In an earlier post, we explored the hidden drivers of our minds and why we think, judge, and decide the way we do.
Because of our incredibly complex and fast-paced world, we have evolved to be quickly guided by intuition instead of reasoning about everything we encounter. We rely on intuition for quick judgment and decisions, with reasoning often serving to justify such judgment and decisions. This usually works well for us, but not always, as we are prone to biases.
So, how did we come about this judgment and decision-making process? And how can we make the most of it to build better teams and societies?
The answer to these questions is what we will explore below. If you haven’t read the earlier post, it’s highly recommended you first do so, as it sets the stage here and lays the grounds for how we can influence and be influenced by others.
Why This Judgment and Decision-Making Process
So, how did we get this weird judgment and decision-making process?
As our brains developed over time, why did we evolve an inner lawyer or spokesman rather than an inner judge or scientist?
In arguments about who did what and why, wouldn’t it have been most adaptive for our ancestors to figure out the truth, rather than using all that brain power to find evidence supporting what they wanted to believe? That depends on which you think was more important for our ancestors’ survival: truth or reputation?
The Selfish Self
In “The Selfish Gene,” Richard Dawkins proposes that genes are selfish because their primary motivation is survival and replication, even if it means sacrificing the organism’s well-being. Genetically related people cooperate and can be selfless towards each other to maximize their chances of survival and pass on those genes.
So, selfish genes shape people to be helpful to others only when it benefits them, and not all the time or to everyone.
Our intuition-driven judgment and decision-making process evolved to:
- Help family members survive
- Help others who help us back
- Maintain a good reputation in our community since others talk about our behavior
Looking Good Rather Than Being Good
In “The Republic,” Glaucon (Plato’s brother) argues that…
People care a great deal more about appearance and reputation than about reality.
Is he right?
For a long time, our ancestors’ survival depended upon their ability to get small groups to include them and trust them, so if there is any inborn drive here, it should be a drive to get others to think well of us.
To test whether we prioritize reputation, Phil Tetlock, a leading researcher in the study of accountability, studied how people make decisions when they know they’ll be held accountable. Meaning they must justify their choices to others.
For example, they’re given information about a legal case and then asked to decide guilt or innocence.
Some subjects are told that they’ll have to explain their decisions to someone else. Other subjects know they won’t be held accountable by anyone.
Tetlock found that when left to their own devices, people relied on their intuition to make judgments quickly and used reasoning to defend such judgments, as explained earlier. They were lazy, made errors, and relied on gut feelings.
But when people know they must explain themselves in advance, they engage in thoughtful reasoning. They:
- Think more systematically and self-critically,
- Are less likely to jump to conclusions and more likely to revise their beliefs in response to evidence.
Tetlock concludes that conscious reasoning is carried out mainly for persuasion rather than discovery. But Tedlock adds that we are also trying to persuade ourselves. We want to believe the things we are about to say to others.
Our moral thinking is much more like a politician searching for votes than a scientist searching for truth.
Glaucon was right. We care a great deal more about appearance and reputation than about reality.
We would rather look good than be good.
Not Only Selfish
Yes, indeed, people are often selfish. Many moral, political, and religious behaviors are thinly veiled ways of pursuing self-interest. Just look at the awful hypocrisy of so many politicians and spiritual leaders.
But it’s also true that people are groupish. We love to join teams, communities, and causes. We take on group identities and work shoulder to shoulder with strangers towards common goals so enthusiastically that it seems our minds were designed for teamwork.
Our intuition learns the group’s norms and forms our new normal from which it derives judgment and decisions. After which, reasoning is deployed to work as a justifier to make us look good within the group.
Note that when it’s said that human nature is selfish, our minds contain several mental workings that make us great at promoting our interests in competition with our peers.
When it’s said that human nature is also groupish, it means that our minds contain various mental works that make us great at promoting our group’s interest in competition with other groups.
We are not saints, but we are sometimes good team players.
The Team Player
So far, based on the works of Jonathan Haidt, Daniel Kahneman, and others referenced earlier, we have a portrait of human nature that is somewhat cynical.
We have seen that:
- We care more about looking good than about truly being good.
- Intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.
- We lie, cheat, and cut ethical corners quite often when we think we can get away with it, and then we use our reasoning to manage our reputations and justify ourselves to others.
- We believe our post hoc reasoning so thoroughly that we end up self-righteously convinced of our virtue.
But this isn’t the complete story.
Yes, human nature is primarily selfish, but with a groupish overlay resulting from natural selection simultaneously working at multiple levels. This is as suggested by Jonathan Haidt in “The Righteous Mind.”
Individuals compete with individuals, and that competition rewards selfishness, including some forms of strategic cooperation (even criminals can work together to further their interests).
But at the same time, groups compete with groups. That competition favors groups of true team players. Those willing to cooperate and work for the group’s best interest, even when they could do better by slacking, cheating, or leaving the group.
In groups of true team players, team members’ intuitions (their elephants) align with the group’s norms. At the same time, their reasoning (their riders) justifies their actions to maintain their reputation within the group.
These two processes pushed human nature in different directions and gave us the strange mix of selfishness and selflessness we know today.
Indeed, we may not understand morality, politics, or religion until we understand human groupishness and its origins.
So, how did we get so groupish as to work for the group’s good and not just for our advancement?
Winning Tribes
A long time ago, when two human tribes living in the same area came into competition, all things being equal, if one tribe included a significant number of courageous, sympathetic, and faithful members who were always ready to warn each other of danger, to aid and defend each other, then, this tribe could succeed better and conquer the other.
The advantage that disciplined soldiers have over undisciplined rivals follows chiefly from each man’s confidence in his comrades. Selfish and contentious people will not be united, and nothing can be achieved without unity.
Cohesive tribes began to function like individual organisms, competing with other organisms. Such tribes relied on the rapid judgments of their intuitions to act as a unit, with their reasoning crafting justifications to strengthen group loyalty.
The more cohesive tribes generally won. Natural selection, therefore, worked on tribes like every other organism.
Note that groups competing don’t necessarily mean groups were at war or fighting with one another.
They were competing to be the most efficient at turning resources into offspring. Don’t forget that women and children were also important members of these groups.
Group selection does not require war or violence. Whatever traits make a group more efficient at acquiring food and turning it into children make it more fit than its neighbors.
Group selection pulls for cooperation, for the ability to suppress selfish behaviors and spur individuals to act in ways that benefit their groups.
Yes, group-serving behaviors sometimes impose a terrible cost on outsiders (as in warfare). However, in general, groupishness is focused on improving the welfare of the in-group, not on harming an out-group.
City States and Empires
In time, tribes conquered/cooperated with other tribes to form even larger groups and eventually city-states, empires, and countries as we know them today.
How and why did it happen?
While many animals are social, that is, they live in groups, flocks, or herds, only a few have crossed the threshold and become ultra-social, which means they live in large groups. Such large groups have some internal structure, enabling them to reap the benefits of the division of labor.
Beehives and ant nests, with their separate caste of soldiers, scouts, and nursery attendants, are examples of ultra-sociality, and so are human societies.
Becoming Ultra-Social
Based on findings by biologists Bert Holldobler and E.O. Wilson in “The Ants,” three key features helped non-humans such as bees and ants to be ultra-social. These include the need to:
- Defend a shared nest plus dependable food within the searching range of the nest inhabitants,
- Feed offspring over an extended period (which helps and gives an advantage to species that can recruit siblings or males to help mothers), and
- Avoid intergroup conflicts.
Those same factors apply to humans. Like bees, our ancestors evolved intuitions (elephants) that drove them to protect shared nests like caves, care for and raise vulnerable children, and steer clear of rival groups. These instincts shaped our ultra-social nature.
When some groups embraced agriculture and built permanent homes, they had a steady food supply that had to be defended even more vigorously.
Like bees, humans began building even more elaborate nests, and in just a few thousand years, a new kind of vehicle appeared on earth – the city-state, able to raise walls and armies. City-states and, later, empires spread rapidly, changing many of the earth’s ecosystems and allowing human beings to dominate the world. Today’s nests are countries or nation-states.
But how did humans get each other to work for the group’s interest rather than their selfish interests within the group?
Especially given that within each tribe (group), selfish individuals (free riders) come out ahead. They share in the group’s gain while contributing little to its efforts. The bravest army wins, but within the bravest army, the few cowards who hang back are likely to survive the fight, go home alive, and become fathers.
Suppressing Selfishness
How did the early humans deal with the free rider problem?
Scientists proposed a series of “probable steps.”
The first step was the “social instinct.” In ancient times, loners were more likely to get picked off by predators than their more social, company-loving siblings, who felt a strong need to stay close to the group.
The second step was reciprocity. People who help others are more likely to get help when needed.
However, the most important step, which we explored earlier, is that people are passionately concerned about the praise and blame of others.
People are obsessed with their reputation. The emotions that drive this obsession were acquired by natural selection at the individual level. Those who lacked a sense of shame or a love of glory were less likely to attract friends and mates.
The final step was shared intentionality. It refers to sharing the same intention (goal) and working towards achieving it together by sharing tasks to meet the goal best.
For example, while foraging, one person could pull down a branch while the other plucks the fruit, and both share the meal.
Shared Intentions
When early humans began to share intentions, their ability to hunt, gather, raise children, and raid their neighbors increased dramatically.
Everyone on the team now understands the task, knows that their partners shared the same intention and the tasks to be done, and knows when a partner acted in a way that impeded success or hogged the spoils and reacted negatively to such violations.
Shared intentionality led to our capacity to treat duties and principles as sacred. We learn and conform to social norms, feel and share group-related emotions, and ultimately, create and obey social institutions. Our intuitions evolved to align and drive shared group goals, while our reasoning justifies cooperation to maintain group harmony.
When you put these steps together, you get evolved humans for whom free riding is no longer so attractive. Selfish genes begin to craft relatively selfless group members who constitute a supremely selfish group.
Today, the most effective groups have many ways of suppressing selfishness.
For example, in a real army that greatly values honor, loyalty, and country, the coward is not the most likely to make it home and father children. He is most likely to get beaten up, left behind, or shot in the back for committing sacrilege. And if he does make it home alive, his reputation will repel women and potential employers.
Team Before Self – Sometimes
So, we are often “groupish” rather than selfish, especially in moral and political matters. We can believe almost anything that supports our team and deploy our reasoning skills to demonstrate commitment to our team.
We ask, “Can I believe it? When we want to believe something, but “Must I believe it?” when we don’t want to believe. Then, we search for supporting evidence, and if we find even a single piece of pseudo-evidence, such as misleading statistics, we can stop thinking. Now we have permission to believe or not. We have a justification, in case anyone asks, as the social intuitionist model suggests.
In the past, many political scientists used to assume that people vote selfishly, choosing the candidate or policy that will benefit them the most. However, decades of research on public opinion have concluded that self-interest is a weak predictor of policy preferences.
Instead, people care about their groups, whether those are racial, regional, religious, or political.
The political scientist Don Kinder summarizes the findings like this:
“In matters of public opinion, citizens seem to be asking themselves not ‘What’s in it for me?’ but rather ‘What’s in it for my group?”
Our politics is groupish, not selfish. So, how do we create effective teams and ethical societies if people within groups can pull in different directions?
Creating Effective Teams and Ethical Societies
To create effective teams and ethical societies, we need to do the following:
- Have shared intentions for the team or society. Everyone must understand the intentions, why and how they benefit, and what part they need to play to meet such intentions.
- Outline and effectively communicate the team’s or society’s norms until they become the group members’ norms. Remember that intuition learns and forms what is normal for us by associations, which is strengthened by repetition, practice, and familiarity.
- Ensure everyone’s reputation is always on the line, so bad behavior will always bring dire consequences. No exceptions. Bear in mind that we would rather look good than be good, and you can trust our “elephant” and ‘rider” to work to protect our reputation within the group.
For example, a business can build a competitive team by setting a clear mission (shared intention), communicating and making its values its culture (norms), and ensuring bad actors face consequences, from employees to executives (reputation).
Similarly, a society thrives by defining a shared goal, communicating and obeying its laws as the norm, and holding everyone, including leaders, accountable.
Accountability is Key
We are champions of cooperation beyond kinship, and we do it mainly by creating formal and informal accountability systems. We are good at holding others accountable for their actions and skilled at navigating through a world in which others hold us accountable for our own.
Remember Phil Tetlock? He defines accountability as the following:
“Explicit expectation that one will be called upon to justify one’s beliefs, feelings, or actions to others.”
We expect people to reward or punish us based on how well we justify ourselves.
Everything falls apart when nobody’s answerable to anybody, when slackers and cheaters go unpunished.
We should make the most of accountability to align the elephant and rider for better teams and societies.
To conclude, our evolved judgment and decision-making, driven by selfish genes and groupish instincts, shapes how we influence and are influenced by others. Hence, our next post is mastering influence because cooperation is our superpower.
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I am the managing director of Proedice Limited where we help organizations and individuals get remarkable results from entrepreneurship, innovation, and marketing. I am constantly learning and always looking to make a positive impact. I believe our duties promotes our rights.