The origins of virtue

Human Instincts and the Evolution of Cooperation

by Matt Ridley

• Below you can find some highlights (not a summary)
• Please remember this represents the authors views, I did not write the book.
• Skim… then slow down on the paragraphs that catch your interest. Reflection requires pause.

Animal bodies, coral clones and ant colonies are just big families.

Whatever human society is, it is not a big family.

This lack of nepotism makes the analogy between people and social insects faulty.

We recoil from only one specialization, the one that ants embrace most enthusiastically: the reproductive division of labour between breeders and helpers.

…three chief consequences of the division of labour. By specializing in pin-making the pin-maker improves his dexterity at pin-making through practice, he also saves the time that would otherwise be spent switching from task to task; and it pays him to invent, buy or use specialized machinery that speeds up the task.

Virtually nothing else of interest has been written about the division of labour since Adam Smith, either by biologist or by economists.

This is the great advantage of a division of labour: by specializing at the level of the individual, the species can generalize at the level of the colony.

…perhaps the least appreciated insight in the whole history of ideas. Smith made the paradoxical argument that social benefits derive from individual vices. The cooperation and progress inherent in human society are the result not of benevolence, but of the pursuit of self-interest. Selfish ambition leads to industry.

Smith is easily misunderstood. … The pursuit of self-interest is as different from the pursuit of spite as it is from the pursuit of altruism.

Smith’s insight, … was that life is not a zero-sum game.

In the case of trade, Smith saw that because of the division of labour, my selfish ambition to profit from trading with you, and yours to profit from trading with me, can both be satisfied. We each act in self-interest, but we only benefit each other and the world.

…benevolence is inadequate for the task of building cooperation in a large society, because we are irredeemably biased in our benevolence to relatives and close friends; a society built on benevolence would be riddled with nepotism.

it is abundantly plain that the way to make a good tennis or chess player is first to find a young prodigy and then send him or her off to a school devoted to little else.

… there is one human division of labour that is extraordinarily marked in all known human societies: the division of labour between man and woman, or more especially between husband and wife. By gathering rare and protein-rich meat while his wife gathers plentiful but protein-poor fruits, the human couple gets the best of both worlds. No other primate exploits a secual division of labour in this way

The great advantage of human society is the division of labour, and the “non-zero-sumness” it achieves … society can be greater than the sum of its parts.

The strongest hypothesis (for how society got started) is that it was reciprocity. In Adam Smith’s words, “the propensity to truck, barter and exchange one thing for another.”

PRISONER’S DILEMMA

For context, wikipedia explanation of Prisoner’s Dilemma.

…it applies wherever there is a conflict between self-interest and the common good.

…any situation in which you are tempted to do something, but know it would be a great mistake if everybody did the same thing, is likely to be a prisoner’s dilemma.

….game theory is concerned with that province of the world where the right hting to do depends on what other people do.

The point of game theory is to find it in simplified versions of the world – to find the universal prescription. This became known … as the Nash equilibrium.

Note that the best outcome is not necessarily achieved at the Nash equilibrium.

For thirty years, … entirely the wrong lesson had been drawn from the prisoner’s dilemma. Selfishness was not the rational thing to do after all – so long as the game is played more than once.

When the game was played repeatedly and indefinitely by a single pair of people, niceness, not nastiness, seemed to prevail.

the longer a pair of individuals cooperated, the greater the chance of cooperation.

Tit-for-tat is a mechanism for generating cooperation between unrelated individuals. Babies take their mother’s beneficience for granted and do not have to buy it with acts of kindness. Brothers and sisters do not feel the need to reciprocate every kind act. But unrelated individuals are acutely aware of social debts.

The principal condition required for Tit-for-tat to work is a stable, repetitive relationship.

The permanence and duration of the relationship is vital to the equation. One-shot encounters encourage defection; frequent repetition encourages cooperation.

our frequent use of reciprocity in society may be an inevitable part of our natures: an instinct.

natural selection has chosen it to enable us to get more from social living.

ON TELLING HAWKS FROM DOVES

Throughout the two cleverest families of land-dwelling mammals, the primates and the carnivores, there is a tight correlation between brain size and social group. The bigger the society in which the individual lives, the bigger its neocortex relative to the rest of the brain.

Tit-for-tat loses or draws each battle but wins the war.

Tit-for-tat does not envy or wish to “beat” its opponent. Life, it believes, is not a zero-sum game: my success need not be at your expense; two can “win” at once.

…turn the prisoner’s dilemma from a zero-sum game into a non-zero-sum game. Life is very rarely a zero-sum game.

Reciprocity can evolve in an entirely unconscious automaton, provided it interacts repeatedly with other automata in a situation that resembles a prisoner’s dilemma – as the computer simulations prove.

reciprocity requires not only repetitive interactions, but also the ability to recognize other individuals and keep score.

the ability to “meet repeatedly, recognize each other and remember the outcomes of past encounters”.

ON GENEROSITY WITH FOOD

food is communal and sex is private. … All over the world

The most fundamentally selfless and communitarian thing we do is to share food; it is the very basis of society.

Meat represents luck. … even the most skilful hunter needs luck.

There simply is not the same dependence upon change for the gatherer as there is for the hunter.

The sharing of meat therefore represents a sort of reciprocity in which one man trades in his current good luck for an insurance against his future bad luck.

ON PUBLIC GOODS & PRIVATE GIFTS

Most of the land surface of this planet is naturally desert or forest.

Only in a few places … does grass dominate the ecosystem.

Yet we human beings are a grassland species. We evolved on the African savanna and we still try to recreate it wherever we go: parks, lawns, gardens.

With our bipedal gait, ouir shade-maximizing posture, our sweat glands and bare skin, our special blood vessels for cooling the brain and our free hands for carrying things, we are superbly adapted to living in the open, sun-scorched grass plains of Africa.

(African grasslanders hunting elephants)… whatever they did, they did not do it alone.

Like all disagreements in academia, it raged so fiercely … because the stakes were so small.

… calls the trading of concrete for abstract benefits “indirect reciprocity”.

the reason hunter-gatherers are so generally idle – they “work” far fewer hours than farming people – and so free of posessions and wealth, is because in their egalitarian societies to accumulate too much is to refuse to share it

In Eskimo societies, to hoard is taboo. Rich people who are ungenerous are sometimes killed.

in Britain… about seven to eight per cent of the economy … will be given away as gifts.

Only with unrelated allies was true reciprocity – value for value – practised.

Gifts are given with an element of calculation, and his recipients knew this as well as he did. There is no such thing as a free lunch. 

you feel obligation that comes inseparably with a rich present from somebody.

“potlatch”, the habit of deliberately trying to embarrass your neighbours with your generosity.

ON THEORIES OF MORAL SENTIMENTS

I noticed when studing animals how lacking they  usually are in a sense of grudge. They do not nurture thoughts of revenge on those that have harmed them; they simply get on with life.

people are much more grateful for acts of kindness that cost the donor some large effort or inconvenience than for easy acts, even if the benefit received is the same. We all know the feeling of resentment at an unsolicited act of generosity whose intent is not to do a kindness but to make us feel the need to do a kindness in return.

human emotions looked to Trivers like the highly polished toolkit of a reciprocating social creature.

Trustworthiness, provided it is recognizable, creates valuable opportunities that would not otherwise be available.

Sen has called the caricature of the short-sighted self-interested person a “rational fool” …

He is indeed a fool who fails to consider the effecto of his actions on others.

So when somebody votes (an irrational thing to do, given the chances of affecting the outcome), tips a waiter in a restaurant she will never revisit, gives an anonymous donation to charity … she is not, even in the long run, being selfish or rational. She is simply prey to sentiments that are designed for another purpose: to elicit trust by demonstrating a capacity for altruism.

People are not generally very secretive about blood donation. Giving blood and working in Rwanda both enhance your reputation for virtue and therefore make people more likely to trust you in prisoner’s dilemmas. They scream out “I am an altruist; trust me.”

The point … of moral sentiments in a situation resembling a prisoner’s dilemma, is to enable us to pick the right partner to play the game with.

The prisoner’s dilemma is a dilemma only if you have no idea whether you can trust your accomplice. In most real situations, you have a very good idea how far you can trust someone.

given just thirty minutes to meet the partners first, they prove remarkably good at predicting whic of the strangers will defect and which will cooperate in the game

To identify people who are not opportunists is an advantage; to be identified as a non-opportunist is equally an advantage for it attracts others of the same stamp. Honesty really is the best policy for the emotions.

Even when the game is only played once, they are concerned to protect their personal reputation for being somebody who can be trusted not to be too nakedly opportunistic at others’ expense.

You get more from life if you irrationally forgo opportunism.

Tell your children to be good, not because it is costly and superior, but because in the long run in pays.

We do not cut into queues, because we care what other people – even strangers – think of us. Other animals do not.

We are immersed so deeply in a sea of moral assumptions that it takes an effort to imagine a world without them. A world without obligations to reciprocate, deal fairly, and trust other people would be simply inconceivable.

emotions are mental devices for guaranteeing commitment.

Virtue is … the instinctive and useful lubricant that is part of our natures.

How many people do you know who are true altruists, always thinking about others and never themselves? Very, very few.

We simply do not practise what we preach. This is perfectly rational, of course. The more other people practice altruism, the better for us, but the more we and our kin pursue self-interest, the better for us. That is the prisoner’s dilemma. Also, the more we posture in favour of altruism, the better for us.

ON OUR TRIBAL NATURES

we are irredeemably tribal creatures. The neighbouring or rival group, however defined, is automatically an enemy. Argentinians and Chileans hare each other because there is nobody else nearby to hate.

the notion of strategic alliances between human tribes is familiar from all of history: my enemy’s enemy is my friend.

There would not be nationalism, borders, in-groups and out-groups, warfare. These are the consequences of tribal thinking. Elephants … do not live in closed societies either … (but) an individual can drift from group to group. It is an intriguing fantasy to imagine ourselves like that.

ON THE SOURCE OF WAR

When the war was over, society fragmented once more and the triumphant greater-goodism of the war years disintegrated into the blickering selfishness of peace

very few animals ever put the interests of the group or the species before the individual.

Without exception, all those that do are actually putting family first

All aggregations in nature that are not families are selfish herds.

selfishness spreads like flu through any species or group that tries to exercise restraint on behalf of the larger group.

One person may thrive at the expense of another not because he has better genes, but because he knows or believes something of practical value.

there is one kind of cultural learning that makes cooperation more likely: conformism.

Human beings are terribly easily talked into following the most absurd and dangerous path for no better reason than that everybody else is doing it.

even the absurdities of political correctness are all telling examples of how easily we can be rendered obedient to the current fashion for no better reason than that it is the current fashion.

The problem with obeying the information cascade is that the blind can end up leading the blind.

Human society is composed of groups, superorganisms. The cohesiveness of groups that conformity achieves is a valuable weapon in a world where groups must act together to compete with other groups. That the decision may be arbitrary is less important than that it is unanimous.

It is cheaper and usually better … to do what other people say than to figure out the best way to do something yourself.

The extinction of ill-suited groups by ones with better traditions can explain trens that occur over 500 or 1,000 years, but it cannot explain shorter changes. And most human cultural change is more rapid than that.

People do think in terms of groups: tribes … nations. But they do not really live in isolated groups. They mingle continuously with those from other groups.

Ritual is universal; but its details are particular.

ON PROPERTY

Give a man the secure posession of bleak rock, and he will turn it into a garden; give him nine years lease of a garden, and he will turn it into a desert … The magic of property turns sand into gold.  – Arthur Young, Travels, 1787

A prisoners dillema played between many people is known as a “tragedy of the commons”

Cooperation – ie. restraint – by one party is opportunity for another

Everybody’s property is nobody’s property. Wealth that is free for all is valued by none

The answer … was to privatize the resource or nationalize and regulate its exploitation.

Freedom in a commons (a shared resource) brings ruin for all.

Free-for-alls are disastrously vulnerable to free-riding. Mediaval commons … were carefully regulted communal property

commoners are no fools; they see the Tragedy coming and act to avert it … So it is nonsense to argue that just because something is communally owned it must suffer the tragedy of the commons. Common property and open-access free-for-all are very different things.

Order emerges perfectly from chaos not because of the way the way people are bossed about, but because of the way individuals react rationally to incentives. Government, in the shape of rajahs or socialists, has done nothing to create the system; it only levies tax.

the reason for environmental troubles in the Third World turns out to be caused by the lack of clear property rights

s(people mine the rain forest logs) because they can own the logs in a way that they cannot own them when they are trees.

the poverty of the Third World is to be cured largely by creating secure property rights without which people have no chance to build their own prosperity. Government is not the solution to tragedies of the commons. It is the prime cause of them.

the best return of all is done by he who does not exercise restraint when everybody else does – the free-rider

communication is more important than punishment; covenants without swords work; swords without covenants do not.

people sustainably exploit only those things they can own

Private ownership of wealth or property brings esteem and prestige, but it also brings envy and ostracism. Thus, however much we may recognize the arguments for property as a means to successful conservation of resources, we deeply dislike the argument

ON TRUST

(Note: the author admits to political implications of the book in this chapter)

…society as the natural product of the instincts of individuals. – Economist, January 1847

Our minds have been built by selfish genes, but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative.

instinctive cooperativeness is the very hallmark of humanity and what sets us apart from other animals.

“Virtually every commercial transaction has within itself an element of trust.”

Trust, like money, can be lent … It pays dividens in the currency of more trust.

Social contracts between equals, generalized reciprocity between individuals and between groups – these are at the heart of the most vital of all human achievements: the creation of society.

On the “perfectability of man” debate: Hobbes -> we are fundamentally nasty; Rousseau -> we are fundamentally nice.

The naturalistic fallacy: to argue that what is natural is moral: deducing an “ought” from an “is”.

This logic is known today as political correctness… to argue that human nature must be infinitely malleable by culture because (they thought, wrongly) the alternative is fatalism, which is unacceptable.

…Communism failed because it failted to change human nature.

Karl Marx designed a system that would only have worked if we were angels; it failed because we were beasts

society is an uneasy compromise between individuals with conflicting ambitions

Human beings have some instincts that foster the greater good and others that foster self-interested and anti-social behavior. We must design a society that encourages the former and discourages the latter.

the reason we must not say that people are nasty, is that it is true

“There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.” – Margaret Tatcher

if you fail to recognize the basic opportunism of human beings, then you fail to notice how government is composed of self-interested individuals rather than saints who only work for the greater good.

Goverment is … a tool for interest groups and budget-maximizing bureaucrats … not a neutral, motive-less machine to deliver social benefits. She was against government’s inherent corruption, rather than its ideals.

where authority replaces reciprocity, the sense of community fades.

Because of its mandatory nature the welfare state encouraged in its donors a reluctance and resentment, and in its clients not gratitude but apathy, anger or an entrepreneurial drive to exploit the system. Heavy government makes people more selfish, not less. 

there have been glimpses of a better way … a society built upon voluntary exchange of goods, information, fortune and power betweeen free individuals in small enough communities for trust to be built.

If we are to recover social harmony and virtue … it is vital that we reduce the power and scope of the state … it means devoluntion: of power over people’s lives to parishes, computer networks, clubs, teams, self-help groups, small businesses – everything small and local.

We must encourage social and material exchange between equals for that is the raw material of trust, and trust is the foundation of virtue.