Are Humans Evolved to be Machiavellian?
Rob Henderson and Dan Williams have thoughts on motives to cheat and to seek status
We are socio-cognitive creatures who evolved in small hunter-gatherer bands in which privacy was essentially nonexistent. So we tend to behave as if we are being watched by an audience at all times. Our Hyperactive Agent Detection Device often causes us to infer the presence of others even when no one is present.
…the more costly error is to overlook the presence of others who are observing you than to misperceive the presence of others when in fact you are actually alone. Put simply, we tend to behave as if we are being watched because it’s more adaptive to do so.
This would seem to make us act morally, out of fear of being caught misbehaving. But it turns out that we can deceive our audience.
People observe both what you say and what you do and make some implicit calculations about you character. Last year, a team of psychologists found that people evaluate individuals who support absolute honesty and then lie more positively than individuals who openly espouse a flexible moral stance on honesty and then lie. In other words, people prefer individuals who endorse honesty and then lie over people who take flexible stances on honesty and tell the same lie.
Plainly, we seem to like people who espouse good conduct and behave in the opposite way more than people who openly express and live by unsavory principles.
I would be careful here. I think that you get points for espousing good conduct for yourself. But if you espouse good conduct for others and then misbehave, you get in major trouble. Maybe the guy who says “I shouldn’t lie” and then lies is forgiven. But the politician who advocates laws to “protect family values” and then engages in sexual misconduct is not.
We recognize that moral standards are difficult to maintain. But we want people to buy into difficult moral standards. It is when someone claims to be an enforcer of moral standards for others but violates them himself that we get really angry.
On a similar topic, Dan Williams writes,
much of our social behaviour is rooted in reputation management and that the subtle incentives of reputation management explain why human altruism is both sincere and strategic. Our moral instincts are much more Machiavellian than we would like to admit.
Why do we behave morally? Because
high school never ends. Human societies function as biological markets in which people compete to access the best mates, friends, and alliances. To succeed in such markets, people must seem impressive, trustworthy, and fair-minded.
A related form of social selection involves group punishment. Human societies are organised around norms: don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t covet your neighbour’s wife or ox or donkey, don’t insult your parents, don’t depict the Prophet Muhammad, and so on. Norm violations tend to be discovered because humans are naturally nosy and love to gossip. If they are discovered, they are punished. Even if the punishment is just a worse reputation, the consequences can be devastating. However, punishment can be much worse than a bad reputation; both in many places today and throughout our evolutionary past, human communities frequently kill their worst norm violators. Given this, being viewed as a good, norm-following group member is one of our most important adaptive challenges.
So we domesticated ourselves, as the anthropologists say.
To survive and thrive in social environments, our ancestors had to cultivate reputations as friendly, fair-minded, generous, and trustworthy. However, the best way to cultivate such reputations is to be friendly, fair-minded, generous, and trustworthy. Given this, we—at least those of us who are not psychopaths—have strong, innate, and sincere altruistic motivations and emotions.
My father used to say, “Honesty is the best policy, unless you’ve got a sure thing.” He said that it’s a mistake to believe that you’ve got a sure thing.
But people do often think that they can get away with violating social norms. So when a situation arises when social norms expect you to be altruistic, your personality could be either:
genuinely altruistic—being nice makes you feel better
Machiavellian—you would prefer not to be nice, but you are nice because it benefits your reputation
misanthropic—you decide to ignore the social norms and be mean instead of nice
Whether you cooperate or defect from social norms depends a lot on how your society operates.
the fact we are disposed to cultivate prosocial traits only when they are socially rewarded explains why human communities invest so much effort into monitoring, rewarding, and punishing human behaviour.
Society punishes defectors. But meanwhile,
Unconditional and un-strategic cooperators cannot evolve.
In terms of game theory, in choosing to cooperate with or defect from social norms, people are most likely to follow a mixed strategy. A pure strategy of always cooperating is likely to make you a patsy who is too easily exploited. And a pure strategy of always defecting risks being punished or socially excluded. People learn to cooperate enough to earn approval, but to defect sometimes when it is to their advantage.
Elsewhere, Dan Williams argues that we should neither be totally cynical nor totally credulous concerning others’ motives.
cynics often misrepresent the underlying psychology involved in human behaviour. They imagine a world of deliberate Machiavellian schemers, self-consciously pursuing power, status, and resources. Sometimes this analysis is correct, but this is generally not how the human mind works. Instead, even when status-seeking drives human behaviour, it typically does so by shaping our sincere motives, emotions, and passions. Someone who goes to the opera because it is high status generally does not consciously reflect on this as one of her motives. Rather, status competition and social signalling shape her genuine love of opera.
Also,
Motives like self-interest and social competition play a role in student protestors' behaviour and ordinary people's political attitudes because they are human beings, and such motives always play a big role in the behaviour of human beings. They do not go away just because somebody is factually well-informed about an issue or reads books on political philosophy.1 Self-interest, status competition, and virtue signalling are just as prominent in the motives of public intellectuals and Substack writers. If anything, such motives are even more prominent among the best-informed than the least-informed. More generally, status-seeking and virtue signalling are fundamental motivations driving most forms of intellectual activity, whether in science, journalism, public debate, or anywhere else.
Given this, even when cynical explanations of behaviour contain an important grain of truth, they are often misleading because they are highly selective, functioning more like accusations than attempts at understanding. In debunking a person or a group’s cover story by identifying the role of self-interest and status-seeking in their behaviour, the implicit assumption is invariably: unlike in my behaviour. In this way, cynical explanations often serve to demonise (the accused’s behaviour is unusually characterised by low motives) and self-aggrandise (in contrast with my behaviour).
…t functions as an accusation driven by the same kinds of grubby motives—status competition, demonisation, and self-aggrandisement—as the targets being accused. We should be cynical about such cynicism.
The late Jeffrey Friedman used to argue that we should try to take people’s opinions at face value, and try not to attribute base motives to them. But it is hard to be intellectually charitable in that way. Still, the safest assumption is that people on your side are just as motivated by status-seeking as people on the other side.
substacks referenced above:
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"We recognize that moral standards are difficult to maintain. But we want people to buy into difficult moral standards. It is when someone claims to be an enforcer of moral standards for others but violates them himself that we get really angry."
If you believe what Charles Murray has written then we should get just as angry at people who refuse to help enforce the social norms they follow themselves.
Two things:
* the definition of "misanthropic" is not "wanting to be mean". To be misanthropic is to recognise (and perhaps over-estimate) the amount of meanness in the human condition.
* taking people's opinions about political/moral abstractions "at face value" is about as foolish (and unobservant) as it gets. Much wiser is to try to develop a broad understanding of the psychology of opinion formation.