Selfishness and Prosociality in Human Nature

In the previous post, I discussed the process of Moral Discovery, and how it can inform the kind of social change that we would like to see brought about. Once we have come to a decision about what form of social change we consider to be desirable (and moral), we then tend to evaluate whether we believe this form of social change would be feasible. In so doing, we typically invoke an intuitive notion of human nature; that is, an understanding of the inherent features of the human condition that would allow for certain outcomes, but would bar or preclude others. In the first post on this blog, I discussed the human need or otherwise for rules and hierarchy to avoid chaos. In this post, I would like to discuss the human tendency for selfishness/egocentrism versus pro-sociality/cooperativeness, and what this can tell us about the feasibility of a fairer form of social organization.

Human societies all require some degree of cooperation for their adequate functioning. People need to work together to grow food, build dwellings, make decisions, raise and educate children, invent new technologies, and so forth. The degree to which human beings are selfish vs cooperative, however, will determine the way in which this cooperation will be realised. If human beings are inherently self-interested, then it will likely be necessary to force cooperation through coercive means; by increasing costs to the individual for not cooperating (e.g., through punishment) or by increasing rewards for cooperating (e.g., through monetary incentives). If, on the other hand, human beings are relatively pro-social and cooperative then coercive structures can be minimized, and people will be intrinsically motivated to work together for the benefit of others and for the collective. A fairer society, in which centralized control was diminished, would therefore only be feasible if human beings were relatively more pro-social than they were selfish.

At first glance, things don’t look promising for inherent human pro-sociality. Clearly human beings engage in selfish acts all the time; they steal, cheat, appropriate, invade, pillage, and hoard resources to the detriment of others. Even in less extreme cases than these, people seek to maximize their own advantage at the expense of any competitors. Every time we buy something - be it groceries, a car, a house - the seller’s goal is to squeeze as much out of the buyer as they are willing to give, and, on the buyer’s part, to make the seller give the item away for less than it’s worth. As a passenger in a taxi, for example, you stare at the fare counter willing it to stay low, while the driver, your direct competitor, wills it to continue rising. Every time we do our tax returns, we try to gain back as much money as we can, thus depriving the broader society, and those less needy, of essential services and benefits. And, every time an investor puts money into a company, a stock, or even into superannuation, they expect returns greater than they put in, otherwise most will be fully prepared to extract their contribution irrespective of the consequences -- which could be as severe as bankruptcy for other investors, the loss of jobs for workers, or even a stock market crash and a financial crisis.

Beyond these anecdotal examples of human selfishness, arguments for its innateness can also be derived more convincingly from evolutionary theory. From a Darwinian perspective, genes survive because they bring about advantages to those organisms that possess them. Genes, therefore, survive by being better competitors than other genes, and one way in which genes can be better competitors is to actively promote their self-interest over the interests of other genes. In this way, selfish genes lead to selfish individuals, who have in-built behavioural tendencies to favour their collection of genes over the collection of genes of other individuals. In this sense, a gene would not exist at all if it were not self-interested, because a selfless gene would die out in favour of the genes it was favouring over itself. Similarly, an individual organism would not survive long if it ignored its own self-interest for the benefit of another, more selfish individual. It seems then that selfishness is rooted firmly in simple principles of differential mortality, at the heart of Darwinian evolution.

With such a strong initial case for human selfishness and egocentrism, it seems unlikely that much could be said in favour of a more pro-social and cooperative view of humanity. Counterintuitively perhaps, the evidence for this more positive side of human beings is also very strong. Every day of our lives, each and every one of us will do something for another person, with little motivation for personal gain or advantage. We share our ideas and knowledge every time we communicate with another person. We buy presents for our nearest and dearest simply to make them feel valued. We give food to our children and to our friends to ensure that they are not only sustained, but also fulfilled. We build hospitals to tend to the sick; we protest injustices wrought on others to the detriment of ourselves; we cooperate to build super structures that may never benefit us personally; we give blood and organs to save the lives of strangers; and we donate literally billions of dollars and countless unpaid hours to charity every year. Anecdotally then, human beings appear to be at least as pro-social as they are selfish.

Can a deeper argument for the innateness of pro-sociality and cooperativeness be made however? The dominant evolutionary analysis of cooperation treats it is an outcome of the selfishness of our genes, thus providing only equivocal and contingent support for in-built pro-sociality. Specifically, it is argued that genes that appear to be cooperating with other genes are still in fact looking out for their own self-interest. First, individuals are thought to favour kin - close genetic relations - over others, thus increasing the chance that copies of their own genes shared with these kin will be selected and passed on to future generations. Second, cooperation is argued to be largely based on a form of reciprocity, in which costs to oneself are tracked relative to benefits derived from others, such that any great disparity in favour of another will eventually lead to the breakdown of cooperation, and a reinstitution of overt selfishness. And finally, there is thought to be a strong tendency to harshly punish those who cheat, such that the costs of the cheater’s selfish behaviour will outweigh the benefits they can derive from cheating; again suggesting that cooperation comes about from others protecting their own self-interest. In general, then, the dominant evolutionary analysis argues for a kind of neoliberal biological economics where individual selfishness can lead to collective good.

There is, however, a less well-known evolutionary account of cooperation and pro-sociality, which relies less on assumptions about selfish genes. This account, which can be traced back to the work of Peter Kropotkin in his Mutual Aid, proposes that pro-sociality is a central feature of the living world, and is in fact a key driver of evolutionary change. He points to the fact that many of the most successful species are those that most effectively cooperate, including many rodents, herd animals such as wildebeest and zebras, schooling fish, flocking birds, and the social insects. He points to the symbiotic relationships of fungi and many plants, coral and algae, and of course to the global cooperative enterprise of human beings. He suggests that individuals that cooperate will have a distinct advantage over those that do not, leading to the eventual decline of selfish urges and selfish behaviour, and the increasing proliferation of pro-social species through evolutionary time. In its more modern guise, this would be to argue for cooperative rather than selfish genes, where any genes that were too good at individual competition would be weeded out at the expense of more efficient cooperative genes, which would gain an advantage directly from their ability to work with, rather than against, other genes.

Evidence for the driving force of cooperation in evolution can also be seen in recent work on major evolutionary transitions. Szatmary and Maynard Smith identify six major transitions since the beginning of life on Earth, all of which can be seen as developments towards greater cooperation. The first was a change from individual replicators to populations of replicators. At the beginning of life, a molecule arose that had the ability to make copies of itself, which allowed for cumulative change across generations necessary for evolution. This first replicating molecule lived alone and then competed with all its offspring, who then competed with their offspring and so on. At some point, some of the molecules began to work together to create more complex collections of genes, which allowed for the development of phenotypes; that is, of body structures beyond the simple replicating molecules from which they were descended. In working together, these molecules - now genes - were able to outcompete their solitary-living relatives, such that all replicators today live in colonies, which we refer to as the genome. It was the ability to cooperate at this early stage that provided a selective advantage over the purely selfish single replicators.

The second major transition was from prokaryotic cells to eukaryotic cells. Again, this change involved different types of organisms working together to form a more complex cell that could fulfill multiple functions. The cell nucleus, chloroplasts, mitochondria, ribosomes and many other eukaryotic organelles are thought to be descendants of free-living prokaryotic ancestors, that came together to perform their functions for the good of the cell and all its genes. Again, their ability to cooperate provided a key selective advantage over their more self-interested counterparts.

The third major transition was from asexual clones to sexual populations. There are many debates about exactly what the advantage of sexual reproduction is, but one of its key features is the coming together of distinct collections of genes housed in separate individuals in order to create a new individual. At the point of meiosis - when the sexual cells are being created through what amounts to halving of the genetic material - individual genes can be thought of as being in competition with one another to be passed on to the next generation. Despite this competition, the cooperative spirit of sexual reproduction persists, thus again suggesting its selective advantage relative to more selfish asexual cloning.

The fourth major transition was from protists - single-celled eukaryotic precursors of plants, animals and fungi - to complex organisms. This was the beginning of multicellularity, when sponges, with differentiated cells living in colonies, came into being. Multicellularity allowed for an even more complex array of phenotypes than was ever before possible. Organisms were no longer constrained to live their lives as microscopic cells floating in isolation from all other organisms, feeding themselves through direct assimilation of nutrients via their cell walls. Instead, by working together, they could fill multiple new ecological niches, and develop an ever more diverse array of lifestyles.

The fifth major transition is where we first see what is most commonly thought of as true cooperation: unrelated individuals began to band together to live in colonies. This can be seen in coral reefs, in blooms of jellyfish, in schools of fish, and in herding mammals such as gazelles or bison. The key advantage of colonial living is the dispersal of responsibility and of risk, with greater numbers of eyes and ears searching for food and identifying predators. Despite the more intense competition for resources engendered by colonial living, this cooperative lifestyle became widespread, and can be seen in all the multicellular kingdoms of life.

The sixth and final transition was that from primate groups to human societies. Here we see a form of social organization unrivaled in scale and complexity anywhere else in biology. Individual human beings from all corners of the planet can get together and help one another in multiple ways at almost any time, they can make collective decisions, and they can overlook their apparent differences to achieve all the advancements that define human history. At this point in the evolutionary journey, then, the degree of cooperation becomes quite startling, as all the cooperative tendencies arising from each of the transitions have accumulated; when we reach human society, there is a recursive hierarchy of cooperation being built on top of cooperation, on top of cooperation, and so forth, going right back to the beginning of life.

Taking this lesser-known view of the evolution of pro-sociality, then, it becomes clear that cooperation is deeply rooted in our genetic inheritance, from the earliest molecular replicators working together, right up to globalized human societies of the 21st century. Obviously, this does not mean that we can dismiss our selfish tendencies, as these are apparent in the countless examples outlined earlier, but nor should we unthinkingly endorse the view that there is something privileged about selfishness in our evolutionary story; selfishness and cooperation are at least equally important in what made us human. Having said this, the true test of which social structures are feasible will come through trial and error, and through experimenting with ones that emphasize fairness and equality, the diffusion of power, and the dismantling of hierarchy. At this point, though, I think it is fair to conclude that nothing in our nature should preclude at least some further advancement towards these goals.