The cooperative monkey – Econlib

• • Unlike chimpanzees, who obtain the vast majority of their daily caloric intake from easy-to-find foods such as fruits and leaves, early humans occupied a more complex foraging niche, relying on foods that they either had to extract (e.g. buried tubers, or nuts in the shell) or hunting. These more complex foraging techniques take time and skill to learn – and are not easily acquired through observation alone. The combination of foraging skills that are difficult to learn and necessary for survival in humans may be the point of difference between us and the other great apes, explaining why we are productive teachers while our cousins ​​are not.
    • • –Nichola Raihani, The social instinct: how cooperation has shaped the world. (p. 92)

HPeople couldn’t just pick the low-hanging fruit. To survive in our more difficult ecological niche, we had to develop skills that other apes did not possess. In The social instinct: how cooperation has shaped the worldNichola Raihani reflects on the skill of collaboration.

• There’s a simple conclusion we can draw from this whirlwind ride through early human evolution: we had to work together to survive. This helps explain why there is virtually no evidence in the fossil record that other apes lived alongside humans in the East African Rift Valley. Instead, our great ape cousins ​​inhabit less seasonal and more abundant environments where extreme cooperation is not a prerequisite for survival. P.77

Raihani sees the cooperation of insects as fundamentally different from the cooperation of humans. She makes the case,

• …for conceiving of highly social insect colonies (ants and termites, for example) as self-contained individuals – or ‘superorganisms’. Social insect colonies often show striking similarities to multicellular bodies, like yours and mine. In particular, the design features and behavior of the constituent ‘parts’ of insects can only be understood with reference to the higher level of organization: the colony. P.25

She wants to show us an ant colony as a whole, with different types of ants acting as constituent parts within that unit. The parts are designed (by evolution) to work together. They do not consciously choose to collaborate or negotiate the way in which they collaborate.

Can we also see a human group as a superorganism, like an ant colony?

• Some evolutionary biologists believe the answer to these questions is yes. Like the insects we just met, humans also have a widespread division of labor and are highly cooperative, even in scenarios where aid is not directed to kin and we cannot expect reciprocation from the beneficiary. These evolutionary biologists argue that the uniquely cooperative nature of our species only makes sense if we view ourselves as cogs in a larger machine. The argument thus goes that cooperation can only be understood for the benefits it produces at the group level, with the implication that selection also occurs at this higher level of biological organization. P.27

But Raihani does not share this view.

• For a collection of parts to fuse into a new kind of being, their interests must be almost completely and permanently aligned. P.27

People only cooperate occasionally. Often within a group we are in conflict, and groups themselves sometimes cooperate and sometimes compete with each other. Ants don’t apply game theory. People are that.

The members of an ant colony automatically work together. They always act in the interest of the survival of the colony as a whole. People work together strategically. We work together when we feel it is in our individual interests, and sometimes we work against the interests of the group or society to which we belong.

Raihani says our family structure is also different from other monkeys. For example, people have developed a cooperative approach to child care.

• Many primates live in social groups, and humans are no exception. Nevertheless, we are unique among the great apes in that we also live in stable family groups, where mothers receive help from others in producing young. The evolution of our family – fathers, siblings and grandparents – was the first crucial step towards becoming a hyper-cooperative species. P.47

Raihani says we stay in families long enough that older siblings can help raise the younger ones.

• …mothers can count on help from their older children in raising younger children. And we are the only monkey that does this.

• For those of us who live in modern, industrialized societies, it may come as a surprise to discover that we are cooperative breeders, because we typically have relatively small families and often stop breeding before the older children can become helpers for the younger children. P.73

Mothers have always received help with childcare, although the form of that help can vary.

• …for most of our time on Earth, mothers are embedded in vast social networks and children are raised by multiple caregivers, including fathers, older siblings, aunts and uncles, and grandparents. Many contemporary human societies still live this way, although these extended families have been replaced (to some extent) in many industrialized societies by more formal institutions, such as schools and childcare. Formal institutions that provide child care are a logical extension of our cooperative breeding nature. P.78

Raihani emphasizes that human brains play a unique role in the cooperation between our species.

• …some of the key social-cognitive traits that distinguish humans from other species – concern for the well-being of others, the ability to take another person’s perspective, and understand and share their mental states – are traits that are conspicuously lacking in the other in cooperation reproduce species on the planet. … Humans are one of the most cooperative species on Earth, a trait we share with other cooperatively reproducing species. But our version of sociality is built on different cognitive foundations. P.126

An important difference from other species is that we are aware of the trade-offs associated with the choice to cooperate.

• Broadly speaking, the types of collaboration problems we face every day can be summarized under one common denominator: social dilemmas. They are social because our decisions affect other people (even if this is not always obvious). And they are dilemmas because individual and collective interests diverge. P.129

At group level we tackle these dilemmas by handing out rewards and punishments. We encourage each other to work together.

An important reward for pro-social action is a good reputation. People strive for a good reputation because a good reputation increases the willingness of others to work with us and help us. This represents another distinctly human use of our cognitive abilities.

• …there is little evidence that other great apes know or care about what others think of them.

• … For humans, reputation management involves taking another person’s perspective, as well as inferring how their beliefs and impressions of us might change under different scenarios. P.159

Raihani sees this as crucial for the development of specialization and trade.

• Without systems to track and monitor the reputations of others, it is unlikely that the complex systems of two-way trade that characterize all human societies would ever have emerged. P.160

But our reputation-tracking heuristics can lead us astray.

• We say we think it’s good to raise money for charities or to protect the environment, but we rail against companies that try to achieve these goals when they also make a profit from it. Our difficulty in reconciling the fact that something can be both for profit and for good at the same time often leads us to choose outcomes or people or companies that provide no benefit to good causes, rather than those that do some take away the benefits they provide. generate. P. 181

I think people systematically give too high a status to nonprofits and too low a status to for-profit businesses.

This was news to me:

• The classic view of ancestral (pre-agricultural) human societies is that they were small-scale, bounded communities, consisting of only a few dozen members, with the idea that “each of our ancestors was essentially on a camping trip that lasted a number of years.” lifespan.” But it turns out that this view is quite outdated. Humans were (as we still are) likely embedded in vast social networks, with many of their closest friends and relatives living far away. While the average male chimpanzee during his would expect to interact with only twenty other males for a lifetime, recent estimates put the social universe of the average hunter-gatherer at about 1,000 individuals P. 193

Yet I do not believe that ancestral societies had the ability to organize social institutions to govern a group larger than the Dunbar number of about 150 people. Instead, I suspect what emerged was something like the Rule of the Clan.

Raihani points out that our skills at cooperation have also increased our ability to cause harm.

• By working together, the earliest humans were increasingly able to overcome the challenges nature threw at them: the problems of food scarcity, water shortages, and dangerous predators could all be mitigated through cooperation. But as a result, other people became our main threat. We were no longer fighting against nature, but against each other. P.207

• Collaboration is favored if and when it offers a better way to compete. A consequence of this is that cooperation often has victims (in fact, cooperation without victims is the most difficult form to achieve). P.236

She says people rightly became afraid of each other.

• …paranoia could be a feature rather than a bug in our psychology. We are emphatically not suggesting that the extreme paranoia associated with mental disorders such as schizophrenia has been favored by evolution…. However, at lower intensities, paranoia is likely to play an important role in detecting and managing social threats. P. 209-210

People get rid of it The social instinct with an appreciation for the complexity of human collaboration. As an individual within a group, I can choose to cooperate or deviate in different situations. The group must give me the incentive to choose to collaborate. Above the group level, a larger society must utilize group cooperation. A highly cohesive group can behave in ways that corrupt and harm the larger society. Institutions must operate to constructively channel group collaboration.

Human collaboration is both impressive and precarious.