domain According to Stanford University's Encyclopedia of Philosophy, like much of cognitive science, evolutionary psychology is a field of study that approaches cognition as the study of internal psychological mechanisms. Evolutionary psychology's distinguishing characteristic, however, is the understanding that these mechanisms were adapted through successive applications of natural selection.
Cosmides and Tooby, at UC Santa Barbara's Center for Evolutionary Psychology, provide the following principles of evolutionary psychology:
- Principle 1. The brain is a physical system. It functions as a computer. Its circuits are designed to generate behavior that is appropriate to your environmental circumstances.
- Principle 2. Our neural circuits were designed by natural selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our species' evolutionary history.
- Principle 3. Consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg; most of what goes on in your mind is hidden from you. As a result, your conscious experience can mislead you into thinking that our circuitry is simpler that (sic) it really is. Most problems that you experience as easy to solve are very difficult to solve -- they require very complicated neural circuitry
- Principle 4. Different neural circuits are specialized for solving different adaptive problems.
- Principle 5. Our modern skulls house a stone age mind.
They further claim that these principles can be used to gain an understanding of most aspects of human behavior, including: "sex and sexuality, how and why people cooperate, whether people are rational, how babies see the world, conformity, aggression, hearing, vision, sleeping, eating, hypnosis, schizophrenia and on and on." An interesting observation is that in this framework, our cognition is adapted to solve the problems of our ancestors, not necessarily our own problems.
Stanford's Encyclopedia of Philosophy further argues that evolutionary psychology views the human mind as, "massively modular." As I understand it, this implies that the mind is not viewed as a general purpose computer, but rather a massive collection of special purpose computers that have evolved to solve specific types of problems.
Evolutionary psychology and the broader subject areas of evolutionary biology and evolutionary game theory have been used to study questions of cooperation, competition, and aggression. One way to investigate these questions is through the use of models and simulations. Some of these will be described in the next section.
Models for studying cooperation and anti-social behavior
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Image Source: pixabay.com, License: Public Domain, CC0 I came across three articles that will inform this section of the essay. In a 1997 paper, Antisocial personality disorder: An evolutionary game theory analysis, Colman and Wilson described the Hawk-Dove game, commonly known as "Chicken", and used it to investigate anti-social personality disorder (APD). In his 2013 article, Evolution Does Not Reward Selfish and Mean People, Christopher Bergland summarized the findings from Evolutionary instability of zero-determinant strategies demonstrates that winning is not everything by Adami & Hintze. That Nature article, in turn, linked back to Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma contains strategies thatdominate any evolutionary opponent, by Press & Dyson. Both of those articles discussed simulations using the Prisonner's Dilemma (PD), and Press & Dyson further noted that some instances of PD are equivalent to ultimatum games.
Chicken: The Hawk-Dove game
An interesting note is that Colman & Wilson specifically said that the prisonner's dilemma is not a suitable model for studying antisocial personality disorder. They list a number of reasons for this, but for this discussion, I'll mention two. First, the percentage of population with APD is known to be a stable percentage around 2%, but the prisonner's dilemma does not converge on that result. Second, the prisonner's dilemma does not adequately model the predatory nature of APD.
Instead, the authors propose the Hawk-Dove game, or Chicken, which is modelled after the well-known real world game of chicken where two players engage in a dangerous behavior, and the first one to yield loses. The game was illustrated in the tractor scene of the 1984 movie, Footloose. In this game, the scoring is described in the following diagram:
The game of Chicken is defined by the payout order:
- Dangerous move when opponent cooperates.
- Both players cooperate.
- Cooperate when opponent plays dangerous move.
- Both players play dangerous moves.
The authors provide this diagram illustrating their results,
They find that the model converges to the place where the two lines intersect, which is close to the real world observation of 2%.
In this model, antisocial behavior becomes a strategic niche, where it is sensible for some players - but not too many - to develop antisocial tendencies. If this model represents reality, then Darwinian evolution would be on a perpetual self-correcting course to maintain the level of APD near the equilibrium point.
Prisonner's Dilemma
The articles by Adami & Hintze, and Press & Dyson study the prisoner's dilemma purely as a mathematical phenomenon. It's only in Bergland's summary that the findings get extended to people, so in light of Colman & Wilson's discussion of PD, that extension may be an overreach.
The prisoner's dilemma is a well-known two person game simulating a police investigation. In the scenario, two people are separated from one another and questioned. If the players both remain silent (known as cooperating), they earn the best score. If one implicates the other (known as defecting) while the other keeps silent, then both players are penalized, but the cooperator is penalized more than the defector. If both defect, both are penalized - more than the cooperator but less severely than the defector in the case of a split decision. Wikipedia illustrates the scoring like this:
Press & Dyson found that there is a class of strategies, known as zero-determinant strategies, where one player can unilaterally determine the other player's score and set up an extortion scheme where the second player's best interest lies with submitting to the extortion.
However, Adami & Hintze found that these strategies are not evolutionarily stable, so they would not be expected to survive through numerous generations.
Ultimatum games
An ultimatum game is a game in which one player dictates the split of the payout to all other players. As noted above, with the zero-determinate strategies from Press & Dyson, the Prisoner's dilemma game collapses into an ultimatum game.
My thoughts
Antisocial behavior can be found in many places, from crime to sexual misconduct to abusive behavior on steemit.
I'll never forget the first time I read about the prisoner's dilemma in Scientific American, sometime in the late eighties or early nineties. It was a truly amazing concept, and I assume that many other people have been similarly impressed by it, and it's tempting to try to apply it to all sorts of situations. However, for those of us who have not formally studied game theory, it is starting to seem like maybe there's a tendency to overfit it. (As they say, "When all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.")
The results form Adami & Hintze are mathematically elegant, but if - as claimed by Bergland - they describe a world where antisocial behavior is eliminated by evolution, then the mere fact that antisocial behavior continues to exist demonstrates that those equations don't describe our world. To be fair, it was Bergland's summary, not the primary papers that mapped those results from the domain of mathematics to the domain of human behavior, but I think the approach by Colman & Wilson is probably more useful for this particular question because they found a model that actually fits the observation.
Once they understood the nature of the model, they were also able to deduce some interesting possible social implications:
- There exists an inflection point in every society above which cooperative behavior is more profitable and below which dangerous behavior is more profitable.
- On average, the gain experienced by the antisocial player must be small relative to the loss experienced by the cooperator. They give the example of a mugger who gains only a few dollars, but might kill his victim.
- If APD is genetic, the model may explain why reproductive competition has been more intense for men than women for large parts of evolutionary history.
- If APD is cultural, then removing offenders from society will not reduce antisocial behavior in society, because new players will move in to fill that strategic niche. Instead, the policy goal should be to move the inflection point by raising the rewards for cooperation, and reducing the harm from antisocial behavior.
Circling back to the introduction, if this Hawk-Dove model describes real world human behavior, then it may explain why sexual misconduct continues to be a problem for generation after generation in human society, and why a small number of offenders have such a wide-ranging impact on a large number of victims. It may also explain why some people are driven to abusive voting behaviors on steemit, even when they know that it may have a long term negative value on their holdings.
On a positive note, it also tells us that both situations will find levels of equilibrium and that there are things we can do to lower the equilibrium level.
One final thought is that there may be a reason why the propensity for antisocial behavior is maintained. At the societal level, this type of behavior may have helped our ancestors' tribes in the competition for scarce resources, and it might be useful in modern society for defensive and offensive militaristic endeavors.
As a general rule, I up-vote comments that demonstrate "proof of reading".
Thank you for your time and attention.
You are plagiarized here.
Thank you. I flagged that post.
its a basic for survival, where you can have no guilt for anti-social behaviour you live in the jungle if every one is normal how do you stand out to get a mate, thats the sex angle survival means that you will do anything to cheat lie steal to feed while others follow the norm.
But that only works if enough people can be counted on to follow the norm. If too many people are following the deviant strategy, then the level of mistrust rises, and it's not a successful strategy any more.
Reminds me of Jon Snow in the last Game of Thrones:
Would social anxiety have any evolutionary benefit?
Yes, one could argue that it leads to higher focus and skill development in activities that demand that attention. In this argument, social anxiety becomes a side effect of high focus and not an intrinsic characteristic of the individual. Try building something or drawing something with acute detail, you will be zoned out. When you come back to daily things, the social world would have moved on. This could make one feel that anxiety. So in a way it does have a benefit.
I like this example. Thank you for your input.
Fair point regarding social anxiety. Also post resteemed @remlaps by your friendly @eastcoaststeem
Intuitively, you wouldn't think so, but then why does it still exist? I don't know, but it might also be an interesting question to research.
I agree.
No
Yes, people with social anxiety understand people and their motives better. They're more intelligent. If I walk through a city with a man with social anxiety, I'll be kept safer than if I'm with a man who is carefree or oblivious.
Good answer! Over awareness of the environment would be an advantage in that situation. Thank you for your input.
Thanks, that was the best read today.
Don't you think, some high functioning sociopaths oblivious of the social distractions and all the complexities created by our "social well being" can do miracles.
There are definitely cases where people can ignore social niceties and make significant accomplishments. I was thinking more of predatory behavior, though. It goes beyond ignoring distraction to actively harming others. Inside a society, I'm not sure how valuable that is. As I noted in the article, though, the propensity for that sort of behavior could conceivably be useful in "tribal" conflict situations, or even in modern warfare.
just imho but i think you are a bit too clinical and making a mountain out of a molehill. self and paid voting is not necessarily "abusive". it isn't harm anyone, it is only perceived as harmful. the sexual abuse cases coming out may be more to do with political dramatization, power plays and changing social norms than what you term as "anti-social" behavior. is the behavior appropriate? no. is there a need for a huge public court case and media circus? no. one harm does not excuse another. i can exhibit antisocial behavior of not saying hello in the morning (which oddly stresses out many people). it is the definition of something as "anti-social" that is the problem. why has bad behavior not been cut out thru natural selection? pretty damned clear cut. we have the most rich and powerful people in government exhibiting anti-social behavior, and they are awarded for their bad behavior. if our own society chooses to accept anti-social behavior as the norm, the trait will only be enhanced.
Thank you for your reply.
I agree with this. It's not necessarily abusive, but it can be. For this article, I was thinking just about the subset of that behavior that is abusive.
I also agree that the definition of the word "antisocial" is sort of slippery, but I was thinking of predatory forms of behavior that go beyond ignoring social amenities to actively harming others. The Colman & Wilson paper was a study of Anti-social personality disorder, which has a specific psychiatric definition (listed in their paper), but of course my article did have a broader focus.
Simple:
Selfishness is a selective trait that is mutually exclusive from social cooperation, which is also a selective trait.
The two hold each other in check with negative feedback. In an environment where almost everyone is highly social and cooperative, there are huge benefits to be reaped by selfish individuals, and they will propagate at the expense of their more cooperative counterparts.
This results in higher and higher proportions of selfish individuals until it reaches a point where there aren't enough cooperatively social individuals to take advantage of, and the advantage of selfishness is lost. Under these circumstances, individuals who are able to cooperate loyally end up with an advantage over all of the selfish "every-man-for-himself" crowd who lose out on the benefits of synergy and specialization. This reverses the momentum, moving the ratio in favor of socially cooperative individuals once more, until the high expectation of social trust creates too many opportunities for the selfish ones to thrive once more.
Rinse and repeat for 200 million years.
Thanks for the feedback. Makes sense to me. I think this is basically the Colman & Wilson model.
Oooh I got one; how many evolutionists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
Just one, but it takes a really long time!
I think at the root of most of this behavior is a lot of selfish folks. It is all about self interest and that's it
Good job...best
Thanks For Giving us a Good Info @remlaps
awesome ..............
Insightful piece, well done!