Why We Are Still Social

written by Linnda Caporael

Why We’re Still Social

If group-living is the mind’s natural environment, we should expect corresponding psychological adaptations that not only respond to structural features of groups and tasks, but also function to maintain them. Groups organize experience, manufacture knowledge, and assign value (Baumeister, 2005). Expert skiers recognize varieties of snow; they not only ski on it, they also talk and compare their experience of snow, preferring some kinds to other kinds. Nonskiers see just snow, sometimes wet snow, sometimes dry snow—and they prefer spring, anyway. The stream of experience must be organized, evaluated and explained. Parents describe a young child puttering in the kitchen “mixing stuff” as “practicing chemistry” if said child is male, “practicing cooking” if female. The actual behavior may be identical, but the description of the experience propels one child toward a future career, and the other toward a future meal. For humans, experience itself, from infancy through death, is transformed into preferences and knowledge through groups. For one group, the lights in the night sky are gaseous balls of flame; for another, the lights in the night sky are holes in the floor of heaven. Organizing and evaluating perceptions of things and people is a constant nonstop activity of face-to-face groups. All human interactions in the world take place in groups or through meanings and artifacts born in groups. On the one hand we are realists, having a physical world to negotiate; on the other, we are social constructivists, creating shared meaning and values.

Humans have dramatically altered their social and material environments over the past ten millennia, and especially in the last 300 years. New technologies have broken the ties of time and space that have always held human groups together. Telecommunications and transportation technologies no longer require us to be members of ingroups composed of immediate neighbors; we can “reach out and touch” someone by telephone, meet our friend from Los Angeles in Paris tomorrow, or conduct our intellectual jousting through the Internet. Clearly the functions that evolve and develop in core configurations are capable of being extended, combined and used in new domains. In times of war, for example, television can extend ingroup biases (and sometimes even challenge them). The spatial relations between human bodies and the material world have not been altered, but we have started to learn to use technology as a bridge between the functions of configurations. A heart surgery team combines microcoordination and distributed cognition. A group of 500 people given an order to march on a football field are likely to clump and straggle, but if a rousing marching song is broadcast, they can hardly avoid keeping time. In an airplane, a pilot and co-pilot fiddling with their controls engage fine hand-eye coordination, a relatively ancient human activity; for 400 strangers to share the close quarters of the plane is novel component of human flight. What does alter—and not in any perceptible linear or progressive fashion—is the reconceptualization of human possibilities and the invention of human nature.

References

Baumeister, R. F. (2005). The cultural animal. New York: Oxford University Press.

Birdsell, J. B. (1972). An introduction to the new physical anthropology. Chicago: Rand McNally.

Brewer, M. B., & Caporael, L. R. (2006). An evolutionary perspective on social identity: Revisiting groups. In J. A. Simpson, M. Schaller & D. T. Kenrick (Eds.), Evolution and social psychology (pp. 143-161). Philadelphia: Psychology Press.

Caporael, L. R. (2003). Repeated assembly. In S. Schur & F. Rauscher (Eds.), Alternative approaches to evolutionary psychology(pp. 71-90): Kluwer.

Caporael, L. R. (2007). Evolutionary theory for social and cultural psychology. In A. W. Kruglanski & E. T. Higgins (Eds.), Social psychology: Handbook of basic principles (2nd ed., pp. 3-18). New York: Guilford.

Hull, D. L. (1988). Science as a process. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

magazine issue 7 2007 / Issue 4