From Behave (Robert Sapolsky, 2018) pp475-7
( Summary and conclusions)
We’re just like numerous other social species in terms of having marked status differences among individuals and hierarchies that emerge from those differences. Like many of these other species, we’re fantastically attuned to status differences, are sufficiently fascinated by them that we monitor status relations in individuals who are irrelevant to us, and can perceive status differences in a blink of an eye. And we find it deeply unsettling, with the amygdala leading front and center, when status relations are ambiguous and shifting.
As in so many other species, our brains, particularly the neocortex and most particularly the frontal cortex, have coevolved with the social complexity of status differences. It takes a lot of brainpower to make sense of the subtleties of dominance relations. This is no surprise, given that “knowing your place” can be so contextual. Navigating status differences is most challenging when it comes to attaining and maintaining high rank; this requires cognitive mastery of Theory of Mind and perspective taking; of manipulation, intimidation, and deceit; and of impulse control and emotion regulation. As with so many other primates, the biographies of our most hierarchically successful members are built around what provocations are ignored during occasions where the frontal cortex kept a level head.
Our bodies and brains, like those of other social species, bear the imprint of social status, and having the “wrong” rank can be corrosively pathogenic. Moreover, the physiology is not so much about rank per se as about its social meaning in your species and particular group, the behavioral advantages and disadvantages, and the psychological baggage of a particular rank.
And then we’re unlike any other species on earth in that we belong to multiple hierarchies, are psychologically adept at overvaluing those in which we excel, and maintain internal standards that can trump objective rank in their impact.
Humans committed themselves to a unique trajectory when we invented socioeconomic status. In terms of its caustic, scarring impact on minds and bodies, nothing in the history of animals being crappy to one another about status differences comes within light-years of our invention of poverty.
We’re really out there as a species in that sometimes our high status individuals don’t merely plunder and instead actually lead, actually attempt to facilitate the common good. We’ve even developed bottom-up mechanisms for collectively choosing such leaders on occasion. A magnificent achievement. Which we then soil by having our choosing of leaders be shaped by implicit, automatic factors more suitable to five-year-olds deciding who should captain their boat on a voyage with the Teletubbies to Candyland.
Stripped to their idealistic core, our political differences concern differing visions of how best to bring about the common good. We tend to come as internally consistent packages of political stances ranging from the small and local to the mammoth and global. And with remarkable regularity our stances reflect our implicit, affective makeup, with cognition playing post-hoc catch up. If you really want to understand someone’s politics, understand their cognitive load, how prone they are to snap judgments, their approaches to reappraisal and resolving cognitive dissonance. Even more important, understand how they feel about novelty, ambiguity, empathy, hygiene, disease and dis-ease, and whether things used to be better and the future is a scary place.
Like so many other animals, we have an often-frantic need to conform, belong, and obey. Such conformity can be markedly maladaptive, as we forgo better solutions in the name of the foolishness of the crowd. When we discover we are out of step with everyone else, our amygdalae spasm with anxiety, our memories are revised, and our sensory-processing regions are even pressured to experience what is not true. All to fit in.
Finally, the pull of conformity and obedience can lead us to some of our darkest, most appalling places, and far more of us can be led there than we’d like to think. But despite that, even the worst of barrels doesn’t turn all apples bad, and “Resistance” and “Heroism” are often more accessible and less rarefied and capitalized than assumed. We’re rarely alone in thinking this is wrong, wrong, wrong. And we are usually no less special or unique than those before us who have fought back.
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