Games Primates Play: An Undercover Investigation of the Evolution and Economics of Human Relationships Read online

  GAMES PRIMATES PLAY

  ALSO BY Dario Maestripieri

  Macachiavellian Intelligence:

  How Rhesus Macaques and Humans

  Have Conquered the World

  DARIO MAESTRIPIERI

  BASIC BOOKS

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  New York

  Copyright © 2012 by Dario Maestripieri

  Published by Basic Books,

  A Member of the Perseus Books Group

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address Basic Books, 387 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10016-8810.

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  Designed by Pauline Brown

  Typeset in 12 point Goudy Std by the Perseus Books Group

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Maestripieri, Dario.

  Games primates play : an undercover investigation of the evolution and economics of human relationships / Dario Maestripieri.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-465-02930-3

  (e-book) 1. Interpersonal relations. 2. Dominance (Psychology) 3. Control (Psychology) I. Title.

  HM1106.M333 2012

  155.7—dc23

  2011045523

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For my children,

  Elena, Luca, and Sarah

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: Dilemmas in the Elevator

  Chapter 2: The Obsession with Dominance

  Chapter 3: We Are All Mafiosi

  Chapter 4: Climbing the Ladder

  Chapter 5: Cooperate in the Spotlight, Compete in the Dark

  Chapter 6: The Economics and Evolutionary Biology of Love

  Chapter 7: Testing the Bond

  Chapter 8: Shopping for Partners in the Biological Market

  Chapter 9: The Evolution of Human Social Behavior

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  References

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  In the Academy Award–nominated 2009 film Up in the Air, the protagonist, Ryan Bingham—played by actor George Clooney—is a corporate layoff expert who travels from city to city, firing employees for corporations that are downsizing their personnel owing to the bad economy. Bingham spends his life on airplanes and in airports around the country. He never checks any luggage and fits all he needs for his travels in a small carry-on bag he packs automatically and wheels around with great ease. Packing light is also his life philosophy. When he’s not busy firing people, he gives inspirational lectures in which he tells audiences that life is easier and happier without heavy baggage. People are dragged down, he says, by owning properties and maintaining social relationships. He doesn’t own a house, or furniture, or any belongings that don’t fit into his bag. He has no wife or girlfriend, no friends, and never sees or talks with his sisters or any other family members. Needless to say, life teaches Bingham a lesson: the happiness of traveling without baggage is an illusion. When he falls in love with a fellow traveler, he experiences the real happiness of love and companionship, and when the relationship ends he feels the keen pain of loss and realizes that being alone isn’t so fun after all.

  Unlike Ryan Bingham, most people don’t live “up in the air” where, by constantly being on the move, they might choose not to have stable relationships with others. Instead, most of us generally maintain lifelong relationships with our parents, siblings, children, and other relatives. We also establish and keep up relationships with our romantic partners, friends, coworkers, and even people we’ve met only on Facebook. Moreover, many of us have intense and long-lasting social bonds with our dogs, cats, and other pets. According to my University of Chicago colleague John Cacioppo, who wrote a book called Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, we all need good social relationships to live a long, healthy, and happy life.1 People who don’t have good relationships with others might think that they are happy, but generally they are not.

  Even when we are alone, relationships play a central role in our lives. For instance, while traveling for business, working out at the gym, or lying in bed with insomnia in the middle of the night, our thoughts revolve around relationships: we remember and revisit past events involving ourselves and other people, plan social strategies, or worry about potential future social failures. And as if what goes on in our own relationships were not enough to keep us busy twenty-four hours a day, we also gossip about the relationships of other people we know and even enjoy following the relationships of people we don’t know on reality television or in People magazine. Relationships have a pervasive influence on all aspects of our lives and affect our thoughts, our emotions, and our health virtually from the cradle to the grave.

  Human social relationships can be good or bad, strong or weak, symmetrical or asymmetrical, and everything in between. The characteristics of a relationship between two people are by no means solely the result of their unique personalities, the history of their previous interactions, or the context in which their relationship takes place. Relationships have a life of their own: they begin in a certain way, develop along a certain trajectory, get stronger or weaker over time, and then stabilize or end in predictable ways. Whether they are parent-child relationships, sibling relationships, same-sex or opposite-sex friendships, romantic relationships with or without children, professional relationships, or competitive relationships, all relationships have their own distinctive patterns.

  In his best-selling 1964 book Games People Play, psychiatrist Eric Berne makes the case that when people interact with their family members, friends, coworkers, or strangers, they do so according to specific patterns that are governed by particular rules and usually characterized by predictable outcomes.2 Calling these patterns “games,” Berne points out that the predictability of these patterns and outcomes stems from our tendency to assume particular social roles in relationships (for example, “the Child,” “the Parent,” or “the Adult”) and that these roles are associated with certain behaviors. Therefore, relationships that involve the same role pairs—such as the Child and the Parent—have a lot in common.

  Not surprisingly, our understanding of human relationships has evolved significantly in the half-century since Berne’s book was published. Research in psychology and psychiatry has shown that our behavior in social relationships is the result of complex interactions between our genes and our environment and the effects of these interactions on our brains, emotions, and thoughts. In analyzing the complexities of human relationships with increasing (sometimes microscopic) precision, however, researchers appear to have lost interest in their general underlying patterns. They no longer ask why these patterns exist or where they come from. To answer these questions—indeed, to identify the patterns at all—we must step out of the laboratory and take a good look at people and their relationships in the context of other life forms and thei
r behaviors. In other words, we need to venture out of psychology and into biology. Why? Because many of the rules and patterns underlying human relationships developed through evolutionary processes, and those same evolutionary processes have produced similar patterns in other animal species.

  As an evolutionary biologist who has studied animal social behavior for almost thirty years, I can attest to the fact that many of the games played by people are also played by other animals. And you don’t have to take my word for it. Tens of thousands of studies of animal social behavior conducted in myriad different species during my lifetime—I was born in 1964, the year Games People Play was published—have shown that all social animals have relationships with members of their own species. These relationships may be few or many in number, and they may be simple or complex, depending, among other things, on whether the animals live in small or large groups, whether they have a short or long life span, and whether they have a small or large brain relative to the size of their body. Humans are more similar in these characteristics to closely related primates—such as chimpanzees and gorillas, or even macaques and baboons—than to other animals. Therefore, human relationships have a lot more in common with the relationships of these primates than with those of other animals.3 In short, the games we play with each other are not unique to our species. Other primate species play the same games, or very similar ones. These games were invented neither by us nor by any of the other primate species. Rather, our shared primate ancestors had been playing these games long before the appearance of Homo sapiens on this planet. Thus, in order to fully understand human relationships, we must first understand that human nature is a particular, specialized version of a more general primate nature.

  So what is this primate nature exactly?

  Our Primate Nature

  Contrary to popular thought, human beings are by no means the most complex life forms on planet Earth. Evolution by natural selection has produced organisms that far exceed our complexity in terms of how their bodies are built, how they function, how they exploit their environment, and how they reproduce. Just think about the fish on the ocean bottom that live under conditions of total darkness and extreme pressure, or the hermaphrodite worms that have both male and female sexual organs and adapt accordingly, depending on the sex of their partner. As evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould wrote in his 1990 book Wonderful Life, every now and then complex organisms go extinct by chance or “bad luck,” and complexity alone does not guarantee that a species will survive or be successful.4 In fact, sometimes complexity can be an evolutionary liability.

  Humans are special, however, in one important feature: our brains. Our brains are larger, relative to our body size, and more complex than those of all other organisms. As a result, our mental abilities (for example, our capacity for abstract thinking or complex computations) are far superior to those of other living things. Yet the increase in brain power in our species is no isolated phenomenon but rather part of an evolutionary trend that began in the primate lineage long before the appearance of Homo sapiens on this planet.5 In fact, other species of monkeys and apes with which we share common ancestors in a not-so-distant evolutionary past also show brains of greater size and complexity compared to those of most other animals.

  In theory, this evolutionary trend toward increasing brain size in primates, which culminated in the appearance of a very intelligent species, could have occurred in any animal taxon—in insects, reptiles, birds, or some other kinds of mammals. If this had been the case, the earth today would be overpopulated and arguably “ruled” not by people but by gigantic and super-intelligent cockroaches, for instance, or by Godzilla-sized reptiles, or by talking parrots, cats, or dogs. These animals happen to be quite different from primates in many aspects of their lifestyles: how long they live, how they reproduce, what food they eat, and the kinds of societies in which they live. If people had evolved not from primates but from insects, dinosaurs, birds, or other mammals, human societies would be quite different from the way they are now, and the way humans think and behave toward one another would be quite different as well. For example, if humans were an intelligent type of parrot, pair-bonds between men and women would be stronger than they currently are (divorce rates would plummet), women would lay eggs in a nest, and men would help feed chicks by regurgitating food into their mouths; moreover, although we would live in large groups with other birds, there would be no struggles for power involving violence or murder. By contrast, if humans were super-intelligent dinosaurs, pair-bonds would not exist between adult men and women, parental care would be minimal, and we wouldn’t live in large and highly structured societies. Social bonds and cooperation between adults would be minimal, individuals would be pretty much on their own, and everyone would be aggressive and dangerous. In a world of large-brained T. rex, life would probably be stressful, with fighting every day, and we’d never know whether tomorrow we were going to eat or be eaten.

  Naturally, in these imaginary “human” societies, there would be scientists and philosophers who ask questions about human nature and behavior. The parrots (or dinosaurs) with advanced degrees in evolutionary biology would argue that since humans are birds (or reptiles), studying and understanding birds (or reptiles) in general is a necessary prerequisite for understanding human nature and human behavior. In contrast, monkeys and apes would probably be kept at home as pets or in zoos, studied in the wild as zoological curiosities, or maybe even served as exotic specialties in restaurants. But nobody would write books about “the monkey in the mirror” or “the naked ape” or “our inner chimpanzee.”

  The way things have turned out, humans happen to be very intelligent primates, not bugs, lizards, birds, or dogs. We share many more of our biological characteristics with other primates than with other animals. Not only is it useful to study primate behavior in general in order to understand our own behavior in particular, but it is especially important to understand the characteristics and behavior of the primates that are most closely related to us, such as apes and Old World monkeys.

  Primates are not that different from other animals in their goals of basic survival and reproduction. They need to find and eat food, avoid being eaten by predators, and mate with members of the same species to reproduce. Many of the problems that arise for primates in pursuing these goals and most of the solutions are the same as those for other animals. One important difference, however, is that success in survival and reproduction for primates depends to a much larger extent on the behavior of conspecifics than it does in most other animals. This is especially true for apes and Old World monkeys. One key characteristic of apes and Old World monkeys, which happens to be strictly associated with their intelligence, is their sociality.

  A brief comparison of the nature of sociality in chimpanzees with that of other animals illustrates the importance of this point. Many animals, including insects, fish, birds, and nonprimate mammals, live in groups with other members of their species. Daily activities, such as traveling, feeding, or sleeping, take place in close proximity to other individuals. Members of the group, however, don’t necessarily compete with one another for food, shelter, or attractive mates, and there is often little or no need for cooperation between group members. In these animal societies, individuals by and large mind their own business and don’t become entangled with “friends” or “enemies.” The disappearance or death of an individual is largely inconsequential for the rest of the group and may even go unnoticed. The life of a chimpanzee, in contrast, is intertwined with the lives of all the other chimpanzees in the group, forming a thick web of intricate connections. Every move a chimpanzee makes on the social chessboard has an effect on every other chimpanzee’s life, whether they like it or not. This has many implications for the behavior of individuals and for what it takes to be socially successful in a chimpanzee group.

  Chimpanzees and humans live in highly competitive societies. Instead of fighting all the time, individuals establish dominance hierarchies
within their group. High-ranking individuals have preferred access to food, shelter, and attractive mating partners. In addition to the difficulties in finding food and mates and their exposure to more risks, low-ranking chimpanzees are also chronically stressed by aggression and intimidation from above. As a result, low-ranking individuals are more likely to be in poor health, to die younger, and to leave fewer descendants than their high-ranking brethren. To attain high social status, chimpanzees must form alliances with other individuals and receive their support. For example, chimpanzee males form alliances with their brothers and occasionally with unrelated but powerful adult males to win fights against other group members. Competition and cooperation with other group members are pervasive aspects of the social lives of chimpanzees, other apes, and Old World monkeys—and the social lives of humans—to an extent that, with a few exceptions, is not seen in other animals.6

  Games Primates Play

  An underlying theme of Games Primates Play is that human nature is manifested in our social interactions more than in any other aspect of our behavior or intellectual activity. This has two major implications. First, since our social behavior has been strongly shaped by evolutionary processes such as natural and sexual selection, we can explain it using cost-benefit analyses and other rational models of behavior (for example, game theory) developed by evolutionary biologists and behavioral economists. Second, the same selective pressures from the social environment that shaped our behavior and that of our primate ancestors may have shaped the behavior of other extant primate species and their ancestors. Therefore, there may be important similarities in social behavior between ourselves and other primate species because we have adapted to similar social environments. It is also possible that natural selection acted on the behavior of the ancestors we share with other primate species and that both humans and modern primates have inherited some aspects of their social behavior directly from their common ancestors. Therefore, other important behavioral similarities between ourselves and other primate species may be due to our common ancestry. In Games Primates Play, I examine human social behavior with both rational scientific models and evolutionary and comparative arguments, using examples from closely related primates that live in societies similar to our own.