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.

Up to this point, three basic assumptions have been made about the behaviour of socially living mammals in general:

1. There is a strong functional link, on the level of behavioural orientation, between the frequency of social behaviour versus thing-oriented individualistic behaviour, and, on the level of distribution of social roles, between conformity and compliance with authority versus a self-willed attitude. These two polarities cannot be separated; they have the same behavioural basis. Therefore a range of personality characteristics have to be strongly intercorrelated, e.g., self-will, thing-orientedness, individualism and innovative creativity on the one pole, and compliance, person-orientedness, sociability, conformity, and adaptiveness to rules and traditions on the other pole.

2. Individuals differ from one another as far as the balance between these polarities is concerned.

3. This variation between individuals must have genetic components.

In the next part of this chapter we will check these assumptions against experimental data, but first we will investigate their logical consequences.

At this point one might justly retort: 'why so much ado about nothing? It seems self-evident that these polarities in behaviour are interconnected, and since for most broad behavioural characteristics it is likely that differences in behaviour are partly caused by genetic differences, in particular if they are of very old phylogenetic origin, which these behaviours apparently are, it is rather tautological to state that they have genetic roots.' The point is, first, that this notion of a biological basis of certain behaviours may be self-evident to behaviour biologists, but it is certainly not for large groups of sociologists and psychologists. Secondly, these three assumptions do have peculiar and important consequences if applied to the sociology of group structures — the incrowd–outcast dynamism and the concomitant behavioural reflexes in particular.

In order to discuss these consequences we have to add one more assumption, which is rather a definition, namely:

4. In what follows, social groups will mean groups over which individuals are distributed discretely. In other words, individuals can be recognized by one another as either belonging to the social group in question or not – and are treated accordingly.

Life cycles of social groups and structures

If social groups are defined as above, the previous four assumptions imply that within such social groups there is exercised a more or less continuous selection pressure in favour of compliance and sociability. It is such because the most compliant – and thus most socially-oriented and rule-adaptive –individuals are most likely to establish long lasting accommodation within the group. Self-willed individualists on the other hand (also being innovative and thing-oriented according to assumption 1), are most likely to run into trouble and disagreement with the dominant individuals and/or habits and rules in the group. They are least prepared to pay the price of postponing or giving up personal urges and initiatives in order to keep up peace and social harmony. As a consequence, such individuals are the ones who are most likely to either fight hard for attaining a dominant position, or, if failing, to drift into marginal omega-like social positions and eventually become outcasts and leave the social structure. For any eventual influx of individuals into the social group or structure, the opposite holds. Individuals will be most readily accepted if they do not pose a threat to the individuals and/or habits ruling group life, which of course favours rule-adaptive compliants.

The effect of such a continuous selection pressure is that the average behavioural make-up of a group will shift gradually towards compliance and sociable rule-adaptiveness. Due to assumption 1, this also implies a shift towards less and less independent creativity and thing-oriented innovativeness; because of assumption 3, this shifting of group characteristics is (genetically) consolidated. What automatically happens then with every social group (structure) is a gradual loss of innovativeness and behavioural flexibility. In the end such a gradual ossification reduces the effectiveness of the group (structure), whether its function be the preservation of a territorial area with sufficient resources to keep a deme of mice alive, or, in man, the enhancement of some sport, the maintenance of political ideals, the aim to get a better share of the market, or the preservation of a political state. Such ossification especially matters whenever novel challenges turn up in the form of environmental changes or the emergence of competing groups. The disadvantages of a lowered flexibility and innovative creativity weigh most when, because of changing circumstances, innovations and a change of habits are urgently required. In such circumstances the advantages of the old social system in terms of experience, solidly established routines, compliance, malleability of all members, and sheer size, may easily be outdone by the innovativeness, flexibility and efficiency of a younger, and often much smaller, social group (structure) on which these selection pressures have not, as yet, been working for such a long period of time. At such a moment the old structure will yield to the younger structure in a relatively sudden way.

Therefore, provided the above mentioned assumptions are valid, social groups and structures only have a limited life span, and, as I shall try to show below, these assumptions indeed seem to fit most socially living mammal species with discrete group structures, including man. The life cycle of a social institution in human society then, can be indicated roughly as:

foundation -- > consolidation -- > internal selection pressure -- > increasing ossification and a reduction of flexibility of the social structure -- > eventual attempts to compensate these effects by means of more striving for growth and power -- > further increase of rigidity and ossification -- > catastrophic collapse by sudden environmental changes or competition (Fig. 4.2).

Our model implies a departure from notions of mere gradual changes in societal structures. The probability of sudden catastrophic turn-over events increasing in time with cumulating selection effects can be graphically represented and mathematically described with help of the bi-stable models from the mathematical branch of catastrophe theory (Thom and Zeeman, 1974; Zeeman, 1976; Woodcock and Davis, 1978). Figure 4.3 shows a cusp catastrophe, visualizing the relation between the continuous and the discontinuous part of the cycle. After foundation of a social structure, the level of overt challenges tends to decrease and the stability of the structure tends to increase until the inefficiency begins to take its toll, after which the stability of the structure decreases again. During this process the average level of self-will decreases. An increase in the level of experienced challenges may then sooner or later lead to a catastrophic turn-over event. In the new structure the percentage of innovators (average level of self-will) starts again at a high level.

The selection rate determines the speed of ossification; the life expectancy of a social structure is, therefore, roughly inversely proportional to the internal selection pressure. Such sudden turn-overs of social structures are therefore bound to happen at any level at which discrete social group structures are operating, as long as individuals can be recognized by one another as either belonging or not belonging to that group, and as long as there is some outflow or neutralization (and eventually a selected influx) of individuals. Depending on the level of organization, such a turn-over goes by the labels conquest, close-down, discontinuance, bankruptcy, revolution, subjugation or extermination.

Once the old, ossified social structure has been replaced by one or more younger competitor-structures, the individuals from the population as a whole have been reshuffled in favour of resourceful self-willed innovators who now occupy the 'incrowd' positions. The rule-adaptive compliants who formed the bulk of the establishment of the former social structure in power, have drifted into marginal positions and now run the worst risks. Thus the previous internal shift in genetic make-up has been undone, and a new selection cycle is started in these new structures.

The selective advantages for individuals are therefore different within and outside of social groups and structures, and are also different depending on the stage of the life cycle an institution is in. A compliant, adaptive and sociable temperament gives a selective advantage within a large, and especially older, social system, whereas a thing-oriented, innovative and self-willed temperament is selectively advantageous outside of the protective maze of established structures, or within small, young systems.