Difference between revisions of "The biological instability of social equilibria"

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P.P. van der Molen

In: Evolutionary perspectives on competition, cooperation, violence and warfare (Chapter 4)

Edited by J. van der Dennen and V. Falger

Published in Sociobiology and Conflict, 1st ed. 1990, ISBN 0 412 33770 3 (HB)

Acknowledgements

The writing of this chapter has been supported by a grant of the ANO foundation. Comments and criticism from Michael Kirton, Vernon Reynolds and Robin Dunbar were of great help to improve this text, which is not to imply that they are responsible for any flaws in the basic line of argumentation defended here. The help of Ben Hoffschulte in refining and presenting this text is also gratefully acknowledged. --- PPvdM

The Sociobiology of Conflict was the topic of the ninth meeting of the European Sociobiology Society, held on January 10 and 11, 1987. It was Michael Hopp's initiative to organize this conference in Jerusalem, Israel, a symbolic place in many respects. Thanks to the scientific and personal quantities of Professor Amotz Zahavi, from Tel-Aviv University, many non-Israeli participants were able to experience the naturalistic, geographical and political history of the country in an impressive guided tour which influenced clearly the presentations and discussion in the conference.

Without the hospitality and financial support of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute the meeting would not have been possible. The Institute's director, Professor Yehuda Elkana, and Mrs Rivka Ra'am, member of the Executive Board of the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, in close cooperation with local organizer Michael Hopp, contributed very much to the success of the meeting itself. The Board of the European Sociobiological Society expresses its gratitude for this vital support.

In the conference itself Vincent Falger, Lea Gavish, Johan Goudsblom, Anne Rasa, Avi Shmida, Jan Wind and Amotz Zahavi presented papers next to those elaborated and collected in this volume. ESS Board members Jan Wind, Hans van der Dennen and Vincent Falger organized those aspects of the conference not immediately connected with the meeting in Jerusalem.

Outline

This chapter deals with a behavioural mechanism which thwarts any systematic attempts to prevent and put a permanent end to conflicts between social groups and organizations. Essential in this mechanism is a certain kind of social-role blindness, a peculiar unawareness of what we are doing on the level of social-role interactions, whereby attraction or repulsion are effectuated. As in Tiger's contribution (Chapter 5), special provisions in our behavioural system are discussed which prevent us from utilizing our intellectual and cognitive faculties for investigation of our innermost social tendencies. We shall return to these 'no entrance' signs built into our cognitive system below.

Other elements of this mechanism are involuntary incrowd–outcast selection reflexes and a 'trait dimension', which may be described as a `readiness to comply with a submissive role'. This dimension is correlated with a great amount of social behaviour and a small amount of thing-oriented, individualistic and explorative behaviour. It is, by definition, of great importance for the distribution of social roles and for the social structure in a group; it determines, for example, the likelihood of drifting into an outcast position versus the likelihood of assuming or maintaining a compliant and socially accepted subordinate position. Knowledge of this personality trait dimension and of its effects in social groups and structures may increase our understanding of a wide range of intriguing and sometimes disquieting phenomena. These phenomena range from educational and organizational strategies to the often catastrophe-like collapses and turn-over phenomena in companies and other social structures, and from the way social roles and positions tend to be distributed to the resulting evolutionary consequences.

First I will explain why, from a purely biological point of view, differences between individuals are to be expected in any socially living mammalian species in the following situations: readiness to comply with a submissive role; sociability versus thing-orientedness; compliance versus self-will. It will be argued that the underlying biological organization must, from an evolutionary standpoint, be very old and elementary. We will investigate then the consequences of these behavioural differences on the level of social interaction. A life span theory of social structures and organizations will be introduced as one of the implications.

The first sections of this chapter comprise a concise outline of these mechanisms, omitting at this point experimental data and illustrations. The basic assumptions made will, however, be stated explicitly. In the following sections we will check these assumptions against experimental and empirical data from biological and psychological research. Finally, it will be pointed out why understanding of the way these interpersonal differences are behaviourally organized (and the way our awareness tends to be blocked in these respects) have such far reaching consequences; an increase in our understanding of the life cycles of social structures might be by far their most important result. Such understanding would enable us to map the processes underlying periodic catastrophe-like turn-over phenomena and to learn how to control their decreasing efficiency and violent backlashing on any level of organization.

Some consequences of living socially

Among socially living mammals, each individual is by necessity saddled with a conspicuous bi-polarity in behavioural urges. First, being a socially living animal, drives for social contact and interaction are an important part of its behavioural–genetic endowment; but secondly, it has a set of perhaps even more basic drives to ensure the fulfilment of a range of non-social personal needs, e.g., water, food, cover, warmth, sex, territory, etc. As far as these latter needs are concerned, the amount of resources is often limited, thus causing competition and social conflict. For that reason a very basic functional conflict does exist in every social individual: between the urges to fulfil a great variety of personal basic (physical) non-social needs and the urge to maintain social contact and interaction. A socially living mammal inescapably has to shift between these two sets of urges much of the time.

Whenever some of the needed resources are scarce, the ensuing competition will put a strain on social relations. Under such conditions an individual frequently has to choose between continuation of peaceful social relations and receiving an appropriate share of the resources, eventually at the cost of social peace and harmony. Most of the time this dilemma boils down to the question of whether or not to submit to the initiative of other individuals at the cost of fulfilling personal urges and desires. In any socially living species this conflict of needs is inescapably present in each individual day after day, the average outcome determining how the individual will deal by and large with the social situation at hand. It is most desirable to have one's own way most of the time and still maintain close social contact and interaction, but that is more or less identical to what is generally understood by a dominant social role, and such roles are rather scarce.

It is, therefore, of theoretical interest to know what happens to the majority of individuals, the various types of subordinates (see Fig. 4.1), who are under regular pressure to comply and postpone or even abandon part of their individual desires and initiatives. For such non-dominant individuals, the balance between the strength of the desire for social contact and interaction, and the strength of the desires to fulfil other biological needs, determine the outcome of this continuous process of balancing one need against the other. Given a certain pressure to comply, it largely depends on this equilibrium of basic sensitivities within the subordinate individual as to what the behavioural outcome will be, either drifting gradually into an outcast position or assuming a compliant and socially accepted subordinate position. Such differences between subordinates have indeed frequently been observed in mammals (refer to section 4.7).

What is important for us to note here is that for any socially living mammalian species the competing sets of needs under discussion are very general and basic. We must therefore assume that the variance in the balance between those sets of basic needs has strong genetic roots. (After all, for many species, the behavioural organization is so simple that learning processes can only play a minor role in establishing behavioural variation. The equilibrium discussed above is therefore also an equilibrium between functionally competing parts of the genetic programme. As such we may consider this equilibrium, varying over individuals, as a trait in the classical sense. We could express this set of behavioural polarities as a set of (inter alia genetically based) trait differences which do have a clearly defined impact on the distribution of social roles.