Consuming Behaviour

© John Desmond

First published, January, 2026

Grianan Publishing,

John’s Brae,

Shrove, ROI, F93E7R9

Cover design © John Desmond (with thanks to Alan Gillies)

Part two: evolutionary and social explanations

This part consists of two chapters which are intended to mirror one another by discussing questions pertaining to exchange from evolutionary and social perspectives, respectively. Discussion is organised using the template developed by the anthropologist Alan Page Fiske (1991) and while there is a risk of procrusteanism in confining a diverse array of explanations into a rigid framework, I consider this worthwhile, because it sharpens understanding of the basic differences between concepts and explanations and provides a basis for reflection and critique.

The concepts in the two Figures below apply different understandings to the same four behaviours, which are presumed universal. What anthropologists and sociologists describe as sharing, gift-exchange, hierarchy, and the market, are explained by evolutionary psychologists as kin selection, reciprocal altruism, costly signalling and market-pricing. While the concepts in the two Figures are explained more fully in the relevant chapters it is relevant to mention here that there is little commerce between the two ways of framing our understanding of exchange. Consumer researchers in general and specifically those aligned with Consumer Culture Theory describe exchange entirely in terms of the concepts used in Figure Two.

Doman-Specific Modules for Exchange
Kin Selection | Costly signalling (Sexual selection)
Reciprocal altruism | Market-pricing

The Four Elementary Forms of Sociality (Fiske, 1991).
Communal Sharing | Authority Ranking
Equality matching | Market-pricing

There are several reasons why consumer researchers remain chary of evolutionary explanations. The mainstream evolutionary approach follows a nomothetic line adopted by the ‘hard’ sciences which favours modelling and experimental designs in contrast to the hermeneutic, or idiographic stance followed by CCT researchers who employ interpretive methods. Epistemologically, CCT assumes a general-purpose intelligence, akin to a ‘blank slate’, written upon by culture (Pinker, 2003) as opposed to the massive modularity determined by genetic influence argued for by mainstream evolutionary theorists. Where the blank slate model is critiqued for ignoring evolved psychology, the evolutionary argument that a given module arises as the result of an adaptation, is critiqued on the basis that it ignores general-purpose capacities and perpetuates a form of naturalistic fallacy (Panksepp & Panksepp, 2000).

Evolutionary theory enables us to reflect on arguments as to the extent to which human nature is different from that of those others we call animals. It enables reflection on the ethnocentrism and anthropocentrism apparent in the construction by philosophers and social theorists who conceived of nature as ordered like a pyramid, with humans at the head of all animals, and humans of European heritage at the head of all others, at the apex of civilisation. This bias is reflected in the historical understanding of market pricing, as even “enlightened” thinkers such as Marx considered money exchange to be a modern development, leading to the mistaken belief that market-pricing did not exist in places such as India from ancient times (Fuller, 1989). Such presumptions and biased judgements have not gone away, but have if anything grown stronger in recent years. While discussion of some of these matters lies outside the purview of the topic at hand it is hope that the following chapters provide an overview of some of the basic arguments pertaining to exchange.

Chapter
Three
Four

Academic Field
Evolutionary Theory
Social theory

Disciplines
Evolutionary biology; Evolutionary psychology

Anthropology

Sociology

Explanations
Domain-Specific
Domain-General

Multilevel

(Cultural Group) selection

Social theory

Ontological position

Objective, tangible

mechanism

Objective, tangible

Process

Objective, tangible

Process

Mixed

Axiological assumption

Causation

Explanation

Epistemological assumptions
Nomothetic
Nomothetic
Nomothetic
Hermeneutic/idiographic

Culture
Jukebox: evoked
“Blank Slate”
Focus on language and religion
Context

Temporal context

Pleistocene

3million – 11,500BC

Holocene

11,500 BC

Holocene to present day
Present day

Core metaphor
Computational
Plasticity
Russian dolls
Various

Methods
Experiment
Computer modelling
Mixed
Mixed

Orientation exercise

You may find it useful to conduct a brief exercise to reflect on the discussion of the differences between the four principal methods of distribution described in these two chapters. Get hold of a pen and some paper. Think of your relationships with your closest family members, or of someone outside of your family with whom you have an extremely close friendship. Now think of an object that you have received in the context of this relationship. Write down a description of the object and the circumstances in which you received it. Write down what you think the object cost in monetary terms when it was purchased? How much would a stranger pay for it today? Do you still have the object? Would you be prepared to sell it? If not, then why not? Finally imagine that all of your goods were to be auctioned to the highest bidder. What is the minimum price that you would accept for this object?

Think of relationships that are based on clear rankings between yourself and another person. The other person might have greater prestige than you, or in the position of greater authority. For example, they could be a teacher, or an employer. Write down a description of the object and the circumstances in which you received it. Write down what you think the object cost in monetary terms when it was purchased? How much would a stranger pay for it today? Do you still have the object? Would you be prepared to sell it? If not, then why not? Finally imagine that all of your goods were to be auctioned to the highest bidder. What is the minimum price that you would accept for this object?

Think of your relationships with friends that are based on balance and equivalent give and take. Now think of an object that you have received in the context of this relationship. Write down a description of the object and the circumstances in which you received it. Write down what you think the object cost in monetary terms when it was purchased? How much would a stranger pay for it today? Do you still have the object? Would you be prepared to sell it? If not, then why not? Finally imagine that all of your goods were to be auctioned to the highest bidder. What is the minimum price that you would accept for this object?

Finally think of your relationships with others that are based on free market principles. This context is where money is the principle medium used. Typical relationships are between salesperson and customer. Thinking of this context, write down a description of the object and the circumstances in which you received it. Write down what you think the object cost in monetary terms when it was purchased? How much would a stranger pay for it today? Do you still have the object? Would you be prepared to sell it? If not, then why not? Finally imagine that all of your goods were to be auctioned to the highest bidder. What is the minimum price that you would accept for this object?

By completing this exercise, you may have found it easier to think of objects in relations to some contexts rather than others. You may also have noted some interesting differences in your response as you shifted perspectives from one context to another. If you felt anything like the respondents to McGraw et al.’s (2003) study, then you may have felt considerably more resistant to selling objects in some of the contexts than in others.

Chapter three: the evolutionary context of consumption and exchange

Introduction

Evolutionary biology and psychology have profound implications for how we conceive of human subjectivity as they seek to explain the questions of the emergence of distinctively human society from hominids. They encourage us not only to think of the process of human development, but also to reflect on what it is to be human. In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin argued that three conditions are necessary for natural selection. Firstly, given that existence is a struggle, only some organisms will survive and reproduce. Secondly, there must be variation, so that some organisms are more likely to reproduce than others. Finally, such variation must be heritable, such that the children of those who survive resemble their parents.

The chapter focuses on two broad explanations comprising on the one hand, the mainstream explanation based on kin-selection and reciprocal altruism and on the other, the minority explanation, based on multilevel selection. The mainstream “domain specific” explanation argues that those pre-human hominids from archaic societies who became our ancestors survived the struggle for existence during the Era of Evolutionary Adaptiveness (EEA), which occurred during the Pleistocene period (from 2.5 million to the onset of the Holocene 11,500 years ago), they developed an innate psychology, consisting of special modules for sharing and reciprocal exchange, which gave them an advantage over their fellow hominids. These are stored as algorithms which work as unconscious routines that are individually called up to address specific problems as they arise in the environment, very much in the way a jukebox selects a record.

The second broad theory discussed below is based on multilevel, or cultural group selection. This argues that kin selection and reciprocal altruism are insufficient to explain large-scale human cooperation. Theorists from this perspective posit that natural selection also works at the group level to explain the superiority of the hominids who became our ancestors as due to their development of cultural resources favouring cooperation over competition. In their view this explains why individuals readily sacrifice their own lives for the sake of the group. The ‘dark’ side of group selection is that given that; “organisms are frequently adapted to prey upon and compete aggressively with other organisms, so no less can be expected of groups.” (Sober & Wilson, 2000: 264). In this argument early cultural institutions linked to the development of religion add the extra dimension, beyond kinship, reputation and reciprocity, which is required to explain large-scale cooperation.

Evolutionary theorists seek to understand firstly, why particular behaviours have evolved and secondly, the mechanisms that directly cause behaviour. ‘Why’ questions are concerned with ultimate explanations. For example, if we ask why reciprocity evolved, the answer is that this increases inclusive fitness. The proximate question, seeks to answer the ‘how’ question, concerning how reciprocity operates in day-to-day encounters. This proximate question is answered differently by mainstream and multilevel theorists. The former focuses on the existence of cheater-detection mechanisms, whereas the latter highlights the role played by norms to regulate such behaviour, although rewards and punishment feature as part of each explanation.

The Mainstream Argument: Evoked Culture

The mainstream argument from evolutionary psychology likens the human brain to a computer onto which evolution has written specific programmes to deal with particular recurrent problems of social exchange. Rather than conceive of our mind as a blank slate onto which culture is written, this explanation argues for a mind comprised of, ‘domain-specific, special-purpose adaptive mechanisms, organized into a coevolved, highly intricate architecture.” (Tooby & Cosmides, 1989: 31). This explanation, which the authors perhaps misleadingly call ‘evoked culture’, has little to do with the standard idea of culture as it is understood by consumer theorists today. Cosmides and Tooby would criticize most consumer theory because it ignores the existence of inherited predispositions.

The idea of an evoked culture is that what can seem to have been transmitted by culture over the generations actually consists of genetically programmed modules which developed in the Stone Age and are evoked in the very different context of life today. By using the analogy of a computer, authors argue that caring for kin and abilities to understand processes of give and take, to recognize faces and to read the minds of others, evolved with hundreds of other programs as specialized sub-routines to solve adaptive problems (problems which recurred and which affected reproduction) during the Era of Evolutionary Adaptiveness (EEA), spanning the Pleistocene period, from around three million years ago to the Holocene period in 11,000 BC. During this period humans belonged to small hunter-gatherer bands. It is argued that the programs discussed below including kin selection; reciprocal altruism costly-signaling and market-pricing were laid down during this period.

Figure 3.1: Doman-Specific Modules for Exchange
Kin Selection | Costly signalling (Sexual selection)
Reciprocal altruism | Market-pricing

Kin Selection

Kin selection posits that we are biased to share with those whom we consider to be our kin. This argument is deceptively simple and a matter of continuing controversy,¹ which presents traps, even for those who should know better.² One trap relates to the general but false belief that we are altruistic to those with whom we share a lot of genes. However, in this explanation it is not the proportion of genes I share with someone (apes share 99% of genes with humans) that is important, but the probability that the two individuals share the same gene-complex for altruism. If we are full siblings, this is 0.5. Genes seek to maximize their reproduction and the individuals who carry them act merely as the containers they use to replicate. From the gene’s perspective if I do not have children but care for those of my relatives, although this has reduced my personal fitness, I have fulfilled my purpose by maximising replication of the gene-complex. In this explanation there is no volition, knowledge or calculating intent on the part of individual persons.

Kin selection is either selected for, or against, depending on the fitness costs incurred. For example, this explanation argues that incest is prohibited because it increases reproductive costs incurred due to increased birth defects. Whilst avoiding sex with kin is positive for fitness, avoiding helping and sharing with kin has negative fitness consequences and so sharing with kin is selected for. The idea of the human as a moral and self-determining being is reduced to that of a replication machine for gene complexes. Altruism has nothing to do with motives, but rather with effects. An apparently altruistic outcome can be achieved by any combination of genes that conveys costs on those who possess them, to the benefit of others. Dawkins (1989) provides the example of a pride of lions, where rotting teeth in older animals, makes it more difficult for them to chew, which unintentionally benefits the young.

Inclusive Fitness

Hamilton’s (1964) concept of inclusive fitness measures a person’s reproductive success not only in terms of their own progeny but also that of their kin. By behaving altruistically towards others who carry the same gene complex, for example by raising the alarm when detecting a predator, an animal incurs a cost to its own reproductive potential but boosts the replication of the genes that underlie its altruistic behaviour in the overall number of related offspring. Whilst this may decrease the donor’s personal fitness, it increases their inclusive fitness, which includes personal fitness added to the sum of the weighted effects of the donation on every other organism in the population. This forms the basis for the explanation as to why parents will often sacrifice their comfort to ensure that of their children and also why aunts, uncles and other kin will do so too. Breeding individuals rely on the presence of non-breeders to rear their young in a variety of species of insects, birds, and mammals (Brown, 1987). Some do not reproduce at all, such as worker bees, whilst others play the role of sentinels to protect the brood from attack.

The Weakening Circle of Sharing: Cutting Cake?

From an evolutionary perspective, a woman’s optimal short-term strategy is to clandestinely pursue extra-marital affairs with genetically better or more diverse mates (Cherkas et al. 2004: 654), In contrast to the father, the mother knows for sure that she is the parent of the child leading some to argue that this may explain why mothers are venerated as exemplars of selfless sharing. Uncertainty surrounding parentage affects has been found to motivate the giving of gifts (Saad & Gill, 2003), where research supports the contention that grandparents giving to their grandchildren is a function of parental uncertainty (Euler & Weitzel, 1996; Smith, Kish, and Crawford, 1987).

Kin selection theory assumes that the circle of sharing progressively weakens as it expands to include more distant relations. This is formalized in Hamilton’s (1964) rule, which is formulated as, rb – c > 0, where r = relatedness of two individuals, b = benefits to the recipient, and c = costs to the benefactor. To demonstrate this formula’s application, if the recipient of helping is a brother or sister (r = 0.5), the benefit to the sibling must be more than twice the cost of helping. If the recipient is an aunt, uncle, grandparent, nephew, or niece (r = 0.25), the benefit must be more than four times the cost of helping (and so on and so forth).

From the above, one might construct mind-games as Dawkins (1976) did when he imagined how a mother, who has baked a cake, might distribute this to her offspring. Using Hamilton’s equation, given that each sibling is equivalent, as each is equally related to their mother (0.5), so she should give them exactly the same slice. This sharing of the cake will be seen differently from the children’s perspective. Given that each sibling is twice as related to themselves as to their fellow siblings or their mother (1.0), in their estimation they ought to get a bigger slice than the others. Conflicts may thus arise between the mother and her children as to what is a fair share. On the other hand, perhaps, she would give the eldest a bigger slice on the basis that they provide a greater contribution to inclusive fitness than do the others. Limited evidence to support this presumption comes from a study of infanticide which found that the eldest is rarely killed (Daly & Wilson, 1988).

Consumer researchers have explored how individuals pass ‘inalienable’ family possessions down through the generations. These possessions are “inalienable” in that the object is considered a family heirloom so that the one who possesses the object is not so much its owner as its custodian, and the object itself is mythologised and cherished over and above its exchange value (Curasi, Price & Arnould, (2004) A related line of enquiry is into grandparental investment into grand-children. A major review of the literatures in evolutionary theory, economics, and sociology came up with little theoretical integration between studies and argued for the need to develop a comprehensive framework for research which includes ultimate and proximate causes of this behaviour (Coall & Hertwig, 2010).

Dawkins later changed his mind about the cake example (Dawkins, 1979), acknowledging that it would be fallacious to assume that one can determine how a given individual ought to behave using Hamilton’s rule, whether that involves cutting cakes, or for that matter, deciding how much money, if any, parents should bequeath to their children.³ This is because the principle of calculation on which kin selection rests will vary widely among individuals and will only achieve regular consistency as the result of the aggregation of the consequences of billions of individual choices that take place over successive generations (Cosmides & Tooby, 1994).

The Cinderella Effect

What if we take a more clear-cut example by comparing the behaviour of biological parents with that of step-parents? Research conducted along a number of dimensions seems to confirm a number of differences (see Saad 2009: 104-111 for a review); for instance compared to their biological children step-parents are less likely to share resources with their step-children (Schoeni et al., 2022), to invest in their higher-education (Zvoch, 1999; Acquilino, 2005) or to subsidize their travels abroad (Tifferet et al., 2010). One study also found that step-parents are more likely to abuse the children in their care (Daly & Wilson, 1988). However, the evidence is not clear-cut, as this study was later critiqued on the ground that the authors did not compare like with like but over-represented step-parents over parents, although the authors have sought to defend their work against this.⁴

One study of American families found that adopted children benefitted disproportionately in gaining help from their adoptive parents by comparison to their genetic counterparts. This was despite that the adopted children were more likely to be arrested, to have engaged in drug and alcohol abuse, have fewer years of schooling and a higher incidence of divorce. The researcher concluded that parents invested in their adopted children not because they favoured them more than their biological children, but because they needed more help; ‘the squeaky wheel gets the grease (Gibson, 2009). Research from the US also found that when faced with the choice of supporting their children or their parents, middle-aged adults generally tend to support children, who are perceived to have greater needs, although there was also evidence of support of parents who were disabled (Fingerman et al. 2011).

If the ‘why’ of kin selection is to increase inclusive fitness, this raises the proximate question of how individuals actually distinguish kin from non-kin? This is discussed next in relation to the ‘big mistake’ hypothesis.

The ‘Big-Mistake’ Hypothesis

From the above it is argued that evolution favours sharing by organisms that are related as this will increase the gene-pool. Richard Dawkins argues species developed rough heuristics, or rules of thumb, such as; “don’t have sex with members of the opposite sex you live with” (bad for replication); “share food with anything that moves in the nest in which you are sitting”; “be helpful and cooperative towards those you live with” (good for replication).⁵ It is argued along these lines that during the long sweep of the Pleistocene period humans lived in semi-nomadic bands of kin consisting of around 25 to 150 individuals where a high level of mutual cooperation could be expected because of the probability that these individuals who are close relatives will carry the same gene for altruism. Indeed it is argued that this forms a limit to the number of people with whom we can maintain stable relationships (Dunbar, 1992; Cosmides & Tooby, 2013).  The ‘big-mistake’ hypothesis refers to the argument that when participating in larger groups we make the mistake of acting altruistically towards strangers which offers no advantage for the replication of our genes.⁶

What then of cooperation in larger groups? Some make the argument that ‘birds of a feather stick together’, to describe how even in large complex societies there is a tendency for kin relations to stick close together. For instance, generations of immigrants from the same village in Europe continue to live in proximity to their old neighbours on the same street in New York. This practice is so pronounced that fifty years after the end of mass immigration, 50% would have to be relocated to achieve a random distribution).⁷ Added to this is the assertion that more successful friendships and marriages occur with others of similar cultural backgrounds.

Another possibility relates to phenotype-matching, which is linked to kin selection bias in that that resemblance in some attribute is taken as a cue to suggest resemblance in genetic makeup. Research conducted along these lines confirms that we prefer people who look the same with similar accents, whose faces are similar to ours (Debruine, 2002; 2004), or who emit the same odour as we do (Porter & Moore, 1981). Similarity matching helps explain the rather curious finding through archival research, that there is a greater than chance relation between a person’s name and the place they live in (Louis/ St. Louis), and a person’s name and their chosen occupation, where those named Denis or Denise are disproportionately more likely to become dentists (Pelham, Mirenberg & Jones, 2002).

According to the ’big mistake’ hypothesis, modules such as kin selection, which determined altruistic behaviour appropriate for the conditions prevailing in the Stone-Age, are drawn upon today in the vastly different world where one predominantly interacts with strangers, or when one is not being observed by others. Thus, the heuristic, “be helpful and cooperative towards those you live with” might today be extended by students to their flat-mates. Primatologist Frans de Waal argues,

All species rely on cooperation – from elephants to wolves and people – show group loyalty and helping tendencies. These tendencies evolved in the context of a close-knit social life in which they benefited relatives and companions able to repay the favour. The impulse to help was therefore never totally without survival value to the ones showing the impulse. But, as so often, the impulse became divorced from the consequences that shaped its evolution. This permitted its expression even when payoffs were unlikely, such as when strangers were beneficiaries. (De Waal, 2006: 15).

There is evidence for this in relation to the extension of the incest taboo to strangers. Although dated, Sheper, (1971), found that of 2,769 marriages in Israeli Kibbutzim, where non-kin groups of strangers were raised together, there had been no cases of intra-peer group marriage.

Evoked Culture

A favoured analogy is to liken the use of domain-specific module to a jukebox. Anyone still familiar with a jukebox will know that it contains a large number of records, with a programme that enables the customer to select specific records. The ‘jukebox’ envisaged by Cosmides and Tooby selects or ‘evokes’ a specific module to address a particular issue today, that initially developed to solve recurrent problems faced by our ancestors in the Pleistocene era. Moreoever, it is argued that ’jukeboxes’ are not uniform but vary from one place to another depending on the environmental conditions that prevailed in the ancestral environment, so that the ‘jukeboxes’ in Africa evoke a different set of modules to those in Asia, or Europe.

It is argued that different attitudes and social rules for food sharing are evoked by environmental factors (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992). Given their focus on the Pleistocene environment these authors are particularly interested in anthropological studies of groups who continue to live in small hunter-gatherer bands. They cite the study of the Ache by Caplan & Hill (1985), who found that the provision of meat was often in short supply and there was a forty percent chance that a hunter would return empty handed. However, the authors found that no matter how little meat there was, this was shared communally across the whole group, whilst plant food, which was plentiful was consumed within each nuclear family. Tooby and Cosmides (ibid.) argue that in situations of scarcity as in the situation with meat, one should see more sharing and more individualistic behaviour in those of plenty. They suggest that these different responses were governed by domain-specific modules that were evoked by the local situation. Moreover they also contend this provides a better explanation than does the argument that they are strategies that were handed down through the generations,

Because foraging and sharing are complex adaptive problems with a long evolutionary history, it is difficult to see how humans could have escaped evolving highly structured domain- specific psychological mechanisms for solving them. These mechanisms should be sensitive to local informational input, such as information regarding variance in the food supply. This input can act as a "switch," turning on and off different modes of activation of the appropriate domain-specific mechanisms. The experience of high variance in foraging success should activate rules of inference, memory retrieval cues, attentional mechanisms, and motivational mechanisms that allow bandwide sharing to occur and that make it appealing. (Cosmides & Tooby, 1994: 111)

Equipped with Stone-Age brains, trapped in modern skulls, does the invocation of similar routines explain why we share more with others when times are hard but are accused of being narcissistic and individualistic when times are good?

Reciprocal Altruism

From the above, the mainstream evolutionary argument offers the ‘big mistake hypothesis’ to explain why we might share with strangers with whom we do not share genes. Robert Trivers (1971) came up with the alternative explanation of reciprocal altruism, whereby A gives B something now because A recognizes that they may need to expect B to share with them at some time in the future. This suggests that individuals will share happily with each other if to do so yields long-run benefits to each that are superior to those yielded by each individual acting independently; summed up in the adage; “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine.” A typical illustration is that it makes sense for a hunter to reciprocally share his kill with others, because in many cases the kill will be too large for him to consume himself, and given it is likely to rot quickly, the remains will be lost unless shared with others. Additionally, he may only occasionally be successful and so it makes sense for hunters to develop a tradition of reciprocal sharing. During the hard winter of 2010, I witnessed drivers who collaborated to free a lorry in front of their cars, that had become stuck in snow, effectively blocking their passage. Their collaborative action makes sense for a number of reasons; it was necessary to free the lorry if their cars were to proceed; no-one acting alone could have freed the lorry; finally, they each reinforced their reputation that they are people who share.

According to this explanation, reciprocity involves some form of calculation, weighing in the balance and keeping score over time. If I help you and you do not reciprocate, then I may very well be upset and annoyed by your failure and may punish you by terminating our acquaintanceship, or perhaps go further to demand that you fulfil your obligation to me. The idea of reciprocity may seem most immediate in relation to gift-exchange, although it is a much wider principle, which is discussed in the next chapter under the heading of equality matching. It is now recognized that reciprocity is a characteristic shared by humans with other social species (Palagi & Cordoni, 2009). In one experiment, where individuals could see what others received, capuchin monkeys who were offered rewards of lower value than others either ignored the reward, refused to enter into exchange, or actively spurned it by throwing it away (de Waal, 2006: 45-49). Like sharing between kin, people are not formally taught the rules of reciprocity but seem to intuitively understand it. Mainstream theorists argue that this is because reciprocity is a domain-specific module that is part of our innate evolved psychology, which is evoked by the ‘jukebox’ in certain situations.

Studies suggest that reciprocity does not seem to be important with respect to close family but becomes progressively more important as social distance is increased. However, Marshall Sahlins (1972) argued that a form of generalized reciprocity exists within families so that while individual members may not seem to keep score of who does what in the daily round of give and take, they nonetheless do maintain a record and will complain if they feel that others are not pulling their weight.

Detecting Cheats

A problem for cooperation is that this can be undermined by lack of reciprocation, as where it bears a cost it can pay to cheat. Indeed cheating is common across species, ranging from birds that opportunistically dump their eggs in the nests of others to humans. Imagine a well-organised flat shared by students who have developed a rota where each is supposed to do one chore every week to support their communal life such as hoovering, cooking, washing-up and cleaning. One flatmate often skips their task and does a poor job when they eventually do get round to it, but when challenged, they vehemently deny that they were slacking. Lacking any form of common police, it is tempting for others to retaliate by cheating themselves. This is ultimately self-defeating, as if everyone cheats, then chaos may ensue.

Evolutionary theorists hypothesize that unless humans developed some kind of means to detect potential cheats, then over time, cheaters would have proliferated at the expense of co-operators by gaining the benefits of cooperation without incurring its costs. They argue that success in exchange was so important to our Stone Age ancestors, carrying such high fitness costs if it went wrong, that a domain specific module evolved to identify costs and benefits in order to spot cheats.⁸

Cosmides & Tooby (1989) tested this proposition using the Wason Selection Task, which is a test of formal logic. Their experiments confirmed that subjects are generally poor at formal logic, experiencing difficulty in detecting violation of abstract ‘if-then’ rules, such as the abstract problem shown in Figure 3.2. You should really have a go at doing this yourself if you want to understand the ins and outs of the argument. Briefly, the selection presents the same basic problem of a violation which is framed in two different contexts. In one context the violation is presented as an abstract logical problem while in the other, it is presented in the context of drinking alcohol. Subjects found the task much easier when the violation was related to the specific context of the calculation of costs and benefits in the drinking problem.⁹ The authors found that there was no need to coach subjects to use this rule and that the ability to do so was not associated with either familiarity nor logic (Sugiyama, Tooby and Cosmides, 2002).

Figure 3.2: Detecting Cheats: Humans are better at solving social exchange problems than abstract problems.

￼

Source: Adapted from Cosmides & Tooby (1989: 89).

Saad (2007) discusses cheating in relation to cross-cultural friendships and paying restaurant bills and argues that in Middle-Eastern culture it is common for a hotly contested dispute to arise over who should be accorded the privilege of paying the entire bill. He argues that within a stable group of friends such behaviour is based on a form of cheater detection, because on average, through time, all of the friends will end up paying roughly equivalent amounts (Saad, 2007: 120). This is evocative for me because of a painful episode some time ago when, as an impoverished PhD student, I shared a meal with fifteen colleagues, some of whom were not close friends, which lasted for two hours; it took another two hours for us to divide the bill into agreed proportions and pay it! One can only imagine the outcome if one of Saad’s people had gone to dinner that night with my friends! Perhaps our group wasn’t sufficiently stable! A very similar state of affairs to that described by Saad prevails in Irish and British pub culture, where friends are expected to stand their round of drinks. As strangers to this culture will know, this is not only about ensuring that everyone pays their share, but is also linked to prestige, given that all are expected to stick to the pace!

Research has found that when presented with a Prisoner’s Dilemma game, cooperative species such as rats will adopt a ‘tit-for-tat’ strategy as a ‘fast and frugal’ heuristic as a means to limit the damage incurred from the actions, or inaction, of cheats who on being discovered are avoided .¹⁰ However it is argued that cooperation amongst humans goes well beyond this as the ‘default response’ to strangers, such that anti-social behaviour is the exception that proves the rule.¹¹

Although the concept of cheater-detection is well accepted within evolutionary theory, it should be mentioned that the existence of a ‘domain-specific’ module for cheating in humans is disputed by cultural theorists. For instance, Jesse Prinz accuses Cosmides and Tooby (1989) of faulty reasoning by arguing that they put the argument backwards. He argues that rather than being innate we learn rules concerning social obligations such as cheater detection from being punished for our disobedience.  Moreover, while our capacity to think about obligations is learned, our ability to track conditionals such as  ‘If A occurs then so does B’ is “probably innate” (Prinz, 2013, 316).

Sharing and Costly Signalling

Costly signalling is a controversial, but increasingly accepted explanation¹² which links sharing to reputation. Costly signalling is linked to sexual selection, through the idea that the hunter shares with others to increase his reputation and so will come to the attention of potential suitors. Reputation can only be increased in relation to what Zahavi calls honest signals, which are difficult, if not impossible to reproduce by imitation. In sharing his meat, the hunter foregoes his own benefit. Zahavi contends that the otherwise useless large and extravagant tail of the male peacock is an example of an honest signal. This is impossible for other peacocks to imitate as it is so unwieldy and useless and so it demonstrates its possessor’s genetic fitness. Other honest signals include the massive bone-structure of the classic ‘he-man’ face, such as that of Arnold Schwarzenegger, where the presence of so much redundant bone is taken as the “honest signal” that its owner has good genes.

In relation to commodity exchange, money can operate as an honest signal; if I have $10,000 in the bank then I can afford to give away $5,000 and have plenty to spare, but if you only have $5000 you cannot afford to give it all away. (Iredale, van Vugt & Dunbar, 2008). If one decides to ‘splash the cash’ it is obviously important have an audience (Low & Heinen, 1993). In a study conducted some years ago it was found that women tend to pay more attention to information about a man’s wealth, status, and commitment and men tend to emphasis these traits in their signals to women (Waynforth & Dunbar, 1995).

Market Pricing

From the above, the mainstream argument is that humans come pre-programmed to engage in market trading, as we are equipped with the capacity to detect free riders. Moreover, proponents contend not uncontroversially, that a domain-specific module to trade with others enables markets to arise spontaneously.

Needless to say, a specialized social exchange logic and associated circuits allows gains in trade to be identified by individuals, trades to be arranged, cheaters to be excluded, and hence markets to emerge spontaneously (Cosmides & Tooby, 1994: 330).

Some might argue this to be a speculative leap too far. However there is evidence which suggests that the capacity for fairness in exchange developed well before the Pleistocene period. Market pricing involves money exchange, and a growing body of research suggests that the symbolic meaning of money has far-reaching implications for individualistic behaviour. In one experiment, individuals who were primed with cues associated with money exhibited heightened behaviours associated with individualism and self-reliance. The expectation that others can fend for themselves has been found not only to reduce helping behaviour towards others but is extended to unethical treatment (Piff et al., 2012). In a further experiment monetary primes fuelled a sense of entitlement and narcissism Those rich in resources interpreted their riches as the fruit of their own efforts and blamed those who were poor for their plight (Piff et al., 2013). In another experiment those primed to think about money pursued more individualistic goals and derived less meaning from spending time with their children (Kushlev et al., 2012).

Heuristics and Questions of Rationality

The discussion of heuristics in this section is necessarily long because there are huge stakes involved as to whether or not the market is “natural” to the extent that we humans are naturally equipped with domain-specific modules to trade in the market-place. This is the argument advanced by Cosmides and Tooby and by Gerd Gigerenzer which is used by neoliberals and libertarians to promote a policy of laissez-faire. On the other hand the research programme conducted by Tversky and Kahneman (1974) found that humans are poor decision makers. Their arguments were subsequently taken up by Richard Thaler who developed the concept of ‘nudge’ economics (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008) which in turn influenced Kahneman (2011) to argue that government should follow a policy of ‘liberal paternalism’. The following discussion aims to provide a snapshot of some key arguments and as an invitation for you to read the literature on this for yourself.

To recap, the mainstream evolutionary argument, that we have a well-developed capacity to engage in reciprocal exchange, are pre-programmed with the ability to detect cheats, and are primed by money to think in a more individualistic and calculative manner, adds up to the idea that humans are naturally equipped to engage in market exchange. This argument is as controversial as it is consequential. It is consequential in that it supports the explanation originally developed by Adam Smith, that order can arise spontaneously if individuals are enabled to follow their self interest to ‘truck and trade’ in the marketplace. It is also controversial in informing anarcho-capitalist and neo-libertarian arguments for laissez-faire, which are enthusiastically endorsed by the likes of Peter Thiel and Elon Musk.

Cosmides and Tooby found an ally in Gerd Gigerenzer (1991) for whom evoked domain-specific modules operate as ‘fast and frugal’ heuristics to inform many of the routine decisions we have to make daily, rapidly and often unconsciously. Influenced by the work of Herbert Simon on ‘bounded rationality’, Gigerenzer and his team were motivated to understand the question of how humans employ heuristics to solve ill-defined real world problems. They found that heuristics such as  ‘take the first’,  ‘take the best’, ‘satisficing’, ‘Imitate the majority and ‘Imitate the successful’, can be successful in situations where a more methodical and logical approach would falter. For instance, Gigerenzer (1996) argues for the successful use of ‘Take the Best’, where we ignore some information in order to make quick decisions with little search for information but nonetheless, higher accuracy. Reading about this, washing-powder came to my mind because I freeze when I am in the supermarket aisle an am faced with dozens of very similar-looking alternatives. Which one to choose? I’ve been told to buy something for a ‘coloured’ wash so ignore all the powders that say they are for whites and then rely on one other criterion, price!

The argument that we are naturally equipped to engage in the market carries implications far beyond a concern with the Pleistocene. Influenced by Gigerenzer’s argument that individuals base their decisions on frequencies, and not probabilities, Cosmides and Tooby (1992, 1994) questioned the research programme into heuristics and biases conducted by Tversky and Kahneman ( 1974) which found that humans are poor decision makers who do not reason rationally in the manner presumed by classical economics, who are prone to use simplifying heuristics that lead to consistent biases, leading to a form of predictable irrationality (Thaler, 2015), when making economic choices. Tversky and Kahneman (1974) explored the extent to which real human beings conform to the model of Bayesian rationality built into the models constructed by economists, finding that instead we often resort to a now well-known set of heuristics such as anchoring and adjustment, availability and representativeness, to name a few. From such findings one might conclude that markets are artificial and complex constructions that humans are poorly equipped to engage in. However it should be mentioned that the libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek whose argument is discussed later in this chapter similarly asserted that the market is artificial but on the ground of an argument based on cultural group selection.

Cosmides and Tooby (1992) argued that the definition of rationality used by Tversky and Kahneman (1974) definition of rationality did not reflect how humans actually evaluate choices and calculate outcomes. In evolutionary terms, they contended that Tversky and Kahneman had mistakenly assumed that rationality is a domain-general capability rather than consisting of a number of domain-specific heuristics. This mistaken presumption had then led them to test the extent to which consumers use Bayesian reasoning in their experiments leading to the finding that humans are poor decision-makers. For Cosmides and Tooby there was something fundamentally wrongheaded about this, arguing that even bumblebees (their italics) are capable of performing the probabilistic induction that according to Kahneman and Tversky, humans are too limited to perform.

Cosmides and Tooby (1992) put this purported anomaly down to the method used by Kahneman and Tversky in their experiments, which employed Bayesian judgements of probability as the basis for judging decision making. As they saw it this was misguided, as humans are not good at gauging Bayesian probabilities as in the Pleistocene era they would have been much better attuned to using frequencies rather than probabilities to form solutions to the problems they encountered. Thus in their view, our hunter-gatherer Stone Age ancestors were not concerned with calculating the probability of the occurrence of a single event, which either happens, or does not, but instead, when confronted with a mass of detail, they organized this into a set of frequencies of the occurrence of real events.

The above argument by Cosmides and Tooby (1992) can be illustrated through a simple example. In Thinking fast and Slow Daniel Kahneman (2011) describes an experiment where ‘Steve” is described to subjects as shy, mild-mannered and retiring.  The experimenter then asks subjects if this person is more likely to be a librarian or a farmer?  Most subjects replied ‘librarian’. Kahneman argues from this that people tend to focus on the stereotype invoked by ‘librarian’ and thus ignore the statistical information that there are twenty times more farmers than librarians. What is your view? On reading this my thoughts were firstly, that I don't have a clue as to how many librarians or farmers there are, and secondly, that yes, it is easier to think of examples that are representative of a stereotype than to think in terms of probability.  Cosmides and Tooby (1996) argue that the problem with the Steve experiment is that humans did not evolve to answer questions that are framed as one-shot problems and would have performed much better had the problem been framed in terms of frequencies.  If this were the case, subjects would first have been asked what proportion of the population of farmers they would consider are shy, and then what proportion of farmers are mild-mannered and so on, and would then repeat the se questions in relation to librarians. They argue that the results of their own study which followed this procedure support their argument that subjects make better decision when they are supplied with information about frequencies (Cosmides & Tooby, 1996, 20, Hertwig and Gigerenzer, 1999).

Rationality Wars

Tversky and Kahneman (1996) did not engage directly with the criticism of their method made by Cosmides and Tooby that are discussed above but rather with Gerd Gigerenzer (1991, 2004) who made a similar argument. They responded that Gigerenzer had ‘erroneously characterized their normative position as ‘narrowly Bayesian’¹³, given that just two of the twelve biases reported on by Tversky and Kahneman (1974) involved subjective probabilities. I might add on their behalf, that at least a part of the research programme followed by Tversky and Kahneman (1974) was necessarily based on Bayesian logic as the intention was to discover whether or not individuals conform to the assumptions made by neoclassical economists. For instance, the arguments that agents will act to maximize their subjective expected utility was developed by Milton Friedman and other social scientists at the Chicago School of Economics as a universal theory of rational decision-making. Secondly, Tversky and Kahneman (1996) argued that Gigerenzer seriously misrepresented their research programme by claiming that they had maintained that the use of judgemental heuristics is independent of context and of content when in fact they did take account of context.

The above argument later hardened into two camps constituting what came to be called the ‘rationality wars’ (Samuels, 2002) with Tversky and Kahneman’s argument described as the ‘glass half empty’ view compared to that of the ‘glass half-full” from Gigerenzer. There is insufficient space here to do justice to the arguments for and against which would require a book-length treatment. In terms of influence, while Kahneman and Gigerenzer each published a book in the same year, Thinking Fast and Slow (Kahneman, 2011) quickly became a public best-seller, while Gigerenzer (2011) has received much less attention (Gigerenzer, 2025). However, just as some of the heuristics identified by Tversky and Kahneman (1974) have been challenged, It seems that neither do the ‘fast and frugal’ heuristics popularised by Cosmides and Tooby and Gigerenzer work as well as they might. For instance, in a study where subjects were asked to judge two baskets of goods, each of which contains many different items, research has found that rather than considering the value of each in turn and then aggregating these values, subjects quickly calculated an average value for each entire assortment as the basis for our comparison.

While this may appear as a sensible operation of a ‘fast and frugal’ heuristic, investigators also found that their subjects were willing to pay more for a small set of high-quality foods than for the same set with additional lower-quality items included (Hsee, 1998), an irrational effect that has also been found for the choices made by macaque monkeys (Kralik et al., 2012)! Returning to the example of washing powder I mentioned earlier, my reliance on price did not work out very well, as when I returned home it seems that I should have also taken some other facts into account when deciding! When I did a little more digging into the use of the Take the Best strategy, I found a study which reported that this is not often used by subjects and that when it is, there is a lot of variability in the strategy used, leading the authors raise doubts as to whether or not this heuristic offered a ‘plausible and pervasive model of behaviour’ (Newell & Shanks, 2003).

To summarize the above it seems that 1. From the research programme conducted by Tversky and Kahneman we are poor decision makers when decisions are framed as probabilities and 2. From the research conducted by Gigerenzer, we can sometimes make good decisions using fast and frugal heuristics . While unequivocal support for either side is lacking, both explanations agree on one thing, which is that humans are not good at making decisions based on the calculation of Bayesian probabilities. The ‘rationality wars’ involve high stakes for those on either side of the argument. From Kahneman (2011) some argue the need for government to follow a policy of ‘libertarian paternalism’ that aims to ‘nudge’ consumers to act more rationally, who are otherwise vulnerable to exploitation through the wiles of marketers. Gigerenzer (2025) on the other hand argues that this can be used as a smokescreen, pointing to the behaviour of some bank executives who were responsible for the Great Financial Crash (GFC) in 2008, who later sought to get themselves off the hook for their unconscionable behaviour by arguing that this had been influenced by the operation of unconscious biases, such that they had no control over the decisions they made. More consequential is that Gigerenzer’s argument for ‘fast and frugal’ heuristics lends support to Cosmides and Tooby (1992) assertion that humans are ‘hard-wired’ to engage in the market. From a review of literature to date, this point remains unproven and the issue thus remains unresolved and probably will continue to be so indefinitely.

Different rules for different domains?

The idea that specific domain specific programmes are selected to fit different conditions suggests that we unconsciously select the kin selection program when dealing with people we consider family; the give and take of reciprocal altruism when dealing with friends and acquaintances; and market pricing when dealing with strangers.

Expectation to share freely with kin

The expectation to share freely among kin is confirmed by research across a range of societies (Fiske, 1992). One study of Hong Kong residents confirmed that communal sharing predominates among kin and close friends, whereas relations with ‘hi-bye’ friends were conducted according to norms of reciprocity (Joy, 2001). The expectation that we share freely with kin is confirmed by a joke attributed to the comedian Woody Allen, who would take a watch from his pocket, check the time, and then say, “It’s an old family heirloom [pause] My grandfather sold it to me on his deathbed”. The joke works because market exchange seems doubly inappropriate in this context, where a person is dying and breaks the taboo, that grandparents share with their grandchildren.

From a kin selection perspective, the general thrust of sharing with kin is that over billions of individual decisions the outcome should confirm Hamilton’s rule (rb - c > 0). Imagine for a moment (perish the thought!) that a family member asks you to donate something significant to them such as bone marrow or a kidney. In relation to the rule, different substances incur different levels of cost; for example, donation of sperm or blood samples are not arduous, or life-threatening, whilst bone-marrow transplants are much more intrusive and painful and 1 in every 1500 suppliers of a kidney donors dies. It is thus perhaps surprising, in light of Hamilton’s rule, that the majority of kidney donors volunteer to give as soon as they hear of the need. Because organ transplants usually involve kin, the emotional connection between parent and child or brother and sister tends to preclude economic quantitative calculation. There are exceptions, which perhaps prove the rule. Hyde (1999) tells the story of a woman who participated in a Minnesota study of organ donation who was to receive a kidney from her daughter, but who said that she would donate the kidney if her mother bought her an expensive coat! This is what the mother said about the daughter’s behaviour:

She’s a very selfish girl and not very mature in many ways…She’s not used to doing things for people. She didn’t think her life should be constricted in any way..She wanted a fur coat. It really shook me up. It was unnerving. She was reluctant and unenthusiastic..She’s very calculating. (Hyde, 1999: 70).

The above example points up two important things in relation to sharing. Firstly, it is socially conventional that individuals act altruistically, or selflessly, when it comes to family. Selflessness is not demanded by Hamilton’s equation, which is based on calculation at the level of the gene and requires that in general terms fitness rewards outweigh the costs (0.5 X Fur Coat – loss of kidney > 0). However, from the mother’s point of view and from that of the court of public opinion, the daughter should have donated her kidney freely and without reserve. From the perspective of the reproduction of the gene-complex that underlies caring, the daughter’s behaviour is understandable; she is fertile; her mother is not; there is a chance that she might die during the operation and so will fail to reproduce. Following kin selection, if everyone behaved selflessly in such situations, this might ultimately have a negative effect on inclusive fitness. Despite this our social conventions remain intact. One might imagine that if the daughter had instead asked her mother for money, this would have been even more insulting! On the other hand, perhaps the mother would have treated the request for a coat differently, if the donor was a stranger?

Thinking within the logic of market pricing, economists assume that goods are fungible and are interchangeable with other goods of the same asset type. This logic breaks down in several ways. The endowment effect (Kahneman et al., 1991), explains the pervasive tendency for us to value what we possess, whether this is an item of clothing, a watch, or a car, more than its market worth. Secondly, individuals consistently refuse to accept offers sometimes well over the market price for goods that have been bequeathed to them or given to them as gifts.¹⁴ Although this has been demonstrated by experimental research (McGraw, Tetlock & Kristell, 2003, Robert Grafton-Small (1992) illustrates how to him the inestimable worth of his grandfather’s bow-tie versus its negligible market value,

When my grandfather died and the time came to divide up his estate, we found two bow ties amongst his personal effects. One, worn every day until his final illness, was in tatters and ripe just for throwing away, but the other was still in its original wrapper, the colours unfaded and the fabric intact. For all sorts of reason, some spoken, some felt, the rest not clear even now, it seemed fitting that I should take the brand-new bow time and likewise dispose of the tatters though I’d never owned such a strip of silk and could not manage the knots.

Since then, however, I have made a point of learning and whist this red and blue ribbon is bound to be my first, it is no longer my only bow tie, for nowadays I buy them on my own account. I think of my grandfather, all the same, whenever his choice is around my neck and I must look into the mirror to make good the knot (Grafton-Small, 1992: 1).

So far as Robert is concerned the tie is unique, irreplaceable and priceless. In commercial terms it is ‘second-hand’ and virtually valueless.

Switching Between Programs: Why the poor share more.

If the human mind is structured like a jukebox or a Swiss Army Knife, then one should be able to summon appropriate programs to suit the demands of different contexts.  Cosmides & Tooby (1992: 215) argue that when one looks to the experience of groups where foraging is important, sharing of resources with the whole group is likely to occur in situations where there is a high degree of variability and uncertainty in obtaining them from one day to the next. In contrast they will be less likely to share and more likely to consume goods individually, or as smaller family units when resources are plentiful.  

Given that In today’s society the poor suffer from an irregular supply of resources, if we accept the above argument then we might reasonably assume that the poor will share widely with others when they are lucky enough to possess resources, in the expectation that others may reciprocate at some point in the future.  Piff et al., (2010) disagreed with this argument to assert that individuals in a state of poverty will prioritize their self interest over the welfare of others because they are more exposed to threats and have less control over their lives.  In contrast they found that individuals from lower social classes are generous and helpful towards others.  Through an argument similar to that advanced by Cosmides and Tooby (1992), the authors reasoned that the generosity they observed might be explained as an adaptation by the poor to their environment, which is more hostile than that confronted by those who are wealthy.

Sharing with Strangers in our Midst

If one accepts the argument for kin selection, then a tricky question arises as to how kin are to exchange with those strangers who become affines and are thus related by marriage. While in Western culture, the strains imposed by the introduction of new family members is sent up in films such as Meet the Fockers, there is little published research in this area. This subject is addressed by Joanna Overing (1992), who conducted her research amongst the Piaroa tribe who dwell in the Orinoco basin in Venezuela and live in large communal huts of 50-60 people wherein relations are cooperative and tranquil and where sharing is the predominant means of distribution, with frequent instances of passive sharing between members. The Piaroa are extremely suspicious and distrustful of outsiders who are competitors for scarce resources and potentially violent adversaries. The Piaroa must exchange with these strangers for needed items, but this is regarded as so potentially dangerous that only a ruatu, or headman with magical powers, can engage in it. However, such dangerous outsiders are accepted into the group as marriage partners. Those inside the community must treat these affines, or kin by marriage, in special ways,

Within the community the danger of necessary affines – father-in-law, brother-in-law, and son-in-law; “was averted through a process of daily productive living that had the effect over time of transforming the dangerous affinal relationship from one of exchange to one of sharing. In the Piaroa view the principle of difference was too dangerous a matter to play out in any overt manner within the context of the highly informal and intimate relations of community life. The cannibal other must become nurturant kin. (Overing, 1992: 194).

Overing found that the Piaroa regarded it as the moral duty of affines to work at achieving friendship, a process which potentially dangerous male in-laws enhance by the continual offering of small gifts to others.¹⁵ Large gifts were to be avoided because of the potential danger that violence might arise from non-reciprocation. Gradually, these potentially dangerous foreigners became ‘of a kind’ with the community, involved in having children, caring for others through daily work, sharing its products and eating together. Generosity in sharing is an important social principle and in some areas an obligation. In hunting, fishing and shopping – the person appropriated mainly for the collectivity. As Overing describes it:

Without the tranquil and cooperative relations of good community life one could not be productive; and without production there was no community. (ibid.: 194).

Overing’s description illustrates not only the importance of sharing in such small communities, but also its hazardous nature. Given that there is no written legal code, nor any police force to intervene in disputes, any conflict, however minor, can at the least be very unsettling and possibly disastrous for the entire community. In this context the prohibitions against passive sharing and the exchange of large gifts with affines are two elements of a sophisticated system to ensure that conflict does not arise. It should be noted that this example can just as easily be used to support an argument from cultural group selection, which is described later.

Self-Interest and Selfishness

A related but bigger question to the above is that given the tendency to share within such small groups and to be wary of strangers, even if we assume the existence of a domain-specific module for market-pricing, how is large-scale cooperation which is a prerequisite for the development of a market system to come into being? Homo homini, lupus’ (‘man is wolf to man, is an ancient saying which assumes that human are individualistic, selfish, aggressive and asocial beings. This generally seems to fit with the mainstream evolutionary account of exchange, which is based on self-interest, whether this is the self-interest of the gene or of the individual person. The idea that society is a form of social contract, voluntarily entered into by autonomous, rational, individuals can be traced to John Hobbes (1651). An extreme example of this view is reflected in Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s oft-quoted statement that there are individuals and families, but no such thing as society.¹⁶

If we accept that this is the nature of humans then sharing presumes the prior existence of private property, which is underpinned by individual property rights, enshrined in law. Belk defines sharing in this vein as, “the act and process of distributing what is ours to others for their use and/or the act and process of receiving and taking something from others for our use’ (Belk, 2007: 126). Belk’s definition refers to sharing of a tangible good that is recognised in law as the private property of one person to another person who requests it. Within this perspective, one shares one’s private property with others only to the extent that it is in one’s self-interest to do so. Added to this is the assumption, that civilization constitutes a thin veneer over a competitive and ultimately selfish animal nature. In this view any alliance based on shared or common interest is unlikely to be preserved for long. This parlous state of affairs is exemplified in the idea of the tragedy of the commons, described below.

The Tragedy of the Commons

The idea that sharing is ultimately determined by individual self-interest has captured the imagination of many scholars, leading Hardin (1968) to develop the thesis of the ‘tragedy of the commons’. Hardin asks us to suppose the situation where a number of animal herders share a common pasture. If one assumes that the herders are individuals who are motivated solely by self-interest, then each herder is entitled to consume the commons without personal cost. Hardin surmises each herder will seek to increase the size of his or her herd so as to maximize their personal gain from the land. The tragedy occurs as a consequence of these individuals acting rationally in pursuance of their narrow self-interest. This is because eventually the population of animals becomes so large and the land so depleted by over-grazing, that the resource is ruined and the animal population collapses.

The Tragedy of the Commons is a powerful argument to explain the despoliation of our shared natural heritage. Modern fishing is a case in point, being described as a war against fish on an industrial scale. Vessels nowadays are large and fast, equipped with GPS tracking and FAD’s (fish-attracting-devices), with the ability to haul in fifty tons of sea animals in a few minutes. Although this may seem to epitomize efficiency, it is also a fundamentally wasteful process; In pursuit of its quarry, the average shrimp-trawling operation throws 80-90% of its catch overboard; 145 species other than tuna are caught as what is euphemistically known as ‘bycatch’.¹⁷ The degree of overfishing is such that the bluefin tuna, reputedly the world’s most endangered fish, is thought to be close to extinction. Paradoxically, it is claimed that due to weak regulation, rather than being stopped, fishing for bluefin tuna continues apace, as companies such as Mitsubishi which has a reported 40% of the market, compete to build frozen stockpiles ahead of the time when this fish becomes extinct.¹⁸

Culture and Memes

A number of authors across the natural and social sciences argue that kin selection and reciprocal altruism are insufficient to explain large-scale human cooperation and that culture is important to understanding human development and sharing. The concept of the meme developed by Richard Dawkins (1976) acknowledges that humans are fundamentally mimetic beings. Memes are basic units of imitation that propagate themselves through human brains and behaviour by means of mimesis, as one subject imitates another. In a manner analogous to genes, memes battle with each other in the cultural struggle for survival and dominance, seeking to propagate themselves at the expense of others across the entire cultural spectrum, from science to business, music, manners, clothing and so on. Some memes, such as the trend for the Furby, are transient, while others, such as religious laws, can persist for thousands of years. Dawkins devotes much time and energy to discussing the potency of memes related to religion, such as belief in God and blind faith. He argues that in order to evolve, memes must possess three qualities: fidelity, being preserved more or less intact, even after a long chain of copies has been bade; fecundity, being able to generate more than one copy of themselves and finally, longevity.

The concept of the meme has been critiqued by the argument that cultural transmission does not involve the replication of gene-like entities. Critics argue that if one wishes to understand why some “memes” spread more successfully than others then it is important to consider this in relation to evolved psychology. For example, sweet potatoes spread throughout New Guinea during the 1700s because they,

have higher yields and grow at higher altitudes than yams, the previous staple. People noticed this and avidly adopted the new crop. Here we have a causal theory that links evolved psychology (people like to be well fed) with the preference of one cultural variant over another (Henrich et al., 2008: 128/9).

Some argue that in order to understand questions such as why some religious beliefs spread whilst others fail, or in some groups rather than others it is necessary to construct a fully-fledged theory of cultural evolution. This second major theory is outlined next.

Discussion

According to the mainstream argument our cognitive capacities were programmed for life during the Era of Evolutionary Adaptiveness I(EEA) in small, face-to-face settings when humans lived in semi-nomadic bands of 25–150 people, many of whom were close relatives. They argue that this is when domain-specific modules developed such as that which determines the limit to the number of people with whom we can maintain stable relationships (Dunbar, 1992; Cosmides &Tooby, 2013).

Authors argue that heuristics such as the endowment effect are domain-specific modules inherited from the Pleistocene period when humans learned over thousands of generations when humans lived close to the margins, when resources were scarce and as the old saying goes, “a bird in the hand was worth two in the bush”. It is argued that explains why today we often act irrationally in the economic sense by valuing an item that we own more than the same item that is for sale on the market (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979). Strahilevitz and Loewenstein, (1998) developed this to argue for a ‘length-of-ownership’ effect by finding that even owning an object for as little as twenty minutes made a difference with respect to psychological ownership. This relates to loss aversion, whereby we weigh losses more heavily than gains, so that we are cognitively biased to hold onto what we have and to weight losses more heavily than gains.

A similar argument is made to explain today’s ‘epidemics’ of obesity as ‘driven’ by our apparently insatiable demand for fats and sugars which we are incapable to resist. In this view a domain-specific programme to load up on these foods was adaptive during the EEA when such foods were scarce but this no longer the case in society today. Arguments made along similar lines contend that many of the difficulties encountered by people in a mass-market context today stem from this.

Scientific Reflexivity: Explanations for the Endowment Effect

If you have ever played Jenga then you will know how easy it can be to be overconfident by assuming that the structure you are working with has firmer foundations than it actually has. Theorists too often make similar assumptions by stacking arguments one on top of another on shaky grounds to make ‘and-so’ claims. Due to the reflexive nature of science it is almost impossible to find any claim that is not contested, that has been established absolutely and beyond doubt. Take loss aversion for instance, which is one of the most accepted ideas in consumer research and the social sciences. What is the evidence for the argument that loss aversion is a domain-specific module?

Kahneman and Tversky (1979; Kahneman et al.,1990) argued that the endowment effect results from the avoidance of the psychological pain involved in disposing of an object one owns. Weaver and Frederick (2012) later argued that price is the determining factor by arguing that buyers and sellers will approach a transaction from different perspectives and so will often have different reference prices, or ideas about how much something is worth. In this understanding there is no mention of pain or of any ‘domain specific module’ but simply that buyers don’t want to pay more than they think an item is worth, while sellers don’t want to sell for less than that item’s actual market price.

Although Weaver and Frederick do not mention the evolutionary context, their explanation seems to tie loss aversion to markets which seem to have arisen relatively late on in evolution. But what if endowment effects and loss aversion run deeper and have more ancient origins? Endowment effects have been discovered in human infants (Harbaugh, Krause, and Vesterlund 2001). Beyond this it is now known that social animals possess a keen sense of fairness and unfairness (Brosnan & de Waal, 2003) and that endowment and loss aversion effects have been discovered in capuchin monkeys (Lakshminaryanan, et al. 2008). Given that the authors attribute their finding to a common ancestor capuchins shared with humans at least thirty million years ago, this antedates the contention by Cosmides and Tooby (1989) contention that domain-specific modules for kin selection, reciprocal altruism and market pricing developed during the Pleistocene period, which began around three million years ago.

Given that as well as adults, young children and monkeys are now found to be susceptible to this bias, surely there is now watertight evidence to support the idea that there is a domain-specific module for the endowment effect? Much, if not most of the research in this area has been conducted in the laboratory, leading Apicella et al. (2014) to conduct a naturalistic experiment with two hunter-gatherer groups in Tanzania, one of which lived relatively close to a market setting while the other lived in an isolated setting. The authors discovered that the group living close to the market setting exhibited the endowment effect while the isolated group did not. Given this they suggest that their results, which go against the conclusions reached by the vast majority of research in this area, suggest that the endowment effect is not universal among humans. However they temper this by mentioning that it is possible that members of the isolated group possessed the cognitive mechanisms necessary for the endowment effect to operate but that there was no necessity for these to be triggered in the specific environment where these individuals lived. The authors conclude that environment and culture play a key role in relation to the endowment effect. This calls for sensitivity to the importance of contextual factors in relation to which it is interesting that it is now argued that laboratory research into the endowment effect has generally been too black and white and has not allowed sufficient scope for different responses depending on the context (Gall ). in some situations losses will sometimes weigh more heavily for an individual than gains but that sometimes losses and gains will have similar psychological impact and at other times gains will be weighted more heavily than losses.

What then for the existence of a domain-specific module for the endowment effect and loss aversion. At time of writing it seems that the jury is still out and probably will be. The above discussion of the endowment effect which is regarded as one of the most robust findings in social science, should give us pause before we begin to stack up arguments based on more dubious bases such as purported measures of intelligence that are used to “naturalise” differences between groups. The research studies described above remind of the ingenuity of researchers in finding new avenues to explore problems. They also point to the dynamic reflexive nature of science which is a process of ‘creative destruction’ where assertions made on the basis of findings are necessarily opened to challenge, debate and revision on theoretical and methodological grounds and where in the end, attempts to look into the far distant past inevitably involve speculation.

Discussion now turns to arguments for the second main stream of theory relating to cultural group selection and multilevel selection.

Cultural Group Selection and Multilevel Selection

Group selection was at one time the dominant evolutionary theory. For example, it was argued that herds of animals evolved to conserve their food supply over the long term. However, observation demonstrated that these claims could not be supported by the facts so that from the 1960s, group selection came to be displaced by the powerful arguments from kin selection and reciprocal altruism discussed above that constitute the mainstream position today.

New life was injected into arguments for group selection in 1978, when George Price argued that group selection can form part of an explanation based on multilevel selection. Multilevel selection is a sub-species of dual-inheritance theory, which argues that genes and culture co-evolve. That cultural group selection theorists refer to these interchangeably acknowledges the role played by genetic and individual selection, while holding that the group is the defining organism (Sober & Wilson 2000). Theorists argue that this explains why individuals are observed to readily sacrifice their lives for the sake of the group. Group selection is by no means a cuddly alternative to the mainstream position, as from a moral perspective; “organisms are frequently adapted to prey upon and compete aggressively with other organisms, so no less can be expected of groups.” (Sober & Wilson, 2000: 264).

As its name implies, multilevel selection theorists argue that selection takes place at three different levels: between genes, in the inter-individual context and within groups. The operation of these different levels is like nested matryoshka Russian dolls, with selection at each lower level, effectively undermining that above. Thus through kin selection an individual will sacrifice their personal fitness to increase inclusive fitness, while the next level group solidarity is undermined because cheaters gain the benefits worked for by honest citizens cost-free, and consequently honest citizens are rendered less fit. Selection between groups works to the benefit of those which are most cooperative, because each helper adds to the inclusive fitness of the group. (Price, 1978; Boyd & Richerson, 2005: 202). From this, multilevel selection theorists argue that groups of honest citizens are have greater fitness than do groups of cheaters. ￼

Figure 3.3 Multilevel Selection

Adapted from Wilson & Wilson (2008: 382), Figure 2.

Figure 3.3 Multilevel Selection

Adapted from Wilson & Wilson (2008: 382), Figure 2.

Re-Contexualising Sharing

Rather than focus on self-interest or selfishness, group selection theorists accentuate human sociability and cooperation. For instance, research by primatologist Frans de Waal discovered that humans hold principles of reciprocity and fairness in common with chimpanzees and capuchin monkeys (De Waal, 2006: 45-49). In one experiment, where individuals could see what others received, those monkeys who were offered rewards of lower value either ignored the reward, refused to engage in exchange, or actively spurned it by throwing it away (De Waal, 2006: 45-49). Indeed, it seems that humans also share this capacity with wolves (Palagi & Cordoni, 2009).

Drawing on the above evidence Frans DeWaal has mounted a critique of the assumptions implicit in the aphorism, homo homini lupus (‘man is wolf to man’), on the ground that , ‘this fails to do justice to canids which are the most gregarious and cooperative animals on the planet’ (ibid, 5). Instead, he argues that we humans share what we regard as our noblest instincts, for empathy and fairness in common with other social animals such as wolves. In his view it is misplaced to consider morality, as prominent philosophers such as Hobbes and social theorists such as Freud did, as a uniquely human property that consists of a thin veneer of humane civilisation over an irrational, selfish ‘animal’ core.

That said, Michael Tomasello whose theory is discussed below argues that although other species possess the concept of fairness, the principle of reciprocity is not so well developed in capuchin monkeys as it is in humans, and that even in human infants, this takes some time to become organized (Tomasello, et al., 2012).

Taking the perspective of group cultural selection enables consideration of an alternative frame to consider sharing to that offered by Russell Belk who describes this as, ‘the act and process of distributing what is ours to others for their use and/or the act and process of receiving and taking something from others for our use’ (Belk 2007: 126). A definition might instead be developed along the lines of, what is mine is yours’, as even in post-industrial societies a lot of sharing does not involve private property, as for instance when we share public spaces with others. Consider the situation where a group of infants in a day-care nursery are provided with a selection of toys to play with. When one starts playing with a toy car, this is not legally his or hers, but nonetheless, because it is in his her possession, the question of sharing arises when another child intrudes to demand they have the car. This enables us to consider the two sides of sharing; constituted by active sharing that occurs when child A spontaneously offers the car she possesses to B without being asked, whereas passive sharing, occurs when B requests A to give her the car. If B demands the car from A, or obtains the car from A by force and then keeps it, this form of appropriation is closer to robbery than to sharing. Instead, the argument from multilevel selection invites us to think from the perspective of the group along the lines of “what is ours”. This raises the question of what forms of sharing existed before the institution of the property rights we generally take from granted today?

Whose Chicken? From the Big Mistake to the Interdependence Hypothesis

The argument for group cultural selection was captivatingly illustrated by David Sloan Wilson, based on research by William Muir. Muir was confronted with the problem of how to increase egg production by chickens. He tested two methods, drawing his sample in all conditions from siblings. One sample consisted of a “supergroup” consisting of the top layers in different groups: the second comprised the most productive group, irrespective of the production level of the individuals within it. Wilson explains why the second method was more successful,

Natural selection within groups is sensitive only to relative fitness, relentlessly favouring hens who lay more eggs than their neighbours. The first method favoured the nastiest hens who achieved their productivity by suppressing the productivity of other hens. After six generations, Muir had produced a nation of psychopaths, who plucked and murdered each other in their incessant attacks. No wonder egg productivity plummeted! It would be hard to imagine a more graphic example of what I have called "the original problem" throughout this series of blogs; traits that are "for the good of the group" are not always locally advantageous within the group and require a process of group-level selection to evolve (Wilson, 2007, 34).¹⁹

Despite that not all were top producers, the most productive groups were those dominated by cooperative relations between chickens.

From this, while acknowledging some aspects of kin selection, cultural group selection theorists argue that the former is hyper-individualistic in orientation, as if looking at the question from the wrong end of a telescope. They argue that mainstream theorists focus too much on cooperation as an efficient means for individuals to achieve their goals, as for instance by means of the argument that by acting together, several individuals can bring down a large mammal that no individual has the ability to achieve alone. In contrast, a group selectionist argument insists that humans are fundamentally social beings.

Sarah Hrdy (2009) framed the ‘grandmother hypothesis’ from her work amongst hunter-gatherers of the Hadza tribe of Northern Tanzania. This argues that humans are unique amongst social mammals by encouraging other adults and not just the mother, to care for their offspring. Unlike chimpanzee mothers who virtually never allow their babies to be held by others, newborns she found that newborns were handled by up to 14 different caregivers for about 85% of the time. Other findings question the Big Mistake Hypothesis as members of bands of hunter-gatherers have been discovered to be loosely related,²⁰ rather than comprising close kin. Silvertown argues from this that the BMH ‘is itself a big mistake, firstly by presuming that relatedness in bands of hunter-gatherers will be high when in fact it has been discovered to be low, and because archaeologists have found evidence for large-scale cooperation between bands of hunter-gatherers going back at least six millennia. In support of this contention he cites research conducted in the USA at a place called appropriately “Head Smashed In’²¹, where large numbers of nomadic native Americans who moved in bands of from fifty to seventy individuals gathered to drive bison over a cliff.

Silvertown argues that something other than kin selection must be work when it comes to human cooperation and so the ‘Big Mistake Hypothesis’ ought to be replaced by an alternative he calls the Interdependence Hypothesis, which recognises that human cooperation stretches back to the time of Homo Erectus, where evidence suggest that 1.8 million years ago they engaged in cooperative child rearing and hunting. Moreover, to prevent free riders from slacking during a buffalo hunt required something more effective than reciprocity. In relation to this Hrdy (2009) found that the Hazda learned to selectively team up with others whom they could trust, leaving others out in the cold.²²

A fundamental requirement of human being is that our desires are recognized by those others we respect, whose approbation we crave. The technical definition of a person who acts as an individual who cares nothing about others and whose conduct is characterized by a rootless aimlessness and inconsistency is the sociopath. (Fiske, 1992: 400). Altruism is not simply good for those who are helped but can have positive effects on the helper (Sloan-Wilson & Csikszentmihalyi, 2007). Although the explanations developed by Frans de Waal and Michael Tomasello differ in important respects, they agree on this point. De Waal argues from a continuist perspective (i.e. by arguing that humans and animals exist on the same continuum),

Yet, there was never a point at which we became social; descended from highly social ancestors – a long line of monkeys and apes – we have been group-living forever. Free and equal people never existed. Humans started out- if a starting point can be discernible at all- as interdependent, bonded and unequal. We come from a long lineage of hierarchical animals for which life in groups is not an option but a survival strategy. Any zoologist would classify our species as obligatorily gregarious.²³

It should be mentioned in relation to de Waal’s mention of hierarchy that one of the great puzzles about the evolution of human sharing, is that it is generally acknowledged that human hunter-gatherer societies are much less hierarchical than those of apes and engage in a good deal more sharing and cooperation. Wilson and Wilson comment that,

Hunter gatherer societies are fiercely egalitarian. Meat is scrupulously shared, aspiring alpha males are put in their place; and self-seeking behaviours are censured (Wilson & Wilson, 2008: 389).

This observation which is indeed puzzling, raises the question as to how it came to be that early human groups developed such pacific relations compared to their hominid ancestors? As discussed below, this has been the cause of a good deal of speculation.

Market Pricing

Off the top your head which of the following is closer to the market ideal; Is it A. someone who prizes the accumulation of wealth and is distrustful and wary of others, who will take advantage of them when they spot an opportunity to do so; or B. an individual who prizes the accumulation of wealth, who believes in fairness and trustworthiness in their dealings with others.  I’m going to leave it up to you to decide the answer once you have read the rest of this section.

Adam Smith famously argued that humans have developed a natural capacity to “truck and trade” and moreover, that Divine Providence’ will ordain that the best outcome for all through the spontaneous engagement of a multitude of individuals who follow their self-interest in the marketplace.  While it may be charitably suggested that the basis of Smith’s argument was to draw attention to the complexity of market exchange to point out that the individual who wishes to do good may end up causing harm, in the film Wall Street (1987), this was reduced to the soundbite, “Greed is Good!”.  In support of such arguments you may recall from the earlier discussion of market pricing in relation to the domain-specific argument which cites the results of experiments where subjects who were primed with ‘money’ cues behaved more individually and were less concerned with the welfare of others in their care.

Evidence from experiments based on the Ultimatum and Dictator games conducted in different societies came up with a finding that at first reading seems strange to fathom. The aim of these experiments was to test expectations of fairness in different societies, or the extent to which real people conform to image of person A above.   In the game one player is allotted  $100 and the other zero and their task is to come up with an amount that is agreeable to both. While homo economicus in the figure of person A would logically have offered the bare minimum of one dollar out of the hundred allocated, the average offered by subjects in experiments conducted in market-based societies was closer to half.  Ironically, the closest match to homo economicus is observed in communities that are least exposed to the market (Henrich et al., 2001). There are resonances here with the discussion in chapter one which discusses findings from the World Values Survey, that individuals living in urban environments in market-based societies tend to be more accepting and tolerant of differences between strangers than their counterparts who dwell in traditional societies.

The same question as the above formed the basis for observation of forty-nine groups of forest users in a real-life setting in Ethiopia.  From this the researchers discovered that those groups that were closest to markets had the highest numbers of co-operators and also the best forest management practices (Rustagi et al., 2010).  In another study, unconsciously priming US subjects with market related themes increased cooperation amongst US subjects (Al-Ubaydli et al, 2016).  

The above studies of the actions of real human beings in market and non-market contexts appear to run counter to the principles of the self-maximising homo economicus by finding that individuals living in communities where market exchange is prevalent are more attentive to fairness than those who do not. The only additional factor found to be significant is that believers in Christianity and Islam have been found to offer more than those associated with local religions (Henrich & Boyd, 2001).  Such findings may make sense if we consider that when acting in the market, although the aim is to get the best deal, the transaction usually results in a compromise involving a ‘fair’ bargain. Importantly, people are not entirely self-interested but are concerned with issues of reciprocity, equity and fairness. Individuals will punish others even when this comes at a cost to themselves. (Fehr & Gäechter, 2002). Authors argue that this is to be expected as those habituated to market interactions trust that the strangers they deal with will act fairly in relation to the exchange. Why is this the case?  Tying back to Fiske’s four-fold scheme discussed earlier in this text, market exchange is different to traditional exchange processes such as communal sharing, reciprocity and status as it requires individuals to trust that the strangers with whom they engage in exchange and may never meet again, will act fairly towards them. Thus market-pricing affects sociality, as those living closer to markets are found to be more cooperative with others across a range of activities. The existence of markets thus makes it easier to construct social institutions involving relations with strangers.

From the above, research concludes that there are “large consistent deviations’ from homo economicus such that individuals living in market societies seek to maintain equity and reciprocity in their dealings with others (Henrich et al., 2001).  However neoliberals, informed by a narrow and dubious interpretation of Adam Smith, continue to proclaim that inequality is good and envy is a spur to economic activity, while academics argue that increasing material inequality has powerful negative psychological effects on individuals (Wilkinson & Picket, 2009; 2018). Demands for social justice have played a key role in populist movements such as that of the  “Gilets Jaunes” that sprang up in France (Harding, 2019).

From the above, despite talk of individualism and selfishness, markets rely fundamentally on trust and cooperation for their effective operation which in the context of evolution raises the question as to how such principles arose?

Developing Large Scale Cooperation

From the above, although it seems to be the case that humans share basic principles of reciprocity and fairness and with their primate ancestors and with other social beings, the development of forms of large-scale cooperation across religions and markets that are nowadays take for granted are more complex. The question then arises, as to how these came to exist? An even more perplexing question from evidence with hunter-gatherer￼

Figure 3.4 Accounts of the origins of human civility

Figure 3.4 Accounts of the origins of human civility

societies suggests that early human groups were quite different to other primates in that they were less hierarchical, more cooperative and pacific and less subject to random acts of violence. These observations led Sigmund Freud, René Girard and more recently, Richard Wrangham to develop accounts of how they transition from primate society to human society occurred.

Sigmund Freud “Father of Psychoanalysis’

Sigmund Freud was inspired by Lamarck to consider the process by which humans evolved from the higher apes. He consulted the ethological and anthropological evidence of his day and was struck by the differences existing between groups of apes and humans. He found that groups of apes are organised according to a strict hierarchy, where the dominant male keeps other males in check and reserves the females for his exclusive enjoyment. In contrast the small native groups of humans described by anthropologists who were assumed by Freud to be similar to the earliest human groups, were comprised of males with equal rights, who were collectively subject to the restrictions of a totemic system, including inheritance through the mother. Freud wondered what process led from the rigid hierarchy characteristic of social organization amongst the great apes to the more egalitarian form, consisting of the incest taboo and totemism to be found amongst humans? He developed his own myth to explain this. His story begins with the exclusion from the group of apes of a number of male brothers who presented a challenge to the dominant male and have consequently been confronted and driven out of the group by their father;

‘One day the brothers who had been driven out came together, killed and devoured their father and so made an end of the patriarchal horde. United, they had the courage to do and succeed in doing what would have been impossible for them individually. (Some cultural advance, perhaps command over some new weapon, had given them a sense of superior strength). Cannibal savages as they were, it goes without saying that they devoured their victim as well as killing him. The violent primal father had doubtless been the feared and envied model of each one of the company of brothers; and in the act of devouring him they accomplished their identification with him, and each one acquired a proportion of his strength. The totem meal, which is perhaps man’s earliest festival, would thus be a repetition and a commemoration of this memorable and criminal deed, which was the beginning of so many things – of social organisation, of moral restrictions and of religion.’²⁴

That the father is primal carries several linked meanings. He is a primate proto-human and is primary or first over all others in the group and enjoyed unalloyed access to all of the females in the group. The brothers, his sons, hated this despot who ruled over them and had cast them out of the group, which is why they murdered and ate him. Freud continues by arguing that following the murder, the brothers experienced ambivalent emotions. Now that he is dead and their hatred has been satisfied, their affection for their father which had been suppressed when he was alive, reappears in the form of remorse, and this is felt by the whole group. Recalled in memory, the image of the dead father becomes stronger than the living one had ever been. What had been prohibited by his actual presence – access to the women of the group – is now prohibited by the brothers themselves. Another way in which they revoke their murderous deed is by forbidding the killing of a totem animal, which they select as a substitute for their father. Out of their guilt arise the two fundamental taboos of totemism which correspond to the two repressed wishes of the Oedipus complex; incest and murder. Henceforth, whoever contravenes these two taboos is guilty of the only two crimes with which primitive society concerns itself.²⁵

Freud argued that the scenes recounted in the story probably recurred on many occasions. Sometimes one of the victors would seek to take the father’s place and the battles would begin afresh, but after many such instances, all renounced their father’s savage domination by forming a community with equal rights that was united by the totem prohibitions that preserved and expiated the memory of the murder.²⁶ Repeated over countless instances of thousands of generations such struggles marked the dividing line that eventually separated humans from animals. Beforehand there was a group of hominids ruled over by fear while afterwards there eventually arose fully functioning human societies comprising language, law and basis of religion. Whilst sexuality is of importance, power and identification are of equal or even greater importance in the story. Symbolism is vitally important. Leadership is no longer a matter of the application of brute force but rather of authority conferred by the group. None of the brothers can become symbolically recognised as a person by the others until they have participated in the ritual meal. Lacan took up this aspect of the story in relation to his discussion of jouissance. In his account, the brothers, by accepting symbolic prohibitions against murder and incest, forego the complete sexual enjoyment experienced by their father. This symbolic castration is the basis of what he calls phallic jouissance.

Freud was a convinced Lamarckian, believing that, with countless repetitions over millennia, the events narrated in Totem and Taboo were passed by organic inheritance from generation to generation, with the memories being literally impressed on the human brain. From this, the ontogenetic development of the prohibition against incest and the acquisition of remorse, guilt and moral sense that appear in the infant today consist of a ‘phylogenetic precipitate’ of the primal father complex of early man’.²⁷

While Lamarck’s idea of organic inheritance has been disproved, the classic psychoanalytic structures of psychosis and neuroses are explained in this context as attributable to the cost of becoming human. Those suffering from psychosis have difficulty relating signifiers to signifieds in language and experience difficulties in differentiating reality from illusion. The price paid by neurosis is in relation to the enjoyment that must be given up if to act towards others in a civilised capacity.

Norbert Elias did not directly question Freud’s Lamarckianism, focusing instead on the latter’s rather simplistic equation of society to a group of individuals or a crowd.²⁸ Firstly, In Elias’s view, Freud made too much of the dichotomy between the individual and society and consequently, he did not pay sufficient heed to the relational aspect of identity; or how the individual “I” identity is always in a state of balance with the collective ‘we’ identity. This blindness is difficult to understand given the amazing perspicacity revealed in Freud’s earliest work on identification. Secondly, Freud did not quite grasp the dynamic relation existing between social structure (sociogenesis) and the organisation of the individual psyche (psychogenesis) and how changes in social structure can bring about changes in the psyche. In support of this, he argued that there is much evidence to support the contention that the social habitus plays a key role in the individual personality structure; for example the pattern of psychological repression of people who live in a long-lasting autocratic regime differs markedly from that of people living under a long-lasting parliamentary regime. Finally, Elias could not understand why Freud, given his acceptance of Darwin, does not simply apply evolutionary theory to the question of human origins instead of going to the trouble of devising his own myth, arguing that there is no good reason to reject the obvious idea that human societies evolve from animal societies as part of a continuous process (Mennell, 2011).

René Girard: The Mimetic Hypothesis

Although René Girard is best known to consumer researchers as a theorist of desire (Belk, Ger & Askegaard, 200), his theory is discussed here in the context of multilevel selection, especially the development of religion and authority (Girard, 1965). Girard’s theory shares with theorists Tomasello (2008), the importance of imitation to human development. However, where Tomasello describes imitation as benign, Girard focuses on the danger posed by the particular type of imitation he calls acquisitive mimesis, which he argues can quickly run out of control, with far reaching consequences. Girard re-interprets Freud’s story to argue that those of us who are alive today owe our existence to those groups which successfully coped with the violence generated by acquisitive mimesis which then led to the development of religion, hierarchy and law.

Acquisitive mimesis

The concept of acquisitive mimesis is best illustrated by means of an example. Think of two children, A and B who each possess an identical toy. A casts aside the toy in her possession and rushes over to demand that B passively shares the identical toy in her possession by giving it to A. Scenes of this kind are not rare, and it is possible that you have witnessed something similar, which has also been discovered by experiment.²⁹ Girard explains such apparently irrational behaviour in terms of the relations between our experience as subject and as model. Fundamental to this argument is that humans do not exist as individuals but that as subjects we become drawn into adversarial relations with those whom we take as our models in an ‘inter-dividual’ context.

Subject-Model

Girard’s explanation is triangular, involving relations between a subject, a model and an object. We act in one capacity as a subject who unconsciously imitates those models whom we take to be attractive and successful and in turn, we are treated as models by those who imitate us, who desire what we desire. Thinking first of the experience of being a subject, Girard argues that humans, in common with our hominid ancestors, suffer from ontological sickness, a lack in being, whereby as subjects, we routinely feel that those others whom we take as our models are more self-possessed and more in control than we are. We want to be the other and to desire the things that they desire. We search around for some reason to account for this, concluding that the difference is down to something that the model has. As subjects, we consider the reason for the self-possession of the model (and our lack) resides in some object possessed by the model.

Object

The object can be almost anything. In the above example, the object is the toy, which is desirable even though the subject has one that is identical. The object might equally be something intangible, such as a mannerism or skill that we admire and envy in the model. The object is not attractive in its own right but assumes its importance to the subject because it represents that which makes the crucial difference between the subject’s feelings of insufficiency and the apparent self-sufficiency and control they perceive in the model. Returning to the two children, A and B, even although the toys are identical, for the subject, the toy possessed by the model is more desirable than their identical toy simply because it is desired by the model. However once the object is obtained it becomes clear that this is not really what the desire was about. Research amongst children aged eighteen months confirms that when a subject wrests a toy from the possession of a model, they usually soon abandon this in favour of the next toy that the model obtains.³⁰ Infants of just eighteen months quickly learn the importance of sharing and also recognize the related demand for reciprocity when they are approached by another infant. They know too that if they are to avoid this obligation they must ensure to avoid eye-contact with the other infant, to feign non-recognition preferably by turning their back on them, a strategy that is only effective when a barrier or gate separates them.³¹

Becoming Human

What has this to do with the development during the Pleistocene from hominids to humans? Imagine a primitive hominid group with no form of policing or self-regulation, where acquisitive mimesis is prevalent and where not one or two, but many hands reach for the same object. In this situation Girard argues that the outcome can only be violent. Girard’s explanation is phylogenetic in that he argues that acquisitive mimesis presented a central and deadly problem for groups of hominid proto-humans during the lengthy process of humanization. In contrast to the relatively stable hierarchical form of organization to be found amongst groups of apes, he contends that hominid organization was often prone to violent disruption for two reasons; firstly, because hominids possessed a greater capability for acquisitive mimesis than apes and secondly, because of the hominid capacity to fashion deadly weapons, which meant that no hierarchy could prevail on the basis of physical superiority alone. Proto-human groups were wracked by epidemics of acquisitive mimesis, escalating to tit-for-tat exchanges of mimetic violence of such magnitude that the towering crisis threatened the survival of the entire social group. Not all groups survived these episodes and humans today are the descendants of those that did.

The Scapegoat mechanism

Girard’s explanation as to how some groups survived epidemics of acquisitive mimesis is based on his analysis of ancient myths which simultaneously act to reveal and conceal the truth. The truth is that our hominid ancestors were saved from extinction by means of what Girard calls the scapegoat mechanism. Rather than being destroyed in an orgy of collective mimetic violence, some groups seized and murdered an innocent scapegoat whom they blamed for causing the entire mimetic epidemic. In this way the collective fury of the entire group was condensed, focused and discharged through the sacrifice of the scapegoat. Repeated instances of scapegoating over generations led slowly to the formation of more lasting prohibitions against mimetic contagion.

Distinctive aspects of human culture developed and began to cohere in the wake of scapegoating incidents, including sacred sacrificial rituals which symbolically re-enacted them to prevent their reoccurrence. Myths, or stories about scapegoating warned of the dangers presented by mimetic contagion. Over time, the scapegoat took on a sacred aspect. The scapegoat was seized and butchered when mimetic rivalry seemed about to envelop the entire community in a spasm of violence of all against all. Their violent death brought about a period of calm in its wake and ultimately they . come to be viewed very differently, as the one who brought peace to the community. In this new phase the scapegoat comes to be venerated as saviour of the community, possessed of the superhuman power to recreate order (Girard, 1975). Girard argues that this terrible prestige of the scapegoat constitutes the basis of all political and religious sovereignty (Girard, 1987: 53). The authority of the monarch does not merely rely on physical force but includes also the aura that once attached to the scapegoat. Leaders thus stand in the place of the scapegoat, being venerated, but are also open to blame and disgrace when things go wrong.

Girard’s theory stresses relations between the organization of exchange and the containment, or otherwise of acquisitive mimesis and violence. Theorists influenced by this explore how reciprocity and market exchange act to contain, or alternatively to foster such rivalry. In the modern world, myth has lost much of its power and the role of sacred ritual has dramatically decreased. In light of this they ask whether there still is sacrifice today and, if so, who is sacrificed?

Wrangham: The Execution Hypothesis

The ‘execution hypothesis’ developed by Richard Wrangham bears comparison to the above argument by Freud, although Wrangham provides a Darwinian explanation in place of Freud’s Lamarckian argument. Wrangham cites evidence to suggest that by comparison to other primates, humans developed a ‘reverse dominance hierarchy’ involving rule by coalitions of males rather than one dominant individual. He dates this important change to 300,000 years ago during the transition to homo sapiens, which he argues occurred over 12,000 generations where individuals within groups were progressively subjected to conform to norms of cooperation and civility for fear of punishment or even death. Over time this led to the internalisation of moral norms of guilt, shame and embarrassment that were designed to protect the individual from retribution by the dominant alliance of males.

A key difference between humans and other primates relates to the use of reactive violence by powerful males, which is rare in the former and is prevalent in the latter. The idea of unprovoked reactive violence is still a feature of one part of human society as it is readily understood by schoolchildren who are often plagued by the overt violence of bullies which is sometimes conducted covertly right in front of the noses of parents, teachers and of the wider community. Wrangham argues that in order to overcome the problem of the overt use of reactive violence by powerful individuals, human societies over many generations developed systems of institutional violence against individuals who acted violently against others. Compared to some species of primate humans thus became domesticated through the public proscription against individual acts of violence.

Wrangham argues similarly to Freud, that the development of a more sophisticated language enabled subordinate males to drive out their violent autocratic leader. Succeeding acts over thousands of generations then led coalitions of males to severely punish disruptive outbreaks of spontaneously violent behaviour by aggressive individuals. Repeated acts led to the internalisation of powerful secondary emotions of guilt, shame and embarrassment which protected group members from engaging the wrath of their overlords. Violent males then learned to control and hide their overt antisocial tendencies, while covertly they continued to act to subvert the existing order. As a consequence, the focus of surveillance extended from the detection of acts of overt violence to any behaviour that seemed odd or which broke communal rules. This was accompanied by a decrease in face-to-face violence and an increase in within-group cooperation. Wrangham argues that,

In sum, killing of those who did not conform to the interests of the dominant male

alliance occurred sufficiently often to create a selection pressure in favour of both self-

domestication and a moral psychology.³²

Discussion

 Freud, Girard and Wrangham provide arguments that are in some ways similar but are also strikingly different to explain the emergence of large-scale human cooperation. Freud and Girard argue that technology played a role in the deposal of the primal leader through the development of weaponry, whilst Wrangham pays more attention to the role of language in enabling coalitions to form. All three argue that their account can explain the establishment of moral norms pertaining to the establishment of large-scale cooperation involving law and religion. Most theorists who have looked for the mechanism that enables the ‘ratcheting up’ of cooperation required by the formation of large-scale human societies suggest that religion provides the most likely explanation. For Freud, religion developed as the group’s collective response to the crime of killing their father, whom they also loved, who later transformed their guilt into reverence by elevating him to the status of a god. For Girard, the leader can himself be made into a scapegoat, as a sacrifice to atone for perceived ills inflicted on the community. Moreover he argued that religious observance developed from multiple acts of scapegoating which found its purest expression in the sacrificial offering of Jesus who offered himself as a scapegoat and whose death was supposed to bring an end to all sacrifice, which henceforth would be reenacted through ritual. Wrangham on the other hand argues that moral norms based on law and religion operate principally in the interests of male interests.³³

A fourth argument (if you can bear it) is that religion evolved as a by-product of the evolutionary process, and that the belief in supernatural entities emerged as an accidental output produced by the developing human cognitive system (Henrich et al., 2010: 37).  In this understanding, religious beliefs evolved to address human existential insecurity and because they favoured norms of obedience to authority and collaborative action that extended beyond the reach of close community networks established by kinship and reciprocity.³⁴  The authors argue that religions developed as a means to reinforce cooperative norms, firstly by encouraging participation in costly rituals, which led to deep commitment to these norms.  These were further incentivized by the supernatural policing of approbation and punishment (heaven vs. hell-fire) which encouraged third parties to keep norm violators in line.  If people believe that God will punish everyone, say by bringing a plague on all, for the misdeeds of the few who transgress the law, then everyone is responsible for keeping others in line. Finally, religion cements social norms by creating a higher plane of existence to that above a mere collection of individuals. 

Cultural variation

Although cultural selection theorists expect humans from all societies to share basic aspects of cognition, motivation and behaviour, they believe that there is a lot of variability between cultures.  A review of cross-cultural research supports the understanding that there are considerable differences between cultures in relation to some important issues.  Recalling Norbert Elias’ concept of “I-We’ identity in chapter one, non-western societies tend to reflect a concept of self that is closer to the ‘We’ end of the scale, whereas western societies come closer to the “I” end (Henrich et al., 2010). Although all humans understand concepts of fairness and punishment, as described above, important differences have been found between cultures, based on samples of participants in in the Ultimatum Game, which is an experimental approach favoured by evolutionary researchers. To recap, the Ultimatum Game is often used as a measure of the extent to which people will punish cheats.  In the game A is given a sum of real money and is then asked to decide how much to give B.  A must be careful, because if B punishes A by rejecting her offer, neither will get a penny.  In the alternative Dictator game A can offer B whatever she wants and B has to take it.   Research findings from the USA are that those in the position of A will offer between 40% and 50% of the total, whilst those below 30% are rejected (Henrich et al. 2010: 9).  This contrasts sharply with the pattern observed in samples drawn from non-Western countries where those in the position of A typically make low offers (3 below 30% and 8 below 40%), which are not rejected by those in the position of B.³⁵ Henrich and his colleagues suggest that much of the variability in results is explained by market integration and participation in a world religion.  Samples drawn from societies with a developed market economy world religion are associated with higher offers.  On this basis authors have argued that norms and institutions for exchange with strangers coevolved culturally with large-scale societies and with the development of markets.  Importantly, they suggest that, at least in some instances, these norms and institutions must have evolved before large-scale sedentary populations or markets did (ibid.13). 

Another important cultural difference is with respect to the prevalent system of morality that pertains in a particular society. Many of those in post-industrial societies subscribe to an individualist, autonomous ethics of social justice, on the same lines as that advanced by World Values Study researchers, outlined in chapter one. Other cultures subscribe to a wider ethical system that is based on two other principles, an ethics of communion and of divinity (Henrich et al., 2010; Haidt, 2007).  The ethic of communion focuses on the importance of fulfilling obligations to others, whilst the ethic of divinity concerns how moral decisions fit with the perceived natural order.

Caring for Parents and the Elderly

The above discussion of religion invites re-consideration of the weakening circle of sharing, discussed above in section. This question has personal significance. I was raised in a family shaped by the Christian norm, that one cared for one’s parents, and indeed my grandmother came to live with my parents, where she was cared for until the day she died. I remember my shock and disapproval some years later when discussing this with a Business School colleague who said that not only did he not feel any sense of responsibility toward his parents when they were old and infirm; he should not have any responsibility.  From the perspective of kin selection, whilst it makes sense for parents to sacrifice their self-interest to that of their children in seeking to perpetuate the survival of their ‘caring’ genes, parents make themselves redundant in the process. Richard Dawkins (1976) refers to the mother as a “full-sibling production machine”. From the perspective of kin selection, my mother is just as valuable to me as I am to myself, or to my twin. However, given that kin selection is only interested in people insofar as they are, or help support, reproduction machines, what happens when mothers age, when grand-mothers become great-grandmothers and are no longer capable of offering their progeny support? From the perspective of Cosmides & Tooby (1989), it is unlikely that the issue of care for parents arose during the Pleistocene period, when humans did not live to anywhere near the age that they are capable of today. Aging leaves its marks on us through greying of the hair, increasing myopia, wrinkles and liver-spots, which are perceived to be unattractive, signalling infertility. It is interesting in this context to note that religions specifically argue for respectful treatment of elders. For example in Chinese culture, filial piety, or xiao, is prescribed by Daoism, Buddhism and Confucianism (Joy, 2001; Chan & Tan, 2004), whereas for Religions of the Book (Judaism, Christianity and islam) this is exemplified by the Commandment, ‘Honour thy father and they mother’.³⁶

(Research in the US has found that, when faced with the choice of supporting either their children or their parents, while middle-aged adults sympathize with the plight of parents, they generally tend to support children, who are perceived to have greater needs (Fingerman et al. (2011).  In Europe and the USA, as the population ages, concerns are raised that a duty from children to parents should be enshrined in the law of the land.  In China, there is draft legislation to make it a duty for children to visit their parents; in the UK, Baroness Deech an influential family lawyer called for a return to the values of the Elizabethan Poor Law, repealed in 1948, whereby children and grandchildren should be made responsible for those who reared them.³⁷ As life expectancy continues to increase, many elderly face a bleak life alone. Mr. Richer, one of Marcoux’s (2009: 678) informants, aged 81 who lives in Montreal, Canada, has only had contact with one of his six children since the death of his wife ten years ago.  He refused to go to her funeral and since then the children and he have been separated by a wall of resentment. Mrs Bolduc, is resigned to the fact that she can no longer help herself and must rely on her sister to care for her, who can scarcely care for herself. 

The Phylogeny and Ontogeny of Joint Attention

Wilson and Wilson (2008)  argue that for those engaging in a hunt it did not matter who made the final kill as the one who did so was expected to share the spoils with all of the other participants. The domain-specific argument for this was discussed earlier in relation to Cosmides and Tooby (1992) who argued that a model for band-wide sharing developed for use in situations such as hunting, where the outcome is variable, by comparison to the procurement of other foods. Fiske (1992) argues for a deeper and more extensive idea of sharing that embraces the enrolment of all those who participated in activities such as the harvest.  During life with the Moose he noticed how those who were younger and fitter, deliberately slowed their pace to accommodate that of others who were older or more infirm and indeed of strangers such as himself.

As argued for by Cosmides and Tooby research evidence suggests that in cultures where hunting is prevalent hunters can be subjected to passive sharing through the expectation to share with others from their group.  Indeed although an individual succeeded on one occasion they were not necessarily granted preferential treatment in future (Woodburn, 1998). Where Cosmides and Tooby (1992) put this down to a domain-specific module that was developed during the Pleistocene, the argument from multilevel selection is that the very act of hunting often depends on collaboration to achieve a mutually known joint goal, so that the group “we” captures the prey, not the individual “I”.  The capacity of shared intentionality requires that humans possess the cognitive skills necessary for creating joint intentions and also the social motivations for helping and asking.  The psychologist Michael Tomasello (2008) argues that over and above the abilities of other primates, humans have developed the capacity to recognize the desire of others and to choose whether or not to recognize this by communicating to them by pointing or pantomiming, in ways that are comprehensible to the recipient.

This focus on mutuality displaces the idea of private property inherent in Russell Belk’s (2010)  definition of sharing in favour of the notion that goods can simply be ‘ours’, not ‘mine’ nor ‘yours’.  Indeed, Belk acknowledges this elsewhere in his paper where he refers to shared goods in communal societies as, ‘ours’ and that, ‘not only is ownership a communal concept in such communal societies, so too, to a large extent is the concept of self’ (Belk, 2010: 723). Tomasello proposes that joint attention started in humankind (phylogeny), and begins in the year-old human infant (ontogeny), whose first experiences consist of sharing in collaborative activities with joint goals.  Mutualistic collaboration thus founds the common conceptual ground necessary for truly human communication and for sharing.

“Gricean” Communication

 In relation to the recognition of the desire of others, Tomasello (2008) acknowledges his debt to Grice (1957), who observed that human communication acts have two aspects: firstly, the receiver of a communication attends to the message content and secondly, they attend to the desire of the sender, usually by engaging in eye-contact; “when I point to a tree for you, I not only want you to attend to the tree, I also want you to attend to my desire that you attend to the tree.” (Tomasello, 2008: 89).  The implicit contract between us is that you will look at the tree because you trust my claim that it will be interesting and beneficial to do so, and you will subsequently provide some acknowledgement of this. 

Consider that you are at a dinner party and that your glass is empty and you would like it refilled, but consider it impolite to mention this directly. Instead you nonchalantly place the empty glass in a conspicuous position near your host.  As Tomasello explains it, “The guest wants the host to know about the empty glass, but he does not want her to know that he wants her to know this.” (Tomasello, 2008: 90).   This process of “recursive mindreading” (Tomasello 2008: 321) requires the creation of a joint intentional frame, or common ground between you and your host, whereby you seek help and the host is presumed to want to provide it.  Tomasello argues more consequentially that once your communicative intention has been made mutually manifest it triggers not only the joint expectation of cooperation, but also “actual social norms, whose violation is unacceptable.” (Tomasello, 2008: 92).  Thus In the above situation, if the host observes that my glass is empty, or discovers through my body language or eye contact that this is the case and that I would like her to fill it, a norm is established so that she is obliged to help.  The above relatively trivial example illustrates the power of an unspoken norm that may be invoked in a whole range of circumstances.

From this perspective, a reputation for sharing is not restricted to the domain-specific argument for sexual selection (Zahavi, 1978).  Rather, it is to our mutual advantage that we help others and also request help when we need to achieve joint goals.  For example, if my car breaks down in front of yours, blocking your passage and also that of all of the traffic behind you, it makes sense for me to help you to move your car to the side of the road away from the flow of traffic.  In such situations we may each use simple gestures such as pointing and pantomiming, which rely on the presumption that we have a common understanding of the situation.  Tomasello argues that it helps to cooperate with others simply because those who gain the reputation of being a cooperative person will be offered opportunities by others, whilst those who act selfishly and competitively will be shunned by others and will thus pay a price by being excluded from attractive opportunities for cooperation and gain.  In this context it makes sense for those individuals who understand this to seek to enhance their reputations by public acts of helping and cooperation, if one assumes that others are observing them.  Consequently, a person might still offer help, for example by offering information to another, even in those situations where they do not receive any benefit (Tomasello, 2008:  205).

Figure 3.5. The Phylogeny of Joint Attention

Source: Figure 5.1, in Tomasello, (2008: 239).

Figure 3.5. The Phylogeny of Joint Attention

Source: Figure 5.1, in Tomasello, (2008: 239).

Tomasello’s illustration of his rather complex account of the phylogenetic development of sharing is shown in Figure 3.5, to illustrate his argument for a stepped development from apes to hominids and thence to the formation of a distinctive mode of human cultural evolution  In this account he argues that such mutual collaborative activities could not have emerged until humans first became more tolerant and generous in sharing the spoils of group activities, following which there evolved the ability for recursive mindreading, which enabled the ability for individuals to formulate joint goals and construct the joint attentional frames relevant to them which enable the provision of a common conceptual ground for action  (Tomasello, 2008: 240).  In charting this development he posits a movement from apes to Homo, then to Earlier Sapiens and finally, Later Sapiens.  Homo had the capability of requesting help from others and of reciprocating this indexically through pointing and pantomiming. The initial motive for such behaviour was self-interest, such that my rendering help to my neighbour helps me.  Helping behaviours were then gradually generalized into other aspects of indirect reciprocity which led to the second motive of role reversal imitation which manifested in Earlier Sapiens, where public displays of help acted to increase one’s reputation. For this to be effective required the presence of mutual assumptions of cooperation and Gricean communicative intention combined with motives of requesting help and of responding by helping.

Explained in terms of ontogeny, Tomasello’s argument is that human infants develop a stage further than their primate cousins. For example, when seeing a model completing a task, a primate subject will often try to achieve the same effect using different steps, or even by cutting out steps in the sequence (emulation), whereas the human subject will faithfully replicate the model’s behaviour, including unnecessary redundant steps (imitation) (Hoehl et al., 2019; Whiten, 2019). Observations that humans subjects copy the exact sequence followed by models, including redundant steps, are taken as evidence for the importance of cultural learning in humans. This relies on the ability for subjects to understand the intentions of models, in forming what Tomasello (2008) calls a joint attentional space. He argues that up until the age of nine months most human infants behave similarly to capuchin monkeys, after which they begin to achieve Gricean communication by following the attention of others and by attending to the objects that others signal to them so that they begin to understand the intention of these others; in other words to form a ‘joint-attentional space’.  This forms the basis for pointing and pantomiming which are the precursors of human language.

Imitation and Emulation

Tomasello argues that a third motive for sharing springs from a completely different source involving motives to be like groupmates and to be liked by them, which is characteristic of Later Sapiens.   It is in this context that he introduces his ideas on cultural group selection, which are admittedly speculative.  It is now accepted that human children will imitate even the redundant steps of a process in contrast to apes, who will often reach the specified goal by other means that can be faster.  The explanation for this difference lies in the joint attention scene formed by human models and their subjects and which is lacking in apes. Humans imitate through the expectation that the subject follows the exact steps shown by the model, even those that are redundant. In contrast, to children who closely imitate the model, chimpanzees engage in emulation by trying to solve the problem independently of the particular behaviour shown by the model.  I should mention here that this understanding of emulation is different to that provided by Thorstein Veblen which is discussed in chapter four.

For Tomasello, the heightened capacity for imitation in humans came about as the result of the need for subjects to exactly copy the actions of a model in order to achieve some complex outcome.  By comparison to René Girard, Tomasello makes no mention of destructive acquisitive mimesis when arguing that the role of imitation is to solidify human sociality through group membership, “to an unprecedented degree (Tomasello, 2008: 209).³⁸  In his view human subjects imitate models and conform to them, seeking to be like them so that they are in turn liked by them. Being liked or even loved by others constitutes a form of respect which recognizes our existence in a special way. Alain de Botton paints a similar picture when arguing,

Our presence is noted, our name is registered our views are listened to, our failings are treated with indulgence and our needs are ministered to.  And under such care, we flourish.  (De Botton, 2005: 11).

Linked to the idea of the social self-mentioned by Belk (2010), Tomasello argues that sharing involves an extensive self who reaches out to others beyond the imitation of accent, vocal expression and modes of dress to share the emotions and attitudes of others.  The ability to share feelings, beliefs and opinions with those whom we regard to be like us strengthens bonds of affiliation, as mutual approbation depends on the relationship. The other side of this is that failure to respect the conventional expressive codes established as the norm by the group in relation to accent, dress, mannerisms, attitudes and so on, will result in a withdrawal of approval for the subject from others whom they take as their models, leading to the ultimate threat of ostracism.  Norms then ‘consist in mutual expectations about behaviour and a concern for reputation plus pressure to conform to group expectations – or else!” (Tomasello, 2008: 212).   The evolution of norms which further bind individuals together is comprehensible in the context of the maximization of within-group conformity and between-group differences in the context of multilevel selection on the group as a whole (Richerson & Boyd, 2005). According to cultural group selection theorists, hunter-gatherer bands confronted a similar problem to that described above during the Holocene period, at the dawn of agriculture around 10,000 years ago, when humans began to live in large-scale sedentary populations.

The importance of culture

Tomasello (2008) illustrates the sophisticated nature of the capacity for sharing and how this is fundamentally linked to the human capacity for language. This draws attention to the importance of culture. For example, the Japanese language contains a unique set of terms which indicate that  for them the threat of social exclusion is the greatest fear.  Key concepts are amae (dependence) and amaeru (to be dependent). To amaeru is, “to passively depend on someone for indulgence of one’s needs and wishes, to desire to be nurtured and cared for…. To amae is to be trustingly, presumptuously, wilfully, dependent, confident that one will be given whatever one desires, without needing to assert oneself to get it, to be “spoiled.”’ (Fiske, 1992: 113). Amae relates to assimilation with another person and the dissolution of the boundary of the self so that the two selves merge, as in the nurturing relation between mother and child.

This motivation to depend on others and to be nurtured and cared for by them, is fundamental to the Japanese personality and to Japanese culture as a whole.  Inability to develop relationships that allow amae is cited as a major complaint by patients seeking psychotherapy in Japan.  Amae operates as a specific social need in individuals and also as the foundation of highly elaborate social relations. Belonging and dependency are such that the idea of group is more important than the individual. In contrast, tannin, denotes an unrelated outsider and enro, to hold back, or to be ill at ease, feeling constraint and a lack of relaxed trust in a person. Consequently, a great deal of distress is experienced by the Japanese person who perceives that they have let down someone who trusted them.  Given the importance of sharing in Japan, it is not surprising that the Japanese Consumer Cooperative Union (JCCU) has 24.2 million people as members of consumer cooperatives and 2.6 million who subscribe to health cooperatives with annual turnover of billions of yen.

Tomasello has constructed an elegant and sophisticated argument which outlines how sophisticated language systems evolved from simple practices of pointing and pantomiming and how the capacity to share attention and intentions has facilitated the human ability to take the perspective of others by putting ourselves in their place and to develop norms of cooperation.  He also draws attention to the fundamental importance of recognition, via the argument that we feel loved to the extent that we are recognised by others and given social approbation. 

On the other hand, it can be argued that in contrast to the mainstream argument which portrays humans as selfish individuals, he constructs too rosy an image of the human subject.  That we can share the perspective of others is also important for purposes of social comparison.  We are acutely aware of the fortunes and misfortunes of those closest to us and contrary to what our culture tells us, we are often envious of the former and joyful of the latter. The philosopher David Hume once remarked on the curious tendency for a person to smile on being told bad news about a loved one, arguing that the news makes them feel better, in that at least this did not happen to them personally.  Schadenfreude is the name given to the joy we experience when we are told of others’ misfortune.  The opposite tendency is the corrosive feeling of envy at the good fortune of another. 

Friedrich von Hayek: The Development of Market Society

Adam Smith famously argued that ‘Divine Providence’ can act in place of top-down management of the economy to ensure that spontaneous order will arise naturally from the bottom up if market transactions are allowed which enable millions of individuals to act in pursuit of their self-interest. While subscribing to the same bottom-up logic as Adam Smith which is discussed in chapter four, Friedrich von Hayek was an ordo-liberal³⁹ who argued to the contrary that the market is not natural but is rather a secondary order formation that arose through cultural group selection. Moreover while this greatly extended the scope of human sociability and progress, market morality exists in a precarious balance and continuous tension with more a primal form of morality.

In the context of evolution Hayek separated biological from cultural evolution by linking the former to our genetic inheritance which developed over thousands of generations. In contrast, cultural evolution which generally operates through group selection involves the transmission and accumulation of knowledge and practices from one generation to the next and is much faster than biological evolution.

Hayek’s argument can perhaps be better understood by following the development charted by Tomasello (2008) in Figure 3.5, which traces a chart from apes to early hominids and then Early Sapiens and Later Sapiens.  Although Tomasello (2008) does not mention the development of markets, he argues that humans are biologically adapted for culture through our capacity to recognize others as intentional agents and that this had a ‘ratchet’ effect for language learning and for the use of tools. These developments sped up the rate of innovation and modifications were then inscribed in cultural traditions and passed on progressively in a process that worked faster than natural selection. Hayek’s argument, that the market is an artificial construction, resonates with Tomasello (2008) in that this recognises that abilities to engage in cooperative activities such as market exchange must have developed over thousands of generations. However Hayek’s explanation is more hard-edged than the gradualist picture painted by Tomasello as he sharply distinguishes a phylogenetically older ‘village’ mentality which he argues consists of innate traits for living in small cohesive groups of kin from the more recent development of the market through group cultural selection. His argument is that markets developed relatively late in the course of human history when some groups eventually broke with the traditional taboo against interacting with strangers to engage in barter for needed goods.  The growing prosperity of these groups was noticed by others which then began to imitate their practice so that an early form of  market society began to spread.  

As Hayek saw it, a new set of social rules developed through the long course of cultural evolution which supported a market logic that encouraged civilised conduct towards strangers.  These evolving rules would have been highly unsettling and disruptive of communal sharing. For instance, one can imagine the corrosive effect on communal solidarity of allowing individuals to barter with strangers, to acknowledge that some property is private, to tolerate competition between individuals within the group, to allow prices to vary, to lend money at interest, or to enforce contractual obligations.⁴⁰

Although acknowledging that humans today are in many ways different to Early Sapiens, Hayek argued that we retain most of the older primitive emotional traits and there is thus a continuing tension between the innate tribal morality that orients us towards kin and the market morality which while greatly disliked is highly effective in bringing wealth. 

The innate instincts of solidarity and altruism were repressed so that the history of civilization could take hold. New rules and practices emerged, enabling the growth and coordination of extended groups no longer based on personal ties or shared ends. These new rules and practices all have to do with the growth of the market: profit, competition, and the division of labor are some of the essential drives for the emancipation from a primitive condition and the development of human civilization.’ (Parmentier, 2025).

In contrast to American neoliberals such as Milton Friedman, who preached the gospel of ‘laissez-faire’, Hayek argued that the market is a fragile, artificial construction that must be nurtured if it is to survive. Although he was antithetical to ‘big’ government and specifically warned against direct government intervention into the marketplace, he also argued that the market can be prone to failure and so government must ensure to protect its efficiency. This was vitally important to him, as in his view civilization itself is based on the market order, as ‘free’ markets enable humanity to be, “many and civilized” rather than “few and savage.”⁴¹

Discussion

Although Bowles et al. (2017) profess their admiration for Hayek for his critique of competitive equilibrium thinking and his bold account of the economy as a complex adaptive system, they suggest that his political arguments for unregulated markets does not square with his economic argument. In a nutshell they argue that in The Road to Serfdom (Hayek, 1945), his experience of the monstrous Nazi state led to an unwarranted emphasis against state involvement in planning. Given that It was this, rather than the efficiency of the market that was his main concern, Hayek’s advocacy of the market was by default, as a better alternative to central planning, on the basis that planners can never possess the required information and so bottom-up solutions will work better by communication through the price system. However this is a far cry from advocating unregulated markets and Bowles et al. (2017), employ Hayek’s own argument to argue why this is a bad idea. For instance, given asymmetric information, it is impossible to write a contract that covers every base so that one can expect lenders and managers to have power over borrowers and employees, or to cover market failure or externalities that will arise as byproducts. The authors argue that Hayek antipathy to the state clouded his judgement so that he failed to recognise that the state can also act benevolently while the market can be cruelly indifferent,

Ask yourself: where are the key liberal ideas of tolerance, the rule of law, and defence of the weak against the strong more secure today: the Nordic countries (where governments comprise half of the economy) or the U.S, where Hayek’s political vision has been widely embraced? (Bowles et al., 2017).

Wilson, Kadar and Roth, (2015) damn Hayek with faint praise, arguing that ’he got some things right’, while otherwise suggesting that his advocacy of economic self-interest was fundamentally misplaced as it is incompatible with cultural group selection. As discussed in chapter three, David Sloan Wilson fundamentally disagrees with arguments which advocate the maximisation of individual self-interest in the marketplace because by maximising fitness at the individual level they antithetical to the whole by undermining cooperation. Where Hayek had argued that one must act to preserve the delicate freedom of the marketplace against reversion to a ‘village’ mentality, Wilson and Hessen (2014) arrived at the exact opposite conclusion to Hayek by arguing that “real villages provide a blueprint for the global village” and moreover Wilson et al. (2015), then argued that the ‘monstrous’ image of Hayek who argued ‘Government bad, Market good’ should have a stake driven through its heart. While conceding that Hayek was right to argue that economic systems are self-organizing products of cultural group selection, Wilson argued that such systems do not support free market fundamentalist views.

Having said that, the argument by Wilson et al. (2015) for the development of prosociality is broadly similar to Hayek, when arguing that humans have always been a more cooperative species than their hominid cousins. In his explanation cooperation became harder to enforce when nomadic societies settled to engage in agriculture and formed larger groups, which is when cultural evolution began to co-evolve new mechanisms of control alongside genetic evolution. He argues that multilevel cultural evolution continues to operate in the present and that the most successful large-scale societies are those that manage to coordinate activity and suppress disruptive forms of within-society competition, while those dominated by small elites fail.

Hayek has been a bogey man for those on the Left since the 1980s, by dint of the warm reception given to (some) of his arguments by the cabinet of UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.  However, the policies pursued by the Thatcher and Reagan governments comprised a mishmash, consisting of a blend of his ideas with those of Milton Friedman and others from the Chicago School of Economics, and as is often the case in realpolitik, not many of these survived in the transition to implementation.  For that reason, followers of Hayek can claim, with some justification, that his ideas were never really implemented.  That said, Hayek offered the market as a panacea for human woes despite clear evidence of booms and busts, market failure and massive social inequality. Hayek is relevant today because some of his later arguments have been taken out of context and bastardised by right-wing elements to square with their racist ideology.⁴² From the above David Sloan Wilson has criticised Hayek for mistakenly believing that the ‘invisible hand’ of the market, steadied only by an occasional light touch on the tiller by government to ensure its efficient operation is sufficient to convey the ship of humanity towards a brave new world.  Wilson (2019) argues that in biology, self-organization is not intrinsically good and that beneficial outcomes only occur when the system is subject to group-level selection. In his view evolutionary theory suggests that complex systems such as the marketplace require effective governance through regulation.

Mal-Adaptiveness

While Hayek argued that the market is a source for good, multilevel selection theorists argue to the contrary that cultural selection can be maladaptive and that markets too can go awry. This explanation is different to the ‘big-mistake’ hypothesis, which argues that today’s environment is radically different from that of the Pleistocene, when domain specific modules were developed.  The cultural explanation is that maladaptive ideas spread in a different way to genes. For instance things can go awry, when subjects imitate prestigious models, because as more individuals join in and become embroiled, this can lead to ‘runaway’ cultural evolution.  As an illustration from a simple economy Bascom (1950) reported on the curious situation that developed in the community living on the Micronesian Pacific island of Ponape. In this culture a man’s prestige was partly judged by his ability to grow very large yams which by the time of Bascom’s report had become so heavy that a large number of men were required to carry them. Richerson and Boyd have argued that the situation in Ponape arose because in the past the male talent for growing yams was a sign of male prowess that attracted potential mates. However, as this idea gained traction over generations, the custom of growing giant yams became an end in itself. Divorced from its original purpose this then escalated in a runaway manner that came ultimately to threaten the way of life of the community.  Richerson & Boyd then make a leap to consumer culture in the USA that, ‘In California, where we live, the twelve-man yam comes to mind when we see a Hummer II rolling down a Los Angeles boulevard’ (Richerson & Boyd, 2005 164). Their point is similar to that of Girard by linking ‘individualism’ to the inter-individual context, where rivalry is not played out in terms of giant yams but on the keyboard of consumer commodities.

The individualism that is so prized in today’s consumer society is one of the best examples of mal-adaption where inter-individual competition threatens not only the basis of human society but against the evolutionary process by drastically reducing procreation of the species. For instance as mentioned in chapter two, rather than procreating in order to spread their genes to subsequent generations, TFR rates have been falling precipitously for decades so that procreation is now below replacement levels in over half of the world’s population (Morgan, 2003). The frenetic lifestyle and time-pressures on young adults who aspire to be educated professionals encourages women to defer childbirth until their career is established and because the acquisition of educational and cultural capital is so expensive parents opt to have fewer children . This trend is explained as the result of children’s observations of successful models around them whom they imitate.  Richerson & Boyd (2005) argue that childless professionals, “succeed culturally as long as they have an important influence on the beliefs, values and behaviour of their students, employees, or subordinates’ (ibid.: 150).  Given that children learn a lot by focusing on successful models who are not their parents, it is argued that such maladaptive ideas can spread relatively quickly throughout a population. This discussion is developed further in chapter five.

The Tragedy of the Commons Revisited

Theorists from a multilevel selection perspective argue that Smith’s conception of homo economicus, is wrong on several counts, for instance, in believing that the market is a natural force for good by assuming that there is a natural order or equilibrium in nature.  David Sloan Wilson argues that Smith’s belief that some invisible hand of Divine Providence will ensure a good outcome is misplaced as there is no moral order to be found in nature, no invisible hand that will convert individual self-interest into an outcome that is beneficial for society (Wilson, 2019).  They also criticize homo economicus, arguing against the scenario described by Garret Hardin (1968) in the Tragedy of the Commons (Wilson, 2019). While Hardin’s argument was not based on fact it nevertheless was taken as economic orthodoxy and informed policy.  This is despite research across a number of cultures which supports the opposite conclusion that individuals are motivated by the common good and that groups play a central role in the management of the commons. 

 As mentioned in the first part of this chapter, Hardin (1968) argued that where a resource such as land is held in common by a community of herders, individuals are motivated to maximise their own return at the expense of the common good as each seeks to maximize his utility by adding another animal to his herd. Consequently, in the long run the common resource is over-grazed and depleted. This is the basis of the argument that it is more sustainable to legitimize private property rights enabling individuals to own and manage their own piece of land.

What can be learned from the above in relation to Hardin’s (1968) idea of the tragedy of the commons?  From a mainstream perspective, one might argue that the strong bonds of community and communal management that Fiske observed amongst the Moose reflect the operation of the ‘big mistake’ hypothesis, in relation to kin selection and reciprocal altruism. Fiske argues that something more is going on here, which reinforces the collective nature of the group, which ensures social solidarity and cohesion, thus increasing overall fitness. In this view sharing does not consist of a patchwork of coalitions engaged in by autonomous, selfish, individuals, but is rather a complex social process that has the texture of a densely woven tapestry, relies on the existence of joint intentionality and the existence of common ground between those who share resources in common. It is clear that there is no tragedy of the commons for the Moose, although one should not fall into the trap of assuming that they are somehow also perfectly attuned to their surroundings.

Imagine that the land used as a commons by the Moose is also used in a similar manner by adjoining groups. In this scenario, the situation described by Hardin (1968) in relation to individual herders is removed to that between groups. This situation perhaps more closely describes the current dismal state of world fishing, which is not so much a free-for-all between individual fishermen but rather involves relations between countries and large trading blocs. Rather than concluding from this that is an inevitable consequence of an inherently selfish human nature, the tragedy of the oceans might better be understood as a complex issue of global governance requiring an agreed superordinate system of monitoring and control for its effective management, involving the collaboration of the world’s nation states acting in unison.  The tragedy of the depletion of global fishing stocks may thus be explained by the fact that an effective management system, comprising effective supra-national institutions for managing the fishing industry, has evolved too slowly in relation to sharp increases in global population and fishing technologies.  

An Alternative Path

David Sloan Wilson argues, contrary to neoclassical economists, that the focus on homo economicus as an individual who cares solely about leisure, income and wealth encourages students who are taught this doctrine to believe that to be human is to be greedy, “and the more greedy you are the more successful you’ll be”.⁴³ This narrow vision of individual success is realised in the online celebrity culture that prevails today where influencers compete for ‘likes’ and the so-called titans of ‘Big-Tech’ who do not need to be named, care more for their longevity and for their vainglorious schemes than for the welfare of the billions of their fellow humans or the diverse species who also live on the only planet in the universe known to support complex life.

Sloan Wilson (2019) argues that if economists say that personal greed is the way to do business then as others see it, this must be true, but that from multilevel selection such a perspective is ultimately disastrous because it undermines group solidarity. On the other hand he mentions that not all of those in economics or business teach this as doctrine, mentioning in particular the contribution of Lin Ostrom (1990), who won the Nobel prize for economics in 2009 for her research in Switzerland, Spain, Ethiopia, the Amazon and Philippines amongst others, which offered proof that Hardin is wrong.  Importantly she documented eight effective principles by which groups manage common resources such as grazing, fisheries and forestry,

·      Build a strong group identity and understanding

·      Establish proportional equivalence between benefits and costs.

·      Institute fair and inclusive decision making

·      Monitor agreed upon behaviours

·      Establish a regime of graduated sanctions for misbehaviour

·      Initiate a programme of fast and fair conflict resolution

·      Provide autonomy for local groups

·      Relationships within groups should be the same as those between groups.

Ostrom (1990) found that while the vast majority of groups she studied did not include these principles but that the most effective groups attend to social justice by agreeing appropriate behaviour and then monitoring this and punishing offenders. The principles of group regulation identified by Ostrom for the effective management of common resources operate at a different level to that proposed by Adam Smith who had argued that the most efficient allocation of resources will develop from the bottom up in the market system, where the common good can be realised by individuals acting according to the principle of homo economicus to maximise their self-interest.  From the perspective of multi-level selection, unregulated inter-individual competition in the marketplace can threaten and indeed destroy the common resources on which the future prosperity of humanity depends. This is discussed further in chapter five.

As mentioned above, Wilson (2019) takes from Lin Ostrom (1990) the challenge today to “scale up” cooperation from the village level to society. And while Mariana Mazzucato (2023) appears broadly supportive of Ostrom’s argument, her critique of what Wilson would call the ‘symbotype’ or ideological frame for Ostrom’s argument is interesting and relevant. Mazzucato’s point is that the pervasive assumption of the exclusivity of the market is such that it even informs how Ostrom came to frame her view of common pool resources. You may remember from chapter three that David Sloan Wilson commended Ostrom for identifying system-level solutions to problems arising from the ‘tragedy of the commons’ in a series of empirical studies. Mazzucato argues that Ostrom based her ideas about the public good in relation to a two by two matrix formed by rivalry and excludability, where “rivalry…refers to whether one person’s consumption of the good reduces its availability for others, and excludability…. denotes whether people can be prevented from the consumption of the good.” Ostrom uses this as a basis to differentiate goods for sale in the marketplace which are excludable and rivalrous, from common pool resources which are relatively non-excludable (as for instance, it is difficult to exclude fishing fleets from exploiting the seas) and are also rivalrous (because “there are only so many fish in the sea”).

Mazzucato’s (2023) point is that Ostrom (1990) uses the dimensions of rivalry and excludability to differentiate private goods from club goods, common pool resources and public goods. The problem identified by Mazzucato (2023) is that by means of the logic of this grid the idea that the realm of private interests is separate has led to the widespread presumption that public intervention in the economy should be restricted to fixing problems after the fact, when markets have already failed. The common view is that the proper role of government is to support positive externalities, say by supporting initiatives to reduce carbon emissions from fossil fuel consumption, and to act to prevent ‘bads’ arising which occasion the need for public measures to deal with waste, pollution or damage to public health. Additionally, in this view government is expected to be involved by addressing negative externalities by nudging business to internalise costs, say through the provision of carbon taxes.

Informed by Polyani (2001), Mazzucato (2023) provides a counter argument to the above by arguing that it is fundamentally wrongheaded to think of the market as separate from the social and political structures in which it is embedded, as markets require “continuous and centrally organised” intervention. This reminds us of the importance of the need to recognise how understandings of the market are framed by beliefs, of which a central belief is whether it is a natural or is an artificial construction. If one subscribes to the neoliberal belief that markets arise naturally and are efficient then they should be left alone and the role of the state should be limited to the provision of a ‘level playing field’, or in instances of market failure, by acting to mitigate “externalities” that need fixing, such as the production of waste, global heating, obesity, addiction and the societal consequences that arise rom the monetisation of anxiety and anger by technology giants.

Mazzucato (2023) argues to the contrary that if markets are conceived of as embedded in larger systems and always imperfect, then the situation will always arise where intervention by government working with a number of stakeholders can improve the outcome. In contrast to the rather fuzzy liberal notion of the common good emerging from the self-interested actions of citizens and consumers, she argues that the seventeen UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) provide a tangible resource for governance and collective action towards collective good. She argues that the market is constantly negotiated and shaped by the ways in which different value-creating actors are governed, so that it should not be inconceivable that the state, working in concert with a range of stakeholders rather than being expected to fix problems caused by externalities after the event, would be involved in shaping and co-creating markets in accordance with sustainable development goals. Rather than seeing this process as state-led, she argues that this process should involve extensive community engagement that is based on a conception of public value that is collectively negotiated and generated by a number of stakeholders.

General Discussion

From the brief review of mainstream and group selection theories in this chapter, sharing is widely understood to be a pervasive aspect of non-human organisms and distinctive of human societies, which cooperate to a much greater level than their primate cousins. This may be surprising for those of us who are steeped in the lore of economics and management, where the overall emphasis is on competition between individuals.

The evolutionary theories used to explain sharing paradoxically link this to self-interest; although this is crucially dependent on the level of ‘self’ we are talking about, whether this is the gene, individual person, or group. This is paradoxical because we usually explain things in relation to individual human agency and in this respect, it can be puzzling to explain how it can be in a person’s self-interest to act altruistically towards others by incurring costs to themselves. From a kin-selection perspective it is in the gene’s interest that a person acts altruistically towards those carrying the same gene complex, so long as overall fitness is increased. It is more reasonable from the individual’s perspective that they help others who reciprocate that help. Indeed, it is useful to secure a reputation for helping, which signals our fitness to potential mates, and makes it more likely that others will help us. Multilevel selection acknowledges the importance of our innate evolved psychology but argues that this is insufficient to explain the challenge presented by large-scale cooperation, which became a feature of human societies during the Holocene period. Theorists argue that such developments can only be made sense of if one acknowledges the central importance of groups and of culture in instilling group norms. They thus focus on the role played by institutions such as religion to increase, or ratchet-up within-group sharing and solidarity.

The explanations point to a complex mechanics underlying the apparently simple process of sharing. Mainstream theorists argue that our innate psychology enables us to unconsciously calculate costs and benefits and to model these in relation to what we receive and what is received by others, when estimating whether or not an exchange is fair. They argue that these innate abilities have little in common with formal logic but enable us to detect potential cheats. They signal a wide range of abilities underpinning sharing, including: joint intentionality; the ability to imitate others; to empathize with them by feeling what they feel; recursive mindreading, which enable us to reverse roles and place ourselves in the shoes of others; the ability to signal our intentions to others through pointing and pantomiming and by means of this, to recognize their desire; finally the role played by group norms in regulating sharing. Taken together, these point to a sophisticated architecture for sharing. In short, our evolved psychology contains systems that do not follow the rules of logic, which, as a matter of routine, operate automatically and unconsciously.

Mainstream and cultural theorists also argue that although humans share the same innate capacities, differences will exist between groups. The mainstream argument suggests that because the challenges confronting humanity during the Pleistocene were quite different from one place to another, so the precise form taken by the domain-specific modules that form the ‘jukebox’ will be different. From a group cultural selection perspective, theorists argue that important differences exist between cultures in respect to perspective, perception of self and expectations of fairness. For example, one difference, which was discussed in chapter one, (in relation to Freud’s topological explanation as developed by Norbert Elias), is where one locates oneself on the “I-We” continuum. Westerners are much more likely to place themselves in proximity to the “I” pole, seeing themselves as self-contained, autonomous individuals, who value freedom as a value. Yet this is not true of many cultures where what is ‘inside’ the self-concept is connected to the collective within which one is immersed (Fiske, 1991: 51) The topology of sharing that links it to the individual “I” is not comprehensible to these people. This idea is strikingly developed by Pasi Falk (1994) whose theory is discussed later in chapter eight.

Differences between “I” and “We” cultures can be extended to issues of morality. John Haidt differentiates, contractualism, from a beehive morality.⁴⁴ Contractualists, take the individual “I” as the fundamental source of value. Their ethical system stresses two forms of affiliation, based on fairness and reciprocity, and also in the injunction to care for others, or at least not to do them harm. The beehive morality likens human society to a colony of bees. Understood in this context, it is the survival of the hive and not the individual bee that is at stake. The two major threats to the hive are attack from outside and disintegration from within, either of which can be disastrous. Unlike bees, humans have to learn the importance of the social group, hence the importance of families and schools and the media. This involves a shared moral code that stresses loyalty to the group, respect for authority and purity and sanctity, in addition to the universal foundations, of caring and reciprocity. Contractualism is linked to the liberal notion of freedom promoted by the modernization theorists discussed in chapter one. Beehive morality on the other hand stresses social order and harmony over and above individual freedom. To illustrate the difference between the two groups, when asked if it is morally acceptable if their next-door neighbour eats the family pet dog, after it has been killed by a car, those who subscribe to a beehive ethics will say no, but contractualists will be able to suppress their distaste by arguing it is up to them (Haidt, 2007). Whilst beehive morality gets a bad press today, being linked to forces of social conservatism and fascism, Haidt (ibid.) argues that critics tend to ignore that religious believers are healthier and longer lived and are more generous in volunteering and in donating to charity, than are their counterparts.

Imitation plays a role in all of the accounts. Again I should mention the important difference between imitation and acquisitive mimesis, where the latter is ultimately rooted in the desire to be, or to take the place of the model. Cultural group selection theorists posit a subject who wants to be like others in order to be liked by them. For Girard, acquisitive mimetic desire is endemic in the human subject who is perennially haunted by a sense of incompleteness in relation to the model. Girard would no doubt accept Tomasello’s point about “Gricean” communication (Grice 1975) is that when we communicate with other people, we are never simply requesting or informing someone, but are also signalling our fundamental desire to be recognized by them. Consider that you are in a restaurant or bar, where the waiter appears to be looking everywhere but at you. That such apparently trivial episodes can quickly escalate to feelings of annoyance and anger that can turn to rudeness and expressions of violence, makes it apparent that communication is always linked to prestige. Grice (ibid.) can be read via Girard, to argue that when the model does not recognize the desire of the subject, then the implication for the subject is that the model does not believe them to be worthy of attention and respect and is presumed by the subject, who feels inadequate in relation to the model, to act wilfully in behaving in that way. Girard pushes this argument one step further to argue, paradoxically, that the roots of narcissism lie in the presumed self-possession of the model. Desire is crucially linked to attainability; the only reason I want him or her is because they don’t want me. The perfect model is also the most unattainable, who appears to be oblivious to the desire of the subject and of others.

Although imitation plays an important role in the accounts provided by Tomasello and Girard their ideas, methods and explanations differ in fundamental ways. At a general level it is likely they similarly argue that subjects imitate the actions of others whom they admire or would like to resemble. This is compatible with Fiske’s (1992) assertion that communal sharing operates when individuals imitate the action of the other whom they perceive to be similar, or whom they want to resemble. Their explanations differ in one crucial respect, relating to acquisitive mimesis, or the imitation of desire which is lacking in Tomasello’s account. Where Tomasello suggests a smooth sequence that leads from imitation to conformity, solidarity and then affiliation (Tomasello, 2008: 212), Girard would interject that there is also the likelihood of an alternative path leading from imitation to acquisitive mimesis, mimetic-violence and scapegoating. Where Tomasello accentuates the ability for humans to construct common ground and to take the perspective of the other, Girard stresses the capacity to imitate the desire of a model and simultaneously to take the place of the model in figuring their desire. This question is discussed more fully later after Girard’s theory has been explained.

Fiske (1991) argues that communal sharing operates when individuals imitate the action of the other whom they perceive to be similar, or whom they want to resemble. The other side of this is that the person fears the derision and shame of standing out as being disparate or opposed to the group, ‘That is, conformity may result from identification and the desire to belong’ (Asch 1955, Milgram, 1974). (Fiske, 1991: 76). Perhaps insufficient attention has been devoted to the role played by envy in relation to the object. Envy is corrosive, with the ability to dissolve any social relation and destroy any form of community. In this sense it can be likened to a contagion. Perhaps sharing has developed as a means to forestall such corrosive tendencies? In many cultures individuals who engage in self-denial and sharing are often held in special esteem and are sometimes venerated as saints. Girard’s contribution lies in spotting the destructive power of acquisitive mimesis, which presented problems for those hominids who lacked most of the controls that modern subjects take for granted. Where desire is most often considered as being that of a subject for an object, acquisitive desire describes the desire of a subject for an object that is desirable only because it is either in the possession of, or desired by another person, the model.

Although this is a matter of continuing controversy and debate, there is a growing body of evidence which suggests that what we perceive as the noblest human impulses, such as sympathy, empathy and fairness are shared to some degree with other social animals (De Waal, 2006). However it is also argued that human capacities for joint attention and language and that human institutions such as religion and law make for a distinctive and decisive difference.

The discussion of religion by evolutionary theorists is of course controversial and indeed repugnant, not only for those of us who profess a religious belief but because proponents can be unscientific themselves in promoting their beliefs (Haidt, 2007). That the evolutionary discussion of religion is rather flat and one-dimensional is possibly because this area of study is for them very much in its infancy. It can seem that be describing religious experience in such hard-edged terms more than a little is lost of its numinous, spiritual aspect, which is central to its understanding. Furthermore, the idea that human and animal sacrifice and other rituals such as fasting, simply function as forms of costly signal to believers can seem inadequate, lacking in a distinctive factor ‘X’. Girard’s explanation, based on repeated instances of scapegoating, may provide a rationale for the terrible nature of religious ritual. While evolutionary theorists draw attention to the power of rhythm and music provide the resonance to raise the sense of “we-ness” to new heights (Atran& Henrich, 2010), their discussion of communion pays scant attention to what is form some its central aspect, (Falk, 1996), which lies in co which is the silent, ritual incorporation of sacred food.

Sharing on the Internet             

The Internet is a relatively arecent feature of the communications context. Although its origins were closely associated with military and scientific uses, a communal culture quickly emerged amongst the scientists and academics who were the earliest users of the Internet.  They developed an ethic different which celebrated sharing through the open sourcing of materials. Paradoxically, this culture was initially supported by the marketplace, as for example in the early days of personal computing when IBM and Microsoft prospered at the expense of Apple by sharing the details of their operating system with others. The use of open-source systems such as LINUX continues to this day.  The presumption, preserved from the early days of the internet, that resources should be open and free, runs counter to a fundamental presumption of the market in relation to the preservation of property rights.  This has been felt particularly acutely in the publishing, media and music industries, which have been subject to a rapid and wholesale transformation of their business models as the result of the development of peer-to-peer networks. (Giesler, 2010).

One hardly reads a newspaper today without some mention of harassment or bullying related trolling on social media sites.  One 13-year-old warned her tormentors on the ask fm website, that she would kill herself if they did not stop; they didn’t; she did.  Two months later, her 15-year-old sister committed suicide. At time of writing, it was reported that a prominent academic Mary Beard became subjected to such vile abuse following her appearance on a TV chat-show, that the website which hosted these views, was closed down.

In light of the above, it may be surprising to some that not long ago some thought of the Internet as potentially opening a new age of altruism and sharing (Belk, 2007: 129). This is perhaps understandable, given the original ethic of the scientists and academics who were its earliest users was to ‘steal’ ideas.  However, problems developed even at the beginning of the development of Multi-User Destinations (MUDs), the progenitors of Facebook and other online fora.  Early MUDS were banned at a number of university campuses because of inappropriate behaviour that was often overtly sexual and violent (Unsworth, 1994).

 PMC MOO was one of a new generation of sites tasked to enable real time interaction of readers and authors of the magazine Postmodern Culture. There was initially no requirement for users to register their real names in order to use the site.    To begin with discussion was amicable, but over time, participants began to attack one each other. Things got dramatically worse when the MOO was mentioned in Wired magazine, after which it was crashed by a number of new users who created so much disruption, that  ‘the bad started to drive out the good’ (Unsworth, 1994).  Newton, one of these new members, reports the following interactions:

Followed by 30 minutes of solid, uninterrupted spam from repeated use of one of my own verbs, during which time I was incapacitated, as was Defender.

Blue_Guest logs out.

Violet_guest logs in.

Violet: (nazi insults) Followed by 10 additional minutes of spam, same method.

Violet_Guest logs out.

Orange_Guest logs in. Orange then attempted to spam me in the same manner, however, I immediately gagged him, the command carrying through after a mere 45 seconds.

Orange_Guest logs out.

Newton is replied to by Visual_Mark who tells him that he has brought this upon himself and:

‘If you think that people are going to stand for your kind of ostracization and oppression? Get a clue! Maybe you should take UG's advice and find another MOO! If you can't stand the heat, get outta the fucking kitchen!’

In 1994 PMC MOO was located to another site where participants had to reveal their real names and addresses.

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¹ Nowack et al. (2010); Abbott et al. (2011).

² Dawkins, (1989); Lloyd, (2001); Park, (2007).

³ Dawkins, (1979): “Misunderstanding Two”.

⁴ See Buller, (2005a; Buller, 2005b), Daly & Wilson, (2005).

⁵ Dawkins, (1979); Lieberman, Tooby & Cosmides, (2007)

⁶ The term ‘The Big Mistake’ seems to have been initially coined by Boyd & Richerson, (2002) who argue for the importance of culture and group selection.

⁷ Glazer, (1975), in Tooby & Cosmides,1989: 543

⁸ Axelrod and Hamilton, (1964); Trivers (1971); Cosmides & Tooby,)1989)

⁹ The authors report that between 4% and 25% of students correctly stated that the card D (P); 3 (Q) and 7 (not-Q) should be turned over. This is exactly the same logical problem as that presented by the drinking test, whivh 74% solved correctly. The authors tested to see if this had anything to do with familiarity of the scenarios and found that it was not (Cosmides & Tooby, 19898: 88).

¹⁰ Vianna et al., (2010) in Silvertown, (2024, 38).

¹¹ Silvertown, (2024, 38).

¹² see Dawkins, (1976: x); Zahavi (1977), (1997); and (2000, 255)

¹³ Kahneman & Tversky, (1996, 583).

¹⁴

¹⁵ Overing, (1992: 194).

¹⁶ Interview with Womens’ Own magazine, October 31st 1987.

¹⁷ Safran-Foer (2009: 35, 48).

¹⁸ Sources: Hickman, Martin (2009) Revealed: The bid to corner the bluefin tuna market. The Independent, Wednesday, 3rd June. Clover, Charles (2009) The End of the Line: How overfishing is changing the world and what we eat. The New Press; Mielgo, Robert (2009) The End of the Line. (film).

¹⁹ See Muir & Craig (1998) for original study.

²⁰ Hill et al., (2011), in Silvertown, (2024, 39).

²¹ Brink, (2014) in Silvertown, (2024, 41).

²² Silvertown, (2024, (43).

²³ De Waal, 2006: 4.

²⁴ Freud, (1938: 203).

²⁵ Freud, (1938: 205).

²⁶ Freud, (1922: 112).

²⁷ Sulloway, (1979: 373).

²⁸ Elias, (1994). See also, Marc Joly, in Mennell, (2011)

²⁹ Caplan et al. (1991: 1515).

³⁰ Hay & Ross, (1982).

³¹ Hay & Weber,, (1985).

³² Wrangham, (2021, 265).

³³ Wrangham, (2021, 262).

³⁴ Norris & Inglehart, (2004), Atran & Henrich, (2010: 20)

³⁵ Henrich et al. (2010 Table 3, 12).

³⁶ Fifth Commandment, Exodus 20, Ephesians 6, Deuteronomy 21.

³⁷ The Telegraph (2010) People should be forced to look after grandparents to repay them for free childcare. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/7130372/People-should-be-forced-to-look-after-grandparents-to-repay-them-for-free-childcare.html. Accessed June 2019.

³⁸ Girard argues that not all mimesis is negative. He singles out in particular those who seek to imitate Jesus, who by ‘sacrificing sacrifice’ and forgiving their enemies break the cycle of mimetic violence.

³⁹ von Hayek was associated with the the Freiburg School formed by Walter Eucken, and Franz Böhm. Ordo-liberalism is more fully discussed in chapter four.

⁴⁰ Examples come from Hayek, Law, Legislation, Liberty, vol. 3, 161. In Piasentier, (2025).

⁴¹ Hayek, The Fatal Conceit, 133, in Piasentier, (2025).

⁴² See Slobodian, (2025).

⁴³ Wilson, (2019, 139).

⁴⁴ Haidt, John (22007) Moral psychology and the misunderstanding of religion.http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/haidt07/haidt07_index.html. Accessed 3rd Feb. 2013.