The Moral Animal: Why We Are, the Way We Are: The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology (42 page)

Was there ever a culture in which people didn't regularly disagree — over goods in a market, over salaries at work, over zoning variances, over whose child was wronged by whose child? The resulting arguments can have real consequence. They're seldom, by themselves, life or death matters, but they affect material well-being, and during human evolution a small slice of material well-being has at times been the difference between life and death, between attracting a mate and not attracting one, between three surviving offspring and two. So there is reason to suspect an innate basis for biased social accounting. The bias appears to be universal, and seems intuitively to be a corollary of the theory of reciprocal altruism.

Still, once you look at the situation with something other than intuition, things grow less clear. In Axelrod's computer, the key to TIT FOR TAT's success was that it didn't try to get the better of its neighbors; it was always willing to settle for an exactly equal exchange. Creatures that weren't this easily satisfied — creatures that tried to "cheat," to get more than they gave — went extinct. If evolution thus punishes the greedy, why do humans seem unconsciously compelled to give a bit less than they get?

The first step toward an answer is to see that getting more than
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you give isn't the same as "cheating."
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Axelrod's computer conflated the two by making life binary: either you cooperate, or you don't; you're nice or you're a cheater. Real life is more finely graded. So bountiful are the benefits of non-zero-sumness that slightly uneven exchanges can make sense for both people. If you do forty-nine favors for your friend and get fifty-one in return, the friendship is probably still worth your friend's while. You haven't really "cheated" him. You've gotten the better of him, yes, but not so much that he should prefer no deal at all to the deal he got.

So it's possible, in theory, to be a little more stingy than TIT FOR TAT without really cheating, and thus without triggering painful retaliation. This sort of stinginess, as ingrained by natural selection, might well assume the form of shady accounting — a deep sense of justice slightly slanted toward the self.

Why would it be so important that the bias be unconscious? A clue may lie in a book called The Strategy of Conflict by the economist and game theorist Thomas Schelling. In a chapter called "An Essay on Bargaining" — which isn't about evolution, but could apply to it — Schelling noted an irony: in a non-zero-sum game, "the power to constrain an adversary may depend on the power to bind oneself." The classic example is the non-zero-sum game of "chicken." Two cars head toward each other. The first driver to swerve loses the game, along with some stature among his adolescent peers. On the other hand, if neither driver bails out, both lose in a bigger way. What to do? Schelling suggests tossing your steering wheel out the window in full view of the other driver. Once convinced that you're irrevocably committed to your course, he will, if rational, do the swerving himself.

The same logic holds in more common situations, like buying a car. There is a range of prices within which a deal makes sense for both buyer and seller. Within that range, though, interests diverge: the buyer prefers the low end, the seller the high end. The path to success, says Schelling, is essentially the same as in the game of chicken: be the first to convince the other party of your rigidness. If the dealer believes you're walking away for good, he'll cave in. But if the dealer stages a preemptive strike, and says "I absolutely
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cannot accept less than x," and appears to be someone whose pride wouldn't let him swallow those words, then he wins. The key, said Schelling, is to make a "voluntary but irreversible sacrifice of freedom of choice" — and to be the first to do it.

For our purposes, take out the word voluntary. The underlying logic may be excluded from consciousness to make the sacrifice seem truly "irreversible." Not when we're on a used-car lot, maybe. Car salesmen, like game theorists, actually think about the dynamics of bargaining, and the savvier car buyers do too. Still, everyday haggling — over fender benders, salaries, disputed territory — often begins with an actual belief, on each side, in its own Tightness. And such a belief, a quickly reached and hotly articulated sense of what we deserve, is a quick route to the preemptive strikes Schelling recommends. Visceral rigidity is the most convincing kind.

Still, puzzles remain. Utter rigidity could be self-defeating. As "shady accounting" genes spread through the population, shady accountants would more and more often run into each other. With each insisting on the better half of the deal, both would fail to strike any deal. Besides, in real life, the rigidity wouldn't know where to set in, because it's often hard to say what deals the other party will Accept. A car buyer doesn't know how much the car actually cost the dealer or how much other buyers are offering. And in less structured situations — swapping favors with someone, say — these calculations are even dimmer, because things are less quantifiable. Thus has it been throughout evolution: hard to fathom precisely the range of deals that are in the interest of the other party. If you begin the bargaining by insisting irreversibly on a deal outside of that range, you're left without a deal.

The ideal strategy, perhaps, is a pseudorigidity, a flexible firmness. You begin the discourse with an emphatic statement of what you deserve. Yet you should retreat — up to a point, at least — in the lace of evidence as to the other person's firmness. And what sort of evidence might that be? Well, evidence. If people can explain the reasons behind their conviction, and the reasons seem credible (and sound heartfelt), then some retreat is in order. If they talk about how much they've done for you in the past, and it's true, you have to
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concede the point. Of course, to the extent that you can muster countervailing evidence, with countervailing conviction, you should. And so it goes.

What we've just described are the dynamics of human discourse. People do argue in precisely this fashion. (In fact, that's what the word argue means.) Yet they're often oblivious to what they're doing, and to why they're doing it. They simply find themselves constantly in touch with all the evidence supporting their position, and often having to be reminded of all the evidence against it. Darwin wrote in his autobiography of a habit he called a "golden rule": to immediately write down any observation that seemed inconsistent with his theories — "for I had found by experience that such facts and thoughts were far more apt to escape from the memory than favourable ones. " The reason the generic human arguing style feels so effortless is that, by the time the arguing starts, the work has already been done. Robert Trivers has written about the periodic disputes — contract renegotiations, you might call them — that are often part of a close relationship, whether a friendship or a marriage. The argument, he notes, "may appear to burst forth spontaneously, with little or no preview, yet as it rolls along, two whole landscapes of information appear to lie already organized, waiting only for the lightning of anger to show themselves."
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The proposition here is that the human brain is, in large part, a machine for winning arguments, a machine for convincing others that its owner is in the right — and thus a machine for convincing its owner of the same thing. The brain is like a good lawyer: given any set of interests to defend, it sets about convincing the world of their moral and logical worth, regardless of whether they in fact have any of either. Like a lawyer, the human brain wants victory, not truth; and, like a lawyer, it is sometimes more admirable for skill than for virtue.

Long before Trivers wrote about the selfish uses of self-deception, social scientists had gathered supporting data. In one experiment, people with strongly held positions on a social issue were exposed to four arguments, two pro and two con. On each side of the issue, the arguments were of two sorts: (a) quite plausible, and (b) implausible to the point of absurdity. People tended to remember the plausible
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arguments that supported their views and the implausible arguments that didn't, the net effect being to drive home the correctness of their position and the silliness of the alternative.
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One might think that, being rational creatures, we would eventually grow suspicious of our uncannily long string of rectitude, our unerring knack for being on the right side of any dispute over credit, or money, or manners, or anything else. Nope. Time and again — whether arguing over a place in line, a promotion we never got, or which car hit which — we are shocked at the blindness of people who dare suggest that our outrage isn't warranted.

In all the psychological literature that predates and supports the modern Darwinian view of deception, one word stands out for its crisp rconomy: beneffectance. It was invented in 1980 by the psychologist Anthony Greenwald to describe the tendency of people to present themselves as being both beneficial and effective. The two halves of this compound coinage embody the legacies, respectively, of reciprocal altruism and status hierarchies.
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This distinction is a bit oversimplified. In real life, the mandates of reciprocal altruism and status — to seem beneficial and effective — can merge. In one experiment, when people who had been part of a team effort were asked about their role in it, they tended to answer expansively if first told that the effort was a success. If told it had failed, they left more room for the influence of a teammate.
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This hoarding of credit and sharing of blame makes both kinds of evolutionary sense. It makes a person seem beneficial, having helped others in the group achieve success, and thus deserving future repayment; it also makes that person seem effective, deserving high status.

One of the most famous triumphs for Darwin's supporters came in 1860, when Thomas Huxley, a.k.a. "Darwin's bulldog," took on Bishop Samuel Wilberforce during a debate on
The Origin of Species
. Wilberforce sarcastically asked on which side of his family Huxley was descended from an ape, and Huxley replied that he would rather have an ape as an ancestor than a man "possessed of great means and influence and yet who employs these faculties and that influence for
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the mere purpose of introducing ridicule into a grave scientific discussion." At least, that's how Huxley told the story to Darwin — and Huxley's account is the one that made it into the history books. But Darwin's close friend Joseph Hooker was also present, and he remembered things differently. He told Darwin that Huxley "could not throw his voice over so large an assembly, nor command the audience; & he did not allude to Sam's [Bishop Wilberforce's] weak points nor put the matter in a form or way that carried the audience."

Fortunately, reported Hooker, he himself had taken on Wilber-force: "I smacked him amid rounds of applause" and went on to show "that he could never have read your book" and that he "was absolutely ignorant" of biology. Wilberforce "had not one word to say in reply & the meeting was dissolved forthwith leaving you master of the field after 4 hours battle." Since the encounter, said Hooker, "I have been congratulated & thanked by the blackest coats & whitest stocks in Oxford." Huxley, meanwhile, reported being "the most popular man in Oxford for full four & twenty hours afterwards."
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Both Huxley and Hooker were telling stories that would do two things: raise their stature in Darwin's eyes, and leave him indebted to them.

Reciprocal altruism and status intersect in a second way. A common exception to our tendency to deflate the contributions of others comes when those others have high status. If we have a friend who is, say, mildly famous, we cherish even his meager gifts, forgive his minor offenses, and make extra sure not to let him down. In one sense this is a welcome corrective to egocentrism; our balance sheets are perhaps more honest for high-status people than for others. But the coin has two sides. These high-status people, meanwhile, are viewing us with even greater distortion than usual, as our side of the ledger is discounted steeply to reflect our lowliness.

Still, we seem to consider the relationship worthwhile. A high-status friend may, in time of need, wield decisive influence on our behalf, often at little cost. Just as an alpha male ape can protect an ally by looking askance at the would-be attacker, a highly placed sponsor can, with a two-minute phone call, make a world of difference for an upstart.

Seen in this light, social hierarchy and reciprocal altruism not
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only intersect but merge into a single dimension. Status is simply another kind of asset that people bring to the bargaining table. Or, more precisely: it is an asset that leverages other assets; it means that 4t little cost a person can do big favors.

Status can also be one of the favors. When we ask friends for help, we are often asking not only that they use their status, but that they raise ours in the process. Among the chimps of Arnhem, the swapping of status support was sometimes simple; chimp A helps chimp B fend off a challenger and maintain its status; chimp B later returns the favor. Among people, status support is less tangible. Except in barrooms, junior-high schoolyards, and other venues of high testosterone, the support consists of information, not muscle, hacking a friend means verbally defending him when his interests are in dispute — and, more generally, saying good, status-raising things about him. Whether these things are true doesn't especially matter. They're just the things friends are supposed to say. Friends engage in mutual inflation. Being a person's true friend means endorsing the untruths he holds dearest.

Whether this bias toward a friend's interests is deeply unconscious is a matter for research that hasn't yet been done. A purely positive answer would clash with the treachery that has been known to infest friendships. Still, it may be that the hallmark of the strongest, longest friendships is the depth of the shared bias; the best friends are the ones who see each other least clearly. Anyway, however conscious or unconscious the lies, one effect of friendship is to take individual nodes of self-serving dishonesty and link them up into webs of collective dishonesty. Self-love becomes a mutual-admiration society.