The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (33 page)

This, at least, was Trivers's suggestion in his 1971 paper on reciprocal altruism. He noted that the payoff from helping people —
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and the payoff from cheating people — depends on the social environment in which we find ourselves. And environments change over time. So "one would expect selection to favor developmental plasticity of those traits regulating altruistic and cheating tendencies and responses to these tendencies in others." And thus, "the growing organism's sense of guilt" may "be educated, perhaps partly by kin, so as to permit those forms of cheating that local conditions make adaptive and to discourage those with more dangerous consequences."
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In short: "moral guidance" is a euphemism. Parents are designed to steer kids toward "moral" behaviors only insofar as those behaviors are self-serving.

It's hard to specify the exact circumstances that, during evolution, made different moral strategies more or less valuable. There may have been recurrent changes in the size of villages, or the density of big, huntable game or menacing predators.
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Any of these could affect the number and the value of cooperative endeavors locally available. And, besides, each person is born into a family that occupies a particular niche in the social ecology, and each person has particular social assets and liabilities. Some people can prosper without taking the risk of cheating, some people can't.

Whatever the reason natural selection first endowed our species with flexible reciprocally altruistic strategies, the advent of flexibility would further raise their value. Once the prevailing winds of cooperation are shifting — from generation to generation, from one village to an adjacent village, or from one family to the next — these shifts are a force to be reckoned with, and a flexible strategy is the way to reckon. As Axelrod showed, the value of a particular strategy depends utterly on neighborhood norms.

If Trivers is right, if the shaping of a young conscience amounts partly to instruction about profitable cheating (and profitable restraint from cheating), then you would expect young children to be good at learning to deceive. That seems to be, if anything, an understatement. Jean Piaget, in his 1932 study of moral development, wrote that "the tendency to tell lies is a natural tendency ... spontaneous and universal."
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Subsequent study has borne him out.
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Certainly Darwin seems to have been a natural-born liar — "much given to inventing deliberate falsehoods." For instance, "I once gathered
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much valuable fruit from my Father's trees and hid them in the shrubbery, and then ran in breathless haste to spread the news that I had discovered a hoard of stolen fruit." (As, in a sense, he had.) He rarely took a walk without claiming to have seen "a pheasant or some strange bird," whether or not this was true. And he once told a boy "that I could produce variously coloured Polyanthuses and Primroses by watering them with certain coloured fluids, which was of course a monstrous fable, and had never been tried by me."
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The idea here is that childhood lies are not just a phase of harmless delinquency we pass smoothly through, but the first in a series of test runs for self-serving dishonesty. Through positive reinforcement (for undetected and fruitful lies) and negative reinforcement (for lies that peers uncover, or through the reprimand of kin) we learn what we can and can't get away with, and what our kin do and don't consider judicious deceit.

That parents seldom lecture children on the virtues of lying doesn't mean they're not teaching them to lie. Children, it seems, will keep lying unless strongly discouraged. Not only are children whose parents often lie more likely than average to become chronic liars; so too are children who simply lack close parental supervision.
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If parents refrain from discouraging the kinds of lies that have proven useful to them — and if they tell such lies in the presence of their children — they are giving an advanced course in lying.

One psychologist has written, "No doubt lying is exciting; that is, the manipulation itself, rather than the benefits that result from it, may spur children to lie."
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This dichotomy is misleading. It is presumably because of the benefits of skillful lying that natural selection has made experimental lying exciting. Once again: natural selection does the "thinking"; we do the doing.

Darwin recalled making up stories for "the pure pleasure of exciting attention & surprise." On the one hand, "these lies, when not detected, I presume excited my attention [and] by having produced great effect on my mind, gave pleasure, like a tragedy."
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On the other hand, at times they left him feeling shameful. He doesn't say why, but two possibilities spring to mind. One is that some of the lies were uncovered by suspicious children. Another is that lying got him chastised by older kin.
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Either way, Darwin was getting feedback about the propitiousness of lying in his particular social environment. And either way, the feedback had effect. By the time he reached adulthood, he was honest by any reasonable standard.

The transmission of moral instruction from old to young parallels the transmission of genetic instruction and is sometimes indistinguishable in its effects. In
Self-Help
Samuel Smiles wrote, "The characters of parents are thus constantly repeated in their children; and the acts of affection, discipline, industry, and self-control, which they daily exemplify, live and act when all else which they may have learned through the ear has long been forgotten... . Who can tell how much evil act has been stayed by the thought of some good parent, whose memory their children may not sully by the commission of an unworthy deed, or the indulgence of an impure thought?"
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This fidelity of moral transmission is plain in Darwin. When, in his autobiography, he extols his father — his generosity, his sympathy — he might just as well have been talking about himself. And Darwin would in turn work to endow his own children with solid reciprocal-altruism skills, ranging from moral probity to social nicety. To a son at school he wrote, "You must write to Mr. Wharton: you had better begin with 'My dear Sir.' ... End by saying 'I thank you and Mrs. Wharton for all the kindness you have always done me. Believe me, Yours truly obliged.' "
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Natural selection had no way of anticipating Darwin's social environment. The human genetic program for custom-tailoring the conscience does not include an option labeled "Well-to-do Man in Victorian England." For this reason (among others) we shouldn't expect Darwin's early experience to have shaped his conscience in a wholly adaptive way. Still, some things that natural selection presumably did "anticipate" — for example, that the sheer level of local cooperation would differ from environment to environment — are relevant to any time and place. It is worth seeing if Darwin's moral development left him reasonably well equipped to prosper.

The question of how Darwin's conscience paid off is really the
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question of how the Victorian conscience itself paid off. Darwin's moral compass was, after all, just a more acute version of the basic Victorian model. The Victorians are famous for their emphasis on "character," and many of them, if plopped down in our midst, would seem bizarrely earnest and conscientious, if less so than Darwin.

The essence of Victorian character was "truthfulness, integrity, and goodness," according to Samuel Smiles. "Integrity in word and deed is the backbone of character," he wrote in
Self-Help
, "and loyal adherence to veracity its most prominent characteristic."
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Note the contrast with "personality," the amalgam of charm, pizzazz, and other social garnish that, we are told, has in the twentieth century largely replaced character as the measure of a human being. This change is sometimes noted with the wistful suggestion that the present century is one of moral relapse and rampant selfishness.
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"Personality," after all, attaches so little value to honesty or honor and seems so plainly a vehicle for self-advancement.

The culture of personality does have a shallow feel, and it's easy to get nostalgic for the days when sheer glibness got a person less far in life. But that doesn't mean the reign of character was an era of pure integrity, unsullied by self-interest. If Trivers is right about why the conscience is malleable, then "character" may have been a self-serving thing.

The Victorians themselves made no bones about the uses of character. Samuel Smiles approvingly quoted a man of "sterling independence of principle and scrupulous adherence to truth" who noted that obedience to conscience is "the road to prosperity and wealth." Smiles himself observed that "character is power" ("in a much higher sense than that knowledge is power"). He quoted the stirring words of the statesman George Canning: "My road must be through Character to power; I will try no other course; and I am sanguine enough to believe that this course, though not perhaps the quickest, is the surest."
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If character was so conducive to advancement in those days, why was it more so then than now? This is no place for a Darwinian treatise on moral history, but one possible factor is obvious: most people in Victorian England lived in the rough equivalent of a small town. To be sure, urbanization was well under way, and thus the
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era of anonymity was nearing. But, compared to today, neighborhoods, even urban ones, were stable. People tended to stay put, and encounter the same small group of folks year after year. This is true in spades of Darwin's hometown, the quaint village of Shrewsbury. If Trivers is right — if the young conscience is molded, with the active aid of kin, to fit the local social environment — then Shrewsbury is the sort of place in which we might expect Darwin's scruples to pay off.

There are at least two reasons integrity and honesty make particular sense in a small and steady social setting. One is that (as everyone who has lived in a small town knows) there's no escaping your past. In a section of
Self-Help
titled "Be What You Seem," Smiles wrote, "A man must really be what he seems or purposes to be. ... Men whose acts are at direct variance with their words, command no respect, and what they say has but little weight." Smiles relayed an anecdote about a man who says "I would give a thousand pounds for your good name." "Why?" "Because I could make ten thousand by it."
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The Darwin described by young Emma Wedgwood — "the most open, transparent man I ever saw, and every word expresses his real thoughts" — is a man well equipped to thrive in Shrewsbury.
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Axelrod's computer world was a lot like Shrewsbury: the same fairly small group of characters, day after day, all of whom remember how you behaved on the last encounter. That, of course, is a central reason why reciprocal altruism paid off inside the computer. If you make the computer world even more like a small town, by allowing its creatures to gossip about how scrupulous so-and-so is or isn't, cooperative strategies flourish even faster. For then cheaters get away with fewer swindles before people start shunning them.
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(Axelrod's computer has multiple uses. Once people have flexible moral equipment, cooperation can, over the generations, spread — or retreat — without any changes in the gene pool. Thus the computer, in chronicling such waves, can model cultural change, as here, rather than model genetic change, as in the last chapter.)

A second reason why being nice is so fruitful in a place like Shrewsbury is that the people you're nice to will be around for a long time. Even scattershot expenditures of social energy, such as the
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diffuse bestowal of warm pleasantries, may be a sound investment. "Those little courtesies which form the small change of life, may separately appear of little intrinsic value, but they acquire their importance from repetition and accumulation," Smiles wrote. He observed that "benevolence is the preponderating element in all kinds of mutually beneficial and pleasant intercourse amongst human beings. 'Civility,' said Lady Montague, 'costs nothing and buys everything.' ... 'Win hearts,' said Burleigh to Queen Elizabeth, 'and you have all men's hearts and purses.' "
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Actually, civility does cost something: a little bit of time and psychic energy. And these days it doesn't buy too much — at least, not unless laser-guided. Many, if not most, of the people we encounter each day don't know who we are and will never find out. Kven our acquaintances may be fleeting. People move often, change jobs often. So a reputation for integrity matters less now, and sacrifices of all kinds — even for colleagues or neighbors — are less likely to be repaid far in the future. These days an upper-middle-class man who by example teaches his son to be slick and superficially sincere, to tell minor lies in profusion, to work harder on promise than delivery, may well be equipping him for success.

You can see this in Axelrod's computer. If you change the rules, and allow frequent migration into and out of the group, so that there are fewer chances to reap what you've sown, the power of TIT FOR TAT wanes visibly and the success of meaner strategies grows. (Here, again, we use the computer to model cultural, not genetic, evolution; the size of the average conscience is changing, but not because of underlying changes in the gene pool.)

In the computer, as in life, these trends are self-sustaining. When less cooperative strategies flourish, the amount of locally available cooperation declines, further devaluing cooperation, so that less cooperative strategies flourish all the more. It works in the other direction too: the more conscientious the Victorians got, the more conscientious it made sense to be. But when, for whatever reason, the pendulum finally reaches its apex and heads back down, it naturally picks up momentum.

To some extent, this analysis simply underscores the old truisms about the effects of urban anonymity: New Yorkers are rude, and
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New York is full of pickpockets.
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But that doesn't go far enough. The point here isn't just that people look around, see opportunities for cheating, and consciously seize them. Through a process they sense dimly if at all, a process that begins as soon as they learn to talk, the contours of their conscience get adjusted for them — by kin (who themselves may not grasp what's going on) and by other sources of environmental feedback. Cultural influence can be just as unconscious as genetic influence. This is not surprising, given how deeply intertwined the two are.