Unlocking Your Primal Intelligence & The Tug-of-War Between Competition and Cooperation

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Today on something you should know, the best thing you can do if you want your cell phone battery to last longer.

Then the new science of primal intelligence.

It's something you have and can make better.

So primal intelligence is four parts of your brain, intuition, imagination, emotion, and common sense.

So the most basic form of primal intelligence is just acting when you don't know what the right answer is.

Also, the solution to the huge problem of pet obesity.

And human beings, we can be cooperative or competitive.

But which is better?

Yes, while we cooperate, while we work together, it's those people who are effective at appearing cooperative for the group's benefit, but also behaving like opportunists when they have a chance to do so.

It's those people who are always going to get ahead in society.

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Something you should know, fascinating intel, the world's top experts, and practical advice you can use in your life.

Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers.

There seems to be some confusion about the best way to optimize the life of your cell phone battery.

So we're going to start with some surprising advice from the experts.

Hi, and welcome to this episode of Something You Should Know.

Your cell phone battery is pretty hardy.

It can take a lot, but there are some things that you may or may not do that can make it last longer or make it last shorter.

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Why are some people so much smarter than the rest of us?

Why are some people super smart?

Well, in 2021, researchers at Ohio State's Project Narrative announced that they had an answer to this.

They named it Primal Intelligence, and they published scientific proof that primal intelligence, while impossible for computers, could be strengthened in humans.

You have primal intelligence, and you can tap into it.

Here to explain what it is and why it is so important is Angus Fletcher.

He is a professor of story science at Ohio State's Project Narrative.

His research has been called mind-blowing by Malcolm Gladwell, and his work has been endorsed by psychologists, neuroscientists, and doctors such as Martin Seligman.

In 2023, he was awarded the Commendation Medal by the U.S.

Army for his groundbreaking research with U.S.

Army Special Operations into Primal Intelligence.

And Angus is author of a book called Primal Intelligence, You Are Smarter Than You Know.

Hi, Angus.

Welcome to Something You Should Know.

Hi, Mike.

I'm thrilled to be here.

So first, help me and the listeners understand better what primal intelligence is.

So primal intelligence is the part of your brain that evolved hundreds of millions of years ago to act smart in volatility and chaos.

As opposed to some other kind of intelligence?

Well, it's the exact opposite of artificial intelligence, which is most of what we are taught today.

And so what do you mean it's the opposite of artificial intelligence?

So artificial intelligence is run by computers, and what computers need to act intelligently is lots of data.

So the more data that you give a computer, the smarter it'll get because the more able it will be to see patterns and trends.

But what's extraordinary about the human brain is that it can be very, very smart with very, very little information.

And that's because it possesses powers like intuition, imagination, and common sense that evolved in these ancient environments where there just wasn't a lot of information to hang on to, but our brain still needed to figure out ways to act smart.

So are you saying that that kind of intelligence,

when you use the word evolve, like

it just comes with the package, it comes in the box, and that you would have that intelligence without having to learn about life and things that would, to me, would develop that intelligence?

You have that intelligence without going to school is what it means.

And you will develop that intelligence if you just interact with life normally.

So life the way it exists outside of a classroom.

But it's something that most of our modern world is designed to socialize us out of, which is why we keep seeing increases in things like anger and anxiety in students and also in adults, sort of panic and stress about volatility.

So give me an example of primal intelligence in action, maybe a couple.

All right.

So maybe the way to do this would be to tell you about my work with the U.S.

Army.

So, the reason I got interested in primal intelligence in the first place is because I got approached in 2021 by the Army because they had noticed this increase in anxiety and anger in young people.

And they thought this was odd because they knew that brains were meant to act intelligently in volunteer situations.

And they wondered why they were seeing over time people who are having more and more education functioning less and less intelligently in stressful situations.

And one of the things we started to notice is that

modern school teaches you not to act unless you have the right answer.

So, the first thing that you learn if you're in a classroom is that there is an answer and the teacher has it.

And so, you're taught to always wait until you know what that answer is.

But actually, the way your brain evolved to function is just to try an answer that it thinks could work.

And this is why children, when they're very, very young, will just try things, explore, play mess around

and so the most basic form of primal intelligence is just acting when you don't know what the right answer is act but acting based on something i mean when you act to do something aren't you using some sort of intelligence or some experience or something something is leading you to do what you did as opposed to doing something else

Well, what you're acting on is a plan that your brain has come up with.

So what drives human behaviors are plans.

And plans are attempts to accomplish a goal.

So a large part of what is driving your behavior is the sense that there is something out there that you want, and you have a hypothesis about how you might get it.

But most of that is very speculative.

It's not actually based on a lot of firm information.

So you said that this primal intelligence evolves.

It evolves from the time we're young through our lifetime, or how does that work?

The way that your brain evolved to think when you're a child is in stories.

So one of the things we know about children is that they think in stories.

They imagine themselves as characters, they role play, they world build.

And

the way that stories work is they start with an exception and they double down on that exception.

So they start with something that doesn't fit trends and patterns and they say, where would it go if I doubled down on that?

That's why all stories begin with a hero who is an exception to the rules of her world, and then that hero doubles down so that instead of becoming a product of her environment, she makes her environment a product of her.

The way this works in real life is if you think about someone like Nikola Tesla.

So what did Nikola Tesla do?

Nikola Tesla created our modern world of electricity.

How did he do that?

He noticed an exception.

What was the exception?

It was something known as the AC motor.

At the time, all the very smart

engineers like Thomas Edison thought that electricity had to be direct current or DC.

But Tesla noticed this exception.

He doubled down on it.

And by doubling down on it, he produced the modern world.

And so when you're thinking in stories, what you're always looking for is what doesn't fit.

And how do I take that exception and make it the rule?

Whereas what we're taught with logic is what is the pattern?

What already exists?

And how do I conform to that?

And primal intelligence fits into into what you just said, how?

So, primal intelligence is the way that we define it with the Army: four parts of your brain: intuition, imagination, emotion, and common sense.

And the idea is that these are what allow you to act intelligently in uncertain situations by coming up with plans that you test through feedback.

So, the idea of primal intelligence is essentially that

you come into a place where you don't know what the rules rules are.

You use your intuition to pick up on something that seems strange and interesting.

You double down on it to see where it takes you.

And you use your common sense to tell you whether or not that's working.

And is that always switched on?

In other words, your primal intelligence is always working or something you...

you say, oh, let's go check out my primal intelligence to solve this because my other intelligence isn't working.

So we're trained out of thinking in primal intelligence by schools because we're trained to think in data and patterns and rules and logic.

And so what you have to start to do is you start to have to become comfortable saying, I don't know what the answer is, and so I'm going to try things.

Another way of thinking about this is the difference between probability and possibility.

So in the modern world, we tend to think in probability.

We look for trends.

We look for things that have worked in the past.

And we try and say, well, based on those things that have worked in the past, what's likely to work now?

A possibility is something that no one has ever tried before.

So you have no idea what the probability of it is working.

And the more that you get into situations that are really new, the more that you have to lean into possibilities as opposed to probability.

Because in new situations, old things aren't going to work.

And so primal intelligence is something you have to engage when your world starts to become new, when it starts to become unprecedented, when you leave a classroom or a stable environment, you get out of the suburbs, and you have to say to yourself, what is something that has never been tried before?

Because only something that has never been tried before is going to work in this situation that has never existed before.

Other than using this to point out spectacular people who did spectacular things, why are we talking about this?

Is this something that we can just sit back and be amazed?

Or is this something you can engage in your own life?

And if so, how?

So the reason that the Army got interested in this is because they noticed that this rise in anxiety and anger stemmed from what we would think of as a threat response.

So basically, people are getting stressed out in their lives because they don't know what to do.

And in the modern world, the way that we're taught to deal with stress is usually through various forms of dissociation.

So things like mindfulness or meditation,

sort of distracting yourself from the problem, stoicism.

These are all forms of dissociation.

But actually, these responses to stress don't help help your brain in the long run.

They make your brain more stressed because what your brain wants when it's stressed is not something to remove the threat for it.

What it wants is a plan to be able to deal with the threat itself.

In other words, what your brain wants is to be able to come up with a plan.

And so the point of primal intelligence is to help your brain come up with plans when it feels stressed.

The point of primal intelligence is if you feel angry or anxious, how do you come up with a plan for dealing with that situation so that your anger and anxiety is eliminated permanently?

But it does seem conventional wisdom that if you're stressed and you need a plan, that you're going to come up with a better plan if you turn down the volume on the stress.

So maybe you go meditate and kind of get your brain calmed down and

you'll be able to come up with a better solution.

Well, it doesn't work because, you know, when we started working with operators, the thing that they were constantly being advised to do when they were stressed was mindfulness and meditation.

And what those do by dissociating you from your environment is they disconnect you from the things you actually need to focus on in order to make a plan.

So the thing you really want to do is you really want in those moments to activate things like imagination.

You want to activate things like intuition.

You want to start thinking and possibility and say, what's something that I haven't tried to do before?

In other words, you want to lean into the problem as opposed to trying to push it out of your mind for a while.

We're talking about primal intelligence.

My guest is Ohio State Professor Angus Fletcher.

He's author of a book called Primal Intelligence.

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So Angus, is this something that anybody can tap into, whether

in life, in business, somewhere, primal intelligence can work for you?

Well, what we've done with the Army is we've started to develop experiential training that we've then taken into businesses and we've taken into elementary schools.

And the idea here is that there's lots of things you can only learn by experiencing them and by practicing them in real life situations.

So a lot of what we're doing with kids in school is we're encouraging them to start

by bringing their own problems into the classroom.

So rather than saying, hey, class is a space where the teacher gives you a math problem, which has nothing to do with you, and then assesses you on whether or not you're able to answer this question, how about you come into the classroom and tell us what's bothering you in your real life?

Are you stressed by the fact that your parents are fighting?

Are you stressed by the fact that your older siblings are bullying you?

What is something else that's causing you to feel anxious or angry?

Let's take that problem and then let's start to say, what are multiple plans we can come up with?

And how can we start to test those plans outside of the classroom?

And then how can we come back to the classroom after we've tested them and come up with ways of altering those plans based on what you've experienced and so that's the kind of thing that we do with

school children we also teach them to understand what their emotions are telling them so for example when you start to feel very angry what that's telling you is that you have one plan Anger evolved in the brain because what the brain realized is that if it has only one plan, it has to really commit to that plan plan for that plan to have its best chance of working.

And so anytime you start to feel angry, that's your brain saying to you, hey, you've got one plan now.

And so your opportunity in that moment is to say, well, should I get aggressive?

Or should I come up with another plan?

Should I instead develop flexibility in this situation?

And so we walk kids through that when they start to get angry and say, hey, is this a time when you think anger is going to pay off?

When your plan, when you're so convinced that your plan is going to work, that really, really forcing it is your best option?

Or do you think that maybe coming up with flexibility and alternatives is actually going to help you navigate this situation more effectively?

And so that's another example of the kind of training that we try and do with kids.

Is this something, though, that,

well, it must be or you wouldn't have written the book, but is this something that people can actually like in a

first 80 kind of way do?

Or is this more of a, you got to study this for months?

And I mean, I'm trying to get a sense of like, okay, so I'm buying everything you say.

Let me try it.

I don't, I'm trying to understand like, so what would I do different?

Well, the first thing that you would do different is you would lean more into surprises.

So one of the things we know about adults, first children, is when adults see something new, they very quickly dismiss or rationalize it.

And you can see this, obviously, if you hang out with a kid and you're walking down the street with them, the kid will often be just pausing and being fascinated by all sorts of things that they see.

And you as the adult will say, oh, no, no, this is very interesting.

You know, let's keep going.

We've got a schedule to keep to.

And so, the first thing that we encourage adults to do is spend a little bit more time every day dwelling on things that they don't understand, suspending their judgments.

Another thing we encourage adults to do is to reflect more on moments in their past that cause wonder.

So, one of the things that many adults struggle with are feelings of grief or shame or burnout.

And all of these can be pretty quickly redressed by reviewing your past for moments of positive surprise.

So if you feel a sense of shame, if you review your past for moments when you surprised yourself, when you did something remarkable that you didn't think you could do, the more you dwell on that moment, the more you will feel your brain being able to process your other moments of shame.

With burnout, if you feel burnout, the more that you focus on moments when other people surprised you.

So there's all sorts of times in our life when people do things that we're not expecting that are wonderful.

You know, maybe they give us a gift, we're not expecting it.

Maybe they, you know, remember us in some kind of unexpected way.

When you start to think on those moments, you'll find that they very dramatically alleviate your burnout.

With grief, if you can think of a time when life surprised you, if you think of a time, for example, when you were out in nature and it was wonderful, or there was a lucky twist in your life, that will help you work through moments of grief.

So these are all sort of practical things that you can do to shift the way that you experience life in the moment.

Why haven't I heard about this before?

Well, because we invented it with only special operations a couple of years ago.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, yeah.

And so since I imagine you have incorporated this into your life,

I'm trying to get a sense of like, and this is something you turn on and off whenever you, like when you say look for surprises and things.

You're always looking for surprises, or you turn it on when you need to look for surprises.

This is a whole new way and philosophy of life life for you, or this is just a tool in the toolbox.

So, I should be very honest.

I mean, one of the reasons I got interested in this is because I'm probably one of the most educated people in human history.

You know, I have my PhD from Yale.

I spend all my time reading books, and I'm always acting very, very stupid.

I'm always acting in incredibly dumb ways.

And at some point, I started to wonder why it is that I have all this book education and I'm so inept at ordinary life.

I mean, I'm really quite bad as a parent, you know.

I mean, I'm very bad at doing basic things.

And I realized that a lot of that was because

when I was confronted with something that I didn't know because I hadn't read it in a book, my first response was panic.

And then after I panicked, my next response was to go on Google or something like that or YouTube and try and figure out how somebody else had solved the situation rather than trying to figure out how to solve it for myself.

And so instead, what I've learned to do by spending the last few years working with Army Special Operators is when I'm confronted with a new situation that inspires panic or anxiety or these other kinds of stress responses, the first thing I think to myself is, your brain is telling you that you need to make a plan because you don't have a plan.

And if you take that plan from somebody else, your brain is not going to calm down.

It's going to remain stressed.

So you've got to do this work now and take this opportunity to make this plan for yourself.

And then you more that you practice that response to stress, just making a plan, making a plan, making a plan, making your own plan, being comfortable even if it isn't perfect, reminding yourself, as General Patton once said, that in combat there are no perfect plans.

There are just plans that work.

The more you remind yourself of that, and the more you kind of of get in this habit of responding to stress and panic and anxiety by making plans, the more effective you are in your daily life.

And, you know, I mean, a couple quick examples of this.

One is, you know, when I went to go see my doctor recently,

she asked me if I'd started working out, if I started exercising.

I said, no, my exercise plans remain the same as it has for the last 30 years.

And she said, well, your blood pressure and your heart rate are significantly down.

Why do you think that is?

And I realized a big part of that is because every time I'd gone in to see my doctor before, I had been in a hospital environment and I just felt very stressed.

And now I just felt very relaxed, even in

a hospital environment.

Another example, which I don't know if is...

Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.

And you felt very relaxed in a hospital environment now because what changed?

Because what changed is when I went into the hospital, so I've had a number of misdiagnoses in my life that have almost killed me.

So I've had some pretty bad medical care in my life that's ended me up in critical care in the ER.

And so a lot of times when I go into the hospital, it's just very stressful for me, you know, because I'm walking in there and I'm afraid.

I feel out of control.

I feel disempowered.

And I know that's an experience that probably a lot of people feel when they go into hospitals nowadays.

They're these big impersonal places, you know, and it can be really scary.

And so now when I walk into a hospital and I start to feel stressed and threatened, I just start to say to myself, okay, well, what is your plan?

My plan is to to have a conversation with a doctor.

Well, what are you going to ask the doctor?

Well, I might ask the doctor these things.

Well, what if the doctor says those things?

What might you say?

And I start just running through my mind and realizing that I actually am in control of this situation and I can handle this situation.

I don't need to be passive or submit and I don't need to panic or get angry and start yelling.

So hospitals are stressful places for me.

So, you know, that's why this works for me.

Another thing that's stressful for me because I can't function very well in the real world is parking.

I lived for many years in Los Angeles.

And so the thought of parking automatically causes me to have a panic attack.

And, you know, working with special operators, I've since realized that, you know, when you start getting stressed because you can't see a parking space, you can just pull your car up on the sidewalk, turn it off, leave, come back two hours later, it'll probably still be there.

There's lots of ways you can, you know, park a car.

And the more you start to realize that life presents you with all these different opportunities and that there are many possible ways of, you know, you don't have to find the perfect parking space,

just the more relaxed and open you are.

So it's all about plans.

It's all about new plans.

Right.

It's all about the ability to come up with new plans on the spot.

Yeah.

Well, I like talking about this because

I've never heard of it before, and it makes you think.

I've been speaking with Angus Fletcher.

He is a professor of story science at Ohio State's Project Narrative, and he is author of the book, Primal Intelligence, You Are Smarter Than You Know.

And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes.

Angus, thank you for being on the show.

Thanks, Mike.

I really appreciate it.

Take care.

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Would you say that people, humans, are cooperative or competitive?

Are we helpful or selfish?

After all, we evolved to live in groups because people need people, but we also have our own self-interest.

It seems to me like it really depends on the situation and the people involved.

We can be allies or rivals, good or bad.

It's a balance.

Here to explain why this is important is Jonathan Goodman.

He is a social scientist based at the University of Cambridge and has written for the Financial Times, New Scientist, Nature, The Guardian, and Scientific American.

He is author of a book called Invisible Rivals, How We Evolve to Compete in a Cooperative World.

Hey, Jonathan, welcome to Something You Should Know.

Hi, Mike.

Thanks for having me.

Well, this is such an interesting question because I don't think it's either or.

I mean, it isn't a matter of you're either cooperative or you're competitive.

You're both.

And in fact, if you question someone's competitiveness, they push back because people like to think of themselves as competitive.

So what do you say?

I think it's exactly how you emphasize it, right?

And in exactly the way that you've just said, if you place the greater emphasis on humans being fundamentally competitive, like you must be competitive, right?

Then people will respond in that kind of way.

Of course, I'm competitive.

Of course, I want to get ahead.

Of course, I want to have the best grades or the best job or the best salary.

But if you switch it around and say, but aren't you a cooperative person?

People say, yeah, you know, I'm a total team player.

And that's very interesting, right?

That just the way that you turn the question can affect the kind of psychology going on in the background.

Right, sure.

Who's going to say, no, I'm not competitive or no, I'm not cooperative because then you'd look kind of dumb.

I mean,

either way, right?

And we see pitches to that effect across the professional sphere where at the same time is saying, we want everybody in this company to be one of the family and, you know, to bring whatever their skill set

is to our group, whatever makes them special to our group, to help the group work more effectively.

But we also say, you know, you really need to differentiate yourself to get ahead.

So I've always thought that we are competitive and that we are cooperative.

And the reason we have both of those is that we're cooperative to the extent that it serves our self-interest.

That you know, we all needed to be members of the tribe because I couldn't do everything myself.

I needed this guy to do this thing.

So we all cooperate, but ultimately it's for my own betterment.

I think that's right.

And I think a lot of people in everyday life would agree with that statement.

The question is, did we evolve to behave that way?

Or is that some kind of anomaly in the history of evolution where somebody who's behaving like an opportunist is somebody who

is an exception to the rule?

of what is otherwise a cooperative group of people.

And I think what you're saying is exactly in line with human evolution.

But a lot of people don't agree with you.

A lot of people think that we evolved in such a way as to better our groups, even if there's a price to doing that for us personally.

But I think there's a huge problem with that.

What's the problem?

The problem is I think it ignores the fundamental self-interest that is built into the story of the evolution of any organism.

And yes, while we cooperate, while we work together, and while mutual aid is an incredibly important element of the history of our species, it's those people who are effective at appearing cooperative, appearing to work

with other people for the group's benefit, but also behaving like opportunists when they have a chance to do so.

It's those people who are always going to get ahead in society and consequently in the story of evolution.

And the point of discussing this is, so we should do something different or we're just observing this and trying to figure it out or why are we talking about this?

I think the first step is acknowledging that that's the case.

And if we ignore the fact that we have a predilection for competition,

even in otherwise cooperative groups.

And when I say competition in this sense, I'm really referring to a kind of silent form of competition, this idea of invisible rivalry, disguising the fact that you're competing, but appearing to cooperate.

If we ignore that tendency of human nature, then we're going to trust too widely.

We're going to believe too much of what other people tell us.

But if, on the other hand, we accept this darker view and think that we're only competitive and people are only out for their own self-interest, then we're unlikely to trust anybody.

And both of those are extremes that we shouldn't take.

And unfortunately, both of those extremes are taken very often in the biological and psychological sciences.

Well, give me an example of an invisible rivalry because we've talked in the abstract here.

But like, so put, give me a situation and two people in that.

I think in the workplace, that's something you see very, very often.

And interestingly, there are good data to support the idea that psychopathic people make up disproportionate positions of power in the workplace.

So, while psychopaths may be about a rate of 1% if it's that high in the population, they're occupying positions of power in about 5% of cases

in positions like being a chief operating officer in a major corporation and so on.

And what's interesting about that is that an important element of being a psychopath is being able to put up a deceptive front about your intention to help others around you and to appear like a team player.

And to me, which is a very extreme example of this idea of invisible rivalry.

And once you reach a position of power, when you've manipulated your way into being high enough that you don't have to cooperate as much to get by.

That's when you kind of shed your skin and show yourself for the opportunist that you are, which is why, exactly why I think we see those data that we do.

But am I in an invisible rivalry and may not know it?

There is a very famous biologist named Robert Trivers who's been writing about this topic for a long time.

And he wrote

the most important works in the history of biology on the topic of reciprocity, reciprocal altruism, and how giving to each other has been an important element of our evolutionary story.

And about 10 years ago, Robert wrote a book called Deceit and Self-Deception, where he explored how self-deception is something that evolved to help us trick others about our intentions more effectively.

If we believe ourselves to be a certain kind of person, whether that's a devoutly religious person

or a very committed employee, but actually are using that appearance and that belief about ourselves to manipulate those around us to get further in society or within our groups, then that would be a case of what I'm calling invisible rivalry.

But I'm taking from what you're saying that these two things are mutually exclusive.

But it seems to me that you could be both.

You could be out for your own self-interest, but still want the group to succeed as well.

Or even be, I don't really care that much one way or the other about the group.

I'm not trying to outdo them or wish them ill.

It's not either or.

I agree with that.

When it becomes a problem is when you have to make a decision in whatever context, whether it's corporate or financial,

in any kind of everyday decision in modern society, when you are thinking, am I going to do something for myself here because I can get away with it at the expense of someone else?

Or am I going to do the more altruistic thing and think for the benefit of the group?

We've all been in that scenario.

And the question is what we do in those cases.

But say, you know, I'm up for a job and so is this other guy and one of us is going to get it.

Well, I want me to get it, but

I'm not out to beat the other guy.

I just want the job.

I have no feelings for him at all.

Do you think that's universally true?

Because I would have thought that there are a lot of cases where people do make that personal and do make it about beating the other guy, some nemesis in their career academically or professionally that they really want to take down.

I don't think that's always the case.

You're going to get huge diversity in why people make those kinds of decisions.

I personally would agree with you, Mike.

I think it's much better just to do the best you can and not worry about what other people are doing.

But I think we all know that that's not how everyone works.

Are the people who are more worried about or interested in the welfare of the group, do those tend to be people who lose out a lot because their interests are for the group and not for themselves?

I think that can often be the case, but it's going to depend entirely on the group dynamics and how often people tend to reward those who are outwardly altruistic towards other group members.

And this is where you get an important distinction in anthropology between different types of capital.

So for example, one of the

important elements of capital in everyday society, as we know, is resource, how wealthy you are.

And whether you give something away towards a group, if I give all my money away and I become impoverished,

then in that sense, I would lose out in exactly the way you're saying, if I don't get anything back for it.

But something that is very important

in anthropology, and particularly in hunter-gatherer studies, this idea of social capital.

How well those around you like you has been incredibly important over our evolutionary history.

And there's very good research showing that people who are well-liked, let's say in their camps, are more likely to be given resources like food if they're in need, in case that their crops haven't come through or that their hunts have been unsuccessful, and so on.

And that element of social capital being popular, being somebody who is likely to be rewarded, is just as important over our evolutionary story as is wealth.

So this is the way it is, right?

I mean, this is,

you're shining a spotlight on it, and it's interesting to talk about, but

there's no like, and therefore we should do something else, or therefore we should, or is there?

I think there absolutely is.

So the first stage is recognition of the problem, recognition that there is what I would think of as a universal human tendency to be an opportunist.

And there's going to be, again, variance in the degree to which people do that.

But nonetheless, it's something that we evolved to do.

We evolved to

work effectively in our groups for our own self-betterment, whether that's at the expense of others or not.

But once we've recognized that,

we can create ways that we

We teach others to try to recognize how to effectively place trust.

So trust is very much at the core of this.

And the problem ultimately is that if you have people who, two people, one of whom is trustworthy and one of whom is not, how are you supposed to tell the difference between the two?

And the story of human acculturation and cultural evolution, to me, is a story of trying to distinguish between those two people, trying to use signals and language and relationship building to be able to tell who in a given situation we can trust and who we can't.

Well, but trust is a two-way street, right?

I mean, you can trust me and I can trust you, but once one of us violates that trust, then the bridge collapses.

It depends on the dynamic between the two people, right?

Because if you're my boss, then whether I trust you

is probably a lot less important than whether you trust me.

Has this,

as you analyze this competition and cooperation, has it been fairly constant throughout human history?

Is it changing?

Are we getting more one way or the other?

Or it's always been this way.

I think it's always been this way.

There is some research suggesting that humans are getting more cooperative over time.

But ultimately, it's going to depend on the number of resources available.

If there are more resources available on average in a population, people are likely to be more altruistic in the psychological sense.

I think it's probably safe to just ignore the biological sense for the moment.

And when there's less available, people are less likely to be altruistic.

I mean, it's really interesting if you just even go on an airplane, right?

And you're looking for the overhead storage for your bags.

People kind of go crazy.

I don't know if you've noticed that.

There's so little room available and people are trying to throw their bags up that there seems to be very little regard for others going on and others' needs around them.

Maybe that's just me that I've noticed that.

But on the other hand, where there are circumstances where people just have more and there's more abundance of whatever is

needed at the the moment, people tend to be more free-giving.

Well, that's really,

you know, I hadn't thought about that, but there are those situations where cooperation seems to go out the window.

And that is exactly one, is when you're trying to find room in the overhead compartment

on the airplane, people couldn't care less about you.

And like when you're at a stoplight and the guy in front of you, you know, doesn't go fast enough.

i mean maybe he has a reason but you don't care i mean there are those situations that that trigger people to to just be complete it's i wouldn't call it competition well sometimes it's competition but i think yeah it often is yeah yeah but it's it's it's like that the switch just goes off and the other switch goes on and it seems kind of weird

I find it fascinating, and I think that's something that we saw a lot over the COVID-19 pandemic, right?

I mean, there was a lot of writing about how people were starting to behave in a slightly more antisocial way.

And at the time where we were all scared of not having enough toilet paper, not having enough food in the supermarkets, I think it's hard to argue that people were behaving in an altruistic way,

particularly over that early period when people were really scared about being trapped in their homes for a long time.

On the other hand,

in times where there's been a great deal of abundance and economies are doing well, people tended to be much more generous towards others.

There's obviously going to be huge individual differences in both, and we're talking about population level averages here, but both are likely to be true, just given the predictions and the models that we're seeing in evolutionary theory.

And I think we see evidence of that.

But sometimes there are other forces at play.

I mean, it's been pretty well documented that that hoarding and COVID, and it's the same kind of hoarding of water and toilet paper that happens when there's a big hurricane coming.

There's something else going on there that isn't this topic.

It's some human thing that we need to be prepared or whatever it is.

Well, yes, there's absolutely going to be more than one kind of force of play, but the idea is that in times when there isn't as much available, people are probably a little bit more likely to behave more selfishly and have some of those social norms and, let's say, ethical rules go out the window a bit.

But on the other hand, there is very interesting research showing that across the world, more impoverished groups are more likely to behave more altruistically towards one another.

And you see that whether you're talking about research in the UK or some parts of the global south, poverty breeds working together and cooperation.

So there's no hard or fast rule there.

But I think the key is looking at what's going to be beneficial on average to a given individual at a given time.

If you can make that prediction, you'll be pretty good at guessing how people are going to behave.

I wonder if people are truthful about this.

In other words, when people say they care about the group or when people say they're altruistic, are they?

There's some interesting research that's come out of Yale.

I think the study was something like the control group didn't say anything, and the experimental group put out something like a tweet saying that they're going to make a donation.

That experimental group were actually less likely to make a donation in the future than the people who didn't say anything at all.

And is there a theory as to why?

The expressing your morality and showcasing your virtue is itself seen very often as the end itself, as opposed to the donation.

The appearance of giving is superior for some people to the act of giving.

Again, not universally true, but this study did show at

the experimental level that there was a trend towards that.

Well, that's very disappointing to hear.

There's a lot of disappointing stuff in the literature, but there's also very nice stuff, too.

You do find research showing that people just tend to behave cooperatively in games when there's absolutely no reason to.

In a specific type of game called the dictator game,

I might be given $10 by the experimenter and you given nothing.

And all the game involves is me deciding whether to give you any money.

And we do find that

they do donate money.

So people aren't just behaving totally economically selfishly either.

Yeah, well, it does seem to be somewhat situation dependent, right?

I mean, the money in your dictator game isn't going to make or break whether I can pay the rent or not.

So, you know, maybe I'm a little freer with that money than

if it did affect that.

That's absolutely true, right?

And that almost ties a little bit into the notion of biological altruism.

If there's a real cost to giving something away, people are less likely to do it.

If it's actually going to meaningfully affect my life, you know, that I can't pay the rent or whatever, then making a donation is going to be a much harder decision.

Okay, so given what you've said for the last 20 minutes, what is it you want people to take from this?

What's the takeaway?

The takeaway is we need to be realistic about our own predilection for being opportunists and appearing to cooperate while sometimes being manipulative and exploitative and competitive.

And if we recognize that, and we recognize that that's going to happen at every level in society, no matter what,

it teaches us that we need to be extremely discerning about how we place trust in others.

And that's something that we need to invest in in a society, giving people the tools they need to ask the right questions to make informed decisions in their day-to-day lives, in their interpersonal lives, and also in the political sphere too.

Well, I enjoy this because this is not the kind of topic that you typically talk to your friends about, but it is an interesting topic to explore and it has

real-world implications.

Jonathan Goodman has been my guest.

He is a social scientist based at the University of Cambridge, and he's the author of a book called Invisible Rivals: How We Evolve to Compete in a Cooperative World.

And there's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes.

Jonathan, thank you for being here.

Thanks, Mike.

Really appreciate it.

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The very best way to support this podcast is is to tell someone you know about it and give them a chance to listen and see if they like it.

And if they do, they'll become a listener and that's how our audience grows.

I'm Mike Carruthers.

Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

It's Marie Antoinette Month on the Vulgar History podcast.

Every week, we'll be taking a deep dive into the life of France's most notorious queen.

Marie Antoinette is still talked about 200 years after her execution in the French Revolution.

Some see her as an out-of-touch, mega-wealthy idiot who deserved to have her head cut off.

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On Vulgar History this month, we're going to be looking at all aspects of Marie Antoinette's life and world to figure out who she really was and why she still fascinates people to this day.

We'll look at the drama of her personal life as well as the series of scandals, mistakes, and disasters that took her from the gilded splendor splendor of Versailles to the guillotine.

Listen to Vulgar History wherever you get podcasts.

You might think you know fairy tales, and you might think that they are cute and sweet and boring.

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