The Rawness

When I say that the tendency to stereotype isn’t all bad, and in fact is often a good thing, I get a lot of grief. The first thing people think is that I’m somehow anti-minority or pro-white, but everyone from a straight WASP male to a Wiccan black butch lesbian can be a victim of stereotypes. Stereotypes are not a problem exclusive to minorities, nor are minorities exempt from doing the stereotyping themselves.

Like it or not, the tendency to stereotype is a part of human nature, and my view is that if a behavior or biological response is part of our human nature, it must be because it traditionally gives people an evolutionary advantage. When we say that a trait gives us an evolutionary advantage, what we’re saying is that it satisfies our two fundamental biological drives: the drive for self-preservation and the drive to spread genes through reproduction. Let me clarify, anything that falls under the human nature category satisfies one or both of those fundamental drives.

Take gossip for example. On the surface it may seem like a petty and ugly part of our human nature with little to no redeeming qualities. But there are many plausible theories out there that convincingly suggest the opposite, that the tendency to gossip is a tool that gives humans a huge evolutionary advantage over those who never gossip. Robin Dunbar in his book Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language discusses the development of language and the evolutionary benefits of gossip, for example. According to Dunbar, in the days before credit reports and background checks, gossip traditionally benefited communities by spreading the word about dangerous and untrustworthy people. If you were unreliable, a thief or violent, word spread around about you and people avoided you. In this way gossip satisfied the self-preservation drive. Also, say a woman was a slut. As a man looking to carry your genes into the next generation, you would have avoided marrying a slut at all costs because in the days before DNA tests and reliable birth control, a slut can easily get pregnant by another man and tell you the baby is yours. Now you’re paying for another man’s child and not spreading your genes. So by telling you about someone’s sexual behavior, gossip helps a man with his drive to reproduce.

It’s also human nature for people to be more critical of a woman for being promiscuous and unfaithful than for a man. As I explained in this earlier post, that’s because if a man slept around and impregnated several women, it optimized the drive to reproduce in two ways. First, one man sleeping with multiple women led to multiple pregnancies whereas one woman sleeping with multiple men still only led to one pregnancy. That’s an inefficient allocation of resources. Second, if one man slept with multiple women, you’d know who the father is and who the mother is in each pregnancy. If a woman slept with multiple men, especially in the days before DNA testing and reliable birth control, you wouldn’t know which man was the father. This is an obstacle in a man’s drive to reproduce and spread genes. It’s for these reasons (and others) that we still tend to be more critical of women for promiscuity than men.

For a man, on the other hand, it’s a worse blow to his reputation to not be a provider than it is to be promiscuous. That’s why most negative gossip about men revolves around being cheap, being a deadbeat dad, and being chronically unemployed or lazy. Traditionally, the danger to women when men slept around wasn’t a threat to the drive to reproduce and spread genes. As we’ve seen, men sleeping around actually optimizes that goal. The threat to a woman when men slept around was to the other drive, the drive for self-preservation, because that man may choose to take better care of the other women and her children and send a majority of his resources their way instead. In evolutionary terms, a hardworking and responsible polygamous man who takes care of all his women and children is preferable to a lazy and irresponsible monogamous man who doesn’t take care of his one family. So when you look at human nature in evolutionary terms and focus on the two drives, the natural tendency human beings have to gossip about women’s sluttiness and men’s ambition and finances make perfect sense.

It also works in reverse, if good gossip is spread about you, it increases your reputation which in turn increases your chances of survival and reproduction. This gives people an incentive to manage their reputations, follow the rules and conform to societal norms, hence another benefit gossip provides to a community.

Take something even less obvious, like the natural urge we have to tickle people, and the built-in response we have of laughing when being tickled. It may seem like a stretch, but even tickling satisfies the two drives, as seen in this NY Times article:

Tickling and laughter are universal among humans and can even be found among chimpanzees, suggesting that they serve some serious evolutionary purpose. Researchers agree that tickling plays an important role in the bonding of infants and parents. Mother tickles baby. Baby laughs and smiles. Mother laughs and smiles. They endear themselves to each other to their mutual evolutionary advantage.

But Dr. Glenn Weisfeld, a human ethologist at Wayne State University in Detroit, suggests that tickling may do much more. Tickling, he maintains, is an educational activity.

”The structures of the body that are most vulnerable to tickling are also the ones that are most vulnerable to attack,” Dr. Weisfeld said. ”We may be responsive to tickling because it gives us practice in defending ourselves.” Children laugh, he said, to encourage adults to continue this tickle schooling, in what are typically safe, practice play attacks.

These examples reinforce the view that human nature is a collection of instinctive responses and learned behaviors that give us an evolutionary advantage by helping us either survive or reproduce. Gossip helps people avoid dangerous, unreliable and untrustworthy people. By helping us socially fit in and form bonds, laughing can help us in our drives to reproduce and spread genes. By teaching us to protect vital areas, tickling can help us with self-preservation.

So if stereotyping is a part of human nature, what evolutionary advantages does it give us? And how does it satisfy the two primal drives of self-preservation and spreading genes through reproduction? We’ll get into that in part 2.

Recommended Reading:

• I first encountered the two human drives in reading a book by the pickup artist Mystery, The Mystery Method: How to Get Beautiful Women Into Bed. Pickup artists and their books often get a bad rap as being manipulative or just plain bunk, but I find them to have a lot of sound theories about evolutionary psychology in general and gender relations in particular. Mystery was the subject of the recent VH-1 show The Pickup Artist. I find his social theories to be pretty sound overall.
• This book is a great resource on the evolution and advantage of language in general and gossip in particular.
• This book is an excellent starting point for learning about evolutionary psychology, and I highly recommend it. It’s written in a really easy-breezy style and is extremely readable and layperson friendly.

Click here for Part 2 of this post.

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