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pg 249
Keywords: solidarity-based groups - in their institution, company, neighborhood; some people are intrinsically likeable and others less so, some people seem trustworthy and others do not. How all this is evaluated in terms of cooperation and trust is not quite accessible to conscious inspection - our systems for social interaction did not evolve in the context of vast groups and abstract institutions like states, corporations, unions and social classes. We evolved as small bands of foragers and that kind of existence is the context in which we developed the special features of our social mind. Sedentary settlements, large tribes, kingdoms and other such modern institutions are so recent in evolutionary time that we have not yet developed reliable intuitions about them. - in all human groups people have consciously accessible concepts of social relations, folk theories about how such relations are built and maintained, culturally specific ways of constrning them. They have explicit understandings of what friendship is, what exchange ought to be, how power is attained and maintained in complex groups - in so many words, "how society works." - people faced with any complex interaction tend to use anthropomorplic concepts - naive sociology
GAME THEORY IS FOR ALlENS
In previous chapters I described various psychological aspects of social interaction: for instance, models of moral feelings as an adaptive strategy, and cheater-detection as a way of maintaining cooperation. In each case I made use of concepts that are constantly used in biology and psychology, such as "strategy," "signaling," "defection", "utility," etc. Now this way of describing social interaction strikes most people as rather alien. That is, we understand the arguments, in a fairly abstract and intellectual way, but what they describe is just not the way we feel when we are engaged in social interaction.
For instance, the principal strategy that social scientists observe among human cooperators is a mixture of positive moral feelings, toward cooperation together with a very strong angry reaction to cheating, as well as anger toward people who do not punish cheaters. However, when we engage in cooperative endeavors with people we are not aware that we are adopting a conscious strategy; we just feel that they are intrinsically "good," "reliable," "nice people," or alternatively that they are "devious," "unreliable," "creepy," etc. We do not see our dispositions as a benefit-driven strategy, even in the long run.
To take another example, people tend to cluster in solidarity-based groups. In some societies this kind of group is given for free, as it were, in that you are born in a particular lineage or village. You then tend to cooperate with your kin and kith and mistrust outsiders. But we are not limited to such groups. In most large settlements or institutions, where thousands or millions are thrown together, people tend to recreate small-scale solidarity networks. After a few months or years in a company or in a town, people identify a number of people whom they talk with, whom they can trust in case of need, as well as a number of neutral outsiders and some potential enemies who should not be trusted.
Sociologists now find that these networks are of the same size and involve similar emotions, regardless of the country, language, size of the institution or town, and other differences. Again, however, people often do not think of such networks as coalitions at all. They just find that in their institution, company, neighborhood; some people are intrinsically likeable and others less so, some people seem trustworthy and others do not. How all this is evaluated in terms of cooperation and trust is not quite accessible to conscious inspection.
Why are we not all sophisticated game theorists? Why do we have vague concepts (this person is "likeable," this group is "friendly") instead of an awareness of the precise calculations that we perform without realizing it?
There are several good reasons for this lack of conscious access to inference systems. First, many mental systems are designed to produce strong motivation and do this by providing us with rewards in the form of emotions. We would not invest great effort and resources in picking Mr. or Mrs. Right if this were not an intensely emotional experience. Emotions goad us in the right direction much more easily than abstract descriptions of what would happen if we made the wrong choice. Second, our inference systems are very complex. Choosing Mr. Right or selecting reliable cooperators in a large company is hugely complicated because there is no such thing as "the right person" in the abstract. It all depends on the context, on what we need and what we have to offer, on what others need and may offer, and it all changes as these parameters themselves change. Attending to vast numbers of relevant cues and constantly reassessing their significance may well be too intricate for our sluggish deliberate thought.
Finally, our systems for social interaction did not evolve in the context of vast groups and abstract institutions like states, corporations, unions and social classes. We evolved as small bands of foragers and that kind of existence is the context in which we developed the special features of our social mind. Sedentary settlements, large tribes, kingdoms and other such modern institutions are so recent in evolutionary time that we have not yet developed reliable intuitions about them.
THE MAG1C OF SOCIETY
Humans live in very diverse social conditions: in small foraging groups in a savannah, or in villages of sedentary peasants, or in towns where many do not actually grow the food they eat, or in modern urban environments where they depend upon a vast number of others for every aspect of their lives. In all these different contexts, people have some explicit description of what society is like, what groups compose it, why this is so, and so on. For instance, people the world over categorize their social environment. That is, they do not think they interact with individuals but they tend to see others as members of more general classes like family, social class, ethnic group, caste, race, lineage or gender. Also, in all human groups people have consciously accessible concepts of social relations, folk theories about how such relations are built and maintained, culturally specific ways of constrning them. They have explicit understandings of what friendship is, what exchange ought to be, how power is attained and maintained in complex groups - in so many words, "how society works."
All these understandings, obviously, differ with the kind of social world people live in. But they have one feature in common. They are very often based on concepts that seem extremely poor and vague, compared to the actual interaction that takes place, and even compared to people's intnitive grasp of what they should do in any social context. To give a few examples: First, the way people categorize social groups is very generally by assuming that there are natural differences between them. In a caste system, people of different castes are said to carry very different "essences," which supposedly explains why they should not intermarry or even come into close contact. In racist ideologies too, the basic assumption is that some differences are founded in nature although they are not always visible. Second, people faced with any complex interaction tend to use anthropomorplic concepts.
Villages or social classes or nations are described as "wanting" this, "fearing" that, "taking decisions," "failing to perceive" what is happening, etc. Even the workings of a committee are often described in such psychological terms: the committee realized this, regretted that,etc. To think that a village, a company or a committee is a big agent spares us the diffficult work of describing the extraordinarily complicated interaction that occurs when you get more than two people together.
Anthropologist Larry Hirschfeld coined the term "naive sociology" to describe such understandings of social groups and social relations. "Naive" does not mean that these understandings are primitive or necessarily misguided but that we develop them spontaneously without the systematic training that we need to acquire scientific concepts.
"Naive sociology" is what you get when you combine (a) the intuitions that we have by virtue of having social mind systems and (b) the concepts tbat we use to create social categories, folk theories of social interaction and so on. Such concepts, obviously, are adapted to the social realities we have to explain: people who live in nomadic bands of foragers have little need for a concept of "social class" or of "caste." However, they are also constrained by expectations about the nature of society that we develop very early. Hirschleld's developmental studies show how even young children have some expectations about social groups. For instance, children assume that kinship terms (aunt, father, sister, etc.) refer to something more than the mere fact of living together. They (and adults) tend to guess that some undetectable, internal "essence" is shared by people with a common genealogy, in the same way that they (and adults too) assume that all tigers share some internal tigerhood. Young children also have some understanding that a "family" (or whatever this kind of unit is called in their society) is therefore logically different from a collection (e.g., the pupils in a class, the flowers in a bouquet).
Children also seem prepared to think of social groups as founded on such undetectable common properties. This makes them, like adults, extremely receptive to ideologies that describe a whole group of people as internally, naturally different from others. Both children and adults acquire such ideologies effortlessly, suggesting that these ideologies are at least congruent with some general expectations about social groups. This does not mean that children are born "racist." Indeed, Hirschfeld's studies demonstrate the opposite. Not only are young children often remarkably impervious to the emotions and attitudes that accompany ethnic classification in their social environment; they do not even seem to pay much attention to the external traits (skin tone for instance) that are the supposed "foundation" of racial distinctions. In other words they - and we all - seem prepared to think of social groups in terms of natural differences, but the racist notion that a particular occupation or skin color is the index of such differences requires some special coltural learning.
Our "naive sociology," then, is an attempt to make sense of our own intuitions about the social world around us. But it is often flawed. The accessible, explicit concepts lag far behind the intaitions they are supposed to explain. Villages do not "perceive" situations, committees cannot "remember" what happened, companies have no particular "desires," simply because all these groups are not persons.
This gives many aspects of social interaction a magical character. Because people live in a social context, they are constantly surrounded by social events and processes that their concepts do not fully explain. These events and processes are real and their consequences are real too. But how they came about is something that cannot really be explained using the concepts of "naive sociology." They all seem to require hidden forces and processes that cause all the effects we can see. For instance, people are members of particular clans or villages. It appears to everyone that these groups were not created by their current members, nor will they disappear with them. It seems that the lineage or the group has a life of its own. Indeed, people are constantly faced with situations where being a member of this clan or that village matters because of how previous members of these units acted. If your village has always fought (note the anthropomorphic term) against the next village, then in a sense the interaction transcends the existence of its participants. So it makes perfect sense to think of villages and other such units as abstract persons or living organisms, because that helps explain stable interaction. People often say that all members of a village or a clan have the "same bones," that they share some essence that is the eternal life of the social group. As anthropologist Maurice Bloch points out, belonging to such groups is "not at all like joining a social club." Bloch shows that the biological understandings that are so often used in naive sociology—"we share the same bones" or "the essence of the clan is inside us," etc.—are not loose metaphors. They express the intuition that stable political units do transcend individual people's transient roles, even in small-scale social arrangements.'
The "magic" of society is merely the fact that our naive sociology cannot explain such stable or complex aspects of social interaction. We are left with explanations like "we in the village act in this way because we share the bones of our ancestors" or "we have inflation because the middle dasses have decided to ruin us." These explanations are magical in the sense that there is no easily described connection between the hidden causes that are described and their effects. No matter how detailed your notions about the ancestors' bones, such concepts just fail to explain why, for instance, a feud between two villages can be extraordinarily stable or why you intuitively trust members of your clan more than outsiders.
Pascal Boyer
Evolution of Society
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