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it's a dog-eat-dog world
winner takes all survival of the fittest
but is it really if the biggest and
baddest always win
how come there are so many more of them
than them
strength is helpful but friendliness
might
actually be the key to evolutionary
success
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they're hugging i think dogs are exhibit
a
for the survival of the friendliest meet
dr brian hare
and vanessa woods co-authors of the book
survival of the friendliest
a group of wolves decided to start
hanging around human settlements
and the friendliest among them started
to breed together their bodies changed
their minds changed
they became more communicative and
cooperative with us they became
but what's unique is our communication
with them
what are you doing dogs understand
communicative gestures if you point
or you look in a direction you're trying
to tell somebody where something is or
what you want
dogs are really good at reading those
intentions in our gestures
that is a crucial ability in human
development
domestication is selection for
friendliness and that's why our dogs are
so good at telling us what they need
so if dogs use friendliness what about
survival of the fittest
survival of the fittest is this
misconstrue
of what darwin actually meant somewhere
along the way it got kind of twisted so
that the most dominant
was going to do the best
but that's not what they meant at all
they were talking about fitness as in
your ability to reproduce
friendliness we find in nature is a much
more successful strategy
and of course one of the friendliest
animals it's us
we often credit our big brains language
or technology
as the keys to survival but we now know
those characteristics
weren't unique to just us one defining
factor that contributed to our
evolutionary success
was our ability to get along humans
developed this new social category
called the in-group
stranger someone that you've never seen
before and that you've never met but you
immediately identify as part of your
group
so in early humans this could be someone
adorned with some kind of
decoration or maybe facial pattern and
this would say
immediately i'm connected to you
and we should be friends and that that
allowed us to
expand our social networks beyond those
we grew up with to
hundreds of people now you're learning
from hundreds of people you're
cooperating from hundreds of people
and now cultural innovation can explode
that's what was the friendly spark that
made our species different than all the
other species but it has a darker side
a darker side and one that's easy to see
when you look at the differences between
these two
i love bonobos because they really do
teach us how to be
better people they don't have any of the
lethal
aggression that we find in other great
apes including humans
the females sort of dictate the way the
culture goes which means that
males don't get too aggressive and the
babies are always
unharmed they're just like an amazing
model you can talk about chimps thanks
um chimps while they can be kind and
friendly and
wonderful i love chimpanzees they like
humans have a darker side
they commit lethal aggression just like
this homicide there's chimp aside
they wouldn't share with a stranger
because strangers might hurt them that
cost
doesn't exist in bonobos and then that's
where humans become
really interesting because we can be
extremely pro-social to strangers and we
can be really aggressive towards
strangers and so
our ability to feel love for these
in-group strangers
also drives our ability to be extremely
violent with those
threatening our group members
but how does friendliness help today
we've become much more of a winner take
all society
and there can't be very many winners
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so it just kind of puts you into that
mindset of
being in a competition with other people
if somebody else wins
it's going to be at your expense dr
jennifer crocker
examines our social motivations of
ecosystem
and ecosystem in the ego system
we are preoccupied with our self-worth
both in our own eyes
and in other people's eyes and then the
ecosystem
is this other paradigm for thinking
about relationships with other people
where
instead of thinking about what i want
from you i'm thinking about oh
what do you need if the other people in
my social context are thriving
that's going to be more likely to help
me thrive
so this might seem like just an
idealistic thought
but the research it actually points to
health benefits
being responsive to other people's needs
actually predicts
increases in self-esteem because people
feel like they can make a difference for
other people
that support predicts decreases in
symptoms of anxiety
symptoms of depression and making a
difference for others
is good for your sense of self-worth i
don't think of ego system
and ecosystem motivation as being traits
everybody has the capacity for both of
these motivations
and the question is which one is
activated at a particular moment
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there's this paradox of human nature how
can we be simultaneously so kind and so
cruel
we're wired to connect with one another
but along the way we started seeing
others as
well others and this ability to relate
it also led us to divide the best
way to understand that we're all human
is through cross-group friendships
through all our research it's
really been one of the main ways that
you can sort of
diffuse the cycle of dehumanization
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you