The Cooperative Ape

• • Unlike chimpanzees, which acquire the vast majority of their daily calorie intake from easy-to-find foods such as fruit and leaves, early humans occupied a more complex foraging niche, relying on foods they had to either extract (e.g., buried tubers, or nuts inside shells) or hunt. These more complex foraging techniques take time and skill to learn—and cannot easily be acquired through observation alone. The combination of foraging skills being 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 prolific teachers while our ape cousins are not.
    • • –Nichola Raihani, The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World.1 (p. 92)

• There is a simple conclusion that we can draw from this whirlwind tour of early human evolution: we needed to cooperate to survive. This helps to explain why there is almost no evidence in the fossil record of other apes living alongside humans in the East African Rift Valley. Instead, our great-ape cousins inhabit less seasonal and more plentiful 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 (for example, ants and termites) as being individuals in their own right—or “superorganisms.” Social insect colonies often exhibit striking similarities with multicellular bodies, like yours and mine. In particular, the design features and behaviors of the constituent insect “parts” can only be understood with reference to the higher level of organization: the colony. p. 25

She would have us think of an ant colony as a single unit, with various types of ants within that unit acting as constituent parts. The parts are designed (by evolution) to work together. They do not consciously choose to work together or negotiate how they work together.

Could we also view a human group as a superorganism, like an ant colony?

• Some evolutionary biologists believe that the answer to these questions is yes. Like the insects we just met, humans also have widespread division of labor and are tremendously cooperative, including in scenarios where help is not directed to kin and we can expect no return favors from the beneficiary. These evolutionary biologists claim that our species’s uniquely cooperative nature only makes sense if we consider ourselves as being cogs in a larger machine. So the argument goes, cooperation can only be understood because of the benefits this yields at the group level, with the implication being that selection also operates at this higher level of biological organization. p. 27

But Raihani does not share this view.

• For a collection of parts to be welded into a new kind of being, their interests need to be almost completely and permanently aligned. p. 27

Humans only cooperate sometimes. Often, we are in conflict within a group, and groups themselves sometimes cooperate with one another and sometimes compete with one another. Ants are not applying game theory. Humans are.

The members of an ant colony cooperate automatically. They always act in the interest of the survival of the overall colony. Humans cooperate strategically. We cooperate when we find it in our individual interest to do so, and sometimes we go against the interests of the overall group or society to which we belong.

Raihani says that our family structure also differs from that of other apes. For example, humans evolved 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 assistance from others in the production of young. The evolution of our family—fathers, siblings, and grandparents—was the first critical step on our path toward becoming a hypercooperative species. p. 47

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

• … mothers can expect to receive help from their older children in the business of rearing younger ones. And we are the only ape that does this.

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

Mothers have always received help in caring for children, although the form that help takes may vary.

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

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

• … some of the most important sociocognitive traits that set humans apart from other species—a concern for the welfare of others, the ability to take another person’s perspective and to understand and share their mental states—are traits that are conspicuously lacking among the other cooperatively breeding species on the planet. … Humans are one of the most cooperative species on the planet, a trait we share with other cooperatively breeding species. But our version of sociality is built on different cognitive foundations. p. 126

A key difference relative to other species is that we are aware of the trade-offs involved in choosing to cooperate.

• Broadly speaking, the kinds of cooperation problems we encounter from day to day can be summarized under one common header: 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 the group level, we address these dilemmas by doling out rewards and punishments. We give one another incentives to cooperate.

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

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

• … For humans, reputation management involves taking the perspective of another person, and also inferring how their beliefs and impressions of us might be altered under various scenarios. p. 159

Raihani sees this as critical to the development of specialization and trade.

• Without systems to track and monitor the reputations of others, it is unlikely that the intricate systems of mutual trade that characterize all human societies would ever have emerged. p. 160

But our heuristics for tracking reputations can lead us astray.

• We say we think it is good to raise money for charity or protect the environment, but we rail against companies that try to achieve these aims if they also derive a profit in doing so. Our difficulty in reconciling the fact that something can be both for profit and for good at the same time frequently prompts us to choose outcomes or people or companies that deliver no benefit whatsoever to good causes, rather than those that take a slice of the benefits they generate. p. 181

I think that people systematically assign overly high status to non-profits and overly low status to profit-seeking businesses.

This was news to me:

• The classical view of ancestral (preagricultural) human societies is that they were small-scale, bounded communities, comprising just a few dozen members, with the idea being that “each of our ancestors was, in effect, on a camping trip that lasted a lifetime.” But it turns out that this view is rather outdated. Humans were (much like we still are) likely to have been embedded in vast social networks, with many of their closest friends and family members living far away. Whereas the average male chimpanzee might expect to interact with just twenty other males in his entire lifetime, recent estimates put the average hunter-gatherer’s social universe at about 1,000 individuals. p. 193

Still, 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 that what emerged was something like Rule of the Clan.2

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

• By working together, the earliest humans were increasingly able to overcome the challenges that nature threw at them: the problems of food scarcity, water shortages, and dangerous predators could all be mitigated via cooperation. But, as a consequence, other humans became our primary threat. We were no longer battling against nature, but against one another. p. 207

• cooperation is favored if and when it offers a better way to compete. A corollary of this is that cooperation frequently has victims (in fact, cooperation without victims is the most difficult kind to achieve). p. 236

She says that humans became justifiably frightened of one another.

• … paranoia might be a feature, rather than a bug, in our psychology. We are emphatically not proposing that the extreme paranoia that accompanies mental disorders like schizophrenia has been favored by evolution…. At lower intensities, however, paranoia is likely to play an important role in helping us to detect and manage social threat. p. 209-210

One comes away from The Social Instinct with an appreciation for the complexity of human cooperation. As an individual within a group, I may choose to cooperate or defect in various situations. The group must give me the incentive to choose to cooperate. Above the group level, a larger society has to harness group cooperation. A highly cohesive group may behave in ways that corrupt and damage the larger society. Institutions must operate to channel group cooperation constructively.

Human cooperation is both impressive and precarious.

Footnotes

[1] Nichola Raihani, The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World. St. Martin’s Press, 2021.

[2] See “State Clan and Liberty,” by Arnold Kling. Library of Economics and Liberty, May 6, 2013.