[...]
SARAH BROSNAN: I'm fascinated by how people manage to work
together and almost as fascinated by when they don't,
and I got interested in cooperation, decided I wanted to
take a very biological approach to it and look at it from a very
evolutionary perspective. And in graduate school started
studying primates and realized pretty quickly that the primates
were different. It's not just one big clade of primates there
and it's not even just an ape versus monkey thing but you find
differences within these sub groups. And so what I decided I
was most interested in was figuring out how these
differences evolved, what were the selective pressures that led
to them. And then as a secondary but very closely
related question once you get to the final product of what we've
got currently, what social individual relationship factors
and so forth affect cooperation.
I think the best piece of life advice I ever received was from
my graduate advisor who told me you should study what you're
interested in because there's, that's what – that's what
motivates you, that's what makes you passionate and that's what
you should do.
My first interaction with science was when I was about
four years old. I was at my grandmother's house and I saw a
lizard who was running up the side of her house and asked my
mother if I could catch the lizard, if I could keep it. And
my mother who hates lizards said, "Sure." And I ended up in
the house two minutes later with a lizard in my hand asking my
mother what lizards ate and not getting a great response
it turns out. So that was probably my first
interaction with science.
I love getting to do what I love doing, so I can't imagine myself
doing anything else. And I love the fact that I get to choose
what I work on and that I get to work on the things that I think
are important and meaningful and that I have a lot of autonomy.
I think the most important probably is passion. You've got
to love what you're doing because it can easily become all
consuming, and I mean that in a good way, I don't mean take over
your life and not let you have time for anything else. But
people ask me how much I work and it's hard to explain to them
that when I'm reading a science book on the beach it's because I
want to not because I need to in order to meet some deadline.
And paired with that you've got to have creativity because you
can't design a good experiment or figure out how things link
together without a creative thought process.
I am really interested in what factors help cooperation exist
and help promote cooperation. So I'm really interested in the
basic building blocks. I'm interested in what is it about
some relationships that makes cooperation work better than
others, what is it about some individuals, what is it about
some context? And I think once we can start to tease these
apart then we really have an understanding of the foundations
and we can then extrapolate it beyond from simple cooperation
to more complex situations. But without understanding these
basics, we can't hope to build a situation where we can promote
cooperation to its fullest.
My graduate advisor was Frans de Waal and he was extremely
creative in his experiments. So he comes up with these really
elegant studies to answer questions, but he was also, is
also very interested in making science accessible to the
masses. So, he writes a fair number of popular books that are
still grounded in science, they've got the end notes back
there, but they get people excited about what's going on
and I think that's really important. So I think he helped
both shape me in terms of my ability to come up with
experiments but also in communicating lucidly.
Unlike what you see on TV, we don't come to conclusions
overnight. It takes forever. So, when I tell people that I
just had a paper come out and that two different post docs and
a graduate student and I spent three and a half years on data
collection and we didn't get anything for it, they are
shocked. Nobody has – nobody seems to understand the amount
of the legwork that goes into getting a question answered in
science. It also seems that people in the general public
don't necessarily understand one study isn't considered to be the
end all be all answer. So just because it's been done before
doesn't mean it shouldn't be done again a bit differently and
that a single study can't rule out every possibility. So
there's a difference between proving a hypothesis and testing
a hypothesis and I think the public thinks we prove
hypotheses but we don't, we test hypotheses and there's a
fundamental distinction there.
So if I can rescue one thing from the lab, hands down it
would be the primates, so I'd go in after the monkeys and the
apes which are more than one thing, but I'm going to count
them as one for the purpose of this. After I got the primates
back I go in after the lab notebooks and the data,
but those are the most important.
Well, I hardly ever play music in my car because it's the only
time of my day when I get peace and quiet and silence, and I
actually spend a lot of time in my car in the silence trying –
it's thinking over questions and thorny issues or new ideas that
I've just heard about.