Co-Opting Human Nature

Twice in recent weeks Bill Maher, comedian and host of the HBO show Real Time, described children as “feral.” To bolster this claim, Maher referenced William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. In Golding’s story a group of British schoolboys, aged (roughly) 6–12, are stranded on a tropical island. Starting with good intentions — for example, keeping a signal fire going 24/7 — the boys quickly devolve into tribes with one of those tribes centering their lives around hunting, savagery, and violence. Yes, Golding’s view coincides with Maher’s.

But Lord of the Flies is a novel, written by a British schoolteacher with his own issues and, apparently, poor view of many, if not most, of his charges. Golding’s experiences and experiments influenced his views. As Gina Perry observes about Golding: He held “a fervent belief that ‘man produces evil as a bee produces honey’” (p. 18). As we see in Golding’s novel, youngsters are feral, mere months away, if left on their own, from devolving into a world of barbarism and violence against one another. Likewise, Maher’s conclusion about children is not surprising, given his own stark position (See the link provided above.): “I hate children.”

For a more nuanced and well-rounded (and grounded) perspective, Maher should have spent a little time investigating developmental psychology and studies of human nature. He would also have found a corrective to his view had he looked into a real-life (and real-time) story of a group of boys stranded on a deserted island.

That is the story of six teen-aged boys from Tonga. Bored one day and sick of their boarding-school food, the six boys decided to “borrow” the small sailboat of a local fisherman they detested and head out to fish for their dinner. With thoughts of sailing to Fiji, about 500 miles away, or even to New Zealand, the boys, aged 13–16, headed out of the harbor in the evening, having brought with them a few coconuts, two sacks of bananas, and a small cooking stove. What they failed to bring was a map and a compass.

The boys all fell asleep, only to awaken to full nightfall, high winds, and water crashing onto them and their boat. Soon they lost their sail to the forceful winds and then their rudder. Without water, rudder, sail, or much food, they drifted for eight days, surviving on rainwater captured in coconut shells. Miraculously they came to an uninhabited and, as it turned out, a largely uninhabitable rock mass. For more than one year they survived by storing water in hollowed-out trees, managing a small communal garden, and scrounging for wild chickens, seabird eggs, and tame birds. Unlike the boys in Lord of the Flies, they kept a signal fire going for the full year.

Also unlike the boys in Lord of the Flies, these real-life castaways survived by cooperating. For the sake of a good story, Golding quickly skipped over that possibility. For convenience and to preserve his own view of feral children, so did Maher.

Of course, the Tongan boys were teen-agers, not elementary-school children. Perhaps those few years of maturity made all the difference. Does civilized, cooperative behavior really take hold around puberty? Does it hold, as Edmund Burke wrote in his Letter to a Member of the National Assembly, that:

“Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites…Society cannot exist unless a controlling power on will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds can never be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”

If Burke is correct, then the Tonga boys must have learned quite a bit in that Catholic boarding school, for they must have had within their group, and possibly within themselves, the controlling power on will and appetite. They were also demonstrably young men with temperate minds. On the other hand, these six young men had committed the felony of stealing a sailboat. So were they all of reasoned judgment and virtuous character? Or did recognition of their circumstances on the island lead them to the understandable conclusion that they were better off cooperating and not competing?

In 1740, at the time when Edmund Burke was himself a boy, the British warship H.M.S. Wager sank off the coast of Chile, marooning many of its crew on a deserted island. Alexandra Alter describes what ensued: Survivors, not unlike the boys in Lord of the Flies, broke into warring factions and “descended into chaos, starvation, sedition and murder.” At the end of Golding’s novel, the British naval officer who comes ashore and discovers the boys on the island observes: “I should have thought that a pack of British boys…would have been able to put up a better show than [this.]” Well, surely the same can be said of 18th-century British sailors. Then, again, maybe the British officer had it right and covered both groups when he described the Brits as “a pack.”

These tales provide us with conflicting views of human behavior. Perhaps helping to resolve the conflict and to bring some clarity to our thinking about human nature are the dynamics of the interactions among the young males during the experiment at Robbers Cave. Here we can see the circumstances that can lead groups to compete or to cooperate.

In the summer of 1954 social psychologist Muzafer Sherif conducted the experiment in Robbers Cave State Park in southeastern Oklahoma. Two busloads of adolescent boys, unknown to one another, would share the park for three weeks. Under the illusion that this was a normal summer camp, with Sherif and his researchers disguised as camp staff, the boys divided into two teams. One busload became the Rattlers; the other, the Eagles.

Though unknown to one another, all of the 22 boys fit the same profile: athletic fifth-graders with average grades, with no evident physical or emotional problems, all middle-class, white, and Protestant. Parents were simply told that the experiment would show which boys were inclined to become leaders and which were more followers.

Sherif hypothesized that the two teams would quickly devolve into aggressive, even nasty, rivals as they vied for a valuable prize that only one team could win. Their behavior in the face of competition and limited resources might be inevitable, thought Sherif, but it was also reversible. Problems that required cooperation could, and would, quickly result in dissolved boundaries and friendly interactions across the teams.

Yet Sherif did not let events unfold naturally. Instead, Sherif and his confederates instilled animosity between the two groups. They did not permit the Eagles to invite the Rattlers to a birthday party for Davey, an “Eagle boy.” The Rattlers, across the creek in their own group, could hear the laughter and singing of the Eagle boys and likely felt, as Gina Perry reports, “resentment and loneliness” (p.174).

To continue with the grooming of in-group formation and out-group hostility, Sherif and his team held a series of contests in tournament form. They would award prizes to the winning team; the losing team would receive nothing.

There were sixteen events — such as touch football, baseball games, tug-of-war contests — held over four days. After one baseball game, the Rattlers (the winning side) gave the Eagles three cheers. Sherif wrote in his notebook that the researchers would have to be careful about “exhibitions of good sportsmanship.” His comment is a sign that Sherif and his staff were carefully orchestrating the circumstances facing the boys and the two teams.

After the tug-of-war the losing team, the Eagles, found and burned the Rattlers’ flag. The next day the Rattlers retaliated by seizing the Eagles’ flag and running off with it.

Despite high tensions between the two teams, the Eagles committed to playing fair and being good sports. When they won the next baseball game, they gave the Rattlers three cheers. This sportsmanship bothered Sherif (p. 183), as did the news that the Rattlers were turning their frustrations on one another, not on the Eagles. Sherif determined to instigate more conflict. He and his crew did so by introducing ancillary competitions such as songs and skits for extra points. These competitions were designed to make contested outcomes close, but the Eagles would be the victors.

As Sherif had predicted, competition led to hostility with skirmishes, raids, and retaliations between the two groups, most often initiated by the Rattlers. Fearing that the weaker team, the Eagles, would fall apart if they lost, Sherif and the staff made certain (Perry, p. 187) that the Eagles won the final competition, the treasure hunt, and thus won final victory.

While the Eagles were off celebrating their win, the Rattlers broke into their cabin, stole their medals and knives, and trashed the place. The two groups were now totally alienated. Time for Sherif, in his experiment, to bring them together.

The research team began this phase of the experiment by assigning boys from both groups problems that could only be solved together. One problem involved trying to figure out what seemed to be an issue with the water supply. Tracing the water line together, the boys discovered that the water valve had been buried by a fall of rocks. The staff, of course, had orchestrated this. The two teams of boys worked together to move the rocks. Working as a single team, the boys formed a chain and moved the rocks down the line (Perry, p. 199).

The researchers created other situations where the boys had to work together. By the time the boys were on the single bus back to Oklahoma City, they were singing songs together and jostling one another good-naturedly.

“Human nature doesn’t change.” We humans often use this maxim to explain or excuse unsavory behaviors. We mean by it that such behaviors will always be with us, even when it is we as single individuals who display this behavior. You’re aggressive and competitive? I’m greedy and insensitive? “Ah, that’s the way things are; it’s just human nature.”

Yet people change; we’ve seen such change in ourselves and/or in others. Maybe they’ve stopped drinking and driving. Maybe they’ve stopped obsessing over work or relationships. Have you known someone who displayed, or have you yourself displayed, selfish, mean, and competitive behavior? Have you also known the same person, or have you known yourself, to be sensitive and kind, even altruistic? Perhaps more realistically, do you see this spectrum of behaviors within the same persons but manifest depending on whom they, or you, are with and depending on the situations they, or you, are in?

All of this is possible, I think, for two reasons. First, human nature is elastic. The evidence of human history shows us that humans can be both competitive and cooperative, often within the same person. So, too, can societies and cultures. We have not one character; we have many characters. Of course human nature doesn’t change. Whatever humans say, do, or feel is part of and reflective of our nature. The question for us is which aspects of human nature do we want to cultivate. Because human nature is elastic and human beings are multifaceted, we need to be careful with that cultivation to avoid generating pernicious characters, even monsters. We must be ever vigilant about uncovering among and within us such traps as confirmation biases, manipulations, deceptions, blind spots, chicanery, and “hoodwinkery” of all sorts.

This vigilance brings me to our second reason for the spectrum of behaviors seen within human nature: Situations heavily influence our behaviors. We like to think that we have firm moral or virtuous characters. But social psychologists demonstrate that circumstances often, and sometimes quite easily, undercut our character and fashion unexpected behaviors. Social psychologist Philip Zimbardo claims that a statistical analysis of 25,000 social-psychological experiments conducted over 100 years and involving eight million subjects reveals the robust finding that circumstance or situation strongly influences behavior and character (p. 323).

We should not be surprised, then, to find that many people were willing to shock with sometimes lethal force unseen strangers taking part in a learning experiment or that persons with solid psychological profiles would turn petty and sadistic when placed into the fictitious role of prison guards.

Nor should we be surprised, then, when a novel about a bunch of boys stranded alone on an island shows most of them turning savage and violent. Didn’t the British philosopher Thomas Hobbes predict this outcome in his view in his book Leviathan that humans are by nature selfish and brutish, driven solely by a desire to dominate to preserve themselves?

But we must also acknowledge the behaviors of the Tonga boys who remained cooperative and supportive during their ordeal. And didn’t French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau predict this with his view of human nature as one of compassion, peace, and goodness, which he describes in his Discourse on Inequality and in The Social Contract?

It is too easy to slip into proclaiming only one perspective or the other, Hobbes or Rousseau, while ignoring the elasticity of humans that shows that we have within us the potential, given the circumstances, for either kind of behaviors. We need, therefore, to create the conditions — norms, procedures, and institutions — that foster well-being and that limit harm. That means, taking the elasticity of human nature into account, emphasizing cooperation while constraining, but not eliminating, competition. Of course, recognizing that elasticity won’t get us many laughs, as Bill Maher surely knows.