"At this moment, someone may be planning to kill you. How afraid should you be?" Dr. Paul Seabright posed the grim question in a lecture on the evolution of economic life in the Crane Room on Monday.
Seabright, a professor of economics at the University of Toulouse in France, is the author of ?¬The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life,?® in which he explores the evolution of social trust.
Trust between strangers ?? a phenomenon that Seabright called ?¬unnatural?® ?? is what allows society to function, he said. Every day, humans engage in transactions with strangers who could potentially lie to us, cheat us, or even subject us to bodily harm.
?¬You think the man in a uniform is coming to fix your washing machine,?® Seabright said. ?¬He?s actually come to kill you and rape all the women in the house. Evolutionarily, we should feel that way.?®
Though the contention sounds fantastical, Seabright?s research is based on a close study of the species most closely related to humans ?? chimpanzees, gorillas, and bonobos and on the especial frequency of violence in primitive human societies.
Chimpanzees and gorillas share most of their DNA with humans, but their interactions can be exceedingly violent ?? infanticide is not uncommon, for example. But bonobos, who are so closely related to chimpanzees that they were once thought to belong to the same species, have a different social structure and tend to ?¬make love, not war,?® as Seabright put it.
Similarly, primitive human societies were far more violent than is the world today. Studies have shown that between 10 and 40 percent of deaths in these societies resulted from human-on-human violence.
Today, only about one percent of deaths result from violence, including the massacres, wars and other tragedies that we see everyday on CNN, Seabright said.
Even if today?s society has become less violent, humans should still be attuned to the evolutionary risk of being mistreated by strangers. ?¬Why are we not more paranoid??® Seabright asked his rapt listeners. The reason we are so trusting, he said, is that social organization makes our learned way of cooperative behavior stable.
According to Seabright, if this social trust did not exist, trade would collapse as exchange behavior rests on trust in the promises of strangers.
But not all of Seabright?s listeners were convinced by his evolutionary explanation for the human capacity for violence. One attending economics professor, Winifred Rothenberg, challenged him by citing studies showing that resource-poor societies ?? ?¬where the breadfruit falls from trees?® ?? are inherently less violent than resource-rich societies.
Seabright acknowledged this point by saying that as wealth increases, social trust becomes endangered. Hunter-gatherers have nothing to steal, so theft and violence were relatively minimal in pre-agricultural societies. But since the agricultural revolution, humans are less mobile and accumulate more goods, making violence more potentially worthwhile, he said.
?¬The more prosperous we become the more we worry about having to protect the fruits of our labor,?® Seabright said.
Rothenberg said that while the question Seabright posed was fascinating, there are several other approaches to studying the origins of cooperative behavior that he did not mention.
According to Rothenberg, who has not read Seabright?s latest book but is familiar with the concepts he discussed, his ?¬approach builds on recent research that finds the brains of humans genetically ?hard-wired? for cooperative behavior,?® she said
But the research of cultural anthropologists in the 1930s through 1960s showed that ?¬interpersonal relations tend to be benevolent in those societies for whom food was plentiful,?® Rothenberg said.
The Arawak of the Caribbean, home of the plentiful breadfruit, are a peaceful people, for example. But relations ?¬tend to be hostile, even pathologically so, among those societies that faced terrible scarcity, like the Arapeche in the South Pacific and the notorious Dik in Africa, she said.
Rothenberg questioned the empirical soundness of Seabright?s hypothesis that sociability evolved genetically, rather than varying in response ?¬to the abundance of resource endowments.?®
Seabright?s lecture was based on his most recent book and also on a paper still in preparation called ?¬Agriculture, Warfare, and the Division of Labor.
Economics Professor Yannis Ioannides introduced Seabright?s lecture as being ?¬on an unusually broad, interdisciplinary subject that involves psychology, biology, anthropology and sociology in addition to economics.
