So dinosaurs, for instance, have massive bodies, like the brontosaurus
(which is not what the dinosaur people call them anymore, but), those huge
dinosaurs, remember, from learning about in childhood, had brains that were
trivially small, the size of a walnut.
Now you could run a giant dinosaur on a brain that's the size of a
walnut because it doesn't really require that much computational power. An elephant, by contrast, the largest land
animal that's around now, it has a huge brain; but that huge brain is not
devoted to running the big old elephant, it's really because elephants also are
political animals. They form coalitions,
they have social structures that change in our dynamic, just like humans, and
that requires a lot of mental effort.
This mental capacity for forming coalitions is what our national
politics of the 21srt century relies on.
But the brain evolved for politics, this tribal politics that has been
around for a very, very long time, even before we had tribes that we would
recognize as humans. When we see these
superpods in dolphins, it's a parallel kind of evolutionary strategy that has
developed.
Rob Kall: So, you're talking about politics like,
"Who's turn it is to do the dishes," or "Whose turn it is to hunt for the
mastodon," eh?
Darren
Schreiber: Exactly. The term that anthropologists use for this is
called "Everyday Politics." The politics
of the office, of the church, of the communities, of the family - all of those
are examples of politics. I take sports
as an example: as a former Philadelphia resident myself, people are very
frequently talking about politics in sports.
When I hear a bunch of guys at a local bar in Philly just sitting around
talking about sports -- me, as a political scientist, I'm hearing them as if
they're talking about politics. Coalition
memberships; which team do they like better, why do they like them better? How are they connected with each other? And that tension that we find there is really
a modem manifestation of this ability we have to think as political
animals.
Aristotle got it right a couple thousand years back: "Man is by nature a political animal." And it comes out in all these different ways:
whether it's talking about sports, whether it's talking about the dynamics of
who's going to do dinner tonight, whose going to do the dishes, and all of that
constant coalitional navigation and negotiation that we're doing is using the
political brain, that's how we can do it.
It's because we have this brain built for politics.
Rob Kall: OK.
You use one word, and I just want to get really clear about it. You talk about the word "coalition" as a
major part of your model. So could you
define it, talk about that a little bit, what that means?
Darren
Schreiber: Yes. So one of the things that's incredibly
fascinating that psychologists have described is what they call the "Minimum
Coalition Model." Very simply, if you
get three people together, and you give two of them blue stickers and the third
one a red sticker, just that minimal level of an intervention, is enough to get
the people who get the blue sticker to act together against the person who has
the red sticker. We have this tendency
as humans to cooperate on any dimension that we can see as being salient, as
being something that will help us to build a friendship.
If I say, "Hey, you've got a blue sticker, I've got a blue
sticker. Let's go after that third
person who has got the red sticker," that's as trivial of an indicator - even
as random as it is, that psychologists just assigned the colors randomly - it
doesn't matter. People will team up and
engage in beneficial relationships with that person that just happens to have
the same kind of sticker as we do.
What's also fascinating about this experiment, though, is that not only
are we building a coalition based on something as trivial as a sticker, but
also based on that trivial sticker, we're changing all of the other coalitions
that people would also be members of.
So, I might be White, he might be Black, and yet a simple of a
manipulation as giving somebody a sticker can get them to work together to
benefit that group. So, we change group
membership really, really quickly.
Shockingly quickly, in fact.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).