8 ms·

For Bonobos, it pays to have powerful allies

32 points by Thimothy 9y ago

aaron-lebo 9y ago
The results support the idea that a tendency to avoid individuals who mistreat others is one of the things that make humans different from other species. What's the evidence for that? Humans love people who mistreat others. We'll die for them and canonize them, for similar reasons as bonobos: they exude power, confidence, strength, certainty. A cursory overview of history and a lot of relationships will support that. Happy to be wrong. What studies are they referring to?
- tome 9y ago
  Presumably the claim is that what makes humans different from other species is that some humans have a tendency to avoid individuals who mistreat others.
  - aaron-lebo 9y ago
    I could see that, but then the article reiterates: The fact that bonobos prefer bullies and humans don’t suggests that an aversion to jerks is a fundamental aspect of human behavior that may be unique to our branch of the primate family tree. In humans, the thinking goes, shunning wrongdoers not only helps people avoid bad partners, but also discourages wrongdoers from behaving badly in the first place. The threat of social rejection keeps them in check. There are a lot of claims in a science article without much support. I don't imagine they are stating that without basis, but not familiar with the research.
- empthought 9y ago
  https://www.nature.com/articles/nature06288 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature06288 I believe this bonobo study is considered salient precisely because it is trying to be an analogue to studies of humans that have found the opposite result.
  - fjfaase 9y ago
    This is a study of preverbal infants. Maybe infants do also discriminate between dominant and less dominant individuals, but at their age, being very care dependent, have a much stronger preference for kind individuals. Maybe infant bonobo's react in the same manner. I am also getting the impression that with adult humans dominance often plays a strong role over kindness.
- lumberjack 9y ago
  Humans feel the need to justify their evil, though. When a populists rises to power and decides to target a minority, he does not openly say, "let us go bully those people". He justifies himself as the one standing on sound moral ground and he comes up with a reason for why that minority are evil people. So for you, an outsider, you see a guy being a jerk and his followers loving him for it. But his followers are not seeing him as a jerk. They see him as their champion who is leading them in a war of good against evil. It is all relative.
notthemessiah 9y ago
As usual with science headlines, it's an oversimplification at best, and inaccurate at worst. The results seemed to indicate that Bonobos preferred those who were at the top of the social hierarchy. The experiment would only be decisive if they could find a way to deconvolve jerkishness from dominance. The researchers say there may be a good reason for these puzzling results. It could be that bonobos interpret rudeness as a sign of social status and are simply trying to keep dominant individuals on their side. In other words, it pays to have powerful allies. To test the idea, the team showed 24 bonobos another set of animated videos in which one cartoon character repeatedly prevents another one from claiming a coveted spot. The apes generally preferred the character who hogged the spot over the one who yielded. For bonobos, schmoozing with dominant individuals could mean better access to food, mates or other perks, or less chance of being bullied themselves, Krupenye said.
- agumonkey 9y ago
  Got me very curious on what part of our brain evolved into spatial protection.
anjc 9y ago
> To test the idea, the team showed 24 bonobos another set of animated videos in which one cartoon character repeatedly prevents another one from claiming a coveted spot. The apes generally preferred the character who hogged the spot over the one who yielded. > they showed 24 bonobos animated videos of a Pac-Man-like shape as it struggles to climb a hill. Then another cartoon shape enters the scene. Nevermind the 'jerk' part, I'm impressed that researchers are interpreting ape preferences via cartoons
- bitwize 9y ago
  Me too. If you showed one group of humans Bugs Bunny and another group of humans Care Bears, they would show a marked preference for Bugs Bunny (who usually abuses poor Elmer Fudd) because it's funnier. Does that mean humans prefer jerks, or just jerky cartoon characters?
  - true_religion 9y ago
    Well to be fair to Bugs Bunny, he is a prey animal trying to avoid being killed. One might say that people just prefer underdogs winning.
farnsworthy 9y ago
And chickens prefer attractive people: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/animals-chickens-evolution-eggs-food/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/animals-chickens... Rough out there.
nukeop 9y ago
Science confirms what we've known for a long time - humans are unique in their ability to act according to morality, instead of pure survival value. We have eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and have free will. Animals don't.
- OneWordSoln 9y ago
  And yet most people still deny it (as evidenced by your being downvoted). Our unique talents also include abstract reasoning and communication as well as advanced tool making, yet most human beings are still acting within the mammalian level of behavior which mostly comprises pack warfare and alpha-dominance seeking, and we are all witness to the disastrous effects those sub-human tendencies are having upon each other as well as the Earth itself (via our short-term profit-seeking over the long-term well-being of the Earth for our descendants benefit). Love -- via selfless service to others' happiness -- is the most unique of human traits as it facilitates our rising above our mammalian tendencies (literally, from a brain structure standpoint) to segregate and wage war upon others of any perceived difference, be it physical (ethnic) or ideological (form of religion, neighborhood, country, sexual orientation or identity, etc.). Only by accepting the primacy of our free wills upon this Earth and the necessity of our training our minds to differentiate good from evil and then choosing the former can we stop the devastation of the Earth and its less fortunate individuals. Until then, the vast majority of human beings will remain, as Wisdom states, "like the animals, only worse".
  - LMYahooTFY 9y ago
    I don't know that most people deny it, nor that down votes on this thread are evidence of anything... It can't be modeled scientifically. People deny it because it's in effect a dogma. I don't say that as a slight, our society is built on the notion of free will. It's simply that the notions exist in a level of abstraction, so the point is moot if you continue living your day to day life, except insofar as you let it affect your mental state.
    - nukeop 9y ago
jVinc 9y ago
"The results support the idea that a tendency to avoid individuals who mistreat others is one of the things that make humans different from other species." The researchers desperately need to take a night out in town and observer other humans a bit. They've acquired a biased view from being cooped up with university people for far too long. I feel like I see directly contradictory behavior on a weekly basis.
- Yuioup 9y ago
  IMO "nice guys finish last" is definitely true.
- watwut 9y ago
  People like to befriend or at least be extra nice to those who mistreat others, especially if those have power or possibility to harm them too. When you have low power and mistreat others, others will retaliate.
  - xya3453 9y ago
    Exactly. Mistreating others is only punished when that individual does not hold a large enough power/status gap between the others being mistreated.
- xya3453 9y ago
  100%. One of the disadvantages of living the privileged, protected life as an academic is the inability to accurately draw conclusions about the majority of humanity.
  - stinkytaco 9y ago
    This seems like a jump. Two, actually. First, that academics, who work in a charged political environment and with college students, are sheltered. Second that the majority of humans prefer jerks. I don't know that we can substantiate either of those claims. It's true that jerks can be in positions of power, but it's hard to say that people prefer them. Indeed, it appears that many people strongly dislike them, but that they are protected by their power and other people with power (a distinct minority).

32 points by Thimothy 9y ago

The results support the idea that a tendency to avoid individuals who mistreat others is one of the things that make humans different from other species. What's the evidence for that? Humans love people who mistreat others. We'll die for them and canonize them, for similar reasons as bonobos: they exude power, confidence, strength, certainty. A cursory overview of history and a lot of relationships will support that. Happy to be wrong. What studies are they referring to?

tome 9y ago
Presumably the claim is that what makes humans different from other species is that some humans have a tendency to avoid individuals who mistreat others.
- aaron-lebo 9y ago
  I could see that, but then the article reiterates: The fact that bonobos prefer bullies and humans don’t suggests that an aversion to jerks is a fundamental aspect of human behavior that may be unique to our branch of the primate family tree. In humans, the thinking goes, shunning wrongdoers not only helps people avoid bad partners, but also discourages wrongdoers from behaving badly in the first place. The threat of social rejection keeps them in check. There are a lot of claims in a science article without much support. I don't imagine they are stating that without basis, but not familiar with the research.
empthought 9y ago
https://www.nature.com/articles/nature06288 https://www.nature.com/articles/nature06288 I believe this bonobo study is considered salient precisely because it is trying to be an analogue to studies of humans that have found the opposite result.
- fjfaase 9y ago
  This is a study of preverbal infants. Maybe infants do also discriminate between dominant and less dominant individuals, but at their age, being very care dependent, have a much stronger preference for kind individuals. Maybe infant bonobo's react in the same manner. I am also getting the impression that with adult humans dominance often plays a strong role over kindness.
lumberjack 9y ago
Humans feel the need to justify their evil, though. When a populists rises to power and decides to target a minority, he does not openly say, "let us go bully those people". He justifies himself as the one standing on sound moral ground and he comes up with a reason for why that minority are evil people. So for you, an outsider, you see a guy being a jerk and his followers loving him for it. But his followers are not seeing him as a jerk. They see him as their champion who is leading them in a war of good against evil. It is all relative.

notthemessiah 9y ago

As usual with science headlines, it's an oversimplification at best, and inaccurate at worst. The results seemed to indicate that Bonobos preferred those who were at the top of the social hierarchy. The experiment would only be decisive if they could find a way to deconvolve jerkishness from dominance. The researchers say there may be a good reason for these puzzling results. It could be that bonobos interpret rudeness as a sign of social status and are simply trying to keep dominant individuals on their side. In other words, it pays to have powerful allies. To test the idea, the team showed 24 bonobos another set of animated videos in which one cartoon character repeatedly prevents another one from claiming a coveted spot. The apes generally preferred the character who hogged the spot over the one who yielded. For bonobos, schmoozing with dominant individuals could mean better access to food, mates or other perks, or less chance of being bullied themselves, Krupenye said.

agumonkey 9y ago
Got me very curious on what part of our brain evolved into spatial protection.

anjc 9y ago

> To test the idea, the team showed 24 bonobos another set of animated videos in which one cartoon character repeatedly prevents another one from claiming a coveted spot. The apes generally preferred the character who hogged the spot over the one who yielded. > they showed 24 bonobos animated videos of a Pac-Man-like shape as it struggles to climb a hill. Then another cartoon shape enters the scene. Nevermind the 'jerk' part, I'm impressed that researchers are interpreting ape preferences via cartoons

bitwize 9y ago
Me too. If you showed one group of humans Bugs Bunny and another group of humans Care Bears, they would show a marked preference for Bugs Bunny (who usually abuses poor Elmer Fudd) because it's funnier. Does that mean humans prefer jerks, or just jerky cartoon characters?
- true_religion 9y ago
  Well to be fair to Bugs Bunny, he is a prey animal trying to avoid being killed. One might say that people just prefer underdogs winning.

farnsworthy 9y ago

And chickens prefer attractive people: https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/animals-chickens-evolution-eggs-food/ https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/01/animals-chickens... Rough out there.

nukeop 9y ago

Science confirms what we've known for a long time - humans are unique in their ability to act according to morality, instead of pure survival value. We have eaten from the tree of knowledge of good and evil and have free will. Animals don't.

OneWordSoln 9y ago
And yet most people still deny it (as evidenced by your being downvoted). Our unique talents also include abstract reasoning and communication as well as advanced tool making, yet most human beings are still acting within the mammalian level of behavior which mostly comprises pack warfare and alpha-dominance seeking, and we are all witness to the disastrous effects those sub-human tendencies are having upon each other as well as the Earth itself (via our short-term profit-seeking over the long-term well-being of the Earth for our descendants benefit). Love -- via selfless service to others' happiness -- is the most unique of human traits as it facilitates our rising above our mammalian tendencies (literally, from a brain structure standpoint) to segregate and wage war upon others of any perceived difference, be it physical (ethnic) or ideological (form of religion, neighborhood, country, sexual orientation or identity, etc.). Only by accepting the primacy of our free wills upon this Earth and the necessity of our training our minds to differentiate good from evil and then choosing the former can we stop the devastation of the Earth and its less fortunate individuals. Until then, the vast majority of human beings will remain, as Wisdom states, "like the animals, only worse".
- LMYahooTFY 9y ago
  I don't know that most people deny it, nor that down votes on this thread are evidence of anything... It can't be modeled scientifically. People deny it because it's in effect a dogma. I don't say that as a slight, our society is built on the notion of free will. It's simply that the notions exist in a level of abstraction, so the point is moot if you continue living your day to day life, except insofar as you let it affect your mental state.
  - nukeop 9y ago

jVinc 9y ago

"The results support the idea that a tendency to avoid individuals who mistreat others is one of the things that make humans different from other species." The researchers desperately need to take a night out in town and observer other humans a bit. They've acquired a biased view from being cooped up with university people for far too long. I feel like I see directly contradictory behavior on a weekly basis.

Yuioup 9y ago
IMO "nice guys finish last" is definitely true.
watwut 9y ago
People like to befriend or at least be extra nice to those who mistreat others, especially if those have power or possibility to harm them too. When you have low power and mistreat others, others will retaliate.
- xya3453 9y ago
  Exactly. Mistreating others is only punished when that individual does not hold a large enough power/status gap between the others being mistreated.
xya3453 9y ago
100%. One of the disadvantages of living the privileged, protected life as an academic is the inability to accurately draw conclusions about the majority of humanity.
- stinkytaco 9y ago
  This seems like a jump. Two, actually. First, that academics, who work in a charged political environment and with college students, are sheltered. Second that the majority of humans prefer jerks. I don't know that we can substantiate either of those claims. It's true that jerks can be in positions of power, but it's hard to say that people prefer them. Indeed, it appears that many people strongly dislike them, but that they are protected by their power and other people with power (a distinct minority).