hardwired

 

Confidence Before Realism. In the unpredictable and often terrifying conditions of the Stone Age, those who survived surely were those who believed they would survive. Their confidence strengthened and emboldened them, attracted allies, and brought them resources. In addition, people who appeared self-confident were more attractive as mates—they looked as if they were hardy enough to survive and prosper. Thus, people who radiated confidence were those who ended up with the best chances of passing on their genes. The legacy of this dynamic is that human beings put confidence before realism and work hard to shield themselves from any evidence that would undermine their mind games.

Classification Before Calculus. The world of hunter-gatherers was complex and constantly presented new predicaments for humans. Which berries can be eaten without risk of death? Where is good hunting to be found? What kind of body language indicates that a person cannot be trusted?

In order to make sense of a complicated universe, human beings developed prodigious capabilities for sorting and classifying information. In fact, researchers have found that some nonliterate tribes still in existence today have complete taxonomic knowledge of their environment in terms of animal habits and plant life. They have systematized their vast and complex world.

In the Stone Age, such capabilities were not limited to the natural environment. To prosper in the clan, human beings had to become expert at making judicious alliances. They had to know whom to share food with, for instance—someone who would return the favor when the time came. They had to know what untrustworthy individuals generally looked like, too, because it would be foolish to deal with them. Thus, human beings became hardwired to stereotype people based on very small pieces of evidence, mainly their looks and a few readily apparent behaviors.

Whether it was sorting berries or people, both worked to the same end. Classification made life simpler and saved time and energy. Every time you had food to share, you didn’t have to figure out anew who could and couldn’t be trusted. Your classification system told you instantly. Every time a new group came into view, you could pick out the high-status members not to alienate. And the faster you made decisions like these, the more likely you were to survive. Sitting around doing calculus—that is, analyzing options and next steps—was not a recipe for a long and fertile life.

And so classification before calculus remains with us today. People naturally sort others into in-groups and out-groups—just by their looks and actions. We subconsciously (and sometimes consciously) label other people—“She’s a snob” or “He’s a flirt.” Managers are not exempt. In fact, research has shown that managers sort their employees into winners and losers as early as three weeks after starting to work with them.

Overconfidence is part of our genetic legacy, but for managers, that can be a two-edged sword.

That such propensity to classify is human nature doesn’t make it right. People are complex and many sided. But it is illuminating to know that we are actually programmed not to see them that way. This perhaps helps to explain why, despite the best efforts of managers, some groups within organizations find it hard to mix. The battle between marketing and manufacturing is as old as—well, as old as marketing and manufacturing. The techies of IT departments often seem to have difficulty getting along with the groups they are supposed to support, and vice versa. Everyone is too busy labeling others as outsiders and dismissing them in the process.

A final point must be made on the matter of classification before calculus, and it comes in the area of skill development. If you want to develop someone’s skills, the best route is to give them ways of classifying situations and behaviors. Lists are attractive and often memorable. But advanced math and science education largely relies on sophisticated models of processes—complex explanations of cause and effect in different circumstances. It also advocates probabilistic ways of thinking, in which people are taught to weigh the combined likelihoods of different events together as they make decisions. Many people may come to understand and use these methods—weather forecasters and investment analysts are examples—but even lengthy training cannot fully eliminate our irrational and simplifying biases.

Gossip. Along with a scarcity of food, clothing, and shelter, and the constant threat of natural disaster, the Stone Age was also characterized by an ever-shifting social scene. From one season to the next, it was not easy to predict who would have food to eat, let alone who would be healthy enough to endure the elements. In other words, the individuals who ruled the clan and controlled the resources were always changing. Survivors were those who were savvy enough to anticipate power shifts and swiftly adjust for them, as well as those who could manipulate them.

They were savvy because they engaged in, and likely showed a skill for, gossip. Even in today’s office environment, we can observe that expert gossips time and again know key information before everyone else. That has always been true in human society. The people who chat with just the right people at just the right time often put themselves in just the right position. In fact, it is fair to assume that human beings have stayed alive and increased their chances of reproducing because of such artful politicking.

Because gossip saved lives in the Stone Age, it will be with organizations forever.

We need segregation to bond! Discrimination, and persecution, lets us experience pain and suffering, and on the other hand, experience strength and victories.

What are the implications for managers? Rumor—what has been called “unofficial news”—is endemic in every organization. And since the interest in rumors is ingrained into human nature, it makes little sense to try to eliminate such interest by increasing the flood of official communications. Rather, managers would be smart to keep tabs on the rumor mill. They might even use their own networks to plug into the grapevine. This doesn’t mean managers should engage in, or encourage, malicious and petty gossip. But when it comes to gossip, it may be that managing by wandering about is the most effective way to communicate, as long as it is performed in a climate of trust and openness.

Empathy and Mind Reading. Simply stated, these two skills are the building blocks of gossip. People are much more likely to hear secrets and other information if they appear trustworthy and sympathetic. Likewise, people with a knack for guessing what others are thinking tend to ask better—that is, more probing and leading—questions. Thus, because empathy and mind reading abet the survival skill of gossip, they too became hardwired into the human brain.

At the same time, people are also programmed for friendliness. Sharing food was the basis for the cooperative exchange with relative strangers in the hunter-gatherer clan. Human beings, or at least those who survived, became adept at building peaceful social alliances and carrying out negotiations with win-win outcomes. We can see these “design features” at every turn today—people love to barter and trade; in fact, both have been keystones of economies since the beginning of civilization. (We can see barter and trade even among very young children at play.) And so it is that friendly exchanges of information and favors remain our preferred way of dealing with nonfamily and a key to building political alliances for social success.

The good news for managers on this front is that empathy and friendliness are, in general, positive dynamics to have around the organization. It pays to empathize with customers, for instance, and we can assume that things like commitment and loyalty grow when employees are friendly to one another. The bad news is that the instinct for empathy very easily leads us to imagine that people are more similar to ourselves, as well as more competent and trustworthy, than they really are. Further, the drive to act friendly can make delivering bad news—about performance, for instance—very difficult.

The employment interview is one situation that exploits the capacities for friendliness and imaginative empathy to its fullest extent. Our natural tendency to sympathize with the person across the table drives us to make excuses for their weaknesses or to read more substance into their work or personal experiences than truly exists. At the same time, our programming for classification—sorting people into in-groups and out-groups—can make us harshly judge those who appear to be in the out-group. We will even focus on and exaggerate the differences we perceive. Thus, strict controls and lengthy training are needed to make interviews effective procedures for objective judgment, and even then they remain highly vulnerable to empathy and mind-reading biases.

Contest and Display. Finally, status in tribal groups was often won in public competitions. (Such competitions were not introduced by human beings; indeed, they were dramas commonly played out by primates.) To establish status in early human societies, people (especially males) frequently set up contests, such as games and battles, with clear winners and losers. Likewise, they displayed their status and mental gifts in elaborate public rituals and artistic displays. The underlying purpose of such practices was to impress others. Successful—that is, high-status—and healthy males were thought to produce strong and intelligent progeny. For survival-driven females, determined not only to reproduce but to nurture their babies once they arrived, such males were…well, irresistible. For their part, women found contests amongst themselves unnecessary, although they did seek to be more attractive than one another so they could have the prime pick of high-status males. But more direct forms of contest neither guaranteed females’ status as attractive mates nor helped them to achieve their ends of protecting their young.

And so the ingrained male desire to do public battle and display virility and competence persists today. That should not surprise any denizen of the corporate world. Men are forever setting up contests between themselves to see who will be promoted, win a new account, or gain the ear of leaders. Winners of these contests are frequently given to public displays of chest thumping. And even in organizational settings, which would benefit from cooperation, men frequently choose competition.

What are the implications for managers? The answer is sensitive territory, because it gets into the inborn differences between men and women and what that means for managers. Recall what happened nine years ago, when Felice Schwartz suggested in her article “Management Women and the New Facts of Life” (HBR January–February 1989) that companies consider establishing a different career track for women with children. Some heralded the concept of the so-called Mommy Track—a term not coined by Schwartz, by the way—but many feminists excoriated her work.

Suffice it to say, then, that managers should be aware that you can urge men to refrain from one-upmanship, but you may be fighting their programming. In addition, companies might ask themselves if their rules of success were written by men and for men. It might be that the reason most women are not breaking the glass ceiling is because they find those rules abhorrent—or at the very least, against their nature.

When all is said and done, evolutionary psychology paints a rather illuminating picture of human thinking and feeling. We may wish human beings were more rational, but our brains, created for a different time and place, get in the way. But the truth is, today we need rationality more than ever. The world is increasingly complex, and we must make harder, more layered decisions faster and faster.

Of course, people have devised wonderful instruments to help predict and manage uncertainty. The mere fact that there are not many more rogue traders like Nick Leeson, who single-handedly managed to bring down Britain’s Barings Bank with his gaming of the system, suggests that many controls are already in place that tame and manage these impulses. On modern trading floors, for example, computer modeling is widely used to estimate risks and probabilities in an unbiased fashion. Traders and managers collectively pore over risk-bearing market positions to limit financial exposure. Reward and punishment systems encourage openness about loss and heavily penalize concealment. Responsibility for different elements of trading deals is divided across functions to prevent an individual from committing fraud. But even with these controls and safeguards, it is a sure thing that enormous costs are still being incurred through the exercise of human irrationality in these and other complex information-based environments.

Evolutionary psychologists contend, however, that our primitive psychorationality, so well adapted to the precarious life of hunter-gatherers, will continue to call the tune whenever it is free to do so. In the choices businesspeople make, one can expect the hidden agendas of emotion, loss aversion, over-confidence, categorical thinking, and social intuition to continue regularly to prevail. Evolutionary psychology thus suggests how important it is for us to have a clear view of our biased natures so that we can construct a mind-set to guard against their worst consequences.

Organizational Design. Like the primates that came before them, human beings were never loners. Indeed, the family is the centerpiece of all human societies. Because of the family’s enduring prevalence, modern Darwinian thinkers hypothesize that human survival was greatly aided by qualified monogamy—pair-bonding necessary for the prolonged care of the young. But no family would have survived the Stone Age without additional support. And thus was born the clan, or an extended family built through “marriages”—that is, mating with other families.

Clans on the Savannah Plain appear to have been similar in one key way: they contained up to 150 members, according to Robin Dunbar, professor of psychology at the University of Liverpool. In his research, Dunbar found a linear relationship between the brain size and troup size of social primates. The larger the brain, the larger the size of the group. Now, it may appear that other species have groups larger than 150 members. We see thousands of moose together, for instance. But these are not clans in the way people configure or experience them. There is no binding connection or social organization among moose. They don’t protect one another, for instance, or establish divisions of labor. They simply gather into mating groups—a single male with his many female mates and their offspring.

Human beings organize socially. They are held together by the bond of communities, although maintaining such communities is a complex matter. It involves a lot of brain power—remembering people, forging alliances, and keeping promises are all advanced mental tasks. And given our brain size, the biggest clan a human being can handle, according to Dunbar’s research, has 150 members.

It may very well be for this reason that we see the persistent strength of small to midsize family businesses throughout history. These companies, typically having no more than 150 members, remain the predominant model the world over, accounting for approximately 60% of all employment. Family-owned companies account for a great deal of big business, too, especially in the Asia-Pacific region. And in the West, many major companies are underpinned by substantial interlocking family networks.

Of course, many companies today employ more than 150 people. And many of these businesses struggle with the tendency of people to break off into cliques, or of functions, departments, or even teams to come into conflict with one another. In recent years, many companies have sought to deal with this complexity through matrix management. Yet it has proved to be one of the most difficult and least successful organizational forms. The reason? Evolutionary psychologists contend that matrix forms are inherently unstable due to the conflicting pulls toward too many centers of gravity. People are instinctively drawn toward commitment to one community at a time, usually the one that is closer and more familiar to them. Thus, when a modern businessperson is asked to report both to her regional boss and to a product manager, she is typically drawn to the regional boss because he is physically closer to where the employee works and to what she knows best. Similarly, when a manager “belongs” to a function and a project, her allegiance to the function—her primary assignment—usually prevails. The dual loyalties required by matrix management are difficult to sustain in the long term. It is no surprise, then, that the matrix has worked best where it has been limited in size and duration and where it has been directed toward the common end of a finite project—like a temporary assembly of a section of the hunter-gatherer clan for some major undertaking such as a game drive.

Evolutionary psychology’s rule of 150 might also explain the success in modern times of cellular and starburst organizational forms, where subunits are spun off from the main body of a growing company, or where new units are acquired but allowed to retain a high degree of autonomy, such that no subunit exceeds more than 150 people. Two notable examples are ABB, the multinational based in Sweden, which has become a world-beater by this means, and Virgin, which, especially in its early days, cultivated a climate of subunit entrepreneurship and self-management. ABB has around 1,500 units, each with an average of 50 people. Virgin allowed no more than 50 employees at any one site during its early years of phenomenal growth and success.

The truth is that leaders are born, not made. They are not clones, but all of them share one special personality trait: a passion to lead.

Leadership. As noted at the outset of this article, evolutionary psychology does not dispute individual differences. Indeed, an increasingly robust body of studies on twins conducted by behavioral geneticists indicates that people are born with set predispositions that harden as they age into adulthood. Genes for detachment and novelty avoidance have been found, for instance, which together appear to amount to shyness. It used to be assumed that shyness was induced entirely by environment—if a shy person just tried hard enough, he or she could become the life of the party. The same was said for people who were highly emotional—they could be coaxed out of such feelings. But again, research is suggesting that character traits such as shyness and emotional sensitivity are inborn.

That personality is inborn is not news to any parent with more than one child. You provide a stable home environment for your brood—the same food, the same schools, the same basic experiences on a day-to-day basis. And yet the first child is introverted and grows up to be an R&D scientist. The second, who never stopped chattering as a child, grows up to become a flamboyant sales executive. And still a third child is as even-keeled as can be and pursues a career as a schoolteacher. Evolutionary psychology would tell us that each one of these individuals was living out his biogenetic destiny.

The implications for leadership are significant. First, the most important attribute for leadership is the desire to lead. Managerial skills and competencies can be trained into a person, but the passion to run an organization cannot. This feeds into the rather unpopular notion that leaders are born, not made. Evolutionary psychologists would agree and, in fact, posit that some are born not to lead.

Second, the theory of inborn personality does not mean that all people with genes for dominance make good leaders. A propensity for authoritative behavior might help, but some organizational situations call more urgently for other traits—such as empathy or an ability to negotiate. There are as many types of leaders as there are leadership situations. The important thing is to have the personality profile that meets the demands of the situation.

Third and finally, if you are born with personality traits that don’t immediately lend themselves to leadership—shyness is a good example, as is high sensitivity to stress—that doesn’t mean you can’t be a leader. Rather, it means that you must protect yourself in certain ways. If you have a low threshold for stress, for instance, you would do well not to lead from the front lines. You could put your trusted senior managers there and position yourself in the corporate office to focus on strategy.

The worst problem an organization can get itself into, this line of thinking suggests, is to have a leader who does not want to lead. Reluctant leaders can survive as symbolic figureheads but will perform poorly if asked to manage other people. The motivation to lead is the baseline requirement for competent leadership. After that, other personality traits and managerial skills matter. They must match the demands of the situation. But if the person in charge is not born wanting to lead, he or she should do everyone a favor and follow or ally themselves with partners who do.

https://hbr.org/1998/07/how-hardwired-is-human-behavior