Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture

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Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of
Culture

• For a good pre-exam summary of the course, read
• The Psychological Foundations of Culture
• Office hours
• Cosmides Thursdays, 230-330 Psych East 3808,
  Tuesdays 1230-130 HSSB 1010
• Mrazek Mondays, 1100-100pm, Bldg 429, room 102
  (mrazek_at_psych.ucsb.edu)
• Course website http//mentor.lscf.ucsb.edu/course
  /spring/psyc155
• E-res password collide

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What is culture?

• Patterns of within group similarity and between
  group differences
• What causes these patterns?
• Can understanding the evolved design of the mind
  help?

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History of Science Isolation of anthropology
from psychology

• Emile Durkheim cannot explain social facts with
  anything other than other social facts
• Anthropology and sociology should be conducted
  with no reference to psychology
• Blank slate conspiracy
• Psychologists have discovered the few,
  domain-general laws of learning
• Anthropologists have a theory of culture and
  how it is acquired (by this blank slate mind)

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Blank slate conspiracy, continued

• Blank slate mind is like a video camera
• Records whatever enters the perceptual system
• Imparts no content of its own
• Children acquire culture from
• their parents (vertical transmission)
• their peers (horizontal transmission)
• Children (and adults) are passive recipients of
  culture
• Not active processors, accepting some ideas,
  rejecting others

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Evolutionary Psychology a different view

• Mind is not a blank slate
• Contains many functionally specialized,
  domain-specific programs
• contain innate ideas, give specific content to
  our thought, make some inferences more natural
  than others
• Knowing the structure of these evolved programs
  is necessary for understanding culture

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Evolutionary psychology culture

• Knowing the structure of these evolved programs
  is necessary for understanding patterns of within
  group similarity, between group differences
• Same mechanism, different inputs
• Facial attractiveness kibbutz incest
• Explains why some ideas spread easily from mind
  to mind and others do not
• Explains why some institutions succeed and others
  fail

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Adaptations for cooperation Examples

• Coalitional psychology and race
• Us versus them ethnic conflict
• Sharing rules luck versus effort
• Organizational psychology and coalitonal
  psychology/ collective action (n-person
  cooperation)
• Was Marx right about collective action?
• Does collective action have a dark side?
• Punitive sentiments
• Iterative racheting back
• Social exchange versus the need for valued
  individuality (Bankers Paradox)

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Karl Marx believed...

• Extant hunter-gatherers (and by extension, our
  ancestors) lived in a state of primitive
  communism
• where all labor was accomplished through
  collective action and
• sharing was governed by the decision rule, from
  each according to his ability to each according
  to his need.

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Karl Marx believed...

• The overthrow of capitalism would bring forth an
  economically advanced society with similar
  properties
• abolish private property and all labor will once
  again be accomplished through collective action
  and, because the mind reflects the material
  conditions of existence, the huntergatherer
  communal sharing rule will emerge once again and
  dominate social life.

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Based on Marxs theory...

• 20th century institutions and laws governing
  property, the organization and compensation of
  labor, the regulation of manufacturing and trade,
  and the legitimacy of consent and dissent were
  changed across the planet
• China, the former Soviet Union, Cambodia, Cuba,
  North Korea, Vietnam, and Eastern Europe.
• Profound impact on the lives of the citizens of
  these nations
• although not the utopian ones Marx had envisioned

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Was Marx right?

• Was Marxs view of huntergatherer labor and
  sharing rules correct?
• If not, what cognitive programs regarding
  cooperation did the selection pressures endemic
  to hunter-gatherer life build?

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Hunter-gatherer life

• Cooperative, but NOT an orgy of indiscriminate
  cooperation
• Several alternative sharing rules
• Even within same the same cultural group
• Triggers for alternative sharing rules
• Perception of variance due to Luck versus Effort

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Alternative sharing rules

• Luck versus effort as triggers for alternative
  sharing rules
• Meat Variance high variance due to luck
• Risk pooling to deal with frequent reversals of
  fortune
• Closest to sharing rule From each according to
  his ability to each according to his need
• Gathered foods Variance low due to Effort
• share within family
• Share via reciprocation
• Other goods reciprocation /trade

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A grammar of sharing

• 1 2 sound human
• 1. If hes the victim of an unlucky tragedy,
  then we should pitch in to help him out.
• 2. If he spends his time loafing and living off
  of others, then he doesnt deserve our help.
• 3 4 sound weird
• 3. If hes the victim of an unlucky tragedy,
  then he doesnt deserve our help.
• 4. If he spends his time loafing and living off
  of others, then we should pitch in to help him
  out.

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Implications for culture

• Evoked culture
• Cue activated programs (Japan, USA)
• Juke box analogy
• High variance due to luck?band-wide sharing seems
  good and proper
• In modern context, what social unit do we
  interpret as our band? Community? State?
  Nation?
• Low variance, effort?share only within family
• Cultural transmission shaped by same sharing
  rules
• Political debate on homelessness
• Argument about bad luck or low effort, not about
  what follows from that

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Organizing labor as a collective action?

• Collective action / coalitional cooperation
• 3 individuals cooperate to achieve a common goal
  and share the resulting benefits
• Hunter-gatherers engage in collective action
  (with non-kin)
• In intergroup conflict (small-scale warfare)
• Resource acquisition
• Big game hunting
• Shelter building (less common)
• Cognitive foundation of teamwork, busineses,
  organizational behavior

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More than 2 The problem of cheating

• in repeated 2-person cooperation and exchange, if
  the other person cheats you, you can protect
  yourself by no longer interacting with him/her
• in n-person collective action, this is no longer
  an effective choice to distance oneself from the
  free-rider, one must distance oneself from the
  cooperating group
• solution keep the group, punish the free-riders
• evolved solution irrational punitive
  sentiments against free-riders
• NOTE these sentiments are open to opportunistic
  exploitation by coalitions who impose their
  preferred projects for the general good

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Communism Organizing labor as a collective action

• Do people freely contribute to collective actions
  that produce public goods?
• From each according to his ability to each
  according to his need? (no)
• Is punishment needed to stabilize contributions
  to collective actions? (yes)

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Public goods games Experimental economics

• Group of 4. Number of sessions known.
• Each person gets an endowment. Can keep all or
  donate any fraction to common pool
• Anything in common pool is multiplied
• Whatever is in common pool is divided EQUALLY
  among each member of the group
• Rational choice predicts
• 100 free riding
• No one pays to punish free riders

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Paired with partners
Fehr Gachter, 2000
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Fehr Gachter, 2000
Paired with strangers
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Disapproval points!
Masclet, Noussair, Tucker, Villeval, 2003
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What predicts when individual contributors punish
free riders?

• Negative deviation from own high contribution
• How much less is he contributing than me?
• Negative deviation from group average
• How much less is he contributing than the group
  average?

Masclet, Noussair, Tucker, Villeval, 2003
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Punishment increases contributions from free
riders
Masclet, Noussair, Tucker, Villeval, 2003
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When punishment is not possible, collective
action unwinds...

• People monitor how much others are contributing
• Pay special attention to the group average
• If I am contributing more than group average, I
  rachet back my contribution to group average
• Over iterations, the collective action unwinds,
  eventually it fails

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Evidence so far suggests that the human mind has
motivational systems that

• lower ones level of contribution when this does
  not adversely affect the welfare of oneself,
  ones family, or ones small circle of
  cooperators
• lower the amount of effort one expends on a
  collective action as a function of whether others
  are free riding and
• increase punitive sentiments toward
  undercontributors by contributors (and,
  presumably, by those in leadership and coercive
  military social roles).

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Coercion A predictable effect?

• Sufficiently large collective actions
• decouple reward from effort, initiating a process
  of declining effort by some,
• which stimulates matching withdrawal by others.
• This free riding and the dwindling participation
  it engenders
• intensifies punitive sentiments toward
  undercontributors, culminating in
• social systems organized around coercion and
  punishment (where rulers can deploy it) or
• dissolution of the collective action (where they
  cannot).

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Is large scale collective action a good thing?
The design of institutions

• Farms, factories, restaurantsall involve
  multi-individual cooperation and hence collective
  action.
• Should these projects be organized as public
  goods (everyone benefits equally, regardless of
  their level of participation), OR
• Should payoffs be organized such that effort is
  rewarded and free riding is punished?

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• The iterative rachet effect...
• Agricultural policy in the former Soviet Union
• The state nationalized farmland and forced
  farmers to organize their labor as a collective
  action.
• But they allowed 3 of the land on collective
  farms to be held privately
• This 3 of land produced 45 to 75 of all the
  vegetables, meat, milk, eggs, and potatoes
  consumed in the Soviet Union
• The quality of land on the collectively-held
  plots was the same
• Iterative ratchet effect. People shifted their
  efforts away from the collective to the private
  plots.
• Without these private plots, it is likely that
  the people of the Soviet Union would have
  starved.

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Reasoning instincts Social exchange

• The human mind contains a neurocognitive
  adaptation that is functionally specialized for
  reasoning about social exchange, which includes a
  subroutine for detecting cheaters.
• This neurocognitive system reliably develops in
  the human cognitive architecture in a
  species-typical manner. (It is one component of
  human nature).
• It is a cognitive foundation of trade.

Cosmides, L. Tooby J. (1992). Cognitive
adaptations for social exchange. In The Adapted
Mind Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation
of Culture. NY Oxford.
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When legal institutions prohibit and sanction the
use of coercion and fraud...

• Private trade can promote social welfare (Adam
  Smith)
• Mind is well-equipped to compute own preferences
• No unbounded rationality problems The system
  uses limited information about values that is
  only available locally (what do I want, what am I
  willing to do) and simple heuristics (choose the
  alternative that is better for me/us) to
  progressively move to ever-increasing levels of
  social welfare.
• Each individual agrees to trade only if they
  believe they will be better off
• Trade picks out benefit-benefit interactions
  disallows taking benefit at someone elses expense

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Puzzle aside from economists...

• Removing restrictions on private trade is rarely
  proposed as a means of advancing general social
  welfare... Why?
• Perhaps because the psychology of social exchange
  produces intuitions about private gain rather
  than public good...
• Why is collectivism so appealing?
• Perhaps because the psychology of collective
  action produces intuitions about enhancing
  welfare of the group

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Mismatch Modern versus ancestral world

• Our minds are equipped with programs that
  evolved to navigate a small world of relatives,
  friends, and neighbors, not for cities and nation
  states of thousands or millions of anonymous
  people.
• Certain laws and institutions satisfy the moral
  intuitions these programs generate.
• But because these programs are now operating
  outside the envelope of environments for which
  they were designed, laws that satisfy the moral
  intuitions they generate may regularly fail to
  produce the outcomes we desire and anticipate

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Mismatch Modern versus ancestral world

• Even worse, they may cause us to overlook
  policies that have the consequences we wish.
• These mental programs so powerfully structure our
  inferences that certain policies may seem
  self-evidently correct and others self-serving or
  immoral
• But modern conditions often produce outcomes that
  seem paradoxical to our evolved programs venal
  motives can be the engines that reliably produce
  humane outcomes, and what seem like good
  intentions can make a hell on earth

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So Go save the world!

• But do it using what you know about human nature!