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Genetics and Behavior
Written and researched by Bob Murray, PhD
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Better Care for the Elderly
May 1, 2005
Our whole concept of "retirement" is absurd from a hunter-gatherer perspective. Our ancestors viewed older members of their band as fonts of wisdom and the repository of traditions and lore. They were highly valued members of the community, senior members of the council of elders. They were not shuffled away out of sight as an inconvenient reminder of our own mortality.
As our society's population ages, greater numbers of people are moving into assisted living and other retirement communities. While these facilities may offer many advantages to the elderly, a recent article in Aging & Mental Health by researchers at Case Western Reserve University concludes that they should consider doing more to alleviate the loneliness and depression that their residents often experience.
In the article the authors write, "With the number of older adults steadily increasing, greater attention must be given to the factors that contribute to loneliness, social isolation and depression among those who live independently or as members of a long-term care or retirement community."
The authors surveyed residents in the independent living sections of two retirement communities to determine what personal and situational characteristics are associated with loneliness and depression, what proportion of people who are lonely are also depressed, and how loneliness and depression differ. They found that loneliness is a strong risk factor for depression among residents of the institutions, and that loneliness is associated with factors such as the size of a social network, grieving the loss of a loved one and having fewer visits from friends.
Depression is also associated with grieving, but in contrast, is more closely associated with lack of participation in activities and having more chronic health conditions (which, of course, can be caused by depression).
Given these differences, the authors say, gerontologists need to recognize the differences between loneliness and depression and develop methods of helping their clients cope with each. For example, retirement communities might develop specific strategies to encourage residents to maintain relationships with outside friends and family, or to send reminder notes to those outside to encourage them to call or visit.
They should also consider forming support groups for those most likely to experience loneliness, such as the recently bereaved, those who have recently moved to the facility or individuals who are shy, or lack social skills.
Our Ancestors Cared For the Elderly
Separate research has provided proof that our remote ancestors did indeed look after the older members of the community. Palaeoanthropologists working in the Causasus have found striking evidence for the care of the elderly. They found the fossilized remains of an ageing individual who had lost his teeth some years before death. The 1.77 million-year-old specimen, which is described in Nature magazine, was completely toothless and had lived to a grand old age.
This may suggest that the human-like creature lived in a complex society which was capable of showing compassion. The researchers claim that these hominids may also have valued the old for their years of acquired knowledge. "It is pretty amazing that [hominid] society fostered this kind of thinking nearly 1.8 million years ago," said co-author Reid Ferring, of the University of North Texas. "Almost any way we cut it, this is very unusual and it is a totally new insight into the social relations of this early hominid."
Although these early people had no fire and only used very basic chopping and cutting tools, the new discovery does hint at a new level of sophistication. "My personal opinion is that they were remarkably human in a lot of ways," said Professor Ferring. "These were tiny people living in a very harsh environment. I think we can only compare them to modern humans in their social skills and behaviors, which allowed them to survive against all these odds."
The ageing individual--who lost his teeth some years before death, palaeoanthropologists estimate--would not have been able to chew the raw meat or fibrous plants which made up his normal diet. For most animals--other than humans, and their now extinct cousin the Neanderthal--this would have been a death sentence. But, Professor Ferring believes, this old man must have been kept alive by being fed the choice soft morsels like brain, marrow and succulent berries.
"This person might have had a function similar to old people in human hunter gatherer societies- his experience and knowledge may have given him high status."
Read more in Nature
Read more in Aging & Mental Health
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Chimps Like to Play Fair
February 7, 2005
We share about 99% of our DNA with chimps but we have struggled for a long time to pretend that we were "different." Yet almost every month a new piece of research comes out to prove just how similar we are. Now it seems chimpanzees display a similar sense of fairness to humans, one which is shaped by social relationships.
The researchers behind the latest study, which appears in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, found that, like humans, chimps react to unfairness in various ways depending on their social situation.
What's probably even more galling to the "we are a unique species" proponents is that a similar finding has been reported in capuchin monkeys, suggesting that a sense of fairness may have a long evolutionary history in primates.
In the study, by researchers at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta, chimps were paired to see how they would respond if one received a better reward than the other for doing the same amount of work. When the pair came from a group that had known each other only a short time, the unfairly treated chimp responded negatively.
An animal rewarded with cucumbers -- instead of highly prized grapes -- downed tools and refused to do any more work. But when the pair were from a close-knit social group that had bonded over a long period of time, unfairness was more likely to be tolerated.
The same reaction is seen in humans, who tend to react negatively to unfair situations with strangers, but not so much when they involve family members or friends. "Human decisions tend to be emotional and vary depending on the other people involved," said Dr Sarah Brosnan, of Yerkes. "Our finding in chimpanzees implies this variability in response is adaptive and emphasizes there is not one best response for any given situation but rather it depends on the social environment at the time."
In a previous study, the same team identified a sense of fairness in capuchin monkeys. "Identifying a sense of fairness in two, closely-related nonhuman primate species implies it could have a long evolutionary history," Dr Brosnan explained. "The capuchin responses as well as those of the chimpanzees -- the most closely related species to humans -- could represent stages in the evolution of the complex responses to inequity exhibited by humans and may help explain why we make certain decisions."
The scientists found chimps demonstrated "inequity aversion" when they were treated unfairly, but not when they received the better reward. They seemed willing to take advantage of good luck while their partner lost out (how human!). The same response was seen in capuchins.
"Most people tend to respond by psychological rather than material compensation -- that is, justifying why they deserved a superior reward -- and most people will choose to ignore information that could lead to a more fair outcome at a cost to the self." How typically chimp!
Read more in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences
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Primates Pay per View
February 7, 2005
"And now showing on Chimp TV..." sounds a bit far-fetched but researchers at Duke University Medical Center have shown that monkeys are willing to pay-per-view just as we are. What's more they rather like the equivalent of the Playboy Channel!
In a finding that deepens our understanding of animal social cognition, the researchers have demonstrated for the first time that monkeys, like humans, value information according to its social content. People readily pay to see powerful or sexually attractive individuals, and, according to this new study, monkeys will also "pay" to view these kinds of images.
Both economics and evolutionary theory predict that animals should selectively acquire information about others that is most useful for guiding behavior. In most monkey social groups, behavior is structured by kinship, dominance, and reproductive status, suggesting that social information should be valued according to these attributes. While previous studies had shown that monkeys would work to see other monkeys, no one knew whether the value they placed on
seeing other individuals was related to the social relevance of those individuals.
In the new work, researchers tested this hypothesis by measuring how much fruit juice monkeys would accept or forgo to see photographs of familiar monkeys, permitting the researchers to compare monkeys' valuation of different types of social information. Male monkeys paid in juice to view female hindquarters (to a monkey this is the only erogenous zone) or high-ranking monkeys' faces, but required "overpayment" to view low-ranking monkeys' faces (the human equivalent of "You'd have to pay me to watch that show!"
Despite living in a captive colony, the value monkeys placed on information about potential sexual partners and powerful individuals matched the relative importance of these individuals for behavioral success in the wild. This study demonstrates that monkeys assess visual information by its social value and provides the first experimental evidence that they spontaneously discriminate between images of others based on the social rank or classification of individuals.
Read more in Current Biology
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Whose Baby Is It Anywaye
October 1, 2004
As avid readers of our health news stories will know, there is a substantial body of research indicating that a sizable number of babies have biological fathers other than the mother's husbands, although very little publicity has been put out about this embarrassing finding.
But it may be that men have a sneaking suspicion anyway. New research by the University of Washington indicates that substantially more men than women favor routine paternity testing when a baby is born. But the surprise to researchers is that the percentage of men favoring such testing wasn't higher.
"The amazing thing is that the guys are always split 50-50. Age and income groups don't seem to matter," said Lisa Hayward, a UW doctoral student in biology and lead author of a paper reporting the findings in the current issue of the journal Evolution and Human Behavior.
The survey showed just 32 percent of women favor such routine testing. The difference in response between genders remained consistent in spite of marital and income status. Has someone got something to hide?
Researchers have speculated about why a woman would seek a father for her child other than her husband and often conclude that it is to improve the child's genetic heritage or to gain parental investment from more than one male. Either way, it would normally be advantageous for the woman to keep the child's paternity a secret so that her husband would continue to care for the child as if he were the father.
"There's this fascinating aspect that when we ask the guys who do not favor paternity testing why they are opposed, more than half of them say, 'Ignorance is bliss,'" said co-author Sievert Rohwer, a UW biology professor. "Then the question becomes, 'Whose ignorance, the cuckolder or the person being cuckolded?'"
Rohwer said the researchers speculate that few men are likely to father offspring with women to whom they are not married. "Men who are successful as philanderers probably are rare, but they may be successful with many women," he said.
Rohwer for several years has, at the beginning of the fall quarter, asked students in a freshman-level and a senior-level biology class whether they would favor routine paternity testing when a baby is born. The answers were very similar year after year, he said, but those results were never formally compiled for research purposes.
Surveys were given to 733 adults, 655 of them students enrolled in science classes at the UW or at Highline Community College in Des Moines, Washington. Of those responding, 294 were men and 439 were women. To broaden the range of ages and backgrounds, surveys also were completed by 78 adults outside a Washington state driver's licensing office and at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport.
Four different versions of the survey were used. For one version, 170 people were asked only one question: whether hospitals should routinely include paternity testing for newborns. The rest received a survey with two additional questions--one regarding a father's presence in the delivery room and the other regarding inducement of labor--to mask the real aim of the survey. The order in which the questions were asked was changed randomly.
"It comes out pretty much the same, whether you ask it by itself or ask it in the context of other questions, and no matter what order the questions are in," Rohwer said.
Smaller groups of those surveyed were questioned further about their responses. A high number of women who favored routine paternity testing said they wanted to reassure their husbands of their faithfulness, he said, and some wanted to make sure that, for health reasons, their children had correct information about their genetic heritage.
Of the men who favored testing, it was unclear just how strongly they were in favor of finding out their children's paternity. Rohwer said he hopes to conduct further surveys to determine the strength of that desire. "There's a huge cost to finding out because there's all this mistrust that comes in," he said. "It has the potential to break up families and may not be in the male's best interest."
Read more in Evolution and Human Behavior
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What Women Really Want
June 26, 2004
Psychologists have long held that heroism is a nonadaptive in Darwinian terms, so why does it exist at all? Risk-taking and heroic behavior are predominantly male tendencies, (literature and legend reflect this) so why do men go out and put them selves at risk.
Well, according to a study led by Professor Robin Dunbar of Liverpool university and published in a recent issue of the journal Review of General Psychology, heroism persists in many human cultures because of a female preference for risk-prone rather than risk-averse males as sexual partners. OK ladies: boxing matches, playing chicken, Iraq, September 11, WWII, the Roman Empire and even the Peloponnesian War are all your fault!!
The researchers suggests that such a preference may be exploited as a male mating strategy. They looked at what were the relative influences of altruism and bravery in the development of heroism and came to the conclusion that in the end females do prefer risk-prone brave males to risk-averse non-brave males, and that men are aware of this preference. Bravery in a man was shown to be the stronger factor influencing female choice of short-term partners (people to have sex with).
Altruism, they say, is important in long-term relationships and friendships, but for short-term liaisons, non-altruists were preferred.
Heroism may therefore have evolved because women instinctively seek out brave, risk-prone males because risk-taking acts as an honest cue for "good genes." Altruism was found to be a less influential factor in the evolution of heroism than bravery and a demonstrated willingness to take risks.
Read more in the Review of General Psychology
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Natural Scenes Calm Drivers More Than City Views
December 2, 2003
I personally don't own a car. I hate cars, I don't like driving in cities. Now, at last researchers have found that I may be quite sane after all!
A new study has found that people who viewed a videotape of a drive down a scenic parkway scored lower on a test of frustration than did others who viewed a drive through a metro area cluttered with buildings and utility poles.
While commuters may not get to choose their views as they drive to work, the results suggest that nature can have a calming effect on drivers, said Jack Nasar, co-author of the study and professor of city and regional planning at Ohio State University.
"Researchers have long found that nature can be an antidote to stress," Nasar said. "We found that roadways with views of vegetation and trees rather than more urban scenes can make drivers feel a little less frustrated. It is clear from the study that our natural environment has a psychological affect on us, even when we're doing something mundane as riving a car."
The study involved 106 college students who viewed one of three videotapes. Each tape was 4 minutes and 45 seconds long and showed a view through the front windshield of a car as it drove along a roadway. The three videos were taken within eight miles of each other on northern New Jersey or southern New York highways.
One video, labeled "Scenic Parkway" was of a four-lane roadway through a wooded area with few buildings or man-made structures visible from the roadway. The second video, labeled "Garden Highway" was of a six-lane, controlled access highway that, while not as wooded as the scenic parkway, till showed relatively few buildings or utility poles. The third video, labeled "Built-Up Highway," featured a drive down a six-lane highway through an area of strip malls, commercial signs and utility poles, and relatively little vegetation.
The researchers made sure that the video that they believed would be most calming--the scenic parkway drive--actually had the most traffic shown. "Though this choice may have reduced the beneficial effects of the parkway, it means the results we found are probably stronger," Nasar said.
Before they were shown the video, the participants had to perform a difficult 10-minute test that was meant to raise their stress and anger levels. They were then given a test measuring their anger levels. After the anger test, they watched the driving videos. The participants were asked to focus on the video, place their foot on a dummy accelerator pedal under the table, and imagine they were driving to work.
After the viewings, participants re-took the anger test. They also took a test to measure their tolerance for frustration, which involved a set of four word puzzles: anagrams (scrambled words) that they were told to unscramble to form a word. However, some of the anagrams were unsolvable. The time people spend on the unsolvable anagrams serves as a measure of rustration, Cackowski said. High levels of frustration should lead people to quit the unsolvable anagrams more quickly.
Results showed that participants who watched the "scenic parkway" video--the one through the wooded area--showed lower levels of frustration than those who watched the videos of the more urban driving experiences. "Respondents viewing the scenic parkway condition worked almost a minute and a half longer on the unsolvable anagrams than did the respondents who watched the other videos," the researchers concluded. "This suggests that the scenic views of this video had a restorative, calming effect on those who watched it. If these people were that less frustrated, it may translate into a real behavior difference."
Read more in Environment and Behavior
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Monkeys Show Sense of Justice
September 21, 2003
Researchers taught brown capuchin monkeys to swap tokens for food. Usually they were happy to exchange this "money" for cucumber. But if they saw another monkey getting a grape--a favored food--they took offence. Some refused to work, others took the food and refused to eat it.
Scientists say this work suggests that human's sense of justice is inherited and not a social construct.
The research was carried out at Emory University in the US, by Sarah Brosnan and Frans de Waal, and is reported in the journal Nature.
"I'm extremely interested in the evolution of cooperation," Sarah Brosnan said. One of the most interesting areas is the recent suggestion that human cooperation is made more effective by a sense of fairness." She wanted to find out if the human sense of fairness is an evolved behavior or a cultural construct--the result of society's rules.
So she and her colleagues devised an experiment using capuchin monkeys. "I chose the capuchin because they are very cooperative, and because they come from a very tolerant society. "We designed a very simple experiment to see whether or not they react to differential rewards and efforts."
Capuchins like cucumber, but they like grapes even more. So a system was devised whereby pairs of capuchins were treated differently after completing the same task. "They had never before been in any sort of situation where they were differentially rewarded," she said. "We put pairs of capuchins side by side and one of them would get the cucumber as a reward for a task."
The partner sometimes got the same food reward but on other occasions got a grape, sometimes without even having to work for it." The response was dramatic, the researchers said. "We were looking for a very objective reaction and we got one. They typically refused the task they were set. The other half of the time they would complete the task but wouldn't take the reward. That is a highly unusual behavior. Sometimes they ignored the reward, sometimes they took it and threw it down," Brosnan added.
The researchers were not surprised that the monkeys showed a sense of fairness, but they were taken aback that they would turn down an otherwise acceptable reward. "They never showed a reaction against their partner, they never blamed them," the researchers noted.
So does our instinctive feeling of fairness predate our species? "It may well," Sarah Brosnan said, and further experiments are planned to see how extensive a sense of justice in the animal world is.
"We are currently repeating the study on chimpanzees, a great ape species, to learn something more about the evolutionary development of the sense of fairness. I suspect that there are other non-primate species with tolerant societies that will show the same behavior."
Read more in Nature
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Early Hominids More Human Than Thought
August 13, 2003
Previously skeptical, an Ohio State University anthropologist now supports the idea that the minimal size differences between male and female pre-hominids suggest that they lived in a more cooperative and less competitive society.
The evidence centers on the extent of sexual dimorphism--differences in size based on sex--that existed among these early primates and what it suggests about the social structure of these creatures. In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at Kent State University reported that remains of both male and female specimens of Australopithecus afarensis showed fewer differences based on size than most paleontologists had earlier expected.
After comparing these bones with the near-complete skeletons of the fossil "Lucy," the researchers argue that the social structure of our earliest ancestors compared more to that of modern humans and chimpanzees than it does to gorillas and orangutans, as had previously been thought. Gorillas, orangutans and baboons are known to have social structures built around fierce competition among males. Chimps and humans however, while still competitive, are more cooperative, giving them a greater degree of "humanness.
The study showed that the sex-based size differences among these early fossils were no greater than those for modern humans, suggesting that the same kind of modern social structure with cooperating males also occurred in the days of Australopithecus afarensis.
"We think what we are seeing here are the very first glimpses of 'humanness' in these early hominids dating back 3 million to 4 million years," the researchers said.
Read more in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
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Waging War: the Curse of Human Intelligence
April 2, 2003
With America and its allies attacking Iraq and the US and North Korea locked
in a showdown over nuclear weapons, diplomats and politicians would do well
to remember that humans may have nuclear technology but still only possess stone-age
brains. This is often a lethal combination, says University of Maine anthropologist
Professor Paul Roscoe who presented a paper on tribal warfare in New Guinea
today at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement
of Science in Denver.
Roscoe has extensively studied revenge as a motive for
war among tribes in New Guinea and concludes that killing enemies to avenge
the death of kin--something
only humans do--is probably not a useful evolutionary adaptation. This is
because lethal revenge most frequently fuels more killing rather than
deterring it, says Roscoe.
"I argue that revenge is probably not an adaptive feature because revenge
is not good for you," Roscoe says. Evolutionarily speaking, it
does not make sense to engage in behavior that may not only kill yourself
but also other members
of your clan or tribe. Writ large in a thermonuclear exchange, revenge
killing could theoretically wipe out your entire species. "It makes
evolutionary sense to fight and then back off."
Humans have, in a sense, deviated from the evolutionary path by engaging in revenge
killings and warfare. They do so because their technical ability
to harm one another has outpaced their social and cultural abilities to deal
with behavior that might not be so wise, Roscoe surmises.
Only in the last 10,000 years of human existence have people evolved from hunters
and gatherers with spears to glorified hunters and gatherers with
thermo-nuclear weapons.
"We may have nuclear technology, but we still have stone-age brains," Roscoe
says. "Our social and political systems are slow to adapt in comparison
to the pace of technological development."
Previous theories on
motives for revenge, based on socio-biology, have centered on an escalating
tit-for-tat complex. This theory holds that humans have
simply taken behavior routinely practiced by other animals to the next
step. Many animal species engage in escalating aggressive behavior.
Male red deer competing for territory or mates, for example, will first
roar at one another. If neither
backs away, the animals then walk back and forth side-by-side sizing
one another up. If this fails to resolve the conflict, the two animals
may fight, but the results are typically not lethal.
Humans, however, are the only animals
to seek out enemies and to kill them for past actions. Roscoe argues
that this is because humans have a large, highly
developed neo-cortex, the region of the brain known for intellectual
thought and creativity. The neo-cortex is believed to have evolved for
positive purposes such as enabling humans to develop tools, to communicate
through language, and to plan cooperative hunting trips. However, it has
not always been used for positive purposes.
"Humans developed the ability to model actions before they happen. This
means we can plan collective violence. It explains why we have warfare," he
says.
Research on chimps confirms that, once you can gang up and launch
a surprise attack on outnumbered victims, killing becomes a dramatically
more attractive
option than it is in the one-on-one confrontations typical of other
species.The neo-cortex also allow humans to manipulate their emotional
states. Warriors,
for example, can whip themselves into an angered frenzy by recalling
slain kin and engaging in repetitive, war-mongering chants.
A highly developed neo-cortex also allows people to de-humanize their enemies.
Many tribes in New Guinea, for example, refer to their enemies
as "our game" and
world leaders have equated their enemies with mad dogs and rats. This
is how humans circumvent their built-in aversion to killing members
of their own species, Roscoe says.
This portion of the brain has also allowed humans to develop
sophisticated weapons whereby they can kill one another without face-to-face
contact. This not only
can make killing more efficient, but also gets around our in-bred aversion
to killing other humans.
Read more on the University of Maine website
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Cooperation? It's Human Nature
April 2, 2003
When social scientists look at human society, they're struck by a basic difference
between us and other mammals: humans are the only species that depends on cooperation
among strangers.
In primates, our closest genetic relatives, cooperation occurs
only among closely related groups--mothers, fathers, children and other
relatives share food, grooming and responsibility for protecting the group.
But in modern human
societies, daily life involves cooperation among people who hardly know
each other. This cooperation is evident in large ways (in
our ability to form corporations and governments) and small (a waiter counts
on getting tipped; you count on your neighbors to not steal your newspaper
in the morning).
Now, new research offers evidence to explain how humans are able to accomplish this.
Many social scientists believe the key to
maintaining order in such large, non-related groups is "altruistic
punishment," that is, people stepping forward to keep members of the
group in line even when the confrontation costs them,
says study author Robert Boyd, an anthropology professor at the University
of California, Los Angeles.
"The longstanding assumption is that people, like other animals, are mainly selfish," Boyd
says. "Natural selection should not favor behavior that benefits others
if it costs the individual doing the behavior."
Boyd's new research at least partially solves the dilemma. Using a mathematical
simulation of a simple human society, Boyd and his colleagues found that
when society is functioning well, just the threat of punishment is enough
to make the need for actual punishment rare.
Therefore, there isn't actually much
cost to the altruistic punishers because they rarely have to take action.
"It's a sleight of hand," says John Hibbing, a professor of political
science at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. "The
person who is willing to punish at cost to himself is not going to have
to suffer many costs because there won't be many instances in which people
behave badly."
The study appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy
of Sciences.
The concept of altruistic punishment is widely accepted
by social scientists, Hibbing explains. One way of better understanding
the concept is through a test called the "ultimatum experiment."
In it, participants are given some amount of money, say $20. Person A is told
they can give Person B some portion
of the money, but Person B has the right to refuse their offer. If Person
B refuses the offer, neither gets to keep any money.
Experiments show
Person A most often gives Person B about half of the money. But when
Person A offers a paltry sum, Person B usually rejects the money,
even though by punishing Person A for dividing the money unfairly Person
B also loses.
Still other laboratory experiments have found that people
are more likely to punish members of a group for behaviors that harm
the group than to spontaneously do nice things for the group themselves.
To further test
the theory of altruistic punishment, Boyd and his colleagues created
a mathematical simulation of a simple society, in which humans
were one of three personality types: "cooperators," who keep
the wheels of the society spinning by doing what they're supposed to
or expected to do; "defectors," who
break the rules, and "altruistic punishers," who confront those
who misbehave.
Previous research has shown societies that are dominated by altruistic
punishers do the best over time. Boyd's research found the mere
threat of punishment from the altruistic punishers is enough to prevent
most of the non-cooperation.
There is also some evidence that people occasionally
do things that are not in their own self-interest to benefit the group,
Boyd says. That is the most controversial
finding of the paper, Hibbing says. Many social scientists firmly believe
there is no such thing as true altruism in human society, or the idea
that people will act in a way that benefits the group at a cost to themselves.
"Most scholars who work in this area are very resistant to this idea,
but it's starting to be talked about with increasing seriousness," he
says.
Read more in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
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Suicide Terrorism
April 2, 2003
The first line of defense against suicide terrorism should be to prevent
people from becoming terrorists--rather than to protect targets from being
attacked, according to a University of Michigan researcher whose analysis appeared in
a recent issue of Science magazine.
"Suicide terrorists are not crazed cowards who thrive in poverty and ignorance.
In fact, most 'human bombs' have no appreciable psychopathology and are at least
as educated and economically well-off as surrounding populations," said
Scott Atran, an anthropologist and psychologist at the University of Michigan
Institute for Social Research.
"They don't act from rational self-interest, opting for paradise out of despair
because they feel there is nothing much to lose in this world," said
Atran.
Nor are they sacrificing themselves for what they see as the good of their
group, even though they are fiercely loyal to their 'families'--cells of fellow
terrorists who take on the role of fictive kin. Instead, they are being deliberately
manipulated by religious and political elites, who are pulling strings attached
to deeply
rooted, culturally universal human propensities to see the world in religious
terms. Even secular groups that sponsor suicide terrorism draw deeply on these
propensities.
"In much the same way," he said, "fast food companies and purveyors
of pornography capitalize on innate human inclinations toward sweet, fatty foods
and sex, tricking people into doing things that have no personal advantage." In
the Science article and in his recent book, "In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary
Landscape of Religion" (Oxford University Press, 2002), Atran maintains
that religion--defined as a community's costly and hard-to-fake commitment
to a counterfactual and counterintuitive world of supernatural agents--is
not an
evolutionary adaptation at all, as many neo-Darwinists argue, but an evolutionary
by-product of early man's ancient emotional and cognitive terrain.
"From an evolutionary point of view, the reasons religion should not exist
are patent," Atran said. "It is materially, emotionally and
cognitively costly. As Bill Gates said, 'There's a lot more I could
be doing on a Sunday
morning.' Yet it is universal across human history and cultures. The
question is why, and what accounts for the properties and practices
common to all religions?"
One of these common practices, he notes,
is a sacrificial display of costly commitment to supernatural agents
that appears irrational but actually helps people deal
with inescapable catastrophes in life for which there are otherwise no
factual or logical solutions possible. Martyrdom (including suicide
terrorism) is an extreme form of religious practice, the ultimate way to
display devotion. "Evolution has made our emotions extremely
powerful," said Atran.
"With music, chanting and swaying in prayer and other forms of communion,
religion evokes and coordinates that power, enabling people to collectively
face vulnerability, deception, loneliness, injustice and even death."
Despite the deep roots of suicide terrorism in religious sentiments, which are
deliberately parasitized and manipulated by political and religious elites, the
first line of defense must be to reduce the receptivity of potential
recruits who are mostly ordinary people, Atran said. The most effective ways
to do this are not to try to educate or elevate the economic conditions
of the populations
from which suicide terrorists often spring, or to bombard them with
self-serving information, he said. Instead, the US and its allies should try to
empower moderates from within the community and strengthen interactions
between members of different religious and political groups, he said.
"Another strategy is to change our own behavior by addressing grievances
and reducing feelings
of humiliation, especially in Palestine, where media images of daily
violence have made it the global focus of Moslem attention," Atran
said.
Atran considers our current homeland security strategy of protecting
targets as a last line of defense, since it is probably the most expensive
to implement
and the easiest to breach because of the abundance of vulnerable targets
and would-be attackers.
"In the long run, our society can ill afford to ignore either the consequences
of its own actions or the causes behind the actions of others. The
cost of such ignorance is terrible to contemplate," he said.
Read more in Science magazine
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Boys Compete for the Sake of It
September 4, 2002
Rosanne Roy from McGill University in Montreal and her colleagues got 40 groups of four boys or four girls, aged 5 to 6 or 9 to 10, to play two specially designed games. In one, for instance, the children had to thread beads on a stick until it was full, taking the beads from either a common pot or another player. One set of rules meant that everyone would eventually win, so competition was pointless. Another set of rules allowed for only one winner, so competing made sense.
The girls spent more time watching the reactions of their competitors and responding to them. "They would watch the facial expression of their opponent as they decided whether or not to take the bead. Sometimes they would decide not to," says Roy. And the older girls wasted no effort on competition, except when it paid off. Boys, on the other hand, competed just for the sake of it, even if there was nothing to be gained. "It was way too much fun to take from others," Roy says.
Yet most education and work situations will force females to heighten their levels of competition, regardless of the emotional consequences as they try to hold their own among their peers. Is this really the most productive way to organize a society? AF
Read more in New Scientist
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About the Author
Dr Bob Murray is a widely published psychologist and expert on emotional health and optimal relationships. Together with his wife and long-term collaborator Alicia Fortinberry, he is founder of the highly successful Uplift Program, and author of Raising an Optimistic Child (McGraw-Hill, 2006) and Creating Optimism (McGraw-Hill, 2004).
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