Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst

Hierarchy is “a ranking system that formalizes unequal access to limited resources, ranging from meat to that nebulous thing called ‘prestige’” (426). Many but not all species have hierarchies. Hierarchies work to establish status quos, which avoids conflict. The benefits of hierarchy are individualistic: Superiors benefit via access to resources, and subordinates benefit by avoiding being attacked by superiors.

Some highly social animals, such as primates and ravens, are able to recognize gradations of rank, i.e., an individual in rank 5 is above me, at rank 6, but below rank 4. Such social cognition is intellectually taxing, and as a general rule the larger an animal’s social group, the larger the brain and neocortex of the species relative to body size. Sociality is particularly complex in fission-fusion species, as the ranks of individuals can differ in subgroups vs. whole groups. As expected, primates from fission-fusion species have larger neocortices and are better at frontocortical tasks.

Rank and Hierarchy in Humans

Average stable human group size exists around 150. The larger the individual’s social group, the larger their vmPFC, orbital PFC, and amygdala, and the better they are at ToM skills. As humans belong to multiple groups, we also belong to multiple hierarchies.

Human hierarchy perception is largely automatic. We can interpret status through gaze and posture alone. Even infants expect larger objects with faces drawn on them to dominate smaller objects with faces drawn on them when these objects come into conflict.

Frontal brain damage impairs our skills at recognizing status relationships. Seeing dominant faces activates the vlPFC and dlPFC, reflecting the dual cognitive and affective processes going on. Seeing dominant faces also activates the superior temporal gyrus (STG), which plays a role in ToM, increasing coupling to the PFC. This shows us “we’re more interested in what dominant individuals are thinking” (433).

Studies on mice show the higher the rank mammals attain in social groups, the greater the coupling between the STG and PFC since attaining rank may be about violence, but maintaining rank is about social intelligence and impulse control. In primate studies, higher ranking males may have higher testosterone but only during times when their rank is unstable: a consequence of more need to aggressively pursue status.

Across species, subordinated animals tend to have higher resting stress hormones. Sapolsky showed this in his own research on baboons, and the hormonal profile associated with that stress resembled the hormonal profile of depression in humans, which also has diverse impacts on the health of the animal. However, among baboons, alpha males often exhibit the same stress hormone levels as highly subordinated males because they have to spend more time engaging in conflict with other males for females. Furthermore, the stress levels of subordinate primates depend more on the degree of aggression, degree of coping opportunities, and presence of relatives than it does on subordination itself.

In a similar curve, high status humans have low stress if they have many people subordinate to them and if they have high autonomy, but not if they need to directly manage many people, at which point stress is high.

When we view someone in pain, our anterior cingulate cortex and insular cortex activate, triggering empathy for them and disgust at the event. The higher the value someone places on social dominance, the less these regions activate.

Each of these examples of human hierarchy’s communication and effects works to show us two simple facts. First, the way humans interact in hierarchical systems has a lot more to do with our ancestry as primates than our uniquely human characteristics. In fact, the social organizations of primates and the social organizations of humans tend to have a lot in common, as primates are themselves a group of highly social species, and we evolved in part by benefitting from these inborn social behaviors. The second fact is that as much as we think of hierarchy and power as totally social constructs, it is more fruitful to think of them as corresponding to specific regions and actions in the brain.

Human Leader Selection

Although having an alpha in a primate group may reduce conflict, the alpha does not behave as a leader, they behave as a superior. Uniquely, humans lead and select leaders based on notions of the common good.

Given the opportunity to select leaders, humans tend to do so based on appraisals of competence, likability, and stance on particular issues—even those completely irrelevant to the realm of their leadership. Unconsciously, people also select for better-looking individuals and those who use more collective pronouns, such as “we” and “us.” We also select leaders based on subliminal, environmentally contingent factors. For instance, in times of war, more masculine and older faces are rated higher as potential leaders. These automatic effects are in place very early in life.

The Biology of Political Affiliation

Human political stances tend to be internally consistent—coming not as discrete appraisals of specific issues but a complete ideological/emotional package. Furthermore, these political ideologies tend to reflect underlying, non-political affects including our emotional world, personality, and penchant for disgust reactions.

Some studies suggest right wing authoritarianism is linked to lower IQ as a product of attraction to simple answers necessary for those with poor abstract reasoning. Discomfort with ambiguity is also predictive of right-wing stances. Cognitive load is predictive of more conservative decisions across both right and left-wing identifiers. When people are hungry, they also become less generous (a serious problem for the justice system when judges pass sentences just before lunch) (449). Priming someone with fear of death or activation of the insular cortex via disgust also predicts conservative views—“stick subjects in a room with a smelly garbage can, and they become more socially conservative” (453). Liberalism is associated with more grey matter in the cingulate cortex; Conservatism with a larger amygdala.

Regarding moral cognition, leftists and rightists tend to evaluate different concerns as morally important. Rightists tend to care about loyalty, authority, and sanctity, whereas leftists care about fairness and liberty. This corresponds with the affective (emotional) differences between the two groups. Leftists tend to use more reappraisal strategies when viewing aversive stimuli—a product of higher degree of comfort with ambiguity. Conservatives express fewer conservative responses when they are explicitly instructed to use such techniques upon viewing aversive stimulus.

This section shows us how differences in political stances are not as logical (related to higher cortical functions) as we might like to think. Our political affiliations and beliefs are largely intuitive and linked to the fears we have learned and the particular emotional dispositions we are both born with and shape throughout our lives. Understanding this can help us be less susceptible to political persuasions that trigger immediate emotional reactions like fear or faith in clearly signaled strength. This is another example of how science gives us tools to improve our lives.

Obedience and Conformity, Disobedience and Nonconformity

Like other animals, humans show subordination to superiors and conformity to group behaviors. Uniquely, however, humans can be obedient not just to individuals but also to abstract concepts. This can lead to incredible cooperation as well as genocide.

In primate groups, conforming is a form of social learning in which animals avoid punishment, acquire skills, and are attracted to mates based on the signaling of others. In an experiment on chimps, subordinates who viewed superior’s techniques for solving a puzzle box were able to learn these techniques, but also inhibited themselves from using alternative solutions when they discovered them—conforming to a behavioral norm. Humans exhibit similar tendencies even when the accepted behavior exhibits considerably more risk than an alternative they know to be less risky. Once again, even though we use logical processes, we are not nearly as logical as we think.

Asch, Milgram, and Zimbardo

Sapolsky now moves to citation of three groups of experiments that are very influential in the field of conformity psychology, those of Asch, Milgram ,and Zimbardo. In Asch’s experiments, subjects regularly made clearly incorrect decisions on visual tasks when a group of confederates (i.e., those “in on” the experiment) made the wrong decision prior.

In Milgram’s experiments, subjects would administer (fake) electrical shocks to confederates when they answered incorrectly on a memory test. As the incorrect answers increased, so did the strength of the shocks, up to a life-threatening level. The confederates would increasingly exhibit pain and beg for the subject to stop while the experiment’s administrator would egg on the subject with increasingly authoritative statements. Though some subjects argued and pleaded with the experimenter, most went all the way up to a potentially lethal shock.

In Zimbardo’s experiment, the Stanford Prison Experiment (SPE), young male volunteers were randomly split into groups of guards or inmates and placed in a realistic prison situation. Role-taking quickly became highly realistic, with guards behaving brutally to inmates despite understanding their authority and the inmates’ crimes were fictional.

These experiments, done in the context of explaining atrocity, ostensibly indicate how any individual could relatively easily be turned into an agent of genocide and, particularly in Zimbardo’s work, that it is cues from our social environments and not individual bad actors that predict “evil” behavior. These studies have, however, come under scrutiny for ethical violations and the authors fudging results. To address some of these problems in Zimbardo’s study, a BBC filmed replication study occurred in 2001. This study brought about totally different results: organized resistance and soaring morale among prisoners and eventual overthrow of the rule of guards. Sapolsky calls it “a replication of […] the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution: a hierarchical regime is overthrown by wet-nosed idealists […] Who are then devoured by Bolsheviks or Reign of Terrorists” (468).

Overall, these studies indicate 1) when pressured to conform, even to immoral acts, many individuals do so, 2) there are always those who reject this conformity. The factors that inspire this conformity are the power of authority, the legitimacy of this power, the incrementality of steps over the line (i.e., slowly moving up toward more painful shocks), the ability of subjects to deflect responsibility for their acts onto the choices of others, anonymity and the taking on of costumes that make us more ubiquitous, and abstraction from the victim (we are far less likely to shock the individual if they are in the same room with us or we meet and shake hands prior to the experiment). Personality traits, such as low conscientiousness, low agreeableness, and high social intelligence, all predict lower compliance in these experiments. Cultural differences in background in collectivist cultures also predict higher compliance. Lastly, people are more likely to obey in times of personal stress and much less likely to comply if any individual around them also chooses not to. There is a banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt writes, but also a “banality of heroism”—it only takes one person being heroic for us to want to conform to that choice, and this heroism takes no unique personality.

Overall, like all social species, humans are highly attuned to status differentiation. Navigating complexity is most difficult in situations of attaining and maintaining status, which requires ToM mastery, social manipulation, and self-control. Being subordinated can be highly pathogenic. Unlike other species, we belong to multiple hierarchies, reliably emphasizing those we excel in. Sometimes our leaders actually work toward the common good, which is unique for humans. However, the automaticity of leader selection in democratic situations devalues the moral potential of human leadership. Our political ideological stances reflect our implicit emotional persuasions, but they can be modulated by priming, cognitive load, and perspective-taking. We are highly motivated to conform and belong, and these motivations can lead us toward compliance in terrible acts, but we also need relatively few changes in our environment to choose heroic acts.

Throughout this chapter, Sapolsky shows us again and again that, even though we think of humans as intelligent and rational, many aspects of our behavior are automatic and evolutionary conditioned. Nowhere is this more true than social behavior since we rely so heavily on our group for survival. This chapter is also another example of Sapolsky’s common argumentative format throughout Behave’s second half. First, he outlines how hierarchy and control operate in animal groups, and then he shows how that science reflects on our understanding of human systems.

Hierarchy, control, and conformity are also good examples of domains of human life we might think of as outside the realm of science and having to do more with individual greed and ambition and the conditions of social organization. However, as this and previous chapters have shown, these very factors of human personality and social organization are themselves controlled by factors we study scientifically: genetics, social learning, and evolutionary dynamics.