Imagining life without society or community is almost impossible, but that hasn’t stopped philosophers, monarchs, and others from thinking about it. And what they’ve wanted to know is this: Do people innately feel compelled to form societies? And when those communities are formed, how do we act towards each other? What is natural, and what is learned?
Nicholas Christakis, a doctor, sociologist and author of “Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society,” also wanted answers to those big questions. So he looked at two shipwrecks in the Auckland Islands of New Zealand.
In 1864, two ships, the Grafton and the Invercauld, both wrecked on the same island within four months of each other back. Although the wrecks were similar in many ways, the the survivors' behaviors could not have been more different. When the Grafton wrecked, the crew worked together to save the life of a sick crewmate. Survivors of the Invercauld wreck, however, did the opposite.
“[The crew of the Invercauld has] to climb this cliff to escape this beach head they’re at, and they abandon one of the men to die at the bottom of the cliff,” Christakis said. “The sacrificing of a life sets the stage for the very different fate of the Invercauld compared to the Grafton.”
According to Christakis, these shipwrecks revealed something crucial. By working together, the entire crew of the Grafton was able to survive for two years — all five were eventually rescued — while only three of the original 19 Invercauld survivors lived long enough to be rescued. Christakis believes this shows that we have a tremendous ability to collaborate and make friendships, and capitalizing on those skills can make all the difference.
We often focus on divisions in society, but “more ancient, more powerful, deeper forces are at work propelling us to make a good society," said Christakis. "Forces acting over hundreds of thousands of years that have shaped us to have these proclivities, these capacities to love each other and befriend each other and cooperate with each other and teach each other things.”
This raises the question: Why are people capable of bad deeds if we are not only drawn to kindness, but also find advantages in working together? Christakis says that in order to be good, humans have had to be able to tell each other apart.
“It turns out this ability to draw distinctions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ likely evolved with our ability to help each other,” Christakis said. “What this ability to draw a distinction between us and them does is it reduces the scale of the demands being made on people … [and] the average amount of cooperation will rise.”
While our capacity to differentiate between groups of people lets us focus on who to help, it also enables discrimination. One way that Christakis says we can overcome this is to see our social identities and groups as flexible.
“These group boundaries are arbitrary. We don’t have to stick to those boundaries. Our brains are equipped with the capacity to redefine the boundaries [and] relax them,” Christakis said.
Instead of focusing on our role in our own smaller community, he added, we can emphasize membership of a larger group. “[We can] take advantage of our ability to draw distinction and say, 'What really matters is that we’re all Americans,'” Christakis said. “And that’s the kind of group membership that is salient, or should be salient.”
Despite the flaws of human societies, Christakis is optimistic about how good we can be.
“There are these forces working over great long time sweeps, all of which are propelling us to be good,” Christakis said. “‘The arc of our evolutionary history is long, but it bends towards goodness. I believe that.”
Eleanor Ho is an intern at Innovation Hub. You can follow her on Twitter at @eleanorho_17
