The problem with Science books is that they’re mostly tucked away in Libraries or technical sections of Bookshops; so that many of the more interesting points they make are often lost to the general public, or sometimes the ideas just become twisted to suit the ideals of noisy braggarts with their own private agendas.

In terms of the scientific aspects of seduction, we have already disproved the notion that amongst human society there is some sort of top dog or alpha male. But looking back at that article there is very little mentioned about human hierarchies and rank; while most reasonably intelligent observers of human society would note that human society is much more complex than the simple and often somewhat bizarre alpha / not-alpha theories touted by various commercial seduction operations.

In purely biological terms, relative resource holdings are best and most decisively demonstrated in the struggle between individuals for access to mates. For both humans and other animals, the most intense of these struggles typically involve males, the reason for this lying in the asymmetry of the reproductive strategies of the two sexes. Females, who in most species invest heavily in the gestation and care of offspring, have limited reproductive capacity relative to males, whose only contribution in many instances consists of just a few sperm cells. This asymmetry means that any single male is capable (in theory) of siring an almost unlimited number of progeny. Thus, the result for males is a genetic tournament with enormously high stakes. As an example, in one species of seal, 4 percent of the breeding-age males sire almost 90 percent of all surviving offspring.¹

The variability of male reproductive success in humans, although smaller than in many other animal species, is nonetheless substantial. More than 85 percent of past and present human societies for which data is available were polygynous.² And, in such societies, high-ranking males often take numerous wives, with the biggest winners enjoying prodigious reproductive success. For example, Moulay Ismail (1646-1727), the last Sharifian Emperor of Morocco, fathered more than a thousand children during the course of his lifetime.² But even people who would be delighted if everyone had lots of grandchildren thus have ample reasons to want high relative incomes.

In modern industrial societies, of course, there is no longer a strong link between income and the number of grandchildren one expects to have, since the government generally subsidises families that have numerous children. Even so, there is still evidence that relative earning power continues to be an important factor in mate selection. And, according to various relationship surveys, women consider earning power the most important characteristic when evaluating potential mates; and, apparently recognizing the growing importance of two-earner families in modern society, men in the same surveys usually rank a woman’s earning power second behind physical attractiveness.

Anyway, to continue, over the course of human evolution, if individuals differed in the intensity of their respective desires to achieve high rank, and if those with more intense desires were more likely than others to achieve it, then it would be most unusual if the relentless forces of natural selection had not produced a human brain that strongly motivated its owner to seek high rank.

So, it seems natural to ask why a brain moulded by natural selection would urge us to seek relative rather than absolute wealth, as in most cases, a person who maximizes their absolute wealth will have maximized their relative wealth as well. We might also ask why our inner voices don’t simply urge “Do the best you can,” rather than “Try to achieve high rank.” After all, most of us are destined to be outranked by at least some people in virtually every domain of life, making a relentless focus on relative position seem more like a formula for misery than a useful motivational tool.

Evolutionary Psychologists stress, however, that the purpose of human motivation is not to make us happy, but to make us more likely to succeed against the competition. Someone who is unhappy about his low relative position in one arena may be more motivated to compete in a different arena. For instance, a talented entrepreneur who is not willing to put in 80-hour work weeks will have a better chance of becoming a success in a small regional town than in Central London.

There is also the linguistic problem that a command like “Do the best you can” is hopelessly vague. Each of us has a unique mix of talent, ability and experience, so in most cases, doing the best we can doesn’t yield much fruit, unless we first discover just what it is that we’re good at. For example, once you’ve chosen to become an Accountant, it may be sensible to say try to become the best Accountant you can; but how did you know that becoming an Accountant was the right choice in the first place?

Much of human learning takes place as a result of the positive or negative reinforcement we receive from different actions. Slowly, and often by trial and error, we purge our mental inventories of behaviours that don’t work, and then replace them with ones that do. If you’re tone deaf, your relatively poor performance in primary school music classes will have spared you the trouble of seeking a career as a Pianist. If you are a slow runner, your poor performance in early races will have steered you away from training for the Olympics. Then, with a little luck, your strong early performance in some other field will have helped guide you towards a career that provided a more fertile ground for your talents. Thus, when it comes to finding the right field to compete in, an inner voice urging “Try to achieve high rank” is likely to be far more informative than an inner voice urging “Do the best you can.”

There is yet another important reason for being concerned about rank per se, and this is that rank serves as a convenient benchmark for us to use in regulating the amount of effort we expend. To use the military as a vivid illustration, we know that human beings under duress can accomplish extremely demanding physical tasks with little sleep for weeks at a time, even when faced with imminent threats of death. However, there are limits, because each persons struggle for survival typically plays out over many decades, and the expenditure of maximum possible effort at every moment is almost certain to be a losing strategy. So, to avoid burning out, we also need to set aside time to reflect and restore ourselves.

A far better general strategy is therefore to conserve energy for the occasions when threats to survival are greatest. Here, also, an intrinsic concern about relative position appears almost tailor-made for the task at hand. So, as a general rule, the farther an individual fell in her local pecking order, the more serious were the threats to her survival. A decline in rank typically provokes distress and anxiety, and these feelings can often spur the additional effort it requires to recover lost ground.

This is not to say that anxiety vanishes once someone achieves a threshold level of high rank. On the contrary, we all know people whose drive to advance remains unsatisfied no matter how much they may have achieved. This could be explained in part by the fact that individuals differ in their respective drives to succeed, and those with the highest drives are more likely than others to have made it near the top.

But the Evolutionary Psychologist’s perspective suggests the additional possibility that we ought not to have expected the relationship between subjective well-being and relative income to have been a simple, static one in the first place. From an evolutionary design standpoint, the most successful organisms will be concerned not just with their relative position but with changes therein, since in competitive environments, complacency about high rank often results in losing it.

Thus, psychological well-being seems attuned to relative income in roughly the following way: Increases in relative income increase wellbeing, and reductions in relative income reduce wellbeing, but both effects tend to decay at least partially over time.³ Once people become adapted to their new circumstances, these constitute a new norm against which further changes are reckoned. (Hence the folk wisdom that “Life is a journey, not a destination”)

The Evolutionary Psychologist’s framework also calls attention to the fact that the relevant reproductive battles were typically decided by competitive balance in highly local environments. For instance, an ape’s reproductive success depended not on how strong he was relative to the entire population of apes on the African continent, but on his strength relative to rivals in his immediate vicinity. Similarly, the economic and psychological rewards of today’s tennis player depend not on his performance vis-à-vis all other athletes, but on how well he performs relative to other tennis players in the particular arena in which he competes. Achieving high or improving rank in this ‘local hierarchy’ will make him feel good, and the reverse will be true for low rank or downward movements.

People in each different category are involved in their own competitions to move forward in their local hierarchies. But in each case, only half of the contestants can rank in the top half.

References:

1. Dawkins, R., ‘The Selfish Gene‘ (1989) United Kingdom: Oxford University Press
2. Wright, R., ‘The Moral Animal‘ (1994) New York: Pantheon
3. Diener, E. & R. Lucas, ‘Personality and Subjective Well-Being’ in Understanding Well-Being: Scientific Perspectives on Enjoyment and Suffering (1998) eds. Daniel Kahneman, Ed Diener & Norbert Schwartz, New York: Russell Sage

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Posted by Jonathan in Sociobiology, Sociology

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