(No 14) - New Scientist Essential Guide_ Human Society-New Scientist (2022)

ESSENTIAL GUIDE№14 E D I T E D B Y KATE DOUGLAS HUMAN SOCIETY T H E R I S E O F C I V I L I S A T I O N S O C I E T A L N O R M S M O R A L I T Y A N D R E L I G I O N P O W E R A N D C O N F L I C T E C O N O M I C S A N D W O R K T H E F U T U R E O F S O C I E T Y A N D M O R E H O W E V O L U T I O N A N D P S Y C H O L O G Y S H A P E D O U R W O R L D -- 1 of 100 -- -- 2 of 100 -- N E W S C I E N T I S T E S S E N T I A L G U I D E H U M A N S O C I E T Y HUMAN society has come a long way in the mere 6000-odd years since the first cities were founded and “civilisation” took root. Our ability to live and cooperate in large groups beyond kinship boundaries has no obvious parallel in the animal world. As this 14th New Scientist Essential Guide makes plain, only strict societal rules and a near-universal moral code have made it possible – as well as power structures such as religion to make us toe the line. Even so, our innate way of dividing the world into “them” and “us” means prejudicial thinking and group-on-group aggression still scar human society today. This guide aims to take a long view of certain aspects of why human society works as it does. With such a complex subject it is necessarily a partial view, but I hope a thought-provoking one. Readers of this volume may also be interested in Essential Guide No. 4: Our Human Story, which charts the earlier evolution of our species and feeds into the story told here. All titles in the Essential Guide series can be bought by visiting shop.newscientist.com; feedback is welcome at essentialguides@newscientist.com. Kate Douglas COVER: MIKE_KIEV/ISTOCK SERIES EDITOR Richard Webb EDITOR Kate Douglas DESIGN Craig Mackie SUBEDITOR Jon White PRODUCTION AND APP Joanne Keogh TECHNICAL DEVELOPMENT (APP) Amardeep Sian PUBLISHER Nina Wright EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Emily Wilson DISPLAY ADVERTISING +44 (0)20 7611 1291 displayads@newscientist.com ADDITIONAL CONTRIBUTORS Pragya Agarwal, Anil Ananthaswamy, Philip Ball, Colin Barras, Nicolas Baumard, Jessica Bond, Michael Bond, Pascal Boyer, Peter Byrne, Patricia Churchland, Kate Douglas, Robin Dunbar, Jessa Gamble, Alison George, Bob Holmes, Rowan Hooper, Joshua Howgego, Dan Jones, Elizabeth Landau, Graham Lawton, Layal Liverpool, Debora MacKenzie, Jo Marchant, Carl Miller, Annie Murphy Paul, Sandy Ong, Gina Perry, Timothy Revell, David Robson, Mark Sheskin, Laura Spinney, Richard Webb, Yvaine Ye, Ed Yong, Emma Young ABOUT THE EDITOR Kate Douglas is a features editor for New Scientist with broad interests across human evolution, psychology and the life sciences New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society | 1 NEW SCIENTIST ESSENTIAL GUIDES NORTHCLIFFE HOUSE, 2 DERRY STREET, LONDON, W8 5TT +44 (0)203 615 6500 © 2022 NEW SCIENTIST LTD, ENGLAND NEW SCIENTIST ESSENTIAL GUIDES ARE PUBLISHED BY NEW SCIENTIST LTD ISSN 2634-0151 PRINTED IN THE UK BY PRECISION COLOUR PRINTING LTD AND DISTRIBUTED BY MARKETFORCE UK LTD +44 (0)20 3148 3333 -- 3 of 100 -- C H A P T E R 1 T H E R I S E O F C I V I L I S A T I O N C H A P T E R 2 T H E H U M A N F A C T O R C H A P T E R 3 M O R A L I T Y A N D R E L I G I O N The bedrock of human civilisation is our ability to cooperate beyond kith and kin. Where that came from, and how that allowed the first civilisations to emerge, is very much up for debate, however – as is the origin of the diversity we see in human societies today. p. 6 Homo sapiens: The first domesticated species p. 9 Hierarchy and the first civilisations p. 11 Monuments to cooperation p. 12 ESSAY: Harvey Whitehouse Why religion matters p. 16 The origins of cultural diversity The complexity of human society requires norms that govern everything from how we structure sexual and familial relationships to the formulation of friendship networks. Whether we are aware of them or not, they shape the way we interact with people from the moment we meet them. p. 22 INTERVIEW: Joe Henrich How culture shapes our minds p. 26 Happy families? p.28 Winning friends (and influencing people) p. 29 Seven pillars of friendship p. 31 Signals of engagement p. 31 The importance of saying sorry p.32 Empathy’s dark side p. 34 INTERVIEW: Steven Pinker Why rationality rules Cooperation between different groups in society often means putting our own narrow advantage to one side. The rules governing our interactions have evolved into a near-universal moral code – one that, in more recent times, structures such as religion have come to police. p. 40 The roots of morality p. 43 Everyday evil p. 45 ESSAY: John H. Evans Human rights – and wrongs p. 47 Why we believe in gods p. 49 Did Protestantism create science? p. 50 INTERVIEW: Alain de Botton Religion for atheists 2 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society -- 4 of 100 -- C H A P T E R 4 P O W E R A N D C O N F L I C T C H A P T E R 5 E C O N O M I C S A N D W O R K C H A P T E R 6 T H E F U T U R E O F S O C I E T Y Questions of who is in charge became ever more central as human society became more complex. At the same time, our evolved sense of “us” and “them” set the stage for new conflicts marked by prejudice against those we deem to differ from us – conflicts that still mark human society today. p. 54 How we choose our leaders p. 57 The origins of sexism p. 59 Dehumanisation, prejudice and bias p. 60 DISCUSSION: How racism harms lives p. 62 Us vs them p. 64 INTERVIEW: Gwen Adshead Are we naturally evil? As society complexified and diversified, we outsourced the provision of basics such as food, clothing and shelter to others with particular expert skills, and became workers – and economic animals. But in modern societies, production, consumption and the ownership of possessions have become about far more than just survival. p. 68 Why we’re bad at economics p. 71 The rise of consumer culture p. 74 Human hoarders p. 75 A good place to work p. 78 INTERVIEW: Roger Kneebone How to be an expert Human society has advanced immeasurably since the emergence of the first cities some 6000 years ago. But environmental degradation, global inequality and the rise of technologies such as artificial intelligence mean we also face challenges that could change the face of society once more. p. 82 DISCUSSION: A fairer, greener future? p. 85 Tackling global inequality p. 87 INTERVIEW: Anu Ramaswami How to future-proof cities p. 90 The fourth industrial revolution p. 93 INTERVIEW: Kate Crawford The challenge of AI p. 94 Is Western power on the decline? New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society | 3 -- 5 of 100 -- C H A P T E R 1 4 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society -- 6 of 100 -- The bedrock of human civilisation is cooperation. Although it is a trait that exists elsewhere in the animal world, the complexity of our cooperative interactions seems unsurpassed, and underlies our moral sense and our rules-based codes of working. Where our unique ability to cooperate came from, and how that allowed the first civilisations to emerge, is very much up for debate, however – as is the origin of the differences we see between human cultures today. Understanding the nature of human society means going back to the beginning. Chapter 1 | The rise of civilisation | 5 -- 7 of 100 -- 6 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society VER the past 30,000 years or so, humans have domesticated all manner of species for food, hunting, transport, materials, to control pests and to keep as pets. But some say that before we domesticated any of them, we first had to domesticate ourselves. Mooted by Darwin and even Aristotle, the idea of human domestication has since been just that: an idea. But now genetic studies suggest there is more than a grain of truth to the idea. Most domestic animals were tamed by another species – us. But evolution itself can play the same role. Dogs, for instance, are thought by some to be partially self-domesticated. The idea is that some wolves were naturally bolder and less aggressive. They had an advantage because they could approach human settlements and dine on their leftovers. Only later did we selectively breed them and complete their domestication. Likewise, it is possible that being less aggressive and more cooperative was an advantage for early humans, giving those with these traits a better chance of surviving and reproducing. Genetic analyses have shown that many of the differences between animals such as dogs and wolves or European cattle and European bison are linked to the neural crest, a tiny collection of cells in the developing embryo, which are sent around the body to form a range of tissues. Several known domestic species 1971YES/ISTOCK > HOMO SAPIENS: THE FIRST DOMESTICATED SPECIES A remarkable ability to cooperate underlies human society. A bold hypothesis suggests that has one ultimate source – early traits we evolved allowed us to tame our wilder sides. -- 8 of 100 -- Chapter 1 | The rise of civilisation | 7 -- 9 of 100 -- 8 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society have varieties of neural crest genes distinct from those in their wild counterparts. Now studies of DNA extracted from Homo sapiens and those of our extinct cousins, the Neanderthals, have pinpointed those self-same differences. The consequences are clear in, for example, the morphology of our skulls. Just as the domesticated dog has a smaller brain case and jaw and a shorter nose than the wild wolf, so do we compared with the Neanderthals (see diagram, above). This suggests there was an episode early in our evolution when our species underwent the same sort of domestication as these animals did. Evidence from the fossil record reveals the process started certainly by 200,000 years ago, and possibly with the first glimmerings of H. sapiens a little more than 300,000 years ago, according to Richard Wrangham at Harvard University. Language-based conspiracy was the key, he argues, because it gave whispering subordinates the power to join forces to kill bullies – presumably, alpha males, since men tend to be more violent than women. As happens in small-scale, traditional societies today, language allowed underdogs to agree on a plan and thereby to make predictably “safe” murders out of confrontations with intended victims that would otherwise have been dangerous. Genetic selection against the alpha males’ propensity for reactive aggression was an unforeseen result of eliminating the would-be despots. The selection against alpha-male behaviour led to an increasingly calm tenor of life within social communities of H. sapiens. The same ability to perform capital punishment that led to self-domestication also created the moral senses, cultural anthropologist Christopher Boehm has argued. In the past, to be a nonconformist, to offend community standards or to gain a reputation for being mean were dangerous adventures; to some extent this is still true today. Rule breakers threatened the interests of the elders – the coalition of males holding power – so they risked being ostracised as outsiders or sorcerers. Nonconformists who refused to change their behaviour were executed. Selection accordingly favoured the evolution of emotional responses that led individuals to feel and display unity with the group. Conformity was vital. The moral senses of individuals thus evolved to be self-protective to a degree not shown by other primates. The strongly conformist behaviours produced by the new tendencies provided a safe passage through life, and they had a second effect as well. By reducing competition and selfishness, they promoted behaviour that benefited the group as a whole. Several researchers are convinced that self- domestication can also explain the explosion of culture during the Stone Age. The objects archaeologists have found suggest that it was only within the past 100,000 years that jewellery, musical instruments and other cultural artefacts became a common feature of human life, 200,000 years after H. sapiens first appeared. “That’s always been a puzzle,” says Steven Churchill at Duke University. He and his colleagues have speculated that this delayed cultural revolution might have been linked to an intense pulse of human self-domestication 100,000 years ago. They argued that our species had the capacity to innovate from the start, but that our ancestors lacked the social networks for ideas to spread from group to group. Instead, knowledge and good ideas lived and died in the family group. Genetic and archaeological evidence suggests population densities began to rise around 100,000 years ago. Until that time, it may well have been beneficial for humans to be hostile towards strangers, perhaps to prevent others encroaching on their territories. But as people began to live more closely together, it would have been better to welcome them. Humans would have experienced an evolutionary selective pressure to be friendly and cooperative. This suggests that an episode of self-domestication was the true bedrock of civilisation. ❚ Shorter nasal bone or snout Compared with Neanderthals, modern humans have facial features that are more similar to those of a domesticated animal Smaller brain case Smaller teeth Smaller jaw NEANDERTHAL WOLF DOG HOMO SAPIENS -- 10 of 100 -- Chapter 1 | The rise of civilisation | 9 HIERARCHY AND THE FIRST CIVILISATIONS Cooperation was essential for civilisation to emerge, but it wasn’t enough. There is a limit to the number of people we can meaningfully know and cooperate with – a fundamental cognitive limit that required another key innovation to overcome. OW many people do you know? It is likely to be at the very most only around 150. That is the number of social interactions that Robin Dunbar at the University of Oxford has shown that one individual can keep track of. Evidence for that includes studies of villages and army units through history, and the average tally of Facebook friends. To build large-scale societies, we had to overcome this fundamental limit on cooperation. How? →- Page 28 has more on the structure of- modern friendship networks- Humanity’s universal answer was the invention of hierarchy. Several villages allied themselves under a chief; several chiefdoms banded together under a higher chief. To grow, these alliances added more villages, and if necessary more layers of hierarchy. Hierarchies meant leaders could coordinate large groups without anyone having to keep personal track of more than 150 people. In addition to their immediate > circle, an individual interacted with one person from a higher level in the hierarchy, and typically eight people from lower levels, says Peter Turchin at the University of Connecticut. These alliances continued to enlarge and increase in complexity to perform more kinds of collective actions. →- Chapter 4 has more on human- power structures- For a society to survive, its collective behaviour must be as complex as the challenges it faces – including competition from neighbours. If one group adopted a hierarchical society, its competitors also had to. Hierarchies spread and social complexity grew. Larger hierarchies not only won more wars, but also fed more people through economies of scale, which enabled technical and social innovations such as irrigation, food storage, record-keeping and a unifying religion. Cities, kingdoms and empires followed. →- How do civilisations fall once risen?- Page 94 explores this question- -- 11 of 100 -- 10 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society Covering much of the Middle East, the so-called Fertile Crescent east of the Mediterranean Sea has often been called “the cradle of civilisation” thanks to the emergence of city-states such as Uruk in ancient Mesopotamia, which became increasingly urbanised from around 6000 years ago. Estimates of Uruk’s population vary wildly, but, by around 4900 years ago, it is thought to have housed more than 60,000 people, making it one of the oldest cities in the world. Its communal works included temples and canals for irrigation. Uruk’s inhabitants invented the first known form of writing, cuneiform, and their texts include the earliest surviving great work of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, about a legendary king of the ancient city. At the western end of the Fertile Crescent, another civilisation was emerging at about the same time as the Mesopotamian cities. Farming communities in Egypt also became increasingly urbanised and, by 5100 years ago, they had coalesced into a society ruled from the city of Memphis by the first pharaoh, Narmer. This “first kingdom” used the waters of the Nile to irrigate the surrounding land, had elaborate tombs – although not yet as ambitious as the famous pyramids – and a rudimentary writing system based on hieroglyphics. The ancient ruins of the city can still be seen near the modern town of Mit Rahina, just south of the Egyptian city of Giza. The urban settlements in Mesopotamia and Egypt were long considered to be the first cities. However, we now know that complex societies were developing independently elsewhere, too. The Indus valley in south Asia, for instance, became increasingly urbanised between 6000 and 5000 years ago, with the formation of cities such as Harappa, home to tens of thousands of people. Intriguingly, there seems to have been some communication and trade between the people of Harappa and Mesopotamia. It isn’t yet clear, however, whether the symbols found on Indus valley artefacts constituted a fully-fledged writing system. The Liangzhu culture on the lower Yangtze had much in common with these early civilisations. With its social elite, skilled craftwork and refined architecture, it demonstrated the most important characteristics of a state society more than 5000 years ago. Its population of up to 34,500 put it on a scale with Uruk, Memphis and Harappa, and its communal works would have required large-scale social organisation and management. Liangzhu’s enormous hydraulic system, which allowed its citizens to master their watery landscape, was so advanced that some consider it the most impressive anywhere in the world at that time. All these urban cultures shared two features that set them apart from the small-scale, egalitarian societies that preceded them: an increased density of habitation, and evidence of a novel hierarchical social structure. All? Not quite all. There is one early experiment in urban development – in fact, comprising the oldest proto-cities we know of – that doesn’t fit this pattern. Megasites built in eastern Europe from 6200 years ago by a culture called the Cucuteni- Trypillia indicate that these people didn’t live in dense populations and, furthermore, retained the egalitarian social structure of their forebears, without the hallmarks of social class and hierarchy. How the story of the Trypillians might alter the story about the origins of city living and the emergence of civilisation is still very much debated. But one thing is for sure: hierarchy was an innovation that stayed with us. ❚ Ancient Egypt’s “first kingdom” was ruled from the city of Memphis starting around 5100 years ago GARGOLAS/ISTOCK -- 12 of 100 -- Chapter 1 | The rise of civilisation | 11 ARCHAEOLOGIST Carl Lipo first went to Rapa Nui, as Easter Island in the south-eastern Pacific is known to its inhabitants, in 2001. Then, the prevailing idea was that the famous stone heads, or moai, had been rolled into place using logs, and that the resulting depletion of trees went on to contribute to the collapse of the island’s human population. Lipo, at Binghamton University in New York, and fellow archaeologist Terry Hunt, now at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, showed something different. They proved that moai could have been “walked” upright into place by small, cooperating bands of people using ropes, with no need for trees. In their 2011 book, The Statues that Walked, they argued further that statue-making benefited these people by directing their energy into peaceful interactions and allowing them to share information and sexual partners. Far from causing their downfall, when the going got tough, Easter Islanders depended on this cooperation. They only stopped making statues, Lipo and Hunt claimed, precisely because life became easy – in part due to the domestication of plants – and it was no longer so important that they work together. Likewise, according to Lipo, many ancient monuments weren’t the product of top-down power play, but of bottom-up cooperation. In other words, they were giant team- building exercises instigated by the people who did the work. “We’re starting to see that there’s this whole other condition under which these monuments get constructed, and it’s very different from the traditional story,” he says. If this idea is correct, it explains several long-standing puzzles connected with ancient monuments. One is why their builders so often destroyed and rebuilt them. A prime example of this can be found at the temple complex of Göbekli Tepe in south-east Turkey, which at more than 11,000 years old is the earliest known example of monumental architecture. Since excavation started there in the mid-1990s, archaeologists have uncovered nine enclosures formed of massive stone pillars carved with pictograms and animal-themed reliefs. Given the size of these pillars – their average weight is 30 tonnes – a considerable workforce would have been needed to transport them from nearby quarries. Yet every so often the workers filled in the enclosures with rubble and built new ones, sometimes even before an enclosure was finished. The apparent disposability of these monuments makes sense if the primary goal was building a team rather than a lasting structure. If human bonding was the objective, then you might also predict that celebrating a project’s completion was an important part of the process – perhaps even an incentive to take part in the first place. A big party would have allowed links forged through collaborative toil to bear fruit, cementing social ties and perhaps leading to sexual liaisons. The rubble filling the enclosures at Göbekli Tepe suggests feasting took place: it is riddled with fragments of carbonised bones from aurochs and gazelle. Peter Turchin, who studies history and cultural evolution at the University of Connecticut in Storrs, sees bottom-up cooperation at work in monuments from the Roman Colosseum to France’s Gothic cathedrals to the International Space Station (ISS). In each case, he says, the project brought together groups who hadn’t previously worked together, and opened the door to new forms of cooperation. As a society grew in scale and complexity, so did its builders’ ambitions. The Great Pyramid at Giza took 400,000 people-years to build. Turchin estimates that the ISS required eight times that. M O N U M E N T S T O C O O P E R A T I O N Easter Island’s massive moai could have been walked into place by cooperating bands of people MIRALEX/ISTOCK -- 13 of 100 -- 12 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society WHY RELIGION MATTERS Its role in human affairs today may be hotly debated, but what isn’t in question is religion’s key role in establishing civilisation, says Harvey Whitehouse ELIGION has given us algebra and the Spanish Inquisition, Bach’s cantatas and pogroms. The debate over whether religion lifts humanity higher or brings out our basest instincts is ancient and, in some ways, reassuringly insoluble. There are so many examples on either side. The last word goes to the most erudite – until someone more erudite comes along. Alternatively, we can ask whether religion has helped societies grow and flourish. Is it, as many believe, a form of social glue that builds cooperation? As it happens, there is surprising agreement about the moral significance of cooperation. A study involving 60 societies, ranging from small groups to the very largest, found that people everywhere equate “good” with cooperative behaviours and “bad” with non- cooperative ones. Admittedly, societies differ in the kinds of cooperation they value: some are more authoritarian, others more egalitarian. Nevertheless, this approach allows us to ask a more tangible question about religion: what role, if any, has it played in establishing the cooperative behaviours that have allowed human societies to grow from small hunter- gatherer groups to vast empires and nation states? One obvious place to begin is the Axial Age, a period ESSAY PROFILE HARVEY WHITEHOUSE Harvey Whitehouse is a social anthropologist at the University of Oxford whose research focuses on the evolution of social complexity -- 14 of 100 -- Chapter 1 | The rise of civilisation | 13 > when many researchers believe civilisation pivoted towards modernity. Around the middle of the first millennium BC, the thinking goes, a set of cultural changes swept the world. Novel notions of equality radically altered the relationship between rulers and ruled, stabilising societies and allowing them to take a leap in size and complexity. Religion is thought to have played a role. Indeed, the Axial Age concept emerged from the observation that a handful of important prophets and spiritual leaders – among them Buddha, Confucius and Zoroaster, or Zarathustra – rose to prominence in that period, preaching similar moralistic ideologies. Another popular hypothesis is that cooperation in complex societies is intimately connected with the invention of “Big Gods”: deities who demand that their moral code be observed by all, and who have supernatural powers of surveillance and enforcement. Most of today’s world religions have these moralising gods, but they are rare in small-scale societies, where supernatural beings tend to care only whether people discharge their obligations to the spirit world. It has been suggested that the establishment of big states with large urban populations depended on belief in such gods, who cared about how everyone, including relative strangers, treated each other. Big Gods could also have helped solve a problem that plagues every society beyond a certain size: free-riders. In smaller communities, it is relatively easy for peer groups and local chiefs to catch people who try to live off the fruits of society while contributing less than their fair share. In bigger ones, where impersonal transactions are more commonplace, compliance is harder to police. Here, the fear that a moralising god is watching and will punish free-riders – for example, with eternal damnation – could help do the trick. →- Chapter 3 has more on religion’s role- in human morality- Other researchers, including me, have examined the role that sacred rituals might have as social glue. For most of prehistory, humans lived in small groups whose members all knew each other. Today’s small- scale societies tend to favour infrequent but traumatic rituals that promote intense social cohesion – the kind that is necessary if people are to risk life and limb hunting dangerous animals together. An example would be the agonising initiation rites still carried out in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, involving extensive scarification of the body to resemble the skin of a crocodile, a locally revered species. However, with the advent of farming around 10,000 years ago, such rituals were no longer fit for purpose. Farming supported larger populations whose members didn’t always know each other. They also weren’t required to risk everything for one another, so they didn’t require the same levels of social cohesion. But they did need to feel part of a group obeying the same moral code and system of governance – especially as their society absorbed other ethnic groups through military conquest. New kinds of rituals seem to have provided that shared identity. These were generally painless practices like prayer and meeting in holy places that could be performed frequently and collectively, allowing them to be duplicated across entire states or empires. A puzzle, however, is that many of these early civilisations also practised the brutal ritual of human THEPALMER/ISTOCK Religious rituals such as processions and burning incense help bind large communities -- 15 of 100 -- 14 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society sacrifice. This reached its zenith in the so-called archaic states that existed between about 3000 BC and 1000 BC, and were among the cruellest and most unequal societies ever. In some parts of the globe, human sacrifice persisted until relatively recently. The Inca religion, for example, had much in common with today’s world religions: people paid homage to their gods with frequent and, for the most part, painless ceremonies. But their rulers had divine status, their gods weren’t moralising and their rituals included human sacrifice right up until they were conquered by the Spanish in the 16th century. The Axial Age, Big Gods, rituals – how can we test these ideas? In 2010, Pieter François at the University of Oxford, Peter Turchin at the University of Connecticut and I began building a history databank. This project, named Seshat after the Egyptian goddess of record- keeping, provides us with the infrastructure and data to investigate these hypotheses rigorously and on a global scale. To date, it contains information on more than 400 societies that have existed around the world over the past 10,000 years. Seshat keeps growing, but we believe it is now mature enough to tackle the role of religion in the rise of civilisation. I was part of a team that used Seshat to explore the Axial Age idea. Advocates of that concept were in for a surprise. For a start, many features characteristic of the age – including moralistic norms and a legal code – arose in places far from the influence of the spiritual leaders, and sometimes long before the middle of the first millennium BC. In what is now Turkey, for example, the Hittites adopted a moral code about a millennium earlier. What’s more, the various features of the Axial Age didn’t come together until much later than most scholars had thought – many thousands of years after the initial emergence of large-scale, complex societies. For a long time after Zarathustra preached in Iran, the divinely sanctioned powers of rulers remained unchecked, for example. And Confucianism didn’t take off in China until after 200 BC. It would appear that these moralising ideologies weren’t directly linked with the rise of sizeable, cooperative civilisations. So what about Big Gods? Were they required for societies to scale up? A large, interdisciplinary team of scholars, including Patrick Savage at Keio University in Tokyo, François, Turchin and me, used Seshat to test this idea. We measured social complexity using 51 markers – such as population size and the presence of a bureaucracy or money – and found that in almost all of the regions we analysed, moralising gods were adopted much later than expected. Instead of helping foster cooperation as societies expanded, Big Gods An Inca ceremonial knife used in human sacrifice rituals -- 16 of 100 -- Chapter 1 | The rise of civilisation | 15 appeared only after a society had passed a threshold in complexity corresponding to a population of around a million people. This happened first in Egypt, where people believed in the supernatural enforcement of order or Maat – personified by a goddess – as early as 2800 BC. Egypt had a population of some 1.1 million at the time and was, by all measures, the most sophisticated society in the world. The most parsimonious explanation is that something other than Big Gods allowed societies to grow. Our study suggests that something was the shift in the nature of rituals from traumatic and rare to painless and repetitive. This predated Big Gods in nine of the 12 regions we studied – by 1100 years, on average – giving rise to the first doctrinal religions, the forerunners of today’s world religions. But there was a dark side to this development: human sacrifice. A 2016 study based on a historical analysis of more than 100 small-scale societies in Austronesia concluded that human sacrifice was used as a form of social control. The elites – chiefs and shamans – did the sacrificing, and the lower orders paid the price, so it maintained social stability by keeping the masses terrorised and subservient. Seshat includes much bigger societies, and our analysis indicates that the practice started to decline when populations exceeded about 100,000. At this point, when rulers were finding it increasingly difficult to police the masses, human sacrifice may have become a destabilising force, providing incentive for people to revolt against the system. Society began to fracture, making it vulnerable to conquest. Piecing all this together, here is what we think happened. As societies grew by means of agricultural innovation, the infrequent, traumatic rituals that had kept people together as small foraging bands gave way to frequent, painless ones. These early doctrinal religions helped unite larger, heterogeneous populations just enough to overcome the free-riding problem and ensure compliance with new forms of governance. However, in doing so they rendered them vulnerable to a new problem: power-hungry rulers. These were the despotic god-kings who presided over archaic states. Granted the divine right to command vast populations, they exploited it to raise militias and priesthoods, shoring up their power through practices we nowadays regard as cruel, such as human sacrifice and slavery. But archaic states rarely grew beyond 100,000 people because they, in turn, became internally unstable and therefore less defensible against invasion. The societies that expanded to a million or more were those that found a new way to build cooperation – Big Gods. They demoted their rulers to the status of mortals, laid the seeds of democracy and the rule of law and fostered a more egalitarian distribution of rights and obligations. To our modern eyes, “bad” religions gave way to “good” ones. In reality, religions were always “good” in the sense that they promoted cooperation. What changed was that societies began valuing social justice above deference to authority. In other words, they changed their ideas about what constituted “good” cooperative behaviours to ones that more closely align with our modern agenda. Today, many societies have transferred religion’s community-building and surveillance roles to secular institutions. Some of the wealthiest and most peaceful have atheist majorities. But some of these same societies are also facing grave problems as they absorb migrants and struggle to contain growing social tensions and xenophobia. Time will tell if they are capable of adapting to meet the challenges of destabilising influences. But analyses of the kind we are doing could at least reveal which elements of religion have pushed us towards our modern notion of civilisation, and so might be worth emulating. ❚ “To expanded to a million or more, societies needed a new way to build cooperation” LEILA MELHADO/ISTOCK -- 17 of 100 -- 16 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society THE ORIGINS OF CULTURAL DIVERSITY While human societies have universal traits in common, built on our ability to cooperate, there exist wide differences also. Where those differences come from is one of the most intriguing questions of our cultural evolution. S A SPECIES, we possess remarkably little genetic variation, yet we tend to overlook this homogeneity and focus instead on the differences between groups and individuals. At its darkest, this tendency generates xenophobia and racism, but it also has a more benign manifestation – a fascination with the exotic. Nowhere is our love affair with otherness more romanticised than in our attitudes towards the cultures of East and West. Artists and travellers have long marvelled that on opposite sides of the globe, the world’s most ancient civilisations have developed distinct forms of language, writing, art, literature, music, cuisine and fashion. As advances in communications, transport and the internet shrink the modern world, some of these distinctions are breaking down. But one difference is getting more attention than ever: the notion that easterners and westerners have distinct world views. Psychologists have conducted a wealth of experiments that seem to support popular notions that Easterners have a holistic world view, rooted in philosophical and religious traditions such as Taoism and Confucianism, while Westerners tend to think more analytically, as befits their philosophical heritage of reductionism, utilitarianism and so on. Time and again, studies seem to support the same basic, contrasting pattern of thought. Westerners appear to perceive the world in an analytic way, narrowing their focus onto prominent objects, lumping them into categories and examining them through logic. Easterners take a more holistic view: they are more likely to consider an object’s context and analyse it through its changing relationships with its environment. →- Turn to page 22 for evolutionary biologist Joe- Henrich’s take on the origin of “Western” values- -- 18 of 100 -- Chapter 1 | The rise of civilisation | 17 > Richard Nisbett at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, has suggested that historical cultural factors are the key to understanding these differences. The intensive, large-scale agriculture of ancient China involved complex cooperation among farmers and strict hierarchies from emperor down to peasant. The situation in ancient Greece, often thought of as the fount of western culture, was very different: agriculture on such a scale was impossible and most occupations didn’t require interactions with large numbers of people. The Greeks led independent lives and valued individualism. That allowed them to focus better on objects and goals in isolation, without being overly constrained by the needs of others – traits that persist to this day in Western culture. Certainly it is appealing to think that a single dimension – individualism/collectivism – can account for much of the difference in people’s behaviour around the world. That might explain why many psychologists have been happy to go along with it. However, recently it has become apparent that the East- West dichotomy is not as clear-cut as this. For a start, the simplistic notion of individualistic Westerners and collectivist easterners is undermined by studies designed to assess how people see themselves, which suggest that there is a continuum of these traits across the globe. In terms of individualism, for example, western Europeans seem to lie about midway between people in the US and those in east Asia. So it isn’t all that surprising, perhaps, that other studies find that local and current social factors, rather than the broad sweeps of history or geography, tend to shape the way a particular society thinks. For example, Nisbett’s group compared three communities living in Turkey’s Black Sea region who share the same language, ethnicity and geography, but have different social lives: farmers and fishers live in fixed communities and their trades require extensive cooperation, while herders are more mobile and independent. He found that the farmers and fishers were more holistic in their The way you see yourself may shape the way you think. If the characteristics associated with collectivism describe you, then your world view will tend to be holistic. If you fit the description of an individualist, you are likely to think in a more analytical way INDIVIDUALISM COLLECTIVISM COMPETE PRIVATE SELF-KNOWING DIRECT COMMUNICATION UNIQUE INDEPENDENT GOALS Freedom, self-sufficiency, control over one’s life Striving for one’s own goals, desires and achievements Thoughts and actions private from others Personal competition and winning Focus on one’s unique, idiosyncratic qualities Knowing oneself, having a strong identity Clearly articulating one’s wants and needs HARMONY BELONG RELATED DUTY CONTEXT ADVICE HIERARCHY Duties and sacrifices being a group member entails Concern for group harmony and that groups get along Considering close others as an integral part of self Wanting to belong to and enjoy being part of groups Turning to close others for help with decisions Self changes according to context or situation Focus on hierarchy and status issues SOURCE: DAPHNA OYSERMAN -- 19 of 100 -- 18 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society psychology than herders, being more likely to group objects based on their relationships rather than their categories: they preferred to link gloves with hands rather than with scarves, for instance. A similar mosaic pattern of thought can be found in the East. “Hokkaido is seen as the Wild West of Japan,” says Nisbett. “The citizens are regarded as cowboys – highly independent and individualistic – and sure enough, they’re more analytic in their cognitive style than mainland Japanese.” Clearly, the dichotomy between holistic eastern and analytical Western thinking is more blurred than the stereotypes suggest. We are all capable of both analytic and holistic thought: the minds of east Asians, Americans or any other group are not wired differently. What’s more, the supposed dichotomy is based on limited evidence, with China and Japan representing the East in most studies and the US and Canada flying the flag for the West. In many regions, from southern Asia to Latin America, studies are extremely scarce, and the kind of things that cue analytic or holistic thought may be very different in these neglected societies. Honour, for example, is a hugely important issue in areas that haven’t been studied very thoroughly, like the Middle East, Africa or Latin America. And what research there is indicates that it has a big impact on the way people think. Anthropologists and social scientists distinguish between what are sometimes called dignity cultures and honour cultures. Dignity cultures value people simply by dint of being human, but in honour cultures your value rests on your reputation. As a result, the impulse to defend one’s reputation is heightened and individuals are expected to avenge insults themselves rather than seeking redress in the courts. Honour cultures are also characterised by contrasting gender expectations. For women, the key requirements are to be faithful and protect one’s virtue. Men should be strong, self-reliant and intolerant of disrespect. They must earn this reputation, and then defend it – even if that requires violence. What’s more, men who score higher on ratings of honour ideology than other men are more prone to sexually objectify women and display stronger beliefs that men should have power over women. It is tempting to conclude that these attitudes are rooted in religious fervour. After all, places with much stricter honour cultures, such as the “Bible Belt” in the US south and Pakistan, are highly religious. However, repeated studies both in the US and elsewhere have found no link between a person’s religiosity and how much they endorse honour-culture attitudes. Instead, honour cultures seem to develop wherever there is severe economic insecurity and a degree of lawlessness. Honour culture is a sort of natural byproduct, because reputation is a way you protect yourself when no one else is coming to your aid. Perhaps a better way to understand societies and their cultural differences is to look at their social norms. That is the argument made by cultural psychologist Michele Gelfand at the University of Maryland in College Park. She and her colleagues describe societies with strict, rigorously enforced A study of 33 nations quantified how strict or laissez-faire each culture is. “Tighter” societies tend to be more conformist, law-abiding and religious, while “looser” ones are more creative, tolerant and disorganised >10 Tightness score 4-7 7-10 <4 SOURCE: DOI.ORG/10.1126/SCIENCE.1197754 -- 20 of 100 -- Chapter 1 | The rise of civilisation | 19 norms as “tight” and those with more laissez-faire cultures as “loose”. They argue that this key difference underpins all sorts of others, from creativity and divorce rates to the synchronicity of public clocks. In fact, the idea of cultural tightness dates back to the 1960s, when anthropologist Pertti Pelto studied 21 traditional societies and found big differences in the rigour of their social norms and how these were enforced. The tightest included the Hutterites, while the !Kung people of southern Africa came at the other end of the scale. Pelto’s insight was to suggest that tightness was connected to ecological factors such as high population density and dependence on crops for survival. Gelfand wondered how this might apply to modern societies. She suspected that tightness is determined by the level of external threat to which a society was exposed historically – whether ecological, such as earthquakes or scarce natural resources, or human- made, such as war. “Tightness is about the need for coordination,” she says. “The idea is that if you are chronically faced with these kinds of threats, you develop strong rules in order to coordinate for survival.” To test the idea, Gelfand teamed up with colleagues from 43 institutions around the world, and compared 33 nations in a study published in 2011. First they asked nearly 7000 people from diverse backgrounds to shed light on the tightness of their national culture by rating their agreement with statements such as: “There are many social norms that people are supposed to abide by in this country” and “People in this country almost always comply with social norms”. The volunteers also revealed how constrained they felt in everyday situations by rating the appropriateness of 12 behaviours, including eating, crying and flirting, in 15 contexts ranging from a bank to a funeral to the movies. There was high agreement among people from different walks of life within nations. Next, the team calculated national averages for tightness and compared these with past threats to each country, as gauged by a battery of measures including natural disasters, exposure to pathogens, territorial conflict, lack of access to clean water and high population density. Sure enough, there was a correlation. Societies that had faced a high level of threat, such as Pakistan and Malaysia, did more to regulate social behaviour and punish deviance than loose countries, which included the Netherlands, Brazil and Australia. Israel, which is also loose, was a notable exception. The UK came out slightly tighter than average, and the US looser. But it doesn’t end there. Gelfand and her colleagues found that the degree of tightness was reflected in all sorts of societal institutions and practices – even after taking national wealth into consideration. Tight societies tend to be more autocratic, with greater media censorship and fewer collective actions such as demonstrations. They are also more conformist and religious, and have more police, lower crime and divorce rates, and cleaner public spaces. “Tightness brings with it a lot of order and social control,” says Gelfand. “Even stock markets are more synchronised.” Loose societies tend to be more disorganised, but also more creative, innovative and tolerant of diversity. ❚ Ukraine AVERAGE Estonia Hungary Israel Netherlands Brazil Venezuela Greece New Zealand Australia US Spain Belgium Poland France Hong Kong Iceland Germany (West) Austria Italy UK Mexico Germany (East) Portugal China Japan Turkey Norway South Korea Singapore India Malaysia Pakistan 0 2 4 6 TIGHTNESS SCORE 8 10 12 -- 21 of 100 -- C H A P T E R 2 20 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society -- 22 of 100 -- Human society requires rules. A huge complexity of relationships underlies how we live together, and the only way we can manage them is by establishing – and enforcing – norms that everyone understands and, to greater or lesser extents, adheres to. Those norms govern everything from how we structure sexual and familial relationships to the formulation of friendship networks. Whether we are aware of them or not, they shape the way we interact with people from the moment we meet them. Taken together, these norms add up to a culture – and the culture we live in has surprising effects on how we think and act. Chapter 2 | The human factor | 21 -- 23 of 100 -- 22 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society You argue that kinship systems are key to the ways in which different cultures develop. What do you mean by that? Kinship systems are collections of norms that define how we should behave in various contexts. They were likely the first human social institutions to emerge because they are built on our evolved psychology. The institution of marriage, for example, taps into our species’ pair-bonding psychology, and notions of extended kin groups play on a core kinship psychology for helping and caring for our children, siblings and other close relatives. The social norms that make up kinship systems structure the world you are born into. They shape who you can marry, what you can inherit and own, who you form alliances with, where you live and what kind of economic activities you engage in. As we grow up among the norms and institutions of our society, we develop psychological adaptations to navigate this social world. In most agricultural societies, people have lived enmeshed in kin-based institutions within tribal groups or networks. Inheritance and post-marital residence often followed either the male or female line – but not both – so people often lived in extended unilineal households, and wives or husbands moved to live with their spouses’ kinfolk. Many kinship units collectively owned or controlled territory, and kin- based organisations provided members with protection, insurance and security, caring for sick, injured and poor members as well as the elderly. Arranged marriages with relatives such as cousins PREVIOUS PAGE: IMAGE SOURCE/ISTOCK RIGHT: CHAMELEONSEYE/ISTOCK > HOW CULTURE SHAPES OUR MINDS PROFILE JOE HENRICH Joe Henrich is an evolutionary biologist at Harvard University and author of The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous The norms of the society we live in have a huge influence on our psychology, motivations and decision making, says Joe Henrich INTERVIEW -- 24 of 100 -- Chapter 2 | The human factor | 23 -- 25 of 100 -- 24 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society were customary, and polygynous marriages were common for high-status men. These intensive kin networks nurture a collectivist mindset with greater conformity, obedience to authority, nepotism and in-group loyalty. You have also argued that the social changes ushered in by the Western Catholic church helped establish a unique psychology among people you dub WEIRD - Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich and Democratic. How? The Western church introduced prohibitions on marriage to blood relatives that were extended to include distant relatives, eventually up to sixth cousins, which broke down ties between families, tribes and clans. It prohibited polygamous marriage and discouraged the adoption of children so that some lineages simply died out because they had no heirs. The church also encouraged, and sometimes required, newly married couples to set up independent households, and promoted the individual ownership of property. Instead of being born into a world where you inherit most of your social relationships, where everything is about social relationships and there is strong in-group loyalty, obedience and conformity, now you have to find and develop your own mutually beneficial relationships. And when you are deciding which towns, guilds or other voluntary associations to join – which will be your new safety net, rather than your kin network – you are looking for people that share your interests, beliefs and so on. This focuses attention on people’s underlying personalities, traits and dispositions, rather than their pre-existing relationship to you. Your success in the world is now tied to cultivating your attributes, making yourself appealing to others because you are going to do business together or get married. What is the psychology of these WEIRD people like? WEIRD people tend to show greater trust in strangers and fairness towards anonymous others; think more analytically rather than holistically; make more use of intentions in moral judgements; are more concerned ROCIO MONTOYA with personality, the self and the cultivation of personal attributes; they are more individualistic and less loyal to their group; and they are more likely to judge the behaviour of others as reflecting some enduring disposition rather than temporary situational factors. So is it the West versus the rest? It is important not to set up a dichotomy between the WEIRD and non-WEIRD. WEIRDness is a multi- dimensional continuum, and there is a lot of variation even within western Europe. We took data from the World Values Survey and, using techniques from population genetics, analysed the cultural distance of various populations from the US, the weirdest of WEIRD countries. This WEIRD scale shows New Englanders as the WEIRDest population in the world and substantially different to populations in the Middle East and Africa at the other end. Interestingly, although there is a huge body of research in social psychology setting up an East-West dichotomy, it turns out that the typical subjects studied in Japan or China are kind of in the middle of the WEIRD spectrum. -- 26 of 100 -- Chapter 2 | The human factor | 25 You believe WEIRDness also helps explain how the West became “particularly prosperous”. What is the link? A WEIRDer and more individualistic psychology provides fertile ground for the development of formal institutions and notions of individual rights and equality before the law that would be hard to conceive of in a world of clans or kindreds. As people in the West moved away from tight kinship networks towards voluntary associations of strangers in the form of labour unions, guilds, monasteries, universities and businesses, they adjusted psychologically to be more trusting of people outside their kin group and also developed contract law to buttress voluntary associations. This happened much earlier than in places such as China. The WEIRD mind is also particularly patient, as documented in many studies, which – combined with trust and an individualistic drive to set yourself apart – helps drive innovation in technology and economic activities. This eventually launched the Industrial Revolution. What are the downsides to WEIRDness? In societies where there is a strong sense of kinship, like Fiji where I have done fieldwork, there is a sense of security, community, oneness – a kind of comfort that comes from the warm embrace of knowing you are at the centre of a tight web of relations who will always have your back. They aren’t tied to you because you are a convenient contact or are currently smart or successful, they are tied to you in a deep way and they will be tied to your children. This is a snug, secure, happy feeling. WEIRDness undermines this feeling. People living in tribal or clan-based societies also tend to see themselves as links in a chain connecting past to future, creating a sense of continuity that gives people a real sense of meaning and security. Then you get Westerners who are like “I’m an individual ape on a pale blue dot in the middle of a giant black space”. What are the consequences of psychology’s bias towards WEIRD subjects? It means that the picture of “human psychology” portrayed in the textbooks, and still in many journal articles, doesn’t represent the psychology of Homo sapiens at all. Perhaps even more concerning is how this bias hampers our efforts to understand the origins and nature of psychological processes and brain development. Much of what looks like reliably developing features of minds, with clear developmental trajectories over childhood, turn out to be the result of cultural products, like the institutions, values, technologies or languages individuals confront and must learn, internalise and navigate to make their way in the world. Then there is the applied side of the WEIRD people problem. If people in different places are psychologically different, then the same forms of government, social policies and economic programmes will often have very different impacts and results. This has often been ignored, as WEIRD governing institutions and economic policies have been transplanted, often word-for-word, into countries and communities around the world. I suspect that some of the failure of well-intentioned efforts to generate economic growth or improved health conditions result from failures to account for differences in people’s cultural psychology. Is the world becoming WEIRDer? With increasing urbanisation and globalisation there is a trend towards smaller families and WEIRDer ways of thinking. Even something as simple as the spread of Western-style schools is going to push people towards more analytic thinking. So a loss of psychological and cultural variation is occurring. But I think we are going to see new ways of organising communities and structuring the social world and people’s relationships. So, I don’t think we have to worry that the institutions that spread out of Europe over recent centuries are going to crush the world’s psychological and social differences. As people reinterpret what they learned from other societies and synthesise their own way of doing things, the world will continue to blend and fragment in a mosaic of cultural and psychological diversity. ❚ -- 27 of 100 -- 26 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society HAPPY FAMILIES? Nothing divides human societies – or indeed individual opinions – quite like our attitudes towards sexual and familial relationships. But the cultural norms in these areas often have relatively recent origins, and examining them from a purely scientific standpoint often undercuts their validity. ND they lived happily ever after.” The lifelong commitment of two people to one another may be the fairy-tale ending, and has certainly developed into an ideal of Western society. Yet throughout our early history, polygyny, or one male with several females, was routine. One idea for how monogamy came to dominate is that as we evolved larger brains, keeping babies alive required more effort and food. The children of men who were spread across too many families were less likely to survive. Indeed, a recent analysis found that, from hunter-gatherers to industrial societies, the greater the father’s investment, the more monogamous the society. In turn, monogamy helped social stability: if a few men monopolise all the women, that leaves a lot of disgruntled bystanders. And, more recently, religion also played a role in making monogamy a Western norm. But sexual relationships aren’t as rigid today as they once were. The erosion of religious values, the development of hormonal contraception and the rupture of taboos around extra-marital sex and divorce mean that rather than having one sexual partner for life, many people are serial monogamists, moving from one long-term relationship to the next. Even with less pressure to make lifelong commitments, we are pretty bad at staying true. -- 28 of 100 -- Chapter 2 | The human factor | 27 In a UK poll, 1 in 5 people admitted to cheating on a partner. Another study found that up to a third of people who are married or cohabiting stray. Perhaps that’s why some have abandoned the ideal altogether. A 2016 survey found that 20 per cent of single people in the US have had “consensual non-monogamous” relationships, where people have multiple sexual partners, but everyone is in the loop. For some people, these relationships work just fine. When researchers compared people in traditional monogamous and open relationships, they found no significant differences in reported relationship satisfaction, commitment or passionate love. What’s more, those in open relationships reported less jealousy and higher levels of trust. Where devout monogamy is expected, it’s no surprise that infidelity spurs negative feelings. But norms change, and just as sexual relationships have become more fluid in some societies, so too have family structures. In Western and many other societies, conventional wisdom long held that children were best nurtured in families with two parents – one male, one female – who were both genetically related to the child. Yet, in the US and UK, married, heterosexual couples with biologically related children now form a minority of families. Results from the first longitudinal studies following the fates of children in non- traditional family structures are now highlighting what is important for a child’s development. The results are clear-cut. The longest-running studies, following lesbian families, show that two female parents are just as likely to raise well-adjusted children as a heterosexual couple is. Although not as extensive, studies on gay father families come to the same conclusion. In the US, several large studies comparing lesbian, gay and heterosexual families have found no differences in parental warmth, child behaviour, the emotional problems experienced by children or their psychosocial adjustment, including anxiety, depression and self-esteem. It is a similar story with single-parent families. The Millennium Cohort Study in the UK has been following 18,000 children born at the turn of the millennium, including some in single-parent families. After accounting for factors like socio-economic status and the parent’s mental health, it has found no difference in the frequency of emotional problems in children across family types. Another study assessed 35 stable single-mother families where there was no divorce or changing partners. They found that children described a close emotional bond with their mother – open communication, shared activities and trust. Relationships within a family aren’t the only determinants of a child’s well-being, however. In one study of 117 Australian gay and lesbian families, more than two-thirds of parents reported that their high-school-age children had felt isolated or different because of their parent’s sexual orientation. Nearly one in five had experienced discrimination by a teacher. Stigmatisation wasn’t universal; 41 per cent of parents reported no problems, and the children themselves said their classmates were more confused than mean-spirited. ❚ ALEKSANDARNAKIC/ISTOCK Children raised by two female parents are as well-adjusted as those with heterosexual parents -- 29 of 100 -- 28 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society WINNING FRIENDS (AND INFLUENCING PEOPLE) The cooperative nature of human society creates networks of supporting social relations beyond mere family. These friendship networks are created and maintained in surprisingly uniform ways – and are absolutely crucial not just to our practical, but also to our mental, well-being. LTHOUGH humans are a highly social species, juggling relationships isn’t easy. Like other primates, the size of our social network is constrained by brain size, and requires structure to organise. The typical social circle of 150 people is made up of a series of layers, each containing a well-defined number of people and associated with specific frequencies of contact, levels of emotional closeness and willingness to provide help (see diagram, above right). In fact, our social world consists of two quite distinct sets of people: friends and family. We tend to give preference to the latter. With our social networks limited in size, we first slot in family members and then set about filling any spare places with unrelated friends. As a result, people who come from large families tend to have fewer friends. People spend around 20 per cent of their waking hours, on average, on social interactions. That is about 3.5 hours a day talking, eating and sitting with others in a social context. This may seem like a lot, but distributed evenly among your 150 friends and family, it works out at just 1 minute and 45 seconds per person per day. Of course, that isn’t what we do. Around 40 per cent of this social time is devoted to the five people in our innermost social circle, the support clique, with another 20 per cent given to the 10 additional people in -- 30 of 100 -- Chapter 2 | The human factor | 29 the next layer, the sympathy group. That’s about 17.5 minutes and 4.5 minutes per person, respectively. The remaining 135 people in the two outer rings of our social circles get an average of just 37 seconds a day each. These are general trends, though. In fact, each person has a unique “social fingerprint” – an idiosyncratic way in which they allocate their social effort. This pattern is quite impervious to who is in your friendship circle at any given time. It does, however, reveal quite a lot about your own identity. How often you contact each of your friends probably reflects aspects of your personality, such as extroversion, neuroticism and conscientiousness. Other factors influencing your social fingerprint are whether you are male or female and whether you are an early riser or a night owl. What is most unexpected, however, is the durability of a person’s social fingerprint in the face of change. It is as though exactly who our friends are doesn’t really matter, as long as we have friends. Of course, we opt for people who are as congenial as possible, but, provided these boxes are ticked, more or less anyone will do. That may sound opportunistic or even callous, but it makes sense. Friendship isn’t just for fun; it has huge benefits for our mental and physical well-being. In a changing world, our approach to making and maintaining friends needs to be both flexible and stable so that we can optimise those benefits. The key is building social capital. For sociologists and psychologists, this includes emotional support, important information learned through the grapevine or practical help, such as a lift to the hospital or cooperation at work. Having high social capital isn’t just a matter of being popular and well-liked, though. As well as having a dense web of connections that includes close friends and more distant acquaintances, people with more social capital tend to be more engaged in building their community. A wealth of studies has confirmed that social capital makes a huge difference to our quality of life. People with high social capital may both perform better at work and find it easier to land a new job, for instance, Our friends tend to be surprisingly like us, and there are certain personal characteristics that predict how close a friendship is likely to be: 1. You speak the same language or, better still, dialect 2. You grew up in the same area 3. You have the same educational and career experiences 4. You pursue the same hobbies and interests 5. You see eye to eye on moral, religious and political matters 6. You share a sense of humour 7. You have the same taste in music S E V E N P I L L A R S O F F R I E N D S H I P > We can only manage a maximum of 150 people in our social circle, and they fall into layers depending on their emotional closeness (all figures are cumulative) Support clique 5 Sympathy group 15 Good friends 50 Dunbar’s number Friends 150 Me -- 31 of 100 -- 30 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society thanks to the greater possibility of constructive collaborations. Social capital can also soothe our stresses and help us live more healthily, leading to a lower risk of mental illness and physical disease, and a longer lifespan. Even our “weak ties” have big effects. These are vague acquaintances and fleeting interactions, say with a barista or the distant colleague queuing next to us at the coffee machine. People have an average of between 11 and 16 of these interactions on a typical day. Their importance to our well-being and work success shouldn’t be underestimated. And even a small effort to build on those interactions can pay great dividends. When participants were encouraged to make small talk to a stranger, for example, they reported a 17 per cent increase in a measure of happiness. The optimal ratio of strong to weak ties is about 50:50. The results fit with historical analyses of scientists’ and artists’ networks, finding that the most productive collaborations are often forged between people of different experiences and backgrounds. Some benefits of social capital come through non- verbal communication, such as physical touch. Various studies have found that non-sexual physical touch – rubbing someone’s arm if they are sad, say – triggers profound neurological and physiological changes, including the release of endorphins. These painkilling compounds can produce a natural high that helps create a sense of bonhomie and goodwill. Social touch also appears to buffer our responses to stress, reducing the release of the hormone cortisol and calming our heart rate following an unpleasant experience like public speaking. The flip side of this is that being lonely increases the risk of everything from heart attacks and cancer to dementia, depression and death, whereas people who are satisfied with their social lives sleep better, age more slowly and respond better to vaccines. The effect is so strong that curing loneliness is as good for your health as giving up smoking, according to John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago, who has spent his career studying the effects of social isolation. This is partly because people who are lonely often don’t look after themselves well, but there are direct physiological mechanisms too – related to, but not identical to, the effects of stress. Cacioppo has found that in lonely people, genes involved in cortisol signalling and the inflammatory response were up- regulated, and that immune cells important in fighting bacteria were more active, too. He suggests that our bodies may have evolved so that in situations of perceived social isolation, they trigger branches of the immune system involved in wound healing and bacterial infection. An isolated person would be at greater risk of physical trauma, whereas being in a group might favour the immune responses necessary for fighting viruses, which spread easily between people in close contact. Crucially, these differences relate most strongly to how lonely people believe themselves to be, rather than to the actual size of their social network. Lonely people become overly sensitive to social threats and come to see others as potentially dangerous. Tackling this attitude reduced loneliness more effectively than giving people more opportunities for interaction, or teaching social skills. If you feel satisfied with your social life, whether you have one or two close friends or quite a few, there is nothing to worry about. ❚ -- 32 of 100 -- Chapter 2 | The human factor | 31 SIGNALS OF ENGAGEMENT The paramount nature of trust and cooperation in human society generates complex rules of engagement. We might not be aware of them, but they come into play from the moment we meet someone. UR greetings are imbued with deep symbolism and meaning. Any greetings that involve bodily contact may offer us a way to pick up chemical cues. Although the existence of human pheromones is controversial, research suggests that we may be able to assess someone’s physical fitness and fertility from compounds in their saliva – a possible rationale for the strange phenomenon of romantic kissing. What’s more, there is evidence that body odour can communicate someone’s emotional state and even their sexual arousal. Our greetings can allow us to sample this aroma without overtly sniffing someone’s body. Our tactile greetings also allow us to assess someone’s character and to establish our trust in them. One study found that the strength and duration of a handshake offers a fairly accurate prediction of personality traits including extroversion, neuroticism and open-mindedness. Another found that students engaged in a simulated real-estate negotiation were more honest about the quality of TAPHOUSE_STUDIOS/ISTOCK Sensitivity to the feelings of others in our social group is key to good relations. But we don’t always get our interactions right, of course. It can often feel very hard to apologise, even if we know the relationship will benefit. There is a perception that apologising weakens your authority, lowers your self-esteem and damages your image in the workplace. And research has also shown that people make “forecasting” errors about the potentially negative effects of apologising - they wrongly expect less benefit and more costs. Indeed, one study found that when people refused to apologise for something they did that upset someone else, they reported feeling more powerful and felt that they’d stuck to their values more. However, when people did apologise, they got the same benefits. So apologising can bring the same psychological benefits as outright refusal to do so. There could also be material benefits to saying sorry; it can make you appear more approachable and trustworthy to strangers, according to work by Alison Wood Brooks at Harvard Business School. The most effective apologies contained six elements: an expression of regret, an explanation of what went wrong and an acknowledgment of responsibility, followed by a declaration of repentance, an offer of repair and a request for forgiveness. T H E I M P O R T A N C E O F S A Y I N G S O R R Y > -- 33 of 100 -- 32 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society the property if they had been encouraged to shake hands before the task. Then there are the social messages we convey with our facial expressions. The orthodox view holds that there is a group of basic emotions – at least six, but perhaps many more – that all humans display on their faces in fundamentally the same way. This means that other people can reliably read your emotional state from your face. It is an appealing idea that has influenced everything from educational practices and behavioural-learning programmes for children with autism to emotion-detecting software algorithms. But now it is being challenged. Some dissenters believe that facial “expressions” aren’t reliable guides to our emotions at all, but tools that we wield – usually unconsciously – to get what we want from others. In this view, the supposed prototypical expressions of emotions aren’t necessarily universal – culture influences how we perceive them – and they take on new meanings. A smile is a signal to work together, bond or be friends. A pout is designed to garner care or protection rather than to indicate sadness. Scowling, the supposed expression of anger, may be used to trigger another person to submit. A gasping face signals submission, not fear (in the West at least), and so could deflect an attack. Nose scrunching, traditionally associated with disgust, is reconceived as a rejection of the way a social interaction is playing out. If this is correct, the implications for our social interactions are enormous. If we are misinterpreting what facial movements mean, this surely undermines our ability to read other people, especially people from other cultures. We aren’t just missing a trick: this could have some serious implications. Our assumptions about facial expressions influence everything from how we diagnose and manage some conditions, such as autism, to policy decisions, -- 34 of 100 -- Chapter 2 | The human factor | 33 “A handshake allows us to assess someone’s character and trustworthiness ” SUTEISHI/ISTOCK national security protocols and legal judgements. Human laughter has also evolved to be a potent and flexible social tool. According to Adrienne Wood at the University of Virginia it serves three main purposes. The first is reward: when we laugh together, it shows appreciation of a particular behaviour and reinforces the interaction, so that we are more likely to act in the same way in the future. Spontaneous laughter triggers the release of opioids, which is probably what creates these rewarding feelings. Laughter’s second function is to signal connection. These affiliation laughs tend to be voluntary (or “fake”) and help to smooth over tension and embarrassment rather than reinforcing a particular behaviour. If you have said something potentially hurtful, for example, a polite chuckle might help to reassure someone that it was just playful teasing. The third purpose of laughter is to signal dominance – like when your boss laughs dismissively at your outlandish idea. Whereas a direct challenge, such as a cutting put-down, might trigger aggression, laughter indicates disapproval in a more subtle way. “It maintains a facade of social harmony,” says Wood. The idea that laughter is the best medicine may be something of a cliché, yet there is some evidence for its health benefits. A big belly laugh can exercise the heart, for example, and it works some of the trunk muscles as hard as traditional crunches. What’s more, the importance of laughter in our social lives means we can use it to boost our friendships or romantic relationships. A study across 21 societies revealed that, in general, people are able to tell the difference between fake and authentic laughs – but further experiments suggest that both kinds can increase someone’s likeability. Another study found that people who watched a funny film together tended to open up afterwards, disclosing more personal information to each other. ❚ Even though we know when a laugh is fake, laughter can make someone seem more likeable -- 35 of 100 -- 34 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society INTERVIEW matter: calculating probability, distinguishing correlation from causation, Bayesian reasoning, statistical decision theory. Those come less naturally to us. And when it comes to issues that are larger than our day-to-day physical existence, people don’t necessarily hew to the mindset that ideas should be evaluated as to whether they’re true or false. You also claim that some seeming irrationality can be understood as the rational pursuit of goals. How so? Rationality always has to be defined with respect to a goal. What are you deploying your thought processes to attain? The goals sometimes can be dubious, but you can be extremely methodical at attaining them. I cite the defenders of Donald Trump against accusations of irrationality, who will say: Well, he got to be president, didn’t he? If the goal is glorifying Donald Trump, rallying his supporters and gaining the levers of power, he was quite a genius at it. From the point of view of his own rationality, there was a certain cunning. But surely the current “pandemic of poppycock”, as you call it, is something new? Conspiracy theories are probably as old as human groups. Paranormal woo isn’t new. Neither is fake news. These are maybe the default mode of our species. For most of human history, it was hard to tell what was true or false. What is the origin of fortune and misfortune? What is the origin of the universe? What actually happens behind closed doors in palaces and halls of power? You can’t find out. But there are some beliefs that will rally your coalition together – that are uplifting, that are morally edifying, that are entertaining – and those stories for most of our history were as close as we could get to the truth, and they served as a substitute for the truth. What’s unusual now is that we have a lot of means to answer questions that formerly were just cosmic mysteries. Before that, it was a matter of conjecture. And a good story was the best we could do. We carry over that mindset when it comes to the cosmic, the counterfactual, the metaphysical, the highly politicised. WHY RATIONALITY RULES As fake news and conspiracy theories abound, it can seem societies are falling apart as a result of unfounded biases. But in fact we remain a supremely rational species, says Steven Pinker What do you mean by rationality? I define it as the use of knowledge to attain goals. There is not one single tool of rationality – it depends what you’re after. If you’re seeking to derive new true statements from existing ones, then logic is your tool. If you want to assess your degree of belief in a hypothesis based on evidence, then Bayesian reasoning. If you want to figure out what’s the rational thing to do when the outcome depends on what other rational people do, game theory. Those tools don’t seem to come naturally to people, yet you reject the idea that human cognition is a heffalump trap of biases and delusions that are a legacy of our evolution. Why? Yeah, I don’t think it’s quite right. Although there’s no question we do have outbursts of irrationality – and they are all too plentiful – I’m not ready to write off our species as irrational. We can all be rational when it comes to our immediate surroundings and outcomes that affect our lives. And if you’re upset about some outbursts of irrationality, don’t blame your hunter- gatherer heritage. The San people of the Kalahari desert deploy rationality to engage in pursuit hunting, where they’ve got to figure out where the antelope may have run based on some fragmentary tracks on the ground. They engage in some pretty sophisticated inference. They wouldn’t survive if they didn’t. All of us command some aspect of rationality. In our everyday lives we package it with subject-matter knowledge in particular areas – bringing up the kids, holding down a job, getting food in the fridge. What we don’t wield are tools that can be applied to any subject -- 36 of 100 -- Chapter 2 | The human factor | 35 You describe key mechanisms through which people form irrational beliefs – the three M’s of motivated reasoning, myside bias and mythological belief. Can you unpack these? Motivated reasoning is a phenomenon where we direct our reasoning toward something that we want to believe in the first place. There is a saying from the [late] journalist Upton Sinclair that it’s very hard to get a man to understand something when his livelihood depends on not understanding it. In the lab, we see this manifested when you give people a logical syllogism [two statements with a logical conclusion] and ask them if the conclusion follows from the premises. If the conclusion is something that they want to be true, they are apt to ratify an invalid syllogism – and vice versa if it is a conclusion that they don’t want to be true. And myside bias? Motivated reasoning can be in the service not just of a goal that favours the individual, but often the larger coalition that he or she belongs to, in which case it’s called the myside bias. Namely, you direct your reasoning to end up with a conclusion that is already a belief in your team, your coalition, your party. It’s among the most powerful of the many cognitive biases that have been documented by cognitive psychology. It afflicts the [political] left and the right. Being smart does not make you immune to it. And it’s rather hard to unlearn. There is a variety of ways in which we comfort ourselves in thinking that beliefs of our side are valid and wise. We muster our ingenuity, we take advantage of ambiguities in the evidence, we feed ourselves evidence that supports our position and try to ignore sources that might contradict our preferred beliefs. We think more like lawyers than scientists. What are some real-world manifestations of myside bias? With politicised issues in science such as anthropogenic climate change, scientists are often surprised that there is so much denial. They sometimes attribute it to scientific ignorance or illiteracy. But that is a less-than-rational belief because it’s not based on empirical studies of why people deny climate change. JENNIE EDWARDS PROFILE STEVEN PINKER Steven Pinker is a psychologist at Harvard University and author of books including The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why violence has declined and Rationality: What it is, why it seems scarce, why it matters > -- 37 of 100 -- 36 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society What those studies show is that the deniers are actually no more ignorant of science than the believers. In fact, a lot of people who endorse the scientific consensus are really out to lunch when it comes to the science of climate change. They think it has something to do with the ozone hole, toxic waste dumps, plastic straws in the ocean. What does predict people’s belief in climate change is their politics. The farther you are to the right, the more denial there is. That’s a case in which the scientifically respectable conclusion is aligned with the left. But there are also cases where the left is out of touch with the scientific facts. My claim that left and right are equally biased is not just an attempt to be even-handed. Research on the myside bias shows that both the left and the right are susceptible. A given set of data – say on the efficacy of gun control – will be seen to support or not support a position depending on whether the reasoner belongs to a side that believes it in the first place. And then we get to the third and most potent M, which is mythological belief. I think this a powerful explanation for why people apparently believe so much nonsense. There are real beliefs like “I believe there is a beer in the fridge”. But then there’s a whole family of beliefs that are more like stories that capture a deeper truth: what our enemies are capable of and how dreadful they are; how noble our side is, how wise and pure and good. Whether these things are true is almost beside the point. These are mythological beliefs. Some of our national founding myths may fall into that category. Some religious beliefs too, and believers are sometimes offended by the idea that they should be subject to empirical scrutiny. For them, belief in God is a kind of belief you hold for its moral benefits, not for its factual accuracy. It’s a different kind of belief. I quote Bertrand Russell, who said it is undesirable to believe a proposition when there are no grounds whatsoever for believing it is true. And what I note is that this is at odds with the way that most people think. It’s a product of the Enlightenment that we think that every question ought to be put in the realm of reality and tested for its literal veracity. That seems to imply that some beliefs are beyond criticism and impervious to evidence. Is that right? There is a tendency to protect these beliefs or at least to take them out of the realm of evidence, but the boundary between the real and the mythical can be changed. The origin of fortune and misfortune may once have been attributed to fate, but we now consider it an empirical question. We want to know what gives you Alzheimer’s. It’s not divine retribution. I think the general tendency since the Enlightenment has been to try to bite off chunks of the mythology zone for the reality zone. I say the more the better, and in particular areas, we can try to persuade people that, no, you can’t just believe anything you want. There really is a fact of the matter. Can that boundary between reality and mythology shift in real time, say with something like covid-19 that starts as an abstract threat, but then becomes horribly real? You would think that vaccine hesitancy would crumble in the face of covid. It has not, although it has declined. What I suspect happens is that with any mythological belief, there are the true believers who will go to their graves believing, no matter how high the evidence piles up. But there are always some who are more open to the evidence. Yet it seems that the mythological zone is expanding right now, at least in Western democracies. Is it? It’s all too easy to come to a conclusion based on our own availability biases, and on an understanding of the world from anecdotes, which is basically what journalism consists of. Unfortunately, we don’t have the good evidence over an extended period that would settle it. I cite a study that looked for conspiratorial content in letters to the editors of major American newspapers over a span of more than a century and found no increase. The data I found on belief in paranormal phenomena among Americans – astrology, crystal power, haunted houses – is pretty much flat over 50 years, too. So humanity isn’t losing its mind today any more than it has in the past? No. But we are squandering some of the tools that could make us more rational if they were more widely applied. It’s not that people are saying more unfounded or outlandish things, but we’re more cognisant of the higher standards that we ought to apply, and so the lapses are all the more salient to us. In terms of the moral statement of what we ought to do, it’s now accepted that we ought to prioritise rationality. ❚ -- 38 of 100 -- NEW SCIENTIST ESSENTIAL GUIDES ESSENTIAL GUIDES &EWIHSRXLIFIWXGSZIVEKIJVSQ 2I[7GMIRXMWXXLI )WWIRXMEP+YMHIWEVIGSQTVILIRWMZI RIIHXSORS[GSQTIRHMYQWGSZIVMRKXLIQSWXI\GMXMRKXLIQIWMRWGMIRGIERHXIGLRSPSK] XSHE]8LI[LSPIWIVMIWMWEZEMPEFPIXSFY]RS[ BUY IN PRINT AT: SHOP.NEWSCIENTIST.COM/ESSENTIALGUIDES Buy each issue digitally via the New Scientist iOS or Google Play App -- 39 of 100 -- C H A P T E R 3 38 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society -- 40 of 100 -- Cooperation between different groups in society often means putting our own narrow advantage to one side. That has led to the development of a near-universal rulebook that governs which behaviours are to be encouraged, and to be proscribed. Traits such as courage and modesty are “good”, for example; lying and cheating are “bad”. As societies became more complex, this moral code has required independent structures to keep people on the straight and narrow and maintain social cohesion – chief among them, perhaps, moralising religion. But our religious sensibilities tapped into far older evolved wiring. Chapter 3 | Morality and religion | 39 -- 41 of 100 -- 40 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society HE anthropologist Franz Boas’s description of Inuit life in the 19th century illustrates the probable moral code of early humans. Here, norms were unwritten and rarely articulated, but were well understood and heeded. Deception and aggression were frowned upon; leadership, food sharing, marriage and interactions with other groups were loosely governed by traditions. Conflict was often resolved in song duels or, failing that, in ritualised combat. Because feuding leads to instabilities, it was strongly discouraged. With life in the unforgiving Arctic being so demanding, the Inuit’s practical approach to morality made good sense. The overlap of moral virtues across cultures is striking, even though the relative ranking of the virtues may vary with a clan’s history and environment. Typically, vindictiveness and cheating are discouraged, while cooperation, modesty and courage are praised. These universal norms far predate the concept of any moralising god or written law. Instead, they are rooted in the similarity of basic human needs and our shared mechanisms for learning and problem solving. Our social instincts include the intense urge to belong. The approval of others is rewarding, while their disapproval is aversive. These social emotions prime our brains to shape our behaviour according to the norms and values of our family and our community. More generally, social instincts motivate us to learn how to navigate in a socially complex world, something that starts pulling these instincts towards particular habitual behaviours. The mechanism involves a repurposed reward system originally used to develop habits important for self-care. Our brains use the system to acquire behavioural patterns regarding safe routes home, efficient food gathering and dangers to avoid. Good habits save time, energy and sometimes your life. Good social habits do something similar in a social context. We learn to tell the truth, even when lying is self- serving; we help a grandparent even when it is PREVIOUS PAGE: LJUBAPHOTO/ISTOCK RIGHT: THOMAS FAULL/ISTOCK > THE ROOTS OF MORALITY For most of our 300,000 years on the planet, Homo sapiens lived in small groups, and it is here that our moral code was forged – for good and all -- 42 of 100 -- Chapter 3 | Morality and religion | 41 -- 43 of 100 -- 42 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society inconvenient. We acquire what we call a conscience. Social benefits are accompanied by social demands: we must get along, but not put up with too much. Hence impulse control – only being aggressive, compassionate or indulgent at the right time – is advantageous. In humans, a greatly expanded prefrontal cortex boosts self-control, just as it boosts problem-solving skills in the social as well as the physical world. These aptitudes are augmented by our capacity for language, which allows social practices and institutions to develop in exceedingly subtle ways. Not surprisingly, this can go awry in various ways. About 1 per cent of humans seem incapable of feeling shame, remorse or genuine affection, and they are apt to lie and injure without compunction. These are psychopaths and they lack a conscience. To a lesser degree, dealing with discordant urges regarding self- care and other-care is something we all struggle with. The human capacity for both good and evil, often within the same person, has long been recognised and puzzled over. Evolutionary biology has an answer, and it doesn’t reflect well on human nature. Acts of both good and evil are driven by altruism – and that is ultimately selfishness in disguise. For a long time, altruism was a biological mystery. The prime directive of evolution is to pass on our genes to the next generation. Engaging in costly behaviours with no obvious survival pay-off seems to go against that grain. The polymath J. B. S. Haldane eventually twigged it: individuals mostly make sacrifices for close relatives, and hence help to usher copies of their own genes into the next generation. Acts of true selflessness exist, but these are explained as reciprocal altruism, where kindness to strangers (who may in fact be relatives) is banked for the future. That’s all good, but what about evil? Evildoers often see their acts as being for the greater good. This “pathological altruism” lies behind some of the worst “Acts of both good and evil are driven by altruism - and that is selfishness in disguise” atrocities in human history, including wars of aggression and genocide. We don’t come fitted with categories of people that are targets of our empathy or cruelty, says psychologist Steven Pinker at Harvard University. “Whether we’re good or evil depends on what side of the sympathy boundary a particular individual is found,” he says. That largely depends on whether we see them as part of our “tribe” at any given point. If we don’t, we can treat others exploitatively or instrumentally, says Pinker. “We can keep slaves, we can engage in ethnic cleansing, we treat people like vermin.” →- Chapter 4 on power and conflict has- more on these themes- Even members of our in-group can’t count on our good intentions all the time. Our sense of justice is often indistinguishable from our sense of revenge, so we can be cruel when we think a person “deserves” it, says Pinker. A desire for dominance can lead us to disadvantage those we see as standing in our way, he says. But humans also have the capacity for self-control and, perhaps uniquely, self-reflection, which has allowed us to suppress or moderate some of our baser evolutionary impulses. Innovations such as the rule of law, courts and the police go some way to reduce our power, or our incentive, to disadvantage others for personal gain. A Maasai tradition known as osotua – literally, umbilical cord – provides further insight into the roots of human generosity. It allows anyone in need to request aid from their network of friends. Anyone who is asked is obliged to help, often by giving livestock, as long as it doesn’t jeopardise their own survival. No one expects a recipient to repay the gift, and no one keeps -- 44 of 100 -- Chapter 3 | Morality and religion | 43 track of how often a person asks or gives. The trigger for such generosity is an unpredictable crisis. This suggests that these practices persist because they help manage risk, which pays off for everyone in the long run. Even the best-prepared family can fall prey to catastrophe, such as a sudden illness. These types of risk can’t be prevented, so need-based giving may have emerged as a proto-insurance policy. Prosperous members of many societies share with others in need, so that this social insurance will be available if they require it – just as wealthy homeowners insure their belongings against fire. However, the ability to help isn’t enough in itself. To benefit from osotua-style generosity, a society needs to prevent cheating, for example asking when not truly in need. Where wealth can be hidden, reputation is the key. In Fiji there is an osotua-like practice called kerekere. “People can get reputations for being habitual kerekere-ers, implying they’re lazy,” says Matthew Gervais at Brunel University London. That makes them think carefully before making kerekere requests, which bring a slight taint of shame. In fact, reputation doesn’t just inhibit cheating in kerekere: it appears to be the rock upon which generosity is built. People with a reputation for giving also tend to receive more. The Maasai and Fijians both live in close-knit societies. Do humans become less generous when they live in more complex societies? On one hand, people in Western countries often walk past beggars on the street. But that could be because social institutions exist that they expect to step in and help. On the other hand, need-based giving is apparent, for example when people donate money in response to a natural disaster. In fact, experiments indicate that Westerners and others living in complex societies often give generously to strangers, whereas people living in smaller-scale societies tend to direct their generosity towards people they know. ❚ > EVERYDAY EVIL Evil lurks in all of us beneath a civilised veneer. That was the apparent lesson of a controversial experiment carried out half a century ago – but it might not have been all it seemed. HILIP ZIMBARDO’S first account of his now classic experiment showcased his talent for storytelling. A sensational article that appeared in a supplement of The New York Times, it kicked off by detailing how, one sunny morning in Palo Alto, California, in 1971, police swooped on the homes of nine young men. They were bundled into squad cars, taken to the police station, charged, then blindfolded and transported to the Stanford County Jail, where they met their guards. The “jail” was actually a set-up in the basement of a building at Stanford University. The prisoners were one half of a group of volunteers, the other half being assigned the role of guards. In what Zimbardo described as “a gradual Kafkaesque metamorphosis of good into evil”, these seemingly well-adjusted young men became increasingly brutal as guards. They “repeatedly stripped their prisoners naked, hooded them, chained them, denied them food or bedding privileges, put them into solitary confinement, and made them clean toilet bowls with their bare hands,” Zimbardo wrote. “Over time, these amusements took a sexual turn, such as having the prisoners simulate sodomy on each other.” The prisoners, humiliated and victimised, suffered such emotional distress that Zimbardo, playing the role of all-powerful prison -- 45 of 100 -- 44 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society they were expected to behave like tyrants and were encouraged to do so. And by Zimbardo’s own admission, two-thirds of them didn’t act sadistically, undermining his claim that the situation had an overpowering influence on their actions. How did a study so flawed become so famous? First, there is the powerful idea that evil lurks inside us all, waiting for the right – or wrong – circumstances to be called forth. The experiment itself may be shocking, but the way it echoes archetypal stories of sinfulness makes it hard to shake off. Then there is Zimbardo himself, a compelling narrator who inserts himself front-and-centre in the drama. His epiphany that he too had been corrupted by power was what prompted him to call the experiment off. There are echoes of biblical conversion stories; Zimbardo’s subsequent involvement in prison reform and more recently in a project to train ordinary people to become “heroes” are a form of atonement. Zimbardo also has a talent for reframing the “lessons” of the Stanford experiment to capture the prevailing zeitgeist. If social psychology can be said to have attained the status of religious teachings, then Zimbardo is one of the field’s best-known preachers. In his 2007 bestseller The Lucifer Effect, he promised readers a journey that will take in “genocide in Rwanda, the mass suicide and murder of People’s Temple followers in the jungles of Guyana, the My Lai massacre in Vietnam, the horrors of Nazi concentration camps, the torture by military and civilian police around the world, and the sexual abuse of parishioners by Catholic priests…” Then he adds that the “one… thread tying these atrocities together” comes from “the Stanford Prison Experiment”. What’s more, like a good preacher, Zimbardo represents the experiment as a timeless parable. Through his story of a descent into the basement hell, the suffering, the epiphany, the ascent, transformation and redemption, he offers a powerful message of hope about human nature: we all have the potential to be saints rather than sinners. It is seductive to think that in the fight between good and evil we can all be winners through the redemptive power of psychological knowledge. Shame that, as far as the Stanford prison experiment is concerned, it is more showbiz than science. ❚ superintendent, terminated the two-week experiment after just six days. The experiment led Zimbardo to conclude that normal people could be transformed into sadistic tyrants or passive slaves, not because of any inherent personality flaws, but through finding themselves in a dehumanising environment: context was king. And suddenly, so was Zimbardo. Overnight, he became the go-to expert on prison reform, and over the following decade he appeared at a series of Congressional hearings and advisory panels on the US prison system. →- Turn to page 59 for more on the psychology- of dehumanisation- The Stanford experiment might have started as a psychological exploration of incarceration, but Zimbardo and countless media commentators since have reached for it to illuminate an ever-widening range of behaviours – police brutality, corporate fraud, domestic abuse, genocide. Every invocation of the experiment has cemented it in the public imagination. The experiment has become enshrined in the psychology curriculum for its simple and compelling conclusion, that corrupt environments can turn good people evil. However, despite Zimbardo’s recognition and career honours, and his experiment being in all the textbooks, academic psychology is ambivalent about it. On the one hand, with his high profile and media know-how, Zimbardo has done much to promote social psychology. On the other, the experiment’s ethics, methodology and conclusions have long troubled colleagues. The first published criticism, in 1973, attacked the ethics of the study and questioned whether the apparent degradation of the young men was justified, given the experiment’s unsurprising result. By 1975, the methodology of the experiment was also under fire. Zimbardo’s claims that the results support the view that behaviour is determined by circumstances, not personality, have also been robustly challenged since then. After all, critics argued, the guards’ behaviour was hardly spontaneous: they knew -- 46 of 100 -- Chapter 3 | Morality and religion | 45 > HUMAN RIGHTS – AND WRONGS The concept of human rights has come to define many moral questions in today’s world – but what that means depends on how we define humanity, says John H. Evans HAT is a human? This is possibly the oldest question in the Western intellectual tradition. Today, there are three influential and competing definitions. The first is the Christian theological view that humans are made in the image of God. The second is a more philosophical position that defines humans as possessing certain capacities, such as self- consciousness and rationality. Finally, there is the biological view, where humans are defined – and differentiated from animals – by their DNA. This is more than an academic debate. Scholars have long argued that these definitions matter in the real world because they influence how people treat one another. Proponents of each definition claim that if the public accepts the “wrong” one, we will end up mistreating other humans. Christian theologians have long claimed, for example, that if we reject the idea that humans are made in God’s image, we will no longer see them as sacred and begin to see them as entities we can use for our own ends. Things like torture would become more acceptable. Social scientists and bioethicists have similarly argued that the biological view leads people to think of humans – ever so slightly – as being like other animals or objects, and treat them as such. As a result, the argument goes, a practice like buying organs from poor people will seem more acceptable. These are important claims. Are they true? Some episodes from history suggest they might be. The paradigmatic claim of this kind is that the Nazis had a ESSAY PROFILE JOHN H. EVANS John H. Evans is a sociologist at the University of California, San Diego, who researches fundamental ethical questions behind societal and technological developments. He is the author of What is a Human? What the answers mean for human rights -- 47 of 100 -- 46 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society CAVAN IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO Should we send troops to prevent atrocities in foreign countries, like the genocide in Rwanda in 1994? false notion of humans based on pseudoscientific racism, and this contributed to the Holocaust. Similarly, the eugenics movements of the 19th and 20th centuries focused on a list of valued human capacities, and held that people with fewer of these capacities should be valued less. What about today? To answer, it is important to note that what humans actually are is irrelevant: people act on what they think is true. The debate thus boils down to an empirical question: what do people think, and how do they think others should be treated? In the first social science study to tackle this question, I examined public attitudes among a representative survey of more than 3500 adults in the US. I started by asking people how much they agreed with very strict versions of the three definitions of a human. I also asked them how much they agreed with four statements about humans: that they are like machines; special compared with animals; unique; and all of equal value. These questions were designed to assess whether any of the three competing definitions are associated with ideas that could have a negative effect on how we treat one another. I finished with a series of direct questions about human rights: whether we should risk soldiers to stop a genocide in a foreign country; be allowed to buy kidneys from poor people; have terminally ill people die by suicide to save money; take blood from prisoners without their consent; or torture terror suspects to potentially save lives. What came out was very striking. The more a respondent agreed with the biological definition of a human, the more likely they were to see humans as being like machines and the less likely they were to see them as special, unique or all of equal value. On the human rights questions, they were less willing to stop genocides and were more likely to accept buying kidneys, suicide to save money and taking blood from prisoners. In contrast, those who agreed with the theological view were less likely to agree with suicide to save money and taking blood from prisoners against their will. Shockingly, then, the critics appear to be right. People who agree with the biological definition of a human are also more likely to hold views inconsistent with human rights. Before anyone concludes that dystopia is upon us, note that only 25 per cent of the US public agreed with the biological definition. What’s more, this study is far from the last word on the topic. It was only about what people think instead of what they do, and didn’t distinguish cause and effect (demonstrating causality with social science is notoriously difficult). That said, these findings suggest a real problem. I do not doubt anyone’s sincerity in believing in both the biological definition of the human and in human rights, but promoting the former risks undercutting public support for the latter. The answer, I think, is to try to sever the link the public apparently makes between definitions and treatment. The way to do this is to promote the idea that however a human is defined, humans are sacred. This sacredness does not have to be of the religious variety: it could be based on secular ideas of dignity found in many European constitutions, treaties and human rights documents. (Incidentally, I suspect that if my study were replicated in a secular European country, it would get similar results. Fewer people would subscribe to the theological view, but attitudes to human rights would be tempered by secular notions of dignity found in those constitutions and treaties). Therefore, whenever we talk about the biological view of humans, we must also say that it doesn’t mean we should treat people like machines. ❚ -- 48 of 100 -- Chapter 3 | Morality and religion | 47 WHY WE BELIEVE IN GODS Almost everybody who has ever lived has believed in some kind of deity. Even today, atheism remains a minority pursuit requiring hard intellectual graft, and committed atheists easily fall prey to supernatural ideas. Religious belief, in contrast, appears to be intuitive. OGNITIVE scientists sometimes talk about us being born with a “god-shaped hole” in our heads. As a result, when children encounter religious claims, they instinctively find them plausible and attractive, and the hole is rapidly filled by the details of whatever religious culture they happen to be born into. When told that there is an invisible entity that watches over them, intervenes in their lives and passes moral judgement on them, most unthinkingly accept it. Ditto the idea that the same entity is directing events and that everything that happens, happens for a reason. This isn’t brainwashing. The “cognitive by-product theory” argues that religious belief is a side effect of cognitive skills that evolved for other reasons. It pays, for example, to assume that all events are caused by agents. The rustle in the dark could be the wind, but it could also be a predator. Running away from the wind has no existential consequences, but not running away from a predator does. Humans who ran lived to pass on their genes; those who didn’t became carrion. Then there’s “theory of mind”, which evolved so that we could infer the mental states and intentions of others, even when they aren’t physically present. This is very useful for group living. However, it makes the idea of invisible entities with minds capable of seeing into yours, quite plausible. Religion also piggybacks on feelings of existential insecurity, which must have been common for our ancestors. Randomness, loss of control and knowledge of death are soothed by the idea that somebody is watching over you and that death is not the end of existence. This helps explain why religious ideas were widely accepted and disseminated once they got started. However, religion and morality were not always as inextricably linked as they are in today’s world religions. Before Christianity, most religions didn’t place a high value on morality. The Greco-Roman religions, for example, were materialistic, mostly concerned with rituals, sacrifices and other ways of begging favours from their various divinities. Christianity’s success is often attributed to its supposedly unique message: it exhorted people to be good and promised to reward them for their goodness in the afterlife. But Christ’s message wasn’t actually new. In Homer’s time, the 8th century BC, the Greeks believed that when people died they all, good and bad, went to Hades. From the 5th century BC on, Greeks started to believe that the dead were judged in Hades according to their deeds during life. Judaism, too, began to incorporate beliefs about moral punishment in the afterlife. Christianity, then, was part of a wave of new religions that emerged more than 2000 years ago. What happened to make materialistic religions transform into moralising ones? Social scientists > -- 49 of 100 -- 48 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society strikingly similar to what happened in the eastern Mediterranean 2500 years ago. Around that time, energy use per capita – a good proxy for affluence – rose from the 15,000 calories per day typically seen in Egyptian and Sumerian civilisations to more than 20,000 calories per day. And as people became more affluent and society more stable and predictable, their slow strategy kicked in. At the same time, we see the invention and spread of moralising religions. There is reason to believe the two were connected. Consider the fact that for a long time, the switch from fast to slow strategy was restricted to only the most affluent members of the population. Everybody else was still living fast and dying young, and the elite were none too happy about it. You are clearly at a disadvantage if you follow a slow strategy when others follow a faster strategy: if you are faithful when others grab sexual opportunities, if you forgive when others avenge, if you work when others have fun. This disadvantage incentivised the elite to morally condemn fast behaviours, in part by adopting and promoting the new religions that legitimised and reinforced a slow morality and promised punishment for transgressors. The same idea could also explain the gradual decline of moralising religion in wealthier parts of the world such as Western Europe and the northern parts of North America. As more and more people become affluent and adopt a slow strategy, the need to morally condemn fast strategies decreases, and with it the benefit of holding religious beliefs that justify that condemnation. ❚ MARCUS LINDSTROM/ISTOCK Why did a new wave of moralising religions, including Christianity, arise around 2000 years ago? sometimes explain this by arguing that moralising religions promote cooperation, which would have given the societies that adopted them a competitive advantage. Religion was a sort of “social glue” that bound societies together as they grew beyond the point where everyone was related and family ties stopped people from freeloading. That seems a plausible explanation. Not everyone is convinced, however. The problem, say critics is that moralising religions didn’t arise until quite late in human history, long after the rise of large-scale societies in Egypt, the Fertile Crescent and elsewhere. Research in behavioural ecology and experimental psychology suggests an alternative answer. This work, known as life history theory, finds that organisms are endowed with evolved programmes that modulate their behaviour according to their environment. In a harsh and unpredictable environment, when resources are scarce and mortality is high, organisms adopt a “fast life strategy”. They mature and reproduce earlier, invest less in offspring and pair-bonding, and are impulsive and aggressive. In contrast, in a more favourable and predictable environment, organisms switch to a slow life strategy. They mature and reproduce later, invest more in offspring and pair-bonding, and become more patient and more forgiving. The same ability to switch also exists in humans, and an abundant stream of research shows that as the environment gets better, individuals start investing more in their family and romantic relationships, and become less impulsive and less aggressive. This is -- 50 of 100 -- Chapter 3 | Morality and religion | 49 ON 31 OCTOBER 1517, the rebel monk Martin Luther nailed his “95 theses” decrying the practices of the Roman Catholic church to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg in present-day Germany, and so kicked off what became the Protestant Reformation. Some historians directly link Luther’s theological revolution and the ensuing scientific one. Luther opened the intellectual floodgates, the story goes, pitting open, forward-thinking Protestantism against conservative, anti-science Catholic dogma. The Enlightenment took root in the northern European countries that embraced Lutheran ideas, while the south languished under the Catholic yoke. It’s an appealing story. However, the notion that Catholic dogma was inherently a brake on science is something of a myth, says historian of science and religion Sachiko Kusukawa at the University of Cambridge. She thinks the misconception was nourished by the “conflict thesis”, an idea shaped by two 19th-century Americans, educator Andrew Dickson White and chemist John William Draper, who argued that science and religious belief are historical enemies destined never to agree. The conflict thesis still has some advocates today, especially among scientists. But this is a distortion of history, says Kusukawa. Even the notorious story of Galileo’s persecution by the church is not as black and white as it might appear. The heliocentric cosmology he championed was unveiled in 1543 by Nicolaus Copernicus, himself a Catholic canon in Frombork, now in Poland. Copernicus’s book On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres challenged the accepted Earth- centred cosmology described by Ptolemy in the 2nd century AD, but drew little objection from the church when it was published. Indeed, Copernicus dedicated the book to the then pope, Paul III. Early Protestantism was hardly more progressive or “scientific”, either. Luther had a rather low opinion of Copernicus, whose ideas he heard about from other scholars in Wittenberg before they were published. Luther called Copernicus a fool who sought “to reverse the entire science of astronomy”. What about the biblical story in which Joshua commanded the sun – and not Earth – to stand still? For Luther, religious faith trumped all: it was hubris and blasphemy to suppose that one could decode God’s handiwork. Men should not understand; they should only believe. Reason was “the devil’s harlot”. Drastic interventions by religious leaders, Protestant and Catholic, were more about maintaining worldly power and authority than about fundamental conflicts between reason and belief. There were broad-minded protoscientists, as well as reactionaries, in both camps. No one – not Copernicus, nor Galileo, nor Newton – denied what both Luther and the popes believed, that the ultimate authority lies with God. Both sides shared a belief in a universe created by a consistent God whose laws let it run as smooth as clockwork. Read that way, the birth of modern science was a development that happened across Europe quite independently of the religious schism. In this view, it was not the Reformation but the Renaissance, a movement that began in 14th- century Italy and rediscovered and built anew upon classical literature, philosophy and art, that gave scholars the confidence to look for God’s laws of creation. And the invention of the printing press in the mid-1400s allowed the rapid dissemination of these new ideas. D I D P R O T E S T A N T I S M C R E A T E S C I E N C E ? GRANGER - HISTORICAL PICTURE ARCHIVE / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO -- 51 of 100 -- 50 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society You believe that religion supplies lots of useful and supportive structures that atheists have rejected along with the supernatural. Can you expand on that? I think the origins of religion are essentially to do with the challenges of living in a community and the challenges of bad stuff happening to us, of which the ultimate is death. Religions are rooted in these needs. They are an attempt to control ourselves, heal ourselves and console ourselves. Some of these manoeuvres are accessible to non-believers and some are not. Belief in the afterlife is simply not there for a non-believer. However, the communal rituals might be utterly accessible to non-believers, and rely in no part on anything supernatural. There are some that can be incorporated into secular life without too much difficulty. What kind of rituals do you mean? I suggest various fanciful and not so fanciful interventions. How do you bind a community? It’s very simple – you need a host. You need someone who introduces people to each other. The modern world is full of gatherings, but they’re not hosted so they remain anonymous. You go to a concert, but don’t interact with anyone. You go to the pub, but you don’t talk to anyone apart from the mates that you walked in with. I also look at morality and the need that religions feel to remind people to be good and kind. This is seen as a bit suspicious by secular society. But we are weak- RELIGION FOR ATHEISTS Approaches to not believing too often ignore what religion existed for in the first place, argues Alain de Botton PROFILE ALAIN DE BOTTON Alain de Botton is a philosopher and author based in London INTERVIEW GL PORTRAIT/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO -- 52 of 100 -- Chapter 3 | Morality and religion | 51 willed. We have aspirations to goodness but just don’t manage it. So it seems important to have reminders of these aspirations. Why have atheists let themselves throw these things away? I think it’s because of a great intellectual honesty: I cannot scientifically appreciate God so I’m going to have to leave all that behind. I’m going to have to give up all those benefits because something doesn’t make sense. That’s a very honest and very brave, lonely decision. And yet you say that we have secularised badly. What do you mean? All sorts of things have become impossible because they seem too religious. There are any number of moments in secular life when atheists say “oh, that’s getting a bit religious isn’t it”. I think we need to relax about approaching some of these areas – they don’t belong to religion, religion happened to sit on them. They’re for everybody. Aren’t you just reinventing movements that already exist, such as humanism? Yes, there have been attempts. Part of what has gone wrong is that people have wanted to start new religions, or rival institutions. The point isn’t so much to start replacement movements as to integrate practices, attitudes and states of mind into secular life. Not all atheists have reacted well to your suggestions… I said that atheists should have temples. Immediately 8 million people on Twitter and Facebook decided to let me know what a terrible idea that was. But the core of their objection was not the idea of putting up a building, but the idea that it would be a replacement for a church. Some atheists argue that we ought to be able to find enough meaning in the grandeur of the natural world. Do you agree? That’s precisely what I think, but I think we need to structure the encounter with that grandeur a little bit better. Essentially, religions are choreographers of spiritual moments, or psychological moments, and on the whole atheists have not been choreographers at all. I think the genius of religions is that they structure the inner life. Where do you go next? I’m aiming for practical interventions. This is not just theory. People are looking all the time for things that are missing in the modern world that they might invent some piece of technology to solve. But in the area of how societies are arranged, there is tremendous conservatism. I’m simply trying to get the conversation going in that area. Even if you give up on the sky daddy, there are still lots of things on the menu that are available to you. I want to make sure atheists are deriving some of the benefits of religion. That’s really my ambition. ❚ “Even if you give up on the sky daddy, there are still lots of other things on the menu” -- 53 of 100 -- C H A P T E R 4 52 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society -- 54 of 100 -- Questions of who is in charge became ever more central as human society became more complex. Hierarchical societies need leaders, and leaders must acquire power – sometimes through consent, but often through coercion. At the same time, our evolved sense of “us” and “them” set the stage for conflict where the need for cooperation extended beyond our kinship groups. The product of these innate biases is prejudicial thinking about those we deem to differ from us or share different goals, resulting in evils, from racism to extremism, that mark human society today. Chapter 4 | Power and conflict | 53 -- 55 of 100 -- 54 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society ONALD TRUMP in the US and Jacinda Ardern in New Zealand (pictured). Vladimir Putin in Russia and Sanna Marin in Finland. It is hard to imagine more drastically different politicians. Yet each has reached the highest office in their country. Given the vast differences in their personal qualities, behaviour and rhetoric, can we ever understand what makes for a successful leader? How is it that Trump, Ardern, Putin and Marin can all become leaders of their nations? If you have had any exposure to business leadership theories, you may see a pattern here. Many identify two main ways that leaders exert their influence over groups. These dichotomies go by names such as democratic versus autocratic, participative versus directive and personalised versus positional. Evolutionary biologists call the two styles of leadership “dominance” and “prestige”. A prestige leader influences people through their superior personal attributes, such as knowledge, wisdom and vision. These leaders may also be charismatic and use their skill at rhetoric to win over followers: think of Jesus or Confucius. Dominance leaders, in contrast, exert influence by demanding support, instilling fear in would-be dissenters and threatening sanctions for anyone who fails to toe the line. Being physically imposing is often key to their approach, so such leaders are almost always men, PREVIOUS PAGE: NASTASIC/ISTOCK RIGHT: 2020 IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO > HOW WE CHOOSE OUR LEADERS The hierarchical basis of human societies creates natural spaces for leaders. But what determines who rises to the very top? Evolutionary biologists see the answer in the interplay of two central characteristics – dominance and prestige. -- 56 of 100 -- Chapter 4 | Power and conflict | 55 -- 57 of 100 -- 56 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society according to the dominance/prestige model. Think of any Machiavellian ruler, from Attila the Hun to Stalin. These two leadership styles seem to be rooted in biology. Personality tests of group leaders reveal that those adopting a dominance style score higher for aggression, disagreeableness and psychopathy (a collection of traits including a lack of empathy and remorse), whereas prestige leaders are strong on agreeableness and conscientiousness. Dominance leaders, especially male ones, tend to have relatively high testosterone levels, which manifest in more masculinised faces and bigger bodies. In contrast, some studies indicate that prestige leaders may have higher levels of the prosocial hormone oxytocin. There are also differences in the non-verbal displays people use to signal their status to others. Prestige leaders smile more, for example, and dominance leaders have more expansive bodily gestures. Until quite recently, in evolutionary terms, people favoured prestige leaders and actively selected against dominance ones. In traditional, small-scale societies, everybody knew each other and most people were related. This changed when urbanisation began, around 6000 years ago. A shift towards more complex, hierarchical, larger-scale societies of unrelated strangers would inevitably have resulted in some individuals trying to game the system. Dominance leaders are more willing to punish such free-riders, while also offering to protect their group from outsiders. So the new social set-up would have favoured them. These influences on leadership are even more pronounced in the modern, globalised world. Nationalistic ideologies often portray immigrants as scroungers, for example. Global competition also makes it easy to perceive other nations as threatening. Another possible explanation for the pre-eminence of dominance leadership in today’s world is a sort of global arms race. “When big countries start to elect authoritarian leaders, then other countries feel they have to do that as well,” says Mark van Vugt at Amsterdam Free University in the Netherlands. “And that’s a real warning, I think, for the stability of world peace and world order.” It isn’t that dominance leaders are inherently bad, but – whether from the right, left or centre of politics – it is in their interests to emphasise potential threats and play on people’s fears. But, despite the trajectory we appear to be on, things could change. As people become increasingly interdependent, both within and between nations, dominance leadership undermines our goals, and the need for prestige leadership increases. But our tendency to bestow power based on prestige isn’t without problems either. We are suckers for prestige. According to biologists, this prestige bias is an evolved feature of human cognition that goes back to the time when our ancestors were nomads living in small bands. Humans are social learners, which means we copy the behaviour of other people rather than figuring everything out from scratch. People who copy successful individuals can acquire useful, survival-enhancing skills – how to hunt, for example. But to do so requires sustained and close contact with the skilled, without getting on their nerves. The best way to do this is to “kiss up”, as anthropologist Francisco Gil-White at ITAM in Mexico City puts it. Pay them compliments, do them favours, sing their virtues and exempt them from certain social obligations. Those of our ancestors who kissed up to talented individuals advanced their own interests, making them more likely to survive and reproduce. Evolution thus favoured sycophants. This can backfire in the modern world. Now, we don’t just judge the prestige of people we encounter directly, but also those we only know vicariously. To do this, we follow our natural tendency to watch others and conform. If certain people are routinely fawned over, we assume that they are skilled and prestigious individuals who we would be wise to kiss up to ourselves. Hence we show deference to any number of celebrities who are famous for being famous. Prestige exerts such a strong pull on the human mind that the construction and perpetuation of hierarchies is hard to resist. In lab experiments, people find it easier to understand social situations where there is a clear pecking order, and they express preferences for hierarchies, even if they are at the wrong end of them. But we can at least be more discerning about whom we place at the top. If we base prestige on skill and genuine achievement, then those we kiss up to won’t be the only ones to benefit. ❚ -- 58 of 100 -- Chapter 4 | Power and conflict | 57 > THE ORIGINS OF SEXISM Most human cultures are patriarchies, where men are more likely than women to hold positions of social, economic and political power. It is tempting to assume that this is natural, perhaps because men are, on average, stronger than women. But this answer may be too simple. HIMPANZEES are not a proxy for our ancestors – they have been evolving since our two family trees split between 7 and 10 million years ago. Nevertheless, their social structures can tell us something about the conditions that male dominance thrives in. Male chimps spend their lives in the group they were born into, whereas females leave at adolescence. As a result, males in a group are more closely related to each other than the females. And because relatives tend to help one another, they have an advantage. The same is true in human societies: in places where women move to live with their husband’s family, men tend to have more power and privilege. Patrilocal residence, as it is called, is associated with patriarchy. For most of our history, we have been hunter-gatherers, and patrilocal residence is not the norm among modern hunter-gatherer societies. Instead, either partner may move to live with the “in-laws”, or a couple may relocate away from both their families. A degree of egalitarianism is built into these systems. If they reflect what prehistoric hunter-gatherers did, women in those early societies would have had the choice of support from the group they grew up with, or the option to move away from oppression. According to one school of thought, things changed around 12,000 years ago. With the advent of agriculture and homesteading, people began settling down. They acquired resources to defend, and power shifted to the physically stronger males. Fathers, sons, uncles and grandfathers began living near each other, property was passed down the male line, and female autonomy was eroded. As a result, the argument goes, patriarchy emerged. The obvious losers are women. “If you have an extremely oppressive society, women have no POWER Ministerial-level positions WOMEN 22% MEN 78%SOURCE: WORLD BANK (2020) HTTPS://GENDERDATA.WORLDBANK.ORG/TOPICS/LEADERSHIP/ National parliamentary seats WOMEN 26% MEN 74%SOURCE: WORLD BANK (2020) HTTPS://DATA.WORLDBANK.ORG/INDICATOR/SG.GEN.PARL.ZS UK FTSE 100 CEOs WOMEN 8 MEN 92SOURCE: CRANFIELD SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT (2021) RECOGNITION Nobel prizes 1901-2021 WOMEN 58 MEN 885SOURCE: NOBEL PRIZE FOUNDATION Time person of the year (1927-2017) WOMEN 10 MEN 78 -- 59 of 100 -- 58 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society control over their reproduction, so they are giving birth to child after child,” says Sarah Hrdy at the University of California at Davis. As a result, children are also, on average, worse off than if they were born into more egalitarian societies. Extreme patriarchies, says Hrdy, have higher maternal and infant mortality and worse child health. The complex and pervasive nature of patriarchy, underpinning all aspects of society, makes it difficult to overthrow. One challenge is female-female competition. Several studies have looked at how this could be creating barriers for women at work. For instance, one found that female faculty in the Netherlands were more likely to be critical of female subordinates than male faculty were. An experimental study suggests that high-ranking women are less likely than high-ranking men to collaborate with subordinates of the same gender. Elsewhere, an analysis of data on US workers found that women tended to prefer a male boss. Even in a world where women and men are equally likely to be engineers and nurses, there will be barriers to equality. For starters, there are hidden disincentives for men to take more responsibility for childcare. A study by Jasmine Kelland at Plymouth University, UK, showed that part-time male workers are considered less competent and committed than any other group. Yet country comparisons suggest that encouraging fathers to be more present could help stem the incidence of rape and sexual assault. In the US, 15 per cent of women report having been raped in their lifetime. Worldwide, 30 per cent have experienced sexual violence in their relationships, ranging from 16 per cent in east Asia to 65 per cent in central sub-Saharan Africa. Even the UN, whose stated mission is to defend fundamental human rights and promote social progress, has been plagued by allegations of rape, sexual exploitation and abuse. Why is sexual violence so universal – and yet so variable in prevalence from place to place? In its global report on violence and health, the World Health Organization cautions that we have only patchy data. Nevertheless, a measured analysis of what we do have reveals a few surprises. Sexual violence is not more prevalent in societies where men outnumber women, neither is it associated with more sexually liberal attitudes, or repressed sexuality in men. As for the factors that do underpin it, anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday of the University of Pennsylvania and her team shed some light by looking at tribal societies. They classed 18 per cent of 156 societies as “rape prone”. The salient features they shared were high levels of violence in general, lack of parenting by fathers, ideologies of male toughness, dominance and competition, and low respect for women, including treating them as property and excluding them from public, economic and political life. Similarly, the WHO report concludes that gender inequality is at the heart of sexual violence against women. Sexual harassment is always about power. ❚ Many women report having experienced sexual violence in their long-term relationships 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 Percentage of women East Asia South-East Asia Australasia Caribbean Western Europe Central Latin America North Africa and Middle East North America (high income) Central sub-Saharan Africa SOURCE: 10.1126/SCIENCE.1240937 -- 60 of 100 -- Chapter 4 | Power and conflict | 59 ITLER did it when he referred to German Jews as viruses, parasites and rats. In Rwanda, Hutu extremists did it to the Tutsis, calling them cockroaches before killing half a million of them in the bloody genocide of 1994. Dehumanisation has long been thought of as a precursor to extreme acts of violence, which has perhaps obscured just how prevalent a mode of thought it is for us. This form of prejudice isn’t only applied along ethnic lines; it can extend to anyone we fail to relate to, from members of the opposite sex and people with disabilities to social, sexual and religious minorities. Our propensity to dehumanise seems rooted in our tendency to judge members of the social groups we belong to as more human than other groups. In fact, the human tendency to split the world into “us” and “them” and then discriminate against outsiders is so strong that it barely requires any prompting. Jay Van Bavel and his team at New York University showed people images from a computer-generated series in which the face of a Barbie doll morphs incrementally into a human face. If the face was designated as one of their own group – a fellow student at their university, they were told – they perceived it as looking human sooner than if they thought it was the face of someone from a different university. Meanwhile, scans of their brains showed corresponding increases in activity in DEHUMANISATION, PREJUDICE AND BIAS To deny someone their humanity ranks among the most demeaning insults one human can give another. Most of us would consider ourselves incapable of such behaviour – yet psychologists have discovered it to be a human universal. the “theory of mind” network of the brain, which is involved in thinking about the minds of others. “Judging the mental capacities of others is the essence of human social cognition,” says Van Bavel. “Our research suggests that group memberships – who is with us and who is against us – play a critical role in shaping how we perceive the mental states of those around us.” Van Bavel concludes that our social identity powerfully affects how we evaluate others, including how much humanness we accord them. He suspects that these evaluations happen rapidly, perhaps even within the first half-second of seeing someone. Some people are more prone to dehumanising behaviour than others. Individuals with narcissistic traits are particularly prone to it, as are those with a strong sense of their own elevated position in a social or professional hierarchy. Dehumanisation may not be blatant, but even subconscious prejudices can affect how we think of and behave towards others. And when we dehumanise someone, we don’t just deny that they have traits such as the ability to be rational or thoughtful. Other experiments show that we are more likely to condone police violence towards them. We are also less likely to help or forgive them, and more likely to bully them. If societies are to truly confront the pernicious effects of prejudice, the importance of examining such unconscious biases and how they become etched into the brain is becoming increasingly clear. The idea that we could pin down and study implicit bias was first hinted at in 1995, when social psychologist Anthony Greenwald, then at Harvard University, and his colleagues invented the Implicit Association Test (IAT). This measures the strength of links between different concepts and words. For instance, participants would be shown Black or white faces and asked to pair them with descriptors such as angry, clever, good and bad. There have since been several adaptations of the test, measuring views on race, body type, gender and even names. Several studies have now shown that, for individuals, carrying an implicit attitude is only weakly linked to > -- 61 of 100 -- 60 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society biased behaviour in the real world. But aggregated IAT results do tell us something about the nature of unconscious bias within societies. Of 630,000 people around the world who have taken a version of the IAT that examines associations between gender and science-related abilities, more than two-thirds correlate males more strongly with science roles and females more strongly with humanities, for instance. Test results from more than 1.8 million people in the US revealed that in geographic areas where white residents show higher implicit race bias measured by a version of the IAT, there is also greater use of force by the police against Black people. Meanwhile, advances in brain scanning techniques have helped reveal the neural underpinnings of our biases and in particular how prejudices about other groups of people activate brain areas associated with threat and fear. In an influential 2005 study, Mary Wheeler and Susan Fiske at Princeton University asked white volunteers who were in an MRI scanner to perform tasks while looking at Black or white faces. They found that when the task involved thinking of the person whose face they saw as part of an out- group, rather than as an individual, the participants showed increased activity in the amygdala, the part of the brain that governs our threat response. Other brain scanning studies show greater activity in the amygdala when people view others from different ethnic backgrounds to their own. Yet our brains can change with experience and environmental influences. In 2013, Eva Telzer, then at the University of Illinois, and her colleagues conducted a study of 49 children and adolescents born in Asia, Europe and the US. They showed that the difference in amygdala activity in response to faces from different races wasn’t innate, but developed over a period of time. This landmark study quashes any suggestion that we are somehow born prejudiced. What’s more, Telzer and her team found that study participants with a more diverse set of peers had less of a heightened threat response in the brain when shown faces from other racial groups. That suggests simply having more contact with people from different groups can reduce the importance of race in how we respond to people and that we can change our biases. ❚ Daphne Henry is a developmental and educational psychologist at Boston College in Massachusetts: We found that higher family socio- economic status was associated with a boost in children’s academic achievement between ages 5 and 14, but the size of this boost differed between Black and white children. When family socio-economic status increases, the academic achievement gap between Black and white children actually grows. This really speaks to the structural and social privileges and constraints that exist in US society, and to how those differ for Black and white children at the same socio- economic level. We know that African Americans have to take out more student loans to finance higher education, for example. They are probably going to live in very different neighbourhoods too. There is also some evidence to suggest that Black and white children in the same school district, or even sometimes attending the same school, may experience differences in the academic instruction that they receive. Teachers may consciously or unconsciously treat Black and white children differently, because everyone – including teachers – grows up in a social context. HOW RACISM HARMS LIVES The effects of colour-based prejudice can be insidious, and spread throughout the lives of those affected, as five US-based researchers show from their work. DISCUSSION -- 62 of 100 -- Chapter 4 | Power and conflict | 61 Shawn Utsey is a psychologist at Virginia Commonwealth University: I was working as a counsellor in Harlem, New York, when I noticed that the items on the life stress scale – a standard measure used by counsellors to assess people – didn’t reflect the lived experiences of my clients. There was no reference to racism or police brutality. So I created my own scale that included those items to try to measure life stress among Black populations. People feel stress emotionally, but the real damage is physiological. Through my research, I discovered that people reported experiencing physical symptoms of stress – such as increased heart rate – simply in the expectation of experiencing racism. Even just anticipating that you might be exposed to racism is stressful. Race-related stress is chronic, and that creates this prolonged activation of physiological stress responses. I think this is a key contributing factor when it comes to racial health disparities. Michele Evans is a medical oncologist at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland: We discovered that low socio- economic status was associated with a twofold higher risk of chronic kidney disease in African Americans. But when we looked at white people, there was no statistically significant relationship between socio- economic status and chronic kidney disease. It seems there is something unique or different about being both Black and poor when it comes to health. African Americans are also more likely to develop Alzheimer’s- related dementia, so we decided to use MRI to look at white matter lesion volume in people’s brains – an early indicator of cognitive decline. We found that, in older African Americans, increases in perceived lifetime discrimination burden were associated with increases in white matter lesion volume. We also discovered that African Americans who reported more perceived racial discrimination tended to have thicker arteries – a subclinical sign of cardiovascular disease. Jhacova Williams is an economist at the RAND Corporation in Washington DC: My research shows that Black people who live in areas that historically had more lynchings are less likely to be registered to vote in elections today. They stopped voting, of course, to protect their own well-being, to make sure they wouldn’t be lynched, to make sure their family wouldn’t be lynched. I believe that this has been passed down from generation to generation, and it has a huge impact on who gets elected. I think the biggest act of voter suppression is that there is a lack of trust in voting within the Black community. If I don’t believe that I am a part of society, why would I vote? Deborah Raji is a fellow at the Mozilla Foundation, based in Ottawa, Canada, and a fellow at the Algorithmic Justice League: Working with Joy Buolamwini at the MIT Media Lab, I discovered that several publicly deployed facial-recognition products developed by companies like IBM, Microsoft and Amazon weren’t performing well on darker-skinned individuals. Later, researchers at IBM reported that some 80 to 95 per cent of the faces in the data sets used to develop these systems were from lighter-skinned individuals. In 2018, we found that Amazon’s facial-recognition system, called Rekognition, was failing to accurately recognise the faces of darker-skinned women almost 30 per cent of the time. That isn’t a good enough performance for it to be deployed as a product. And definitely not good enough to be pitching the technology to police departments, which the American Civil Liberties Union reported that Amazon was doing at the time. People with darker skin would be more likely to have their faces falsely detected in CCTV footage of crimes they weren’t involved in, for example, and potentially even wrongfully arrested because of it. ❚ -- 63 of 100 -- 62 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society US VS THEM Although you would not think it watching the news, at an individual level we are living in the most peaceful era of our species’ existence, where we are less likely to die at the hands of another person than at any time in human history. Yet violence between groups is still shockingly common. Why? ONFLICT seems to be an integral part of human social organisation. “We’re one species, yet we bind ourselves into exclusive, conflicting groups,” says anthropologist Scott Atran, cofounder of the University of Oxford’s Centre for Resolution of Intractable Conflicts. Numerous experiments have revealed how the flimsiest badges of cultural identity can create hostility towards outsiders – even the colour of randomly assigned shirts can do it. Paradoxically, these antagonistic tendencies may be intimately linked with another, much more noble side of human nature: our unparalleled capacity for large- scale cooperation and altruistic self-sacrifice. Few activities draw on these traits like fighting on behalf of our group, with the high risk of injury or death that entails. Such a combination would have paid off in a world of warring tribes, where groups with members who were inclined to band together to fight for the common good would have had a competitive edge over groups made up of individuals less willing to pay the ultimate price for their peers. And for much of our prehistory, we lived in such a world. Archaeological evidence going back 12,000 years and ethnographic studies of tribal societies, suggest that on average, 14 per cent of all deaths stemmed from inter-group violence – more than sufficient to promote the evolution of this coalitional psychology. If inter-group conflict is in our nature, it is also reinforced by our culture. Culture encourages group members to differentiate themselves from others through markers such as dress codes, food preferences and ritual practices. They also prescribe what is worth fighting over – and some cultures are more antagonistic than others. We develop social norms about conflict, and because norms differ widely across cultures, there are going to be some big differences in aggressive tendencies. That has been shown in, for instance, people who commit terrorist acts. These people are usually embedded in a network of familial and friendship ties with allegiance to a closed group, be that tribal, cultural, national, religious or political. Historically, the conditions for the murder of innocents by terrorism or genocide have occurred when one group fears extinction by another group. Ordinary people are motivated to “kill people by category” through their own group identity. Viewed from inside the group, that can seem rational: terrorists are brave altruists protecting the group from harm by powerful outsiders. Terrorist acts are warnings to the out-group, demanding that certain actions be taken, such as withdrawing a military occupation or ending human and civil rights abuses. -- 64 of 100 -- Chapter 4 | Power and conflict | 63 Terrorism is a militarised public relations ploy to advance a grander scheme – a political tactic, not a profession or an overarching ideology. But the vast majority of people who might share the same sense of grievance or political goals are not motivated to kill and maim the innocent. An influential paper “The causes of terrorism”, published in 1981, summed up decades of observations of terrorists and their organisations, ranging from 19th-century Russian anarchists to Irish, Israeli, Basque and Algerian nationalists. The outstanding common characteristic of individual terrorists, concluded its author Martha Crenshaw at Stanford University, is their normality. In her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, political theorist Hannah Arendt noted the same thing about the “banal” Nazi concentration camp bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann. The question that concerns Atran is what makes someone prepared to die for an idea? Research he has led in some of the most embattled regions of the world, including in Mosul, suggests the answer comes in two parts. Jihadists fuse their individual identity with that of the group. They also adhere to “sacred values”. Sacred values are values that cannot be abandoned or exchanged for material gain. They tend to be associated with strong emotions and are often religious in nature, but beliefs held by fervent nationalists and secularists, for example, may earn the label too. Atran has found that people in fighting groups who hold sacred values are perceived by other members of their group as having a spiritual strength that counts for more than their physical strength. What’s more, sacred values trump the other main characteristic of extremists: a powerful group identity. “When push comes to shove, these fighters will desert their closest buddies for their ideals,” he says. Ideology may be a strong motivator but it is not the only one according to criminologist Andrew Silke at Cranfield University, UK, who has conducted many interviews with imprisoned jihadists in the UK. “When I ask them why they got involved, the initial answer is ideology,” he says. “But if I talk to them about how they got involved, I find out about family fractures, what was happening at school and in their personal lives, employment discrimination, yearnings for revenge for the death toll of Muslims.” Research into white supremacist extremism by sociologist Pete Simi at Chapman University in California tells a similar story. He and his team record the emotions associated with events their subjects mention, such as family traumas, hurting people or joining or leaving a violent group. They can then Like Basque nationalists during the Spanish civil war, many humans will fight for an idea > WORLD HISTORY ARCHIVE / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO -- 65 of 100 -- 64 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society determine the intensity of pleasure or pain the events evoked, as revealed in the language used. The results are digitised for statistical analysis to uncover the extent of shared motivations between the people he interviews. The first results from this programme were laid out in 2016, in a 260-page paper from the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START), principally authored by Simi, with the title “Recruitment and Radicalization among US Far-Right Terrorists“. The analysis revealed that white extremists, while not necessarily psychopathic, are often violent before they join extremist groups. Only after joining are they generally schooled in ideologies that justify channelling pre-existing urges into violence towards Jewish people, non-white people and anti-racist groups. The ideology is the excuse for ultra-violence, not the reason. “Far-right ideologies channel a pre-existing need to express violence by narrowing the selection of victims,” says Simi. Simi’s analyses tease out the possible driving factors. About 80 per cent of his interviewees have experienced childhood traumas: violence, sexual abuse and broken homes. Many had horrible, shame-filled childhoods that morphed into lonely, self-hating adulthoods. White power groups can provide angry loners with a sense of pride in community and conveniently dehumanise targets to blame. White supremacist propaganda is filled with references to collective shame related to feelings of cultural, racial and economic dispossession, from the Confederacy’s defeat in the civil war to the election of Barack Obama as the first non-white US president. Many white supremacists are also substance abusers: the reward of hate may be dopamine, too. In her 2002 book Inside Organized Racism, Kathleen Blee at the University of Pittsburgh observes that “the mainstay of any substantial racist movement is not the pathological individual, but rather a pathological vein of racism, intolerance, and bigotry in the larger population that the movement successfully mines”. Unconscious bias towards protecting our in-groups is a natural, evolutionarily adaptive feature of the human psyche, and the wellspring of racism. ❚ ARE WE NATURALLY EVIL? A propensity to violence is more often a product of nurture than nature, says Gwen Adshead PROFILE GWEN ADSHEAD Gwen Adshead is a forensic psychotherapist who has spent her career working in prisons and secure hospitals including Broadmoor, where some of the UK’s most notorious criminals are detained. She holds visiting professorships at Gresham College in London and Yale University. She is the author of A Short Book About Evil INTERVIEW -- 66 of 100 -- Chapter 4 | Power and conflict | 65 If a propensity for evil deeds is not innate, are you saying that we are all capable of them? I became interested in this while working as a therapist and listening to what people who’d done terrible things had to say. These offenders were familiar to me. They were not the “monsters” that I’d read about in the newspaper. They often seemed to be people who were sad and disorganised, and frightened as much as frightening. It is my very firm conviction that we all have the capacity to get into states of mind that we might call evil. It’s better that we understand those aspects of ourselves. In fact, the more we know about our own inner devils, the better able we are to act in ways that might help people and help ourselves. Which aspects should we be wary of? The risk factors for violence include very general things, like being young and male, which are not much help, really, in terms of assessment or intervention. But also more specific kinds of risk factors that could be additive. If you add in substance misuse, if you add in some kinds of paranoid mental illness and then if you add in extreme exposure to childhood trauma, without any support, then you can get to a situation where all these risk factors pile in and generate a level of stress. The last risk factor that unleashes the violence is often something rather specific to the offender. It can be something that the victim does – which is in no way to blame the victim for what happens – but it may be that the victim doesn’t realise that what they’re doing or saying is having a very specific psychological impact on the perpetrator, who then acts violently. How important is childhood experience in subsequent violent behaviour? We really have to take childhood adversity seriously because there’s such a solid evidence base for that now. A study published in 2019, for example, found that nearly 50 per cent of prisoners in HMP Parc [a prison for men and young offenders in Wales in the UK] had been exposed to a very high level of childhood adversity, which was about five times what you’d expect compared with the general population. Of course, most victims of trauma will not go on to be violent. It may be that very high levels of childhood adversity – particularly some kinds of adversity, like physical abuse and neglect – can be risk factors for significant violence if they then get combined with substance misuse and serious mental illness or serious mental disorganisation. What is your take on the role of genetics in violence? It’s absolutely clear from the research, over and over again, that nature and nurture interact. The interaction of an environment with a genetic vulnerability can then change that gene to express itself in different ways. But we have no genes for violence. Behaviours arise from the human mind and the journey from synaptic activity to the decision to kill somebody is a very long one. After decades working with violent criminals, what is your view of human nature? My view is very much that we have the capacity for goodness, and that is something that has to be worked on, as much as the capacity for cruelty has to be managed and minimised. Most offenders, once they’ve done something horrible, are keen to learn from what they’ve done, get themselves into a situation where they’re not going to be a risk again and go out and have the usual things that everybody likes. Which is a roof over their heads, someone to love and something useful to do. And those three things are pretty much important to all human beings, and most violent offenders are not exceptions. ❚ JENNIE EDWARDS -- 67 of 100 -- C H A P T E R 5 66 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society -- 68 of 100 -- Trade lies at the heart of modern human society. As cultures complexified and diversified, basics such as food, clothing and shelter became products to be sold, bought and exchanged. We outsourced aspects of our subsistence to others with particular expert skills, and became workers – and economic animals. But work, production and consumption has become about more than just survival. A desire to own possessions and to fill our lives with creature comforts has become deep-rooted in our psychology, and the basis of much economic activity. There’s one thing we need to know about our relationship with economics, however – we are not very good at it. Chapter 5 | Economics and work | 67 -- 69 of 100 -- 68 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society URING the 2016 US presidential election campaign, Donald Trump and Hilary Clinton both promised to “protect” America against foreign imports, a promise echoed in similar debates four years later. In Europe, right-wing populist politicians have gained ground by claiming they will reduce immigration to create more jobs for local people. Left-wingers, meanwhile, promise to tackle growing wealth inequality by taking from the rich and giving to the poor. All these ideas reflect a shaky grasp of economics. Nevertheless, they are often attractive to voters. That is no accident. Most of us have little or no education in economics, but that doesn’t stop us holding beliefs about all sorts of things from the benefits of international trade, the effects of immigration and the origins of inequality, to the power of big business, the consequences of regulation and whether the state should provide education, transport and healthcare. These “folk- economic” beliefs are often vague, incoherent or just plain wrong. But they are not random – people everywhere seem to have similar intuitions. This can be explained if we have a mental template for how exchange, the action that lies at the root of economic activity, should occur. This “exchange psychology” is not simply shaped by self-interest, the media or the political arguments we are exposed to. It is seen in people from early childhood and has been documented in a diverse range of cultures. This suggests that our naive economic beliefs are an outcome of evolution, they are adaptations to the particular context in which our species developed. PREVIOUS PAGE: ZEYNEPOGAN/ISTOCK RIGHT: HELIVIDEO/ISTOCK > WHY WE’RE BAD AT ECONOMICS Our moral code evolved to trump naked self- interest, so it is perhaps no surprise that some ideas stemming from it act against our economic self-interest, too. In fact, you might go so far as to say that everything we think we know about economics is quite possibly wrong. -- 70 of 100 -- Chapter 5 | Economics and work | 69 -- 71 of 100 -- 70 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society The key factor, as we have seen elsewhere, is that humans evolved to be highly cooperative. Hunting, foraging, community defence and even parenting were done in groups. There was some division of labour, because of individual differences in talent, but not much specialisation. And our ancestors shared resources, especially when it came to goods with highly variable availability, such as game. Trade mostly took place between people who knew each other, or between groups that shared repeated exchanges. Technology was simple enough that they could track how much effort was involved in making most things. And verbal communication provided rich information on the behaviour of others, which was used to select the most cooperative partners with whom to do business. The way we think about exchange is the result of millennia living in these conditions. In recent years, numerous experiments using economic games have highlighted these psychological effects. For instance, we have a strong sense of fairness, and intuitively expect and prefer that the proceeds of a joint effort be shared in proportion to each participant’s contribution. Indeed, free-riding – reaping the benefits of trade or joint effort without paying a cost or contributing – triggers anger and strong aversion. We also prefer to trade with known partners and tend to avoid purely anonymous transactions. Not only that, but we intuitively consider it beneficial to extend small favours to trading partners, rather than exploiting their weak positions, because our psychology is built on expectations of long-term interactions. ←- Turn back to page 40 for more on the origins- of morality- Evolved dispositions such as these enabled trade to eventually expand from small, local exchanges between known partners, all the way to global commerce networks. At each point in this process, people widened the circle of trade by using the mental tool-kit they already had. For instance, modern global communication enhances our ability to get information about possible partners and select the trustworthy ones. This leads to a paradox. Our evolved exchange psychology made mass-market economies possible while simultaneously making it very difficult for us to understand them. Evolution and our moral intuitions have left us with “folk economics” beliefs that underpin some major misconceptions about mass-market economies. For example, we tend to see wealth as a fixed-size pie – the poor get poorer when the rich get richer – and believe that importing from other nations makes our own one poorer. We are suspicious of the profit motive, and believe free market competition will necessarily have negative social effects. We think big corporations and governments have the power to control prices. And we believe it is better to trade with known parties. Folk economic intuitions are not just misleading, they are also powerful, because they can be used to justify conflicting conclusions about the modern world and Americans think US society is much more equal than it actually is and would like it to be more so – but they don’t want total equality SOURCE: DOI: 10.1038/S41562-017-0082 What they’d like to see How unequal is society? What people think The reality Percentage of total wealth owned 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 Wealthiest 20% Second 20% Middle 20% Fourth 20% Bottom 20% -- 72 of 100 -- Chapter 5 | Economics and work | 71 > then direct policies for change. But understanding them better can also help us see divisive issues more clearly. Take inequality. A dislike of economic inequality supposedly runs deep in human psychology. The trait we call “inequality aversion” emerges early in development and is found across many cultures, from city dwellers in the US to villagers in Peru and Uganda. There is, however, a paradox. A separate body of research finds something quite different. When people are asked about the ideal distribution of wealth in their country they are actually quite relaxed about inequality. In fact, inequality is not the problem, but something that is often confounded with it: economic unfairness. →- How should our economic models change?- Turn to page 82 for a discussion- Over our evolutionary history, individuals who cooperated fairly outcompeted those who didn’t, and so evolution produced our modern, moral brains, with their focus on fairness. This intuitive liking of fairness can explain many apparent puzzles that inequality aversion cannot. For instance, even though current economic conditions in wealthy nations lead to a preference for reducing inequality, in various other societies across the world and across history – the USSR, for example – concerns about fairness have led to anger about too much equality. People are also generally happy with gross inequalities created by national lotteries. If everyone knows that the outcome is random, one person receiving millions and everyone else nothing seems entirely fair and reasonable. Despite our strong evolution-based motivation for fairness, people often act quite unfairly. This shouldn’t come as a surprise: we have many competing motivations that trade off with one another. One of them is greed. So, if we want to achieve greater fairness, it is important to know how and why the motivation for it increases or decreases. Many studies have shown that it depends on context. Most notably, the motivation is quite high when people know they are being evaluated by others who can choose whether to interact with them in the future. Likewise, being in an environment in which it is common to interact with strangers – and in which any given one of them is a potential partner – leads to higher levels of fair behaviour. How people think about fairness has obvious ramifications for contentious social issues such as executive pay, taxation and welfare. There are staggering levels of inequality in the world, and wide agreement that these should be reduced. But we should aspire to fair inequality, not unfair equality. ❚ THE RISE OF CONSUMER CULTURE How did we evolve from indigent ape to hoarding human? Answering this question isn’t easy, but clues can be found among humanity’s first possessions. OSSESSIONS define us as a species; a life without them would be barely recognisable as human. Without clothes, a roof over our head, some means of cooking and a supply of clean water, we struggle to survive at all. Imagine, once you have them, wanting to live without a bed, a bath, towels, light bulbs or soap – let alone indulgences and luxuries, and all those objects with sentimental value. Our closest living relatives make do with none of this. Chimps employ crude tools and build sleeping nests, but abandon them after one use. Most other animals also get by without possessions. Our first possessions were probably our tools. The earliest stone tools, made some 3.3 million years ago, were designed to do a job, and must have been held by an individual for a time at least. At some point, however, as tools became more sophisticated they became “possessions” – items that were valued by their creator and even worth fighting over. The concept of ownership emerged and may have taken off with the advent of spear and arrow heads, which first appeared in Africa at least 300,000 years ago, around the time that our species Homo sapiens originated. Another key early possession was probably fire. The earliest convincing evidence of controlled use of fire dates to around 800,000 years ago. Once humans possessed fire and sophisticated tools, they presumably came to depend on them for survival. -- 73 of 100 -- 72 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society Belongings started to become part of our “extended phenotype”, as crucial to survival as a dam to a beaver. With time, there was another leap forward. Objects became valued not only for their utility, but also to advertise the skill or social status of their owner. Eventually, certain objects became valued for these reasons alone – jewellery, for example. At the Blombos cave in South Africa, excavations have revealed collections of shells that had been perforated and stained, and then strung together to form necklaces or bracelets. A small number of 100,000-year-old shell beads have also been found in Israel and Algeria. More recently, work at Blombos has uncovered evidence that ochre was deliberately collected, combined with other ingredients and fashioned into body paint or cosmetics. At first glance these inventions seem trivial, but they hint at dramatic revolutions in the nature of human beliefs and communication. Jewellery and cosmetics were probably prestigious, suggesting the existence of people of higher and lower status and challenging the egalitarian sensibilities that had existed since the early days of Homo erectus. More importantly, they are indications of symbolic thought and behaviour because wearing a particular necklace or form of body paint has meaning beyond the apparent. As well as status, it can signify things like group identity or a shared outlook. That generation after generation adorned themselves in this way indicates these people had language complex enough to establish traditions. What our ancestors invented to wear with their jewellery and cosmetics was equally revolutionary. Needle-like objects appear in the archaeological record about 60,000 years ago, providing the first evidence of tailoring, but humans had probably already been wearing simple clothes for thousands of years. Evidence for this comes from a rather unusual source. Body lice, which live mostly in clothes, evolved from hair lice sometime after humans began clothing themselves, and a study of louse genetics suggests body lice arose some 70,000 years ago. A more recent analysis puts their origin as early as 170,000 years ago. Either way, it looks like we were wearing sewn clothes when we migrated from our African cradle some 60,000 years ago and began spreading across the world. Mark Stoneking at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, Germany, an author on the original louse study, suggests that clothes would have allowed humans to inhabit cold areas that their naked predecessors could not tolerate. Sewing could have been a crucial development, since fitted garments are more effective at retaining body heat than loose animal furs. When some of our ancestors left Africa, they probably travelled with more than just the clothes on their backs. About 100,000 years ago, people in southern Africa began using ostrich eggs as water bottles. Having containers to transport and store vital resources would have given them huge advantages over other primates. But engravings on these shells are also highly significant: they appear to be a sign that dispersed groups had begun to connect and trade. Since 1999, Pierre-Jean Texier at the Aix-Marseille University in France has been uncovering engraved ostrich egg fragments at the Diepkloof rock shelter, 150 kilometres north of Cape Town in South Africa. The same five basic motifs are used time and again, over thousands of years, implying they had a meaning that could be read and understood across numerous generations. Texier and his colleagues think they show that people were visually marking and defining their belongings to maintain their group identity as they began travelling further and interacting with other groups. The amount of stuff that prehistoric people could accumulate was constrained by their nomadic lifestyle, leading some archaeologists to speculate that bags or papooses might also have been among our earliest possessions. This changed with the switch to a settled lifestyle. Once people chose to live in one place, their possessions began to accumulate. This lifestyle also heralded a new form of society and economy. Groups became larger and hierarchies developed, with the status of important individuals bolstered by prestige items such as fine clothes and jewellery. In fact, some archaeologists argue that societies could not have become complex and hierarchical -- 74 of 100 -- Chapter 5 | Economics and work | 73 without an associated “material culture”. As our ancestors began trading, they would have needed to cooperate fairly and peacefully – not just with group members,but also strangers from foreign lands. So trade may have provided the impetus to invent law and justice to help keep people in line. Hints of how law evolved come from modern human groups, which, like Stone Age hunter-gatherers, live in egalitarian, decentralised societies. The Turkana are nomadic pastoralists in east Africa. Despite having no centralised political power, the men will cooperate with non-family members in a life-threatening venture – stealing livestock from neighbouring peoples. While the activity itself may be ethically dubious, the motivation to cooperate reflects ideas that underpin any modern justice system. If men refuse to join these raiding parties they are judged harshly and punished by other group members, says Sarah Mathew at Arizona State University in Tempe. “They display mechanisms of adjudication and punishment akin to formal judiciary, suggesting that law and justice predates the emergence of centralised societies.” The engraved ostrich eggshells of Diepkloof show that modern humans have used graphical symbols to convey meaning for at least 100,000 years. But genuine writing was only invented about 5000 years ago. Now people could record information and pass it between places and generations. Some of the world’s oldest texts, from the Mesopotamian city-state of Lagash, rail against the spiralling taxes exacted by a corrupt ruling class. Soon afterwards, King Urukagina of Lagash wrote what is thought to be the first documented legal code. He has gained a reputation as the earliest social reformer, creating laws to limit the excesses of the rich, for instance, but his decrees also entrench the inferior social position of women. One details penalties for adulterous women, but makes no mention of adulterous men. Despite all the revolutionary changes, humanity still had some way to go. The switch from hunting and gathering to a sedentary lifestyle drove materialism in another way too. When people settled down, they became more susceptible to environmental disaster. A way to insure against this was to store surplus food – a process that created the need for possessions to gather and hoard, as well as the domestication of animals. Eventually, when societies became even larger and more complex, material goods became a store of wealth. Trade in such goods eventually led to the development of money. Of course, there are several groups in the world today who don’t live in large, complex societies with abundant possessions. But the vast majority of people are surrounded by stuff. As well as being useful, our possessions represent our extended selves. They provide a sense of past and tell us who we are, where we have come from and perhaps where we are going. Our things are repositories of ourselves. Our tendency to imbue things with rich meaning is a universal human trait that emerges early in life and develops as we get older. Indeed, our ability to imagine the way new things will change our lives is what drives us to acquire them in the first place, according to Marsha Richins at the University of Missouri. She found that we have “transformation expectations” about new stuff: we expect things to make our lives better and enhance the way we are viewed by others. It’s a tendency expertly exploited by advertisers, she says. > PIERRE-JEAN TEXIER/DIEPKLOOF PROJECT Engraved ostrich egg fragments dating from 100,000 years ago and found in South Africa -- 75 of 100 -- 74 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society Our culture of hyper-consumerism can make it difficult to determine where normal behaviour ends and compulsion begins. Of course, we are all materialistic to some extent – some more than others – and we do get a boost of happiness from buying things. But it doesn’t last. And because it is so fleeting, many people quickly feel the desire to top up with another purchase, and another – and are often willing to go into debt to do so. Still, the solution isn’t simply to reject our instinct for accumulating belongings. Our stuff has an important role in shoring up our sense of identity, one made most apparent when we are forced to let it go. This can be difficult, even traumatic, since it is akin to letting go of parts of ourselves. Institutions such as prisons and military camps strive for just this effect by removing clothes and other personal items from people and issuing them with standardised kit to diminish their individuality. They become like clay, primed for reshaping. Our sense of self isn’t the only reason we accumulate stuff, or doggedly hang on to it. As was the case for our ancestors, our possessions are symbols of social standing and status. Our materialistic desires are usually dictated not by what we need, but by what those around us have. Envy is a mover of markets. At a deep level, it is all about fairness and dignity, says Edward Fischer, an anthropologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. “Is it fair that I have less than others? And what does this mean to my sense of self- worth?” This isn’t just a feature of affluent societies, he adds. “It is also true among rural Maya farmers, Cairo’s workers and around the world. The norms of those peer groups vary a lot, but the influence of relative standing in them is important everywhere.” ❚ Our instincts to possess can sometimes get out of hand. As many as 1 in 20 people struggle with an obsession with acquiring stuff and the inability to part with it – some to the point that their home becomes impassable. Hoarding also isn’t limited to Western society. Cultural idiosyncrasies may shape how it manifests, but hoarding exists in virtually every culture. Although each person with a hoarding problem is unique, there are certain patterns of thinking that clinicians often see. People who hoard often maintain that it’s better to save items that could be useful in the future than to dispose of them. Many talk about a sense of responsibility towards their things, wanting to make sure that they get properly recycled or donated or used to their fullest extent. They may keep things simply because they find them attractive. However, often they develop emotional attachments to objects, seeing them as mementos and even imbuing them with person- like qualities. These ways of thinking are not unique to hoarding disorder. We all save things because we’re sentimentally attached, or we think they could be useful, or we think they are pretty. It’s just that someone with hoarding problems will carry that to an extreme. H U M A N H O A R D E R S “The tendency to imbue things with rich meaning emerges early in life” -- 76 of 100 -- Chapter 5 | Economics and work | 75 > A GOOD PLACE TO WORK Bar perhaps the bedroom, our place of work is where most of us spend the most time. Unsurprisingly, our reaction to our working environments is hugely influenced by how they tap into our basic psychological needs. OMPUTERS are indifferent to their surroundings: a laptop works the same in a fluorescent-lit office or a leafy park. The same isn’t true of the human brain. In fact, its performance is exquisitely sensitive to the context in which it operates. This came into sharp focus for many people during the covid-19 pandemic when they were abruptly forced to work and learn in different environments. For Sapna Cheryan that realisation came earlier. In 2001, as a new graduate interviewing for internships in tech firms, she felt unwelcome, even alienated, by workspaces that looked like a stereotypical computer enthusiast’s basement hang-out. Now at the University of Washington in Seattle, she studies “cues of belonging”, the signals embedded in an environment that communicate to occupants that they are welcome there – or not. In one experiment, Cheryan and her colleagues commandeered a room in Stanford University’s computer science building and created a stereotypical and a non-stereotypical setting. After just a few minutes in the stereotypical room, male undergraduates expressed a high level of interest in pursuing computer science. Female students were less interested. But their interest increased markedly – and actually exceeded that of men – after spending time in the non-stereotypical room. Cheryan has also explored how spaces might be designed to make a wider range of people feel they belong. The key, she maintains, is not to eliminate stereotypes, but to diversify them – to convey the message that people from many different backgrounds can thrive in a given setting. -- 77 of 100 -- 76 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society To help people think effectively, a workplace doesn’t just need cues of belonging, it also needs cues of identity. These are tangible signs and signals we arrange around us to support our self-conception. They do things like advertise our enthusiasms, hobbies and achievements, express a creative streak or a quirky sense of humour, or simply remind us of our loved ones. Such displays are sometimes aimed at informing others of who we are – or who we would like to be – but often they are intended for a more intimate audience: ourselves. When researchers examined the workspaces of people in a variety of jobs, from engineers and estate agents to event planners and creative directors, they found that about a third of the cues of identity were visible only to their owners. That rose to 70 per cent for objects whose stated purpose was to remind their owners of personal goals and values. A related feature of our workspaces concerns a sense of ownership. When we enter a space that feels like it is ours, a host of psychological and even physiological changes ensues. These effects were first observed in studies of home advantage, the phenomenon in which athletes tend to win more and bigger victories when playing on their own fields, courts and stadiums. Studies show that, on home turf, teams play more aggressively and their members (both male and female) exhibit higher levels of testosterone, a hormone associated with the expression of social dominance. But home advantage isn’t limited to sports. Researchers have discovered that when people occupy spaces that they consider their own, they feel more confident and capable. They are also more efficient and productive, less distractible and they advance their own interests more forcefully and effectively. With ownership comes control. A sense of control over how a workspace looks and functions increases performance too. Psychologists Craig Knight, then at the University of Exeter, UK, and Alex Haslam at the University of Queensland, Australia, have demonstrated how powerful this effect can be. They got volunteers to perform a set of tasks in four different environments: a bare, minimalist office; an enriched office decorated with posters and potted plants; an empowered office, arranged by participants as they liked; and a disempowered office, in which their chosen arrangement had been rearranged in front of them without consent. They performed best in the empowered office, completing about 15 per cent more work than in the enriched office and 30 per cent more than in the bare office. The size of such effects is large enough to make employers take notice: given the right surroundings, three people could accomplish almost as much as four. It is particularly relevant to employers experimenting with hot-desking, in which workers don’t have a dedicated space of their own, but grab an available one when they arrive at the office. In principle, hot-desking allows people to move to areas best suited to their task and mood: a private room T_A_P/ISTOCK Workers are 30 per cent less productive in a bare office than in one they have customised -- 78 of 100 -- Chapter 5 | Economics and work | 77 if they need to concentrate hard, an open area if they want to collaborate and be inspired. But in 2004, Theo van der Voordt at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and his colleagues surveyed companies that switched from fixed-desk offices to hot-desking. They found no evidence of a productivity boost, but there was a definite minus: animal territorialism. “Users often try to claim a familiar place by arriving at work earlier or by leaving items behind during their absence,” van der Voordt wrote. Another workplace trend, the open-plan office, poses a further environmental challenge to effective thinking. The brain evolved to continually monitor its immediate surroundings lest nearby sounds or movements signal danger to be avoided or an opportunity to be seized. In other words, we are easily distracted – and open-plan offices are teeming with distractions. It is nearly impossible, for example, to prevent our gaze from darting towards a novel object or one in motion. Our eyes are especially drawn towards faces, and our brains automatically prioritise processing them, even when we are trying to focus on a page or a screen. What’s more, we become emotionally aroused when we feel we are being observed. All this visual monitoring and processing uses up considerable mental resources, leaving less brainpower for our work. Then there is noise. Any sounds may grab our attention, but speech is particularly distracting because, whether or not we want to be listening, our brains try to work out the meaning. Background speech is processed by the same brain regions we employ to do things like analysing data or writing a report. Research shows that it can drastically reduce our performance on such tasks. The sort of one- sided conversation resulting from a colleague speaking on the phone is especially distracting because our brains constantly try to predict when the speakers will pause or resume conversation and what they will say next. Lauren Emberson at the University of British Columbia, Canada, has found that people’s verbal and motor skills are even more impaired by hearing such “halfalogues” than when they can hear both sides of a conversation. More troubling still is the finding that open-plan environments may not actually promote creative interactions – one rationale often used to promote them. Researchers use a device called a sociometer to measure patterns of physical movement and social interaction among co-workers. Worn around the neck like an ID badge, it collects precise data about who talks to whom, where and for how long. Their surprise finding is that while there is some evidence that workers do move around more in open-plan settings, and so benefit from increased physical activity, people are less likely to have face-to-face interactions in open-plan offices than in more private workspaces. The lack of privacy in an open-plan setting makes us retreat into our shells, putting on headphones to block background noise and emailing and instant messaging people just a few desks away. ❚ “People are less likely to have face-to-face interactions in open-plan offices” -- 79 of 100 -- 78 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society What does being an expert mean? That’s actually a surprisingly tough one to answer. Broadly, it means that you are demonstrably extremely good at what you do, having spent a long time learning your craft; that you can pass your knowledge on to other people; and that you are recognised by other people as being extremely good at what you do. But there are complications. For a start, people often underestimate their own level of expertise and others might recognise you as an expert in ways you don’t yourself. Often there’s a social judgement involved, too: we think of brain surgeons or fighter pilots or concert pianists as having greater expertise than mechanics or plasterers or plumbers. We often overlook the experts all around us who don’t occupy very high positions in this hierarchy or whose area of expertise isn’t regarded as “important”. That’s a great mistake. Is expertise generally undervalued? I think there’s been a very dangerous sense growing that experts are sort of a needless luxury. They’re telling us what to do, and what do they know about it? The coronavirus pandemic brought the value of expertise into sharp focus. In medicine, there’s the mantra that a surgeon knows how to operate, a good surgeon knows when to operate and a really good surgeon knows when not to operate. The same goes for someone who comes to check your boiler, or a whole host of other things. Expertise isn’t just about knowing stuff and being able to do stuff, but about having the judgement to apply that knowledge in the right way: to improvise, to bring accumulated experience to bear on a new situation where there may be no clear answers, but we need to make decisions anyway. Governments and tabloid newspapers have an instinctive dislike of operating under conditions of uncertainty because they want simple answers to questions. If we dismiss the value of experts, just pooh-pooh them and say we don’t need them, we are depriving ourselves of something crucially important. HOW TO BE AN EXPERT Expertise is an undervalued good, says Roger Kneebone – but all of us have it within us PROFILE ROGER KNEEBONE Roger Kneebone is author of Expert: Understanding the path to mastery. Having worked as a trauma surgeon in Soweto, South Africa, and as a family doctor in rural Wiltshire, UK, he has now become expert in a third area as professor of surgical education at Imperial College London INTERVIEW -- 80 of 100 -- Chapter 5 | Economics and work | 79 You identify three stages of becoming expert in something: apprentice, journeyman and master. What’s the difference? In the apprentice stage, generally somebody else is taking responsibility for your cock-ups, and also taking credit for your successes. You have to spend a load of time doing stuff that other people tell you, whether you like it or not, whether you think it’s useful or not and whether you even understand it or not – and you usually don’t. It can be boring, it can be tedious, it can be frustrating, whether you’re learning to take bloods in my case when training to be a surgeon, making a stone surface flat or smooth if you’re trying to be a mason, learning tricks as a magician or anything you can imagine. But during that time, you find all sorts of other things happen that you’re not aware of. You come to understand the materials you’re working with and what you have to do to work with them. You understand how to occupy the space you’re in, how to interact with other people, how to work in a workshop or community. And that takes a long time. And as a journeyman and master? As a journeyman, two very interesting things happen. You change your focus of attention from yourself and the things that you’ve learned – the exams you’ve passed, the stuff you want to show off – to whoever your work is for: an audience, patient, customer or client. Simultaneously, you’re moving to becoming an independent person with your own individuality and style, what jazz musicians call “voice”. As a master, you must obviously take responsibility not only for the people you’re working for, but for other people who are also doing that work: apprentices, trainees, PhD students or whoever. But under the surface, you’re having to develop that quality of wisdom and to shape other people’s direction. There’s two crucial skills you only develop in this phase. First, how to deal with error, both in terms of recovering from an error – crucial obviously as a surgeon, but in a whole host of other areas, too – and building up your own resilience. And you learn to improvise – not in the sense of just knocking something up on the spur of the moment because you haven’t thought about it in advance, but in being able to respond to the unexpected, and to bring into play all the knowledge and experience you’ve gained to make a sensible response to an unpredicted situation. Do we give people the necessary time and space to become an expert? When you look at what’s happening from quite an early age, certainly in the UK, there are real problems. All those opportunities that people used to have at school for doing stuff with their hands, for doing things like music or dance or drama that allow them to explore their physical space, for performing to other people and working in groups – all those things that the process of becoming expert builds on – are being stripped out of the curriculum. More and more, we’re being encouraged to think that really only the sciences are worth doing, all the rest is touchy-feely stuff that doesn’t matter. This absolutely couldn’t be further from the truth – partly because, as humans, we need those different aspects, but partly because there is just as much craftsmanship and performance in expert laboratory science as there is anywhere else. We are impoverishing people at an early, formative stage and it’s very difficult to get these things back. Part of it is because people haven’t made this connection between other experts and what we all do. An expert epidemiologist, say, may have gone a long way along a particular path, but they’re still on that same path we all are. They’re not a completely different species – the process itself is a universally human one. ❚ ROCIO MONTOYA -- 81 of 100 -- C H A P T E R 6 80 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society -- 82 of 100 -- Human society has changed immeasurably since recognisable civilisation began with the first cities some 6000 years ago. In many ways, in many parts of the world, we live longer, safer, healthier and happier lives than in any era of human history. And yet human society today faces huge challenges. The growth-based economic model that has delivered unprecedented prosperity and well-being for many over the past few decades is also the driver of environmental problems from climate change to chemical pollution. Meanwhile, growing inequalities suggest new sources of future conflict both within and between nations, and the rise of artificial intelligence challenges many aspects of the current organisation of society. Can things continue as they are? Chapter 6 | The future of society | 81 -- 83 of 100 -- 82 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society The goal of economic policies is often thought of as increasing GDP. What should the objective be as we recover from the covid-19 pandemic? Diane Coyle: It should be to make people better off, where that is broadly understood not only as income, but anything that contributes to people’s sense of how well things are going for them. When policies are geared towards increasing GDP growth as the only measure of success, they will deliver distorted outcomes. We need to add a true balance sheet for the economy by measuring the assets we use to produce and consume, particularly natural resources. Tim Jackson: Pursuing GDP growth for the past 50 years has justified policies that lionise short-term productivity goals and prioritise the interests of capital over those of workers, creating huge social inequalities and preventing long-term investment in people and planet. The last financial crisis exposed the financial and monetary flaws in this system. The global pandemic has exposed the social and human flaws. There have been some attempts to shift to more holistic measures of economic success, such as the UN’s Human Development Index and the Stiglitz-Sen-Fitoussi commission set up by former French president Nicolas Sarkozy. But these haven’t yet had the impact needed. TOBIASJO/ISTOCK > A FAIRER, GREENER FUTURE? PROFILES Diane Coyle is an economist at the University of Cambridge Andy Haldane is a former chief economist at the Bank of England Cameron Hepburn is the director of the University of Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment Tim Jackson is an economist at the University of Surrey, UK Keston Perry is a political economist at Williams College in Massachusetts The world economy has quadrupled in size since 1970, improving the material well- being of billions. Over the past decade, however, incomes have stagnated in many parts of the world, while the covid-19 pandemic has laid bare inequalities within and between societies. Five economists debate whether it is time for a rethink. DISCUSSION -- 84 of 100 -- Chapter 6 | The future of society | 83 -- 85 of 100 -- 84 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society Keston Perry: The objective has to be multifaceted. It’s about enhancing the well-being of workers, especially women and Black and ethnic minority people. It’s about improving the life chances of more unemployed people, especially in the global south. It’s about addressing extreme wealth and income inequality, improving welfare systems, ensuring that women have a fair stake in the future. And doing all this in a way that doesn’t threaten our planet’s habitability or create disproportionate suffering for some groups. We cannot simply have unimpeded growth as the end goal; we need to reimagine the global economic architecture. Another measure economists like to see rise is productivity, often described as output per worker. But that has flatlined lately. Must we keep getting more efficient? Diane Coyle: Getting more benefit while using the same or fewer resources is how humanity escaped the Malthusian trap, the idea that population growth would inevitably hit the limit of available resources. Productivity drives up living standards and means longer lives, better health, lower infant mortality, more leisure. So it’s fundamental. Productivity increases, delivered through innovation, will be essential to sustaining current living standards and increasing them without bursting planetary boundaries or causing catastrophic environmental crises. However, the way we define and measure productivity needs a complete rethink. There are no “products” for 80 per cent of the economy. What is the productivity of a management consultant or an accountant? Andy Haldane: Productivity improvement is one of the key determinants of income, living standards and well- being over the medium term. So it would be a grave mistake to abandon that as an objective of public policy. That isn’t the same, however, as having productivity as a singular objective. There are a range of other factors relevant to our future livelihoods which need also to be weighed. As the covid crisis has revealed, that includes improving the resilience of our economies when providing the goods and services critical to its citizens, including health and social care. It also includes purposeful work, an inclusive society and a clean environment. Some people say we need an entirely new economic system. What sort has the best chance of delivering sustainable prosperity? Should the state be more involved? Keston Perry: We have lots of evidence that the market- led paradigm has terribly failed our societies. What we need is an alternative that is based on equality and sustainability and one that affords populations in the global south the ability to determine their own futures. The fragments left behind by neoliberalism are of no use for this purpose. But we don’t yet know what the replacement may be, what might emerge from the ruins of the past 40 years. It really depends on how different groups organise to challenge the status quo. Diane Coyle: The state has always had a role in the economy – this is widely recognised by economists. In the UK, for instance, we have had a long-standing, but unspoken, industrial policy in support of the City of London, from a favourable regulatory environment to building the train lines and airports to service it. The challenge is to make sure the state’s role is strategic and avoids obvious traps, such as political lobbying by big businesses to get subsidies. Many are calling for a Green New Deal, where states create jobs to help us transition to net-zero carbon. Should this happen? Cameron Hepburn: The world has a unique opportunity to “build back better” after this pandemic has passed. Together with several colleagues, I recently surveyed 231 economists working in central banks or finance ministries and asked which policies would offer a green route out of the crisis and be workable and highly economically effective. We identified five key policies. For example, investing in clean energy infrastructure construction will create more jobs in the short term than investing in fossil fuels. Other good options would include retrofitting buildings for better heat efficiency and restoring natural capital such as forests. Tim Jackson: We need a Green and Social New Deal, a systematic programme of large-scale social investment to deliver a “just transition” towards a resilient, fair and sustainable economy, create the social infrastructure of net-zero-carbon lifestyles and invest in the ecological assets on which tomorrow’s prosperity depends. ❚ -- 86 of 100 -- Chapter 6 | The future of society | 85 > TACKLING GLOBAL INEQUALITY The gulf between haves and have-nots is more obvious than ever in today’s globalised world. Perhaps reducing it would be the most important thing we could do to improve human society – but how? CCORDING to the World Bank, about 10 per cent of the planet’s population, or 760 million people, earn $1.90 or less per day. The hardship is such that the life expectancy of the world’s poorest people is nearly 15 years lower than that of the richest. Such absolute poverty is bad for those in it. But it is also a potential source of future conflict, especially as climate change is expected to hit the livelihoods of the poorest, often living in already marginal environments, the hardest. It’s in everyone’s interest to change things. While globalisation has eased the lot of many, the widespread policy of trade liberalisation and easing taxes on business and wealth with the expectation that money will “trickle down” from richer societies to poorer ones as they buy in services hasn’t helped the world’s poorest. One radical alternative is direct handouts: giving everyone in extreme poverty a lump sum of, say, $1000, or equivalent assets. An objection often raised When disasters such as floods occur, financial insecurity can spiral into destitution DEBARCHAN CHATTERJEE/ISTOCK -- 87 of 100 -- 86 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society against such proposals is that people will waste such gifts. But a 2014 review of cash handouts by the World Bank found that this is hardly ever the case. People tend to use handouts wisely. Even one-off cash and asset transfers seem to genuinely change people’s lives. In a trial in Bangladesh, for example, ultra-poor families were given assets in the form of livestock. Follow-ups showed that the handouts had sustainably changed their lives and put them on a new trajectory out of extreme poverty. Similar one-off asset-transfer programmes have been rolled out in Ethiopia, Ghana, Honduras, India, Pakistan and Peru, involving a total of more than 10,000 people. After the second year of this project, families enrolled in the treatment groups had more assets, better diets, better physical and mental health, higher political engagement and increased female empowerment compared with control groups. Most of the cash-transfer experiments done so far are on a scale of hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars. We don’t know what might happen if we showered larger amounts on entire populations. Might people give up work? It is hard to say, but the little evidence that exists suggests not. In Alaska, for example, all residents receive a yearly dividend derived from oil revenue, and this has no negative effect on the rate of employment. Nor do such cash transfers seem to have much impact on inflation, judging by a study in Kenya. What we know for certain is that the benefits can be huge. In Brazil, a countrywide initiative called Bolsa Família introduced in 2003 helped to reduce financial inequality by 15 per cent, and the proportion of the population in extreme poverty shrank from 9.7 to 4.3 per cent. Cases of infant mortality caused by malnourishment also halved. Payments from the programme aren’t universal: they are made only to families earning under a certain amount, but in 2015 that was still a quarter of the population, almost 52 million people. In Peru, there was a cash transfer scheme that came with conditions. In enrolled villages, the female head of households with children received the equivalent of $143 every two months if she had been sending the children to school, had obtained identity cards for them and had taken under 5s for health checks. This hints at the kind of lasting change you can make if you simply give away money, albeit with the proviso that children are educated. The non-profit Brookings Institution in Washington DC discovered that a woman who has never been to school has around four to five more children than a woman with 12 years of education. It also found that women who went to school earn more, are less likely to marry as children, are less likely to have HIV or malaria, and tend to farm more productive plots of land, which results in better- nourished families. Ensuring everyone across the world has access to a free, basic education is the surest way of helping them help themselves. The UN currently spends $13 billion a year on international aid projects for education, and estimates that just an extra $39 billion per year could ensure universal education in low and lower-middle income countries – small change in the general scheme of things. ❚ “One radical alternative is giving everyone in extreme poverty a lump sum” -- 88 of 100 -- Chapter 6 | The future of society | 87 HOW TO FUTURE- PROOF CITIES Over half of the world’s population now live in cities, and urban environments have become the engine rooms of progress and growth. Until recently, however, we paid little attention to how best to design them, says Anu Ramaswami INTERVIEW > Urbanisation is accelerating as global population grows. Is that a good thing? Many people point to cities as villains. I prefer a more nuanced narrative that says cities offer an opportunity for innovation. This typically generates more wealth and, to some extent, more well-being, but also inequality, which has its own implications for well-being. More than 90 per cent of the world’s GDP arises from urban activities, but its distribution is very uneven. Cities have other drawbacks too, such as higher crime and air pollution. So the question shouldn’t be: is urbanisation good? It should be: since urbanisation is inevitable, can we urbanise in a more resource-efficient way? And how do we measure both resource efficiency and urban well-being? You have pioneered a field called sustainable urban systems science. Can you explain how it differs from more traditional urban planning? To sum up what I do, I study how materials and energy flow through cities, shaped by people and policies, and their impact on human and planetary well-being. Cities draw resources from everywhere, so instead of studying what’s happening inside the city boundary, my team and I study cities in their broader context – as sustainable urban systems. One way to do that is to consider the seven key provisioning systems that support them: shelter, water, food, energy, connectivity, sanitation and green spaces. Planners tend to focus on these in isolation; our goal is to study them holistically, including their interactions. We PROFILE ANU RAMASWAMI Anu Ramaswami is a professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the M. S. Chadha Center for Global India at Princeton University. Her research focuses on what we can do to improve the urban environment, and she works closely with US cities as well as with the United Nations and national governments -- 89 of 100 -- 88 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society look at their impacts beyond the city too. So, for example, we might ask how inequality contributes to global greenhouse gas emissions. In 2018, you co-authored The Weight of Cities, a report for the United Nations. It concluded that the materials used to build and sustain cities could be reduced by a factor of five, bringing huge environmental benefits. How? The argument is that you need a cascade of actions to maximise efficiency. There are five levels of these. The first is land use: with more compact land use, you reduce your mobility needs and your use of construction materials per square metre. At the next level, you deploy more efficient technologies, such as better vehicles. The third level considers synergies – efficiencies that cities offer through co-location, an example of which would be heat recycling through district energy systems. Next comes behavioural change: encouraging the use of public transport and the use of public spaces for, say, urban farming. And fifth is renewable technologies – building a capacity for regeneration into your city. Planners might focus on different levels of the cascade depending on whether the city is old or new. For a new city, starting with a compact plan will be most important. Compact growth is harder to achieve in existing cities, but you can build up what we call “articulated density” around major transit corridors, which are the connective tissue in the porous matrix of a walkable, liveable city. London is an example of a city that has done well lately in building up articulated density. In The Weight of Cities, you gave a striking statistic: China used more concrete between 2011 and 2013 than the US used in the entire 20th century. Are we heading in the wrong direction? Nothing in China’s growth is surprising. A lot of urbanisation has yet to happen, and most urbanising countries will follow the same trajectory if, like China, they have steady population growth. In some countries, people are still migrating into cities from rural areas at a really rapid clip. There’s a rule of thumb that says you calculate the doubling time of a city’s population by dividing 70 by the city’s annual percentage growth rate. A city that is growing by 10 per cent annually – as some Indian cities are – will have a doubling time of seven years. Such a city will have very large infrastructure needs, but it’s as important to ask how long that infrastructure will last as what materials will go into building it. Are governments listening to you? After The Weight of Cities, I wrote a follow-up report focusing on the ASEAN [Association of Southeast Asian Nations] region, which will be the next urbanisation hotspot after India and China. The aim was to show how the principles outlined in Weight of Cities could be applied in a specific regional context. That report got a lot of traction; with the UN, we presented it to urban planning agencies across the ASEAN region. The challenge, in fact, is not to get governments to adopt these ideas. It is whether it is even possible to do intentional planning when cities are growing so fast. We provided case studies to show that it is. Ahmedabad Although the first cities arose some 6000 years ago, it is only in the 20th century that urban living really took off – and only in the past decade or so that humanity became a majority-urban species Percentage of global population SOURCE: OWID BASED ON UN WORLD URBANIZATION PROSPECTS 2018 AND HISTORICAL SOURCES Year RURAL URBAN 0 1500 1600 1700 1800 1900 2000 20 40 60 80 100 2050 -- 90 of 100 -- Chapter 6 | The future of society | 89 “The materials used to build and sustain cities could be reduced by a factor of five” in India, for example, has been able to plan ahead of its 15-to-30-year doubling time. You use a bottom-up approach. Is that because you have found it the best way to get things done? Yes. With Minneapolis, for example, we’re in the process of drawing up a food action plan that takes a transboundary approach to urban food policies. It’s a local adaptation of the 2015 Milan Urban Food Policy Pact, which has more than 200 signatories worldwide. In both Minneapolis and Denver, the community generates strategies which we – the academics – then shape and prioritise. It’s very much a two-way street, though, because the collaboration throws up new research questions. This kind of co-production isn’t new, but over the past decade, I’ve seen it evolve from a practice into a science. It has established procedures now, and the conditions that favour success are better understood. Resilience to future threats is key to urban planning. How is it being built into cities? Climate change is the most obvious threat, now and in the future. In the US, many cities are designing storm- water systems that will withstand higher levels of flooding than we have seen so far, or planting trees to reduce heat stress, or thinking about how to keep the power grid functioning in conditions of extreme cold. There are other, more intangible forms of resilience, of course. The covid-19 pandemic has taught us that low social inequality is one of them – and good city design can contribute to that. ❚ ROCIO MONTOYA -- 91 of 100 -- 90 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society ESCRIBING the rise of robotics and AI as a “fourth industrial revolution“ follows on from recognising three similar step changes over the past three centuries: those powered by coal and steam, by oil and electricity and by digital computing. Many cheer the promise of self-driving vehicles, virtual assistants and other labour- saving innovations. However, people are also worried about the potential long-term jobs fallout of the trend towards automation. One analysis by consulting firm McKinsey & Company in 2017 suggested that automation could displace up to 800 million jobs worldwide by 2030. Back in 2013, Carl Frey and Michael Osborne at the University of Oxford rather piquantly used a machine- learning algorithm to assess how easily different jobs could be automated. The study concluded that machines will be able to do 47 per cent of all US jobs in the coming two decades – a figure that remains relatively constant today, says Frey. “In the UK, the estimates are at 35 per cent.” Automation-related upheaval already posed a big threat to warehouse and factory workers, but many THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION Resource scarcity, inequality and underemployment are known factors in conflict and political upheaval. The rise of robots and artificial intelligence, sometimes dubbed the fourth industrial revolution, is often seen as a particular risk factor owing to its potential to eliminate many jobs. But we should perhaps be more worried about other, more insidious aspects of the automation revolution. People may not want to do the sorts of jobs that are automated at Amazon’s fulfillment centres -- 92 of 100 -- Chapter 6 | The future of society | 91 others in white collar jobs may find themselves out of work too. Those include financial analysts and radiographers whose jobs involve a lot of routine analysis of specific forms of data. Such jobs can now be performed just as competently, if not more so, by an AI. On the other hand, many tasks are still too delicate or complex to be automated. These include assembling a smartphone, cleaning elevator buttons or delivering the post. Others, such as confirming a medical diagnosis, still require human insight and interpretation, even if AIs can do some of the legwork. Then there are undertakings that simply cannot do without the warmth of a human touch. Most of the world is a long way from accepting robot therapists or nurses, for example. Whoever is affected, the trend tends to be a one-way street. “When automation is here, it’s here to stay,” says futurist Ravin Jesuthasan. “In the economics of robotics, once you’ve made the upfront investment, whether it’s in hard dollars or soft dollars of retraining the workforce and getting behaviour change from customers, it’s much easier to perpetuate.” There are challenges we will have to face as the trend towards automation accelerates. One major issue is that AI has a tendency to inherit and amplify biases that exist in the data used to train it – for example, against minority ethnicity or lower-income groups. Then there are questions about how to frame laws around the responsible use of machines with ever- increasing autonomy, and the possibility of a growing social divide between those who can afford technology and those who can’t. It isn’t all doom and gloom, though. With this wave of innovation, as with previous ones, the jobs most ripe for automation are those that are repetitive and dull. Few people have ever begged for one more spreadsheet to fill or one more box to pack, after all. Here, technology can remove tedium and free up people to do more meaningful work. More often than not, they end up working in partnership with machines – algorithms can trawl through countless transactions or medical images and flag up suspicious ones for a person to review, for example. “The only thing that is worse than automation is no automation,” says Frey. The world has been on a long-term path of technology doing more work for us for good reason, he adds – it has enabled higher productivity, lowered costs, greater scalability, safer environments, more flexible working and improved connectivity, to name just a few things. “If you look BEN BIRCHALL/PA IMAGES/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO > -- 93 of 100 -- 92 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society back over the past 200 years, there’s no question that people are better off today, in large part because of automation,” says Frey. Economist James Bessen at Boston University in Massachusetts agrees. What we are likely to see isn’t fewer jobs overall, but different ones. “There’s no evidence that AI will lead to massive unemployment, but there will be increased churn,” he says. “Automation can actually lead to new jobs.” Already, we are seeing an increase in demand for the likes of drone operators, data scientists, cryptographers, digital marketing specialists, video tech support and virtual event organisers. In the future, we are going to need robot mechanics and customer service officers capable of handling people so that they aren’t mad at a robot anymore. But there’s one task that automated systems are particularly good at that does pose a threat to the stability of societies: seeding disinformation and misinformation. The manipulation of information during warfare is as old as warfare itself. But it really took off during the cold war, when both sides systematically developed tools to influence the public watching at home and abroad. Fake companies, front organisations, leaked letters, bogus journalism, planted conspiracy theories and manufactured protests were all part of the ideological struggle. For the practitioners of these tactics, the arrival of the internet and social media was a spectacular opportunity, providing environments far more open than newspapers and television, and global forums for debate and discussion that were very easy to join and post in, and which were curated and shaped by algorithms that could be reverse-engineered, gamed and manipulated. The most successful of those platforms, such as Facebook, Twitter and TikTok, also became increasingly personalised, serving up the information they thought users wanted and, in doing so, sometimes creating bubbles of hyper-partisanship – small online knots of identity that could each be contacted and exploited. In the space of a decade, it became far easier, faster and cheaper for people to mould the public with social media. And it didn’t take the resources of a state, either. Anyone could do it, so long as they had a smartphone. Around the world, thousands of people are using the same tools to game and manipulate social media platforms on an industrial scale. For $3 you can buy a “HUGE MEGA BOT PACK” on the darknet, allowing you to build your own army of automated accounts across hundreds of social media platforms. Other services can manipulate search engine results, buy Wikipedia edits or rent fake IP addresses to make it look like your accounts come from all over the world. There are even “legend farms” that you can recruit, giving you control of tens of thousands of unique identities, each with its own personality, interests and writing style. The creation of fake realities online can lead to real violence. In 2018, false information shared on social media in Nigeria caused rioting and people to be hacked to death by machetes. In 2019, rumours of child abductions in France caused violence against the Roma community. In Myanmar, hundreds of soldiers posed as celebrities and national heroes on social media to flood it with incendiary comments about the Rohingya minority, again leading to violence and conflict. This type of information warfare is on the rise. In 2017, researchers at the University of Oxford found it happening in 28 countries. In 2018, it was 48. Since the end of the cold war, the militaries of liberal democracies have been bigger, better funded and more powerful than the military of any country that wishes to do them harm. The dangers, however, are no longer physical. Now, coordinated groups can step right into the middle of the politics of any country with an online presence. The conflict in Ukraine, with its apparently incontrovertible proof of atrocities immediately and vigorously denied and decried as “fake news” by the other side, shows how the nature of battle has changed. Information is no longer being used in war. War is being waged within information. ❚ -- 94 of 100 -- Chapter 6 | The future of society | 93 THE CHALLENGE OF AI With potential downsides ranging from contributing to climate change to the entrenching of inequalities, societies need to think carefully about how they employ artificial intelligence, says Kate Crawford PROFILE KATE CRAWFORD Kate Crawford is co-founder of the AI Now Institute at New York University and a researcher at Microsoft Research and the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris who investigates the political and social implications of AI INTERVIEW You argue that AI is inherently political. What do you mean? Artificial intelligence is politics all the way down. From the way in which data are collected, to the automated classification of personal characteristics like gender, race, emotion or sexual identity, to the way in which those tools are built and who experiences the downsides. Time and time again we’ve seen that people who are already marginalised are the ones who experience the worst harms from large-scale artificial intelligence systems. We’ve seen communities of colour targeted by predictive policing systems, immigrants surveilled and tracked by deportation tools, and people with disabilities cut off from support services due to poorly designed healthcare algorithms. What are the most problematic uses of AI you can see coming down the track? One I find particularly concerning is so-called emotion detection. There are companies that use this in hiring tools so that when you’re doing a job interview, the micromovements in your face are being mapped to all sorts of interpretations of what you might be thinking and feeling – often in the context of previous ROCIO MONTOYA > -- 95 of 100 -- 94 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society IS WESTERN POWER ON THE DECLINE? To varying degrees, the past centuries have been a period of European and latterly North American dominance of global affairs. History suggests that civilisations rise and fall, and all such periods of dominance are transient. Is the West’s time now up? successful applicants. One of the problems with that is that you end up hiring people who look and sound like your existing workforce. There was also a tool that has been marketed for shopping malls that looks at people’s faces to see emotions that will indicate that you might be about to steal from shops. What was the training data for that, and what are the assumptions about what somebody looks like when they are shoplifting? When it comes to the future of AI, are you an optimist or a pessimist? I’m a sceptical optimist. I am optimistic about the ways in which we think about the next generation of civic infrastructure. How do we make sure infrastructures are going to really serve us, and in ways that can’t just be switched off in the middle of a political negotiation, as we saw with Facebook and Australia [in 2021]? The conversation about climate change has reached a point that means we are going to think about the impact technical systems have on the planet from an energy and natural resources perspective. I’m also optimistic that, in some ways, AI allows us to have conversations about how we want to live. These conversations have often been quite segmented. If you think about conversations about labour rights, climate justice and data protection, they’ve primarily been in very separate silos, but right now artificial intelligence touches each one. This is the moment to bring those issues together. So the detrimental effects of AI, which is still in its infancy, can be reversed? The important thing to remember is that no technology is inevitable. Just because something is designed, doesn’t mean it has to be widely deployed. And just because something has always been done a certain way, doesn’t mean we can’t change it. That is the most important thing when we think about labour exploitation, environmental degradation and the mass harvesting of data, all of which can be profoundly detrimental. These are all practices that can change, and the great legacy of industry over the past 300 years or so is that industries have changed once regulated. We can remake these systems and there’s profound political hope in that. ❚ -- 96 of 100 -- Chapter 6 | The future of society | 95 HE idea that Western power and influence is in gradual decline, perhaps as a prelude to collapse, has been around for a while. But in recent years it has gained a new urgency. Resource depletion, inequality and environmental issues such as climate change and biodiversity loss threaten the basis of Western prosperity and stability. Other nations and regions, justifiably demanding a fairer share of the cake, are on the up. Using science to predict the future isn’t easy, not least because both “collapse” and “Western civilisation” are difficult to define. Despite these difficulties, some scientists and historians are analysing the rise and fall of ancient civilisations to look for patterns that might give us a heads-up on what is coming. ←- Chapter 1 deals with how civilisations first arose- According to Peter Turchin, an evolutionary anthropologist at the University of Connecticut, there are some worrying signs that the West is reaching its end game. Turchin was a population biologist studying boom-and-bust cycles in predator and prey animals when he realised that the equations he was using could also describe the rise and fall of ancient civilisations. In the late 1990s, he began to apply these equations to historical data, looking for patterns that link social factors such as wealth and health inequality to political instability. Sure enough, in past civilisations in Ancient Egypt, China and Russia, he spotted two recurring cycles that are linked to regular era-defining periods of unrest. One, a “secular cycle”, lasts two or three centuries. It starts with a fairly equal society, then, as the population grows, the supply of labour begins to outstrip demand and so becomes cheap. Wealthy elites form, while the living standards of the workers fall. As the society becomes more unequal, the cycle enters a more destructive phase, in which the misery of the lowest strata and infighting between elites contribute to social turbulence and, eventually, collapse. Then there is a second, shorter cycle, lasting 50 years and made up of two generations – one peaceful and one turbulent. Looking at US history Turchin spotted peaks of unrest in 1870, 1920 and 1970. In 2010, he predicted that the end of the next 50-year cycle would coincide with the turbulent part of the longer cycle, causing a period of political unrest in around 2020 at least on a par with what happened around 1970, at the peak of the civil rights movement and protests against the Vietnam war. Recent history suggests he was onto something. As for what will happen next, he can’t say. He points out that his model operates at the level of large-scale forces, and can’t predict exactly what might tip unease over into unrest and how bad things might get. How and why turbulence sometimes turns into collapse is something that concerns Safa Motesharrei, a mathematician at the University of Maryland. His modelling has shown that either extreme inequality or resource depletion could push a society to collapse, but collapse is irreversible only when the two coincide. > ZUMA PRESS INC/ALAMY STOCK PHOTO The 2020s are predicted to see the sort of civil unrest sparked by the Vietnam war 50 years ago -- 97 of 100 -- 96 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Human Society This doesn’t bode well for Western societies, which are dangerously unequal. The world’s richest 1 per cent now owns around half the wealth, and the gap between the super-rich and everyone else has been growing since the financial crisis of 2008. Indeed, the West might already be living on borrowed time. Motesharrei’s group has shown that by rapidly using non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels, a society can grow by an order of magnitude beyond what would have been supported by renewables alone, and so is able to postpone its collapse. “But when the collapse happens,” they concluded, “it is much deeper.” That sounds disastrous, but not everyone agrees that a boom-and-bust model applies to modern societies. Many researchers avoid the word collapse, and talk instead about a rapid loss of complexity. When the Roman Empire broke up, new societies emerged, but their hierarchies, cultures and economies were less sophisticated, and people lived shorter, unhealthier lives. That kind of across-the-board loss of complexity is unlikely today, says Turchin, but he doesn’t rule out milder versions of it: the break-up of the European Union, say, or the US losing its empire in the form of NATO and close allies such as South Korea. On the other hand, some people, such as Yaneer Bar- Yam of the New England Complex Systems Institute in Massachusetts, see this kind of global change as a shift up in complexity, with highly centralised structures such as national governments giving way to less centralised, overarching networks of control. “The world is becoming an integrated whole,” says Bar-Yam. He and others are even predicting a future where the nation state gives way to fuzzy borders and global networks of interlocking organisations, with our cultural identity split between our immediate locality and global regulatory bodies. Anne-Marie Slaughter of Princeton University, a former US assistant secretary of state, also sees hierarchies giving way to global networks primarily of experts and bureaucrats from nation states. For example, governments now work more through flexible networks such as the G7 (or 8, or 20) to manage global problems than through the UN hierarchy. The limitations of the structures set up to manage global problems after the second world war, dependent on consensus decision making underwritten by a security council consisting of five permanent powers, have become apparent as those powers have begun to flout the rules – think the US-sponsored invasion of Iraq in 2003, or Russia attacking Ukraine in 2022. Ian Goldin at the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford, which analyses global problems, thinks such networks must emerge. He believes existing institutions such as UN agencies and the World Bank are structurally unable to deal with problems that emerge from global interrelatedness, such as economic instability, pandemics, climate change and cybersecurity – partly because they are hierarchies of member states which themselves cannot deal with these global problems. He quotes Slaughter: “Networked problems require a networked response.” The underlying behaviour of systems and the limits of the human brain explain why. Bar-Yam notes that in any hierarchy, the person at the top has to be able to get their head around the whole system. When systems are too complex for one human mind to grasp, they must evolve from hierarchies into networks where no one person is in charge, he argues. Nevertheless, the very globalised economy that is allowing these networks to emerge needs something or somebody to write and enforce the rules. Nation states are currently the only entities powerful enough to do this. Their limitations are clear, both in solving global problems and resolving local conflicts. But one solution may be to pay more attention to the scale of government. Known as subsidiarity, this is the idea that government should act at the level where it is most effective, with local government for local problems and higher powers at higher scales. There is empirical evidence that it works: social and ecological systems can be better governed when their users self-organise than when they are run by outside leaders. However, it is hard to see how the current political system can evolve coherently in that direction. Nation states could get in the way of both devolution to local control and networking to achieve global goals. With climate change, it is arguable that they already have – making that and related environmental changes perhaps the greatest challenge to the current organisation of human society. ❚ -- 98 of 100 -- QUANTUM FIELDS AND FORCES / THE STANDARD MODEL / ANTIMATTER / THE HIGGS BOSON / DARK MATTER AND ENERGY / THE SEARCH FOR BETTER THEORIES / AND MORE ON SALE 8 DECEMBER ESSENTIAL GUIDE №15 PARTICLE PHYSICS U N D E R S T A N D I N G R E A L I T Y ’ S B U I L D I N G B L O C K S -- 99 of 100 -- £9.99 ESSENTIAL GUIDE№14 HOW HAVE EVOLUTION AND PSYCHOLOGY SHAPED HUMAN SOCIETY? WHAT ARE THE ROLES OF RELIGION, POWER AND WORK? AND WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD? HOMO SAPIENS HAVE DEVELOPED UNIQUELY COMPLEX SOCIETAL STRUCTURES THAT ALLOW COOPERATION BEYOND OUR IMMEDIATE KIN. LEARN HOW THAT HAPPENED, AND THE NATURAL TENSIONS IT HAS CREATED, IN THIS 14TH NEW SCIENTIST ESSENTIAL GUIDE. TOPICS INCLUDE: ❶ The rise of civilisation ❷ Morality and religion ❸ Power and conflict ❹ Economics and work ❺ The future of society HUMAN SOCIETY 9 7 7 2 6 3 4 0 1 5 0 1 9 1 4 -- 100 of 100 --