The Blank Slate by Steven Pinker

Author:Steven Pinker
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Penguin Group USA, Inc.
Published: 2002-12-08T10:00:00+00:00

PEOPLE DO MORE for their fellows than return favors and punish cheaters. They often perform generous acts without the slightest hope for payback, ranging from leaving a tip in a restaurant they will never visit again to throwing themselves on a live grenade to save their brothers in arms. Trivers, together with the economists Robert Frank and Jack Hirshleifer, has pointed out that pure magnanimity can evolve in an environment of people seeking to discriminate fair-weather friends from loyal allies.64 Signs of heartfelt loyalty and generosity serve as guarantors of one’s promises, reducing a partner’s worry that you will default on them. The best way to convince a skeptic that you are trustworthy and generous is to be trustworthy and generous.

Of course, such virtue cannot be the dominant mode of human interaction or else we could dispense with the gargantuan apparatus designed to keep exchanges fair—money, cash registers, banks, accounting firms, billing departments, courts—and base our economy on the honor system. At the other extreme, people also commit acts of outright treachery, including larceny, fraud, extortion, murder, and other ways of taking a benefit at someone else’s expense. Psychopaths, who lack all traces of a conscience, are the most extreme example, but social psychologists have documented what they call Machiavellian traits in many individuals who fall short of outright psychopathy.65 Most people, of course, are in the middle of the range, displaying mixtures of reciprocity, pure generosity, and greed.

Why do people range across such a wide spectrum? Perhaps all of us are capable of being saints or sinners, depending on the temptations and threats at hand. Perhaps we are set on one of these paths early in life by our upbringing or by the mores of our peer group. Perhaps we choose these paths early in life because we are endowed with a deck of conditional strategies on how to develop a personality: if you discover that you are attractive and charming, try being a manipulator; if you are large and commanding, try being a bully; if you are surrounded by generous people, be generous in kind; and so on. Perhaps we are predisposed to being nastier or nicer by our genes. Perhaps human development is a lottery, and fate assigns us a personality at random. Most likely, our differences come from several of these forces or from hybrids among them. For example, we may all develop a sense of generosity if enough of our friends and neighbors are generous, but the threshold or the multiplier of that function may differ among us genetically or at random: some people need only a few nice neighbors to grow up nice, others need a majority.

Genes are certainly a factor. Conscientiousness, agreeableness, neuroticism, psychopathy, and criminal behavior are substantially (though by no means completely) heritable, and altruism may be as well.66 But this only replaces the original question—Why do people vary in their selfishness?—with another one. Natural selection tends to make the members of a species alike in their adaptive traits, because whichever

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