The Self and the Social World

The Self and the Social World  

Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology
Edited by Louise Barrett and Robin Dunbar

Print Publication Date: Apr 2007 Subject: Psychology Online Publication Date: Sep 2012

Humans are, above all, social. As with all primates, we owe our success as a species in
large measure to our ability to cooperate in finding solutions to the problems of everyday
survival and reproduction. We can do that mainly because we can call upon the willing
commitment of moderately large numbers of individuals. In effect, we live in societies
that are implicit—and sometimes explicit—social contracts. It is here that the issue of
multi-level selection that was discussed in Section I comes to the fore. However, that kind
of sociality presents serious conflicts for the individual, because the continued existence
of a social group depends on individuals being willing to sink at least some of their per­
sonal interests for the benefit of the larger community in order to maintain the coherence
of the coalition. There will inevitably be tensions that ultimately have to resolved. We re­
turn to this particular issue again in Section VII. Our concern here, however, lies with the
more immediate questions of individual psychology, on the one hand, and, on the other
hand, the larger-scale influences and tensions that affect the structure of societies within
which every individual is embedded.

Although evolutionary ideas first gained currency within psychology mainly in the context
of cognitive psychology, recent years have witnessed a particular upsurge of interest
among social psychologists. This is in some ways not so surprising. Indeed, it is surpris­
ing only in that it has taken so long to do so: social psychology would seem to be a natur­
al arena for evolutionary ideas in that social psychology's interests focus on overt behav­
iour and its psychological underpinnings. Both the strategic approach offered by behav­
ioural ecology and the more cognitive approach offered by evolutionary psychology sensu
stricto add new dimensions to the social psychologist's toolkit. Of course, intellectual evo­
lution is necessarily a two-way process, and social psychology opens up topics (and hence
challenges) for an evolutionary approach that have yet to be explored in any detail.
Among these are the nature of the ‘self’ (an issue explored here from both anthropologi­
cal and psychological perspectives by Crook, and Skronowski and Sekidides, respective­
ly), the importance of individual differences (Nettle) and aspects of social cognition such
as disgust and social rejection (Schaller and colleagues). It is worth remarking here that
the term ‘social cognition’ is used in the social psychology literature in a somewhat differ­
ent sense to that in comparative (and developmental) psychology. In the latter, it refers to
a handful of high-level capacities like theory of mind; in the former, it has a much wider
usage that includes both basic cognitive processes (memory, perception) and larger-scale

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The Self and the Social World

processes (p. 448) like the way reputations can be influenced by the presence of onlook­
ers.

The conflict between the individual and societal levels has spawned a considerable litera­
ture in both social psychology and economics, where the main workhorse has been the
public goods problem. Any social contract, as Salter shows, involves the risk of exploita­
tion (the freerider or freeloader problem, sometimes also known as the public goods
dilemma), and humans have a wide range of mechanisms for reducing the intrusiveness
of freeriding. In traditional societies, for example, kinship often plays a central role in
mitigating these risks, and badges of kinship and group membership (which may include
dialects and shared knowledge, as well as more conventional badges like hair or clothing
styles) are an important mechanism for enforcing conformity. Other mechanisms, as van
Vugt and colleagues point out, include both punishment of ‘social loafers’ (altruistic pun­
ishment whereby the punisher of a backslider pays a cost for doing so, but society as a
whole benefits) and prosociality (the strong predisposition to behave altruistically).

Many of the topics of more traditional anthropological interest continue to remain central
to this debate. These include the nature of kinship and the way kinship terms are used to
partition members of the community into classes (Cronk and Gerkey) and the influence
that both ecology and culture have on marriage and inheritance patterns (Low). Classifi­
catory kinship (as socio-cultural anthropologists term it) can cut across genetic kinship.
This has sometimes been interpreted as disproving any claim that genetic kinship is rele­
vant to human social behaviour, but such claims are based on a misunderstanding and
are, at best, premature. To be sure, the relationship between classifica-tory and genetic
kinship is not always straightforward, but that is because classificatory kinship repre­
sents the intersection of conflicting genetic and social interests (a point stressed both by
Hamilton's (1964) conception of inclusive fitness and by Hughes (1988) in an important
but little-appreciated book). Elucidating this remains a central, and genuinely interesting,
problem for evolutionary psychology.

Finally, by being embedded within a society—whether traditional or modern—we inherit a

specific culture or world view, a set of intellectual rules that define how the world is seen
and how to travel through both the physical and the social state spaces created by it. So
far, the evolutionary approach has given scant attention to this topic and its psychological
roots. It remains an important problem for the future, and one that provides the potential
for a better articulation between evolutionary psychology and socio-cultural anthropolo­
gy. Crook offers us a glimpse of that world and its possibilities through his analysis of
shamanism.

References

Hamilton, W. D. (1964) The genetical evolution of social behaviour. I, II. Journal of Theo­
retical Biology, 7: 1–52.

Hughes, A. L. (1988) Evolution and Human Kinship. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

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The Self and the Social World

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date: 06 July 2019