The Evolution of Agency – Part 4
The social guardrails that formed the track to human agency.
Continuing this series of essays, we’ll explore the evolutionary origins of human agency, the key steps in that development, and the need for society to uphold the types of social arrangements that made the development of human agency possible in the first place. Michael Tomasello, in his book The Evolution of Agency: Behavioral Organization from Lizards to Humans, writes:
Early humans adapted their skills of great ape rational agency to the challenges of collaborative foraging—that is, the challenges presented by unpredictable partners with their own individual agendas—by developing the capacity to form a joint agency with a rational partner. This required three sets of adaptations not possessed by great apes, supported by a brain about double the size of an ape’s brain. (Indeed, in the analysis of González-Forero and Gardner [2018], about 60 percent of the brain growth characteristic of early humans during this period was concerned with adaptations for cooperative interactions.)
How did this happen?
First, humans needed to be able to form with one another a joint goal superseding their individual goals, which required both cognitive and motivational adaptations. Second, they needed to coordinate their individual roles in the collaborative activity, which required new forms of perspective taking and cooperative communication. And third, they needed to have ways of keeping everything on track in the collaboration even in the face of unanticipated exigencies—by working together to cognitively control the collaboration from one or another executive level—which required new mechanisms of social self-regulation.
What separates humans from chimpanzees is our ability to reliably cooperate with other humans:
Motivationally, the key to forming a joint goal is each partner’s assurance to the other that she will play her role in a cooperative spirit: each will subordinate, to some degree, her own individual interests to that of the joint agency, assuming that the other does so as well. This process also requires cooperative communication in the form of a mutually reassuring joint commitment to collaborate (Gilbert, 2014), whose effects may be seen in two lines of comparative experiments. First, if a chimpanzee is collaborating with a partner and unexpectedly gets her reward first, she simply takes it and runs (Greenberg et al., 2010); in contrast, if a young human child gets her reward first, she nevertheless stays committed to the collaboration throughout, delaying cashing in her own reward until her partner gets hers as well (Hamann et al., 2012; see also Kachel & Tomasello, 2019). Second, when a collaboration has reached its joint goal, a dominant chimpanzee will, if possible, hog all the spoils and exclude her partner, which means that the pair is unlikely to continue collaborating (Melis, Hare, & Tomasello, 2006); in contrast, when a young human child obtains rewards collaboratively with a partner, she almost always divides them equally, which encourages continuing collaboration (Warneken et al., 2011; see also Hamann et al., 2011) … The foundation stone of uniquely human agency is individuals’ ability and propensity to form with others a joint goal, thereby creating an evolutionarily unique, socially constituted feedback control system.
The usefulness of cooperating with other humans spurred human communication:
When a collaborating individual notices a situation relevant to the joint goal that her partner has not yet noticed, it would be helpful if she could draw her partner’s attention to that situation. Early humans thus evolved a new form of communication—cooperative communication (also used to form joint goals and commitments …)—in which collaborative partners informed one another of things helpfully so as to facilitate their joint success (Tomasello, 2008). The first instantiations were the species-unique gestures of pointing and pantomiming. To communicate effectively using such natural gestures, individuals had to take each other’s perspective: I see that you are not attending to something that I am; or conversely, I try to discover what you are apparently attending to that I am not (because you are gesturing to me). Chimpanzees do not communicate in this way. In chimpanzee group hunting, an individual may be excited about an approaching monkey and scream, from which other individuals make inferences; but the screamer does not intend this effect. Indeed, one of the most striking observations about chimpanzee collaboration in experiments is that they do little, if anything, to actively communicate with their partner, even when it would be easy and useful to do so (Melis et al., 2009). Chimpanzees are not attempting to influence their partner’s perspective in the direction of joint attention because they do not operate with the notions of perspective and joint attention in the first place.
The need to cooperate tended to encourage tribalism (the modern manifestation of which was explored in a previous essay):
Early humans collaborated in pairs, but they lived in larger, loosely structured social groups. That worked well for several hundred thousand years, but then, about 150,000 years ago, it began to work less well, and the reasons were mainly demographic. The problem was that these groups were so successful that their populations kept growing, which meant ever more encounters and possibly conflicts with other groups over territory and resources. By the end of this period, we observe the emergence of distinct cultural groups that distinguished themselves from one another—even from neighboring groups—by operating with distinct sets of artifacts, which clearly required different knowledge and cultural practices. For modern human individuals to survive and thrive, they needed to stay in their group, and if they were threatened by other groups, they needed to band together … Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson (2005) have argued that cultures with “strong” conventions, norms, and institutions supported by individual group members’ loyalty and conformity form units of selection that tend to survive and persist, whereas cultures with “weak” conventions, norms, and institutions not supported by individual group members’ loyalty and conformity fractionate and perish … Modern human cultural groups thus became collective agencies that pursued goals and made decisions as a single body. Collective goals concerned matters such as the destination of group travel, the location of a home base, the preparations for group defense, the division of resources, and the division of labor in tasks such as collective childcare. Collective decisions about such things took place through discussion resulting in consensus. Some individuals’ voices might be louder than others, but in virtually all small, informal human groups, when a large majority inclines in a certain direction, the rest tend to go along. And if one individual tries to take too much power and impose his will, the rest of the group pushes him aside or worse. This new collective way of doing things resulted in two major changes in individual psychology. First, because individuals were almost totally dependent on the group for survival, they became ever more concerned with its well-being, expressing their loyalty in various ways. Combined with a mistrust of outside groups, the result was a distinctive in-group/out-group psychology. In-group favoritism accompanied by out-group mistrust is one of the most well-documented phenomena in all of social psychology, and it emerges ontogenetically already in childhood. Thus children are more inclined to help in-group than out-group others; they are prone to share more with in-group than out-group others; and they care more about their reputation with in-group than out-group others. Reciprocally, young children also favor their in-group compatriots who express loyalty to the group (and mistrust of out-groups). In a direct test of the evolutionary hypothesis that group competition spurs within-group cooperation, groups of young children are more cooperative within their in-group if they are competing with an out-group (see Dunham, 2018, for a review of all this literature) … Second, because individuals needed to be able to recognize in-group members and, just as important, to be recognized by them as a member of the in-group, they began to conform to one another’s practices as a way of expressing their group identity (which worked even with in-group strangers from other social bands within the cultural group). If everyone in the group has a tendency to conform, then people who talk like me, dress like me, and eat the same foods as me are most likely members of my cultural group, even if I have never met them before. And, once again, conformity to the in-group is one of the most well-documented phenomena in all of social psychology. Thus, when young children witness in-group peers making clearly incorrect judgments, they often conform and follow suit nonetheless, especially if those peers are watching (Haun & Tomasello, 2011) … And slightly older children even tend toward what has been called overimitation—copying causally irrelevant aspects of an action—as they take whatever adults do to be an expression of the normative way that “we” do things (Keupp et al., 2013).
As groups became larger, they developed social norms for use in identifying members of the larger tribal group:
Modern humans’ collective agency was thus made possible by individuals evolving a group-minded concern for the culture’s goals and welfare, and a propensity to conform to the group’s ways of doing things … Now, in the collective agency of a cultural group with all kinds of cultural conventions and roles as part of the cultural common ground, there emerged collective expectations for individual behavior, also known as social norms, that served as self-regulators. All modern human cultural groups had (and have) social norms, at the least to self-regulate activities in which group-damaging conflicts might occur … [I]f the group is to function smoothly, everyone must be committed both to following those norms and to calling out transgressors for the good of the group as well.
But then something truly wonderful happened. Out of tribalism grew a need to see something outside oneself. From that need grew the beginning of objectivity, which has the potential to dispel some of the falsehoods that have a tendency to be perpetuated by tribal pressures:
As descendants of earlier humans, modern humans perceived and understood reality in terms of different possible perspectives on it, and also in terms of newly normative social attitudes, like responsibilities, that bound individuals to their collaborative partners. But as they evolved into fully cultural beings, modern humans came to perceive and understand the world not just in terms of individual perspectives on things but in terms of the objective situation that was independent of any individual perspective. And they came to understand their group mates not just in terms of their responsibilities to one another but also in terms of their obligations to uphold the collective normative standards agreed to by everyone in the group. Modern humans came to inhabit an objective-normative world. The key cognitive advance creating this objective-normative world is the ability to distinguish between subjective perspectives or beliefs, on the one hand, and the objective situation or reality, on the other. Great apes do not make this distinction: they take the world as it appears to them, and act accordingly. They can discern what a conspecific [a member of the same species] is perceiving, but they do not contrast his perspective with their own perspective on the situation, much less with the objective situation (because they do not understand perspectives as contrasting views of the same thing) … The process is not just “reading the mind” of another, as apes already do, but rather mentally coordinating with others in a way that requires the comparison of different perspectives or beliefs on one and the same reality … Normative rationality thus means adapting one’s individual agency to “objective” facts and values as they inhere in collective cultural experiences.
In the next essay in this series, we’ll explore more of Tomasello’s insights into the evolution of human agency and compare the factors that led to our rational capacities with some modern trends that threaten these same rational capacities.