Why Humans Are Lazy and Other Mysteries
by Benjamin ShenderHumans are animals, and therefore, have instincts. If the proceeding sentence offends you in any way, please stop reading now. The most commonly cited of these instincts are eat, procreation, and the so-called “fight or flight” reflex. Hence, these will not be discussed here.
Beyond this are several other instincts that are also obvious after some consideration. For instance, when babies are frightened they cry for help. This is hardly learned behavior as it is demonstrated too soon after birth for it have been learned. Also, the baby could not have learned it from a parent, as adults rarely bawl out when frightened, hungry, or wet. Granted the latter instance is usually due to a desire not to attract attention. Since this behavior is observed whether or not the child in question is in the presence of other children, it did not come from the parents, and could not have been invented it must therefore be instinctual. While infants do learn that when they cry their parents come, it is only because they already cry when something untoward happens that they can correlate the two.
There are many other autonomic reflexes that are instinctual; however, they lead to less amusing anecdotes. There are three specific instinctive behaviors I want to discuss. Namely, these are efficient action, the creation of communities, and gathering during perceived times of danger.
“What do you expect? People are lazy.” I have heard this said many times before, and until recently I never really considered it. But now I always think to myself, “why do you say that like it was a bad thing?” Laziness is quite adaptive as is produces several reactions. First, while a lazy person will do everything they need to do they will neither look for more to do nor will they expend excess energy doing what they had to do. Therefore they have more energy saved for later, when it might be needed more. As such, laziness is simply a question of efficiency. Secondly, it makes exploitation more difficult. Exploitation requires massive expenditures of energy. A lazy person is unlikely to expend that energy unless they feel they must. In other words, unless a lazy person feels that their food, water, or safety is in jeopardy they will not expend the energy required for exploitation. Such is the case in civilization, where otherwise efficient humans believe that unless they work forty or more hours a week they will not be able to eat. This is a memic-illusion more than a fact, but it is yet a very real motivation. And, apparently, is quite sufficient to cause these persons to work.
When people gather in small groups without a previously determined social structure they invariably form communities. When a group of friends gets together for a night out, it is very rare that one person simply tells everyone else what to do in order to have a good time. More often either of a form of democracy or consensus is used. What is most intriguing about this is that democracy is only used if the group formalizes their decision. If the decision remains in formal then the group as a whole often discusses the options until an idea is reached that everyone in the group is happy with.
The power is out, everyone grabs their flashlights and makes their way to a central location. This happens so regularly as to be completely unremarked upon. The power goes out in a dorm, and two minutes later everyone is in the hall or in the floor lounge. The power goes out at home, and the entire household gathers in the living room. The power goes out in New York City, and everyone takes to the streets. Black-outs are simply a single example of a broader instinctual reaction. Studies have been done demonstrating this. The sociologists split their test group into two parts. The first was assured that the experiment was harmless, safe, and would not hurt. The second was warned that there would be pain and there was a risk of semi-permanent damage. Each group was given a questionnaire asking if they would like to wait their turns alone or together. Every member of the second group requested to wait with someone else. Many in the first group were fine waiting alone.
When the power goes out everyone does not think to themselves, “I should probably go outside now.” Everyone simply grabs their light source, if they have one, and goes to a central meeting place. No signal, order, or decision is required. The power goes out, and people gather. It is only when members of that group do not gather that it becomes obvious that something is amiss. That person might feel uneasy, inordinately alone, or even fearful. This is quite regardless of whether there is any actual danger. Instincts relating to defense activate when there is a perceived threat, any actual danger being quite without standing. The historical antecedents of this instinct are easy to see. If a band of humans were in danger their best chance of survival was always when they were together. An individual human is always quite vulnerable, only in a group do people become dangerous.
Ultimately the difficulty in understanding human instincts is that all instincts work invisibly. Instincts are, by definition, not conscious decisions, but rather an unconscious need. This need is not logical or sensible in the usual sense. While there is a distinct reason behind each instinct, otherwise they would not exist, they are not something that a person considers and then does. Rather suddenly that person feels that they have to act in a certain manor, and they do. This manor is the latest version of instincts dating to the first primordial ancestor.
There is also the “Panty Investigation Phenomenon,” well documented in horror films, in which the female lead instinctively investigates strange noises and disturbances in her most revealing undergarments…
All jokes aside, this was a great article. When you mentioned people automatically banding together during times of danger, I thought, “He’s totally right. How did I never notice that?”
- Chuck
Comment by Chuck — 15 October 2005 @ 2:20 PM
Great article Ben!
=)
I know I’ve mentioned to you before about my oh so wonderful sociology teacher. Well let me re-hash.
(This was a few sememsters ago)
First day of sociology. Looked like it would be a very interesting course and I was pretty excited about it…except…the teacher dropped the bomb, “Humans have no instincts.”
Huh?
My gut reaction was debate debate debate till I was blue in the face. Others in my class debated as well. “Well, what about breast feeding?” No, apparantly all nurses have to teach babies to breast feed because they obviously would NEVER do it on their own. Argument after argument was shut down, until I was the last one debating. Luckily, for her anyway, the class ended without any real evidence to back up her claim, so she sent us all away and avoided me as I tried to talk to her later.
Before the next class I found myself with lacking of money issues and realized that I had to drop one of my classes. Which one did I choose? Sociology!
But really, this is an excellent article and you make some really good points that I wish I had come up with during that particular class.
=)
Comment by Miranda — 15 October 2005 @ 6:30 PM
A very interesting article. I was especially interested in the notion that people congregate in disasters. What seems to run counter to the current “market based” civilization is that people also tend to help each other without hope for profit or other gain when disaster strikes. My impression is that cooperation is instinctive; competition, at least in the economic sense, is learned. The more primitive the society the less hierarchical and the more cooperative.
Dave
Comment by Dave Gordon — 16 October 2005 @ 9:25 AM
Agreed. Excellent article overall; however, I think that the automatic community structure needs a little refinement.
I agree with the central gathering point in times of crisis, with the caveat that people tend to gather in the point central to their next largest support group, corresponding to the progression of Spiral Dynamics. IE, the individual “survivor” (beige) will seek shelter first with family (purple); if the family’s in trouble, they’ll look to the local authorities (red); if the local authorities aren’t any help, the community looks up to a religious order or national government (blue)… and if any step in that chain is non-existent, and there’s no apparent higher order to jump-start the necessary lower levels, the available people will CREATE the missing steps spontaneously as their conditions improve through cooperation, unconsciously rebuilding what we call “civilization”.
In other words, as long as there’s people there will always be family. There will always be government. Even if your current family and government disappear, if there are people, they will become your new family, and together, you will create a new government.
Look at New Orleans. When the government dropped the ball, the locals formed “tribes” to divide chores and look out for one another. Had there been a need for common defense, the people would have naturally formed militias for their communities, made up of able bodied males. That’s another instinct, the PRIME instinct that keeps civilization alive, what Heinlein called the Root of Nobility: “Women and Children First”. IE, if you’re a military-age male, you’re expendable.
Comment by Tar — 17 October 2005 @ 1:40 PM
Well of course men are expendable, and I think you’re on solid ground for the automatic formation of tribes, but for governments … that seems shaky. Why did it take us two million years to reach such a “natural” state? Why did people in New Orleans automatically form tribes, but governments had to reinsert themselves by (a lot) of force?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 17 October 2005 @ 3:31 PM
Because FORCE is what a Government does. I’m a Libertarian, and we hold that the purpose of government is as an AGENCY OF COERCION.
Two million years to reach this state? We’ve had RED the whole time. Technology just advanced enough for us to formalize it, record it, and standardize it. Power relationships have existed as long as powerful people have.
Think of Big Thag leading the tribe with his brutish coterie of club-swinging dudes. Big Thag settles disputes with the business end of his hand-axe. Dispute between the tribes? Big Thag organizes for war. Families don’t make war: their warriors do.
And the evidence for organized warfare extends back so far that we don’t know WHERE it started. It’s in our DNA for throwing: chimps suck at throwing rocks accurately, but all humans can be taught pretty easily. The genes for proclivity with that skill were passed to us from our ancestors who survived by winning the primitive rock-fights in their day.
Eventually, tribes with a militia need formalized rules to deal with individual excess. This is the root of BLUE, the mythological order. Think about a tribal shaman chiding Thag for fucking all those slave girls from the conquered tribe, telling him that the Gods disapprove, sent burning spirits to harm his manhood. Thag, not being able to deal with THIS problem with violence, would be inclined to listen. And when the chief listens, everyone else does, too.
You can’t stop the Spiral from growing.
Comment by Tar — 18 October 2005 @ 11:07 AM
I agree. But if government is such a natural state, those tribes in New Orleans should have spontaneously formed one, no? Instead, they formed tribes and then–stopped. As if they were pretty content where they were, and natural inclination wasn’t pushing them any further.
Why should we think that egalitarianism is a novel development that the majority of contemporary cultures spontaneously developed, just to throw off the ethnographers? Why would we believe this, when we have such clear evidence of hierarchy going back to the Agricultural Revolution–and not before?
Chimpanzees aren’t humans; egalitarianism is our specifically human adaptation (see thesis #7). We have evidence of war going back to the Agricultural Revolution–and not before. The only foragers who “war” are Inuit, and there the numbers are so low, it’s very difficult to disentangle “war” and “homicide.” So where’s the evidence?
Or could it be that hierarchy and war are not our natural state, but abberations that occur when humans are placed into a context to which they are maladapted?
Not once it’s started, no. But that doesn’t mean it’s in our nature. I would say that attributing something that first appeared in the last 99.9% of our history as a species, and even then is found only in a small minority of our cultures, to “human nature” takes ethnocentrism to the most ridiculous, absurd extreme.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 18 October 2005 @ 11:30 AM