The Social Leap by William von Hippel

Author:William von Hippel
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-10-03T16:00:00+00:00

For most of us, social engagement is fun and rewarding, and ever since we left the trees, it has been our default orientation toward the world.* As a consequence, highly social people who have the talent to tinker with objects are relatively unlikely to do so when confronted with a problem. For example, it might be easy enough for some people to wire a can opener to their toaster and an oven timer to create an automatic dog feeder for when they’re out of town, but even people as handy as that would typically prefer to ask a friend to come over to feed Fido while they’re away. Thus, the social innovation hypothesis predicts that most people are unlikely to innovate technically. Of the (relatively few) people who reside in the lower two quadrants, only those who have a strong technical orientation would be likely to innovate technically. So even if technical skills themselves are relatively common, the ubiquity of human sociality would make technical innovation a relatively rare occurrence.

It is very difficult to test these possibilities with ancestral data, but two pieces of modern evidence support the social innovation hypothesis. First, one way of quantifying sociality is to look at the frequency of autism. People on the autism spectrum vary in intelligence, but regardless of their intellect, they struggle with social relations. Impaired social functioning is one of the hallmarks of autism. Even highly intelligent individuals with autism have problems with Theory of Mind, as their brains don’t automatically compute the intentions and feelings of others in the manner we discuss in chapter 2. As a result, people with autism don’t understand neurotypical people very well and struggle to engage them socially.

Given these facts, it’s no surprise that you rarely find people with autism working in sales, and they are also rare in the humanities and social sciences. In contrast, people on the autism spectrum can be readily found in fields in which the dominant orientation is toward objects and away from people, such as engineering and the physical sciences. For example, Simon Baron-Cohen of Cambridge University and his colleagues found that autism is more common in the families of physicists, engineers, and mathematicians than in the population in general.

When Baron-Cohen and his colleagues went on to develop a scale to quantify levels of autism, one of their first comparisons was between students in the sciences and those in the humanities. They found that science students had higher autism scores, including reduced levels of sociality, than humanities students, and this difference was most notable among students studying physical sciences, computer science, and mathematics. Students in the social sciences scored no differently from students in the humanities. Engineering students in this sample had scores that fell between those in the physical sciences and those in the humanities.

Unsurprisingly, engineers and physical scientists are also more likely than people in the humanities and social sciences to hold patents or to innovate technical products for their own use at home. In other words,

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