7

From Groups to Individuals

What is an individual person? The fact that we have such a clear physical boundary and that all sorts of individual measurements can be taken on each of us leads easily to the wrong answer. Consider the chickens that we met in chapter 4. Hens were housed in cages and selected on the basis of their egg-laying ability. It’s easy to count the number of eggs that emerge from the hind end of a hen and to regard it as an individual trait. Yet, when the most productive hen from each group was selected to breed the next generation of hens, egg productivity went down, not up, and after five generations the experiment had resulted in a breed of psychopaths.

The reason for this perverse result, as we saw in chapter 4, is that the most productive hen achieved her productivity by bullying the other hens. What seemed like an individual trait because you could measure it in an individual turned out to be the product of social interactions. In the parallel experiment, whole groups of hens were selected on the basis of their combined productivity. This experiment resulted in a breed of contented hens and an increase in productivity over the course of five generations because selecting at the group level favored cooperative rather than aggressive social interactions.

Thus, not only do the chickens serve as a parable for the problem of goodness, the focus of chapter 4, but also for the concept of individuals as products of social interactions, the focus of this chapter. Like the chickens, what can easily be measured about us as individuals, such as our statures, our personalities, and our physical and mental health, are not individual traits. Instead, they are the result of social processes that stretch back to before we were born—indeed, all the way back to when our distant ancestors were born if we take all evolutionary processes into account. Each person is an active participant in the social process, so there is plenty of scope for individual agency, but the idea that any one of us is “self-made” is a fiction.

In this chapter, I will show how a systemic view can help to solve many of the problems of modern civilization that manifest as individual dysfunctions. Along the way, I will introduce you to some people who first achieved distinction in their field of expertise and then discovered the added value of adopting an evolutionary worldview.

WHY WE HOLD HANDS

Meet Jim Coan, a clinical psychologist at the University of Virginia’s highly regarded department of psychology.1 Clinical psychologists are trained to work with people from all walks of life to improve their well-being, but many of them also conduct basic scientific research. Jim is a state-of-the-art neuroscientist in addition to being a clinical practitioner. Several years ago, if you had asked Jim if he accepted Darwin’s theory of evolution, he would have said “Of course!” Yet, a patient in Jim’s clinical practice caused him to rethink the entire nature of the human brain from an evolutionary perspective in a way that differed profoundly from his previous academic training.

The patient was a World War II veteran who had developed the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in his eighties. The old soldier refused to recollect his wartime experiences or do anything else suggested by Jim. At one point he declared, “I want my wife with me.” This was the first time that Jim had received such a request, but he had no reason to deny it, so the next session was with the patient and his wife. At first Jim treated her as a bystander and the patient was as resistant as before. Then she offered to hold her husband’s hand. Like magic, he opened up and was receptive to therapy, but only when holding hands with his wife.

Jim was amazed and intrigued. The simple act of holding hands was having a powerful effect on the old man’s behavior, which must have been mediated through brain activity. To learn more, Jim put on his neuroscience hat and embarked upon a set of brain-scanning experiments. The participants in the experiment didn’t have PTSD, so Jim had to create a stress-inducing situation to serve as a rough equivalent.

If you’ve ever been in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, you know that it isn’t much fun. You’re inserted into a narrow tube that’s extremely noisy. To make the experience even more distressing, Jim placed the hapless participants under threat of electric shock by attaching electrodes to their ankles. They experienced this stressful situation under three conditions: by themselves, holding the hand of a stranger, and holding the hand of a loved one. Now that Jim could look inside the brain, what did he find?

When participants of the experiment were on their own, their brains were in turmoil as various fight and flight circuits were activated. Holding the hand of a stranger had a slight calming effect, but the most dramatic calming effect came from holding the hand of a loved one. Jim had succeeded at duplicating in the laboratory what he had observed with the old soldier and his wife.2

As with many basic science experiments, this one is likely to produce a reaction of “Amazing!” followed quickly by “But didn’t we already know this?” Jim’s mother even scolded him for spending so much time and money when he could have just checked with her! Nevertheless, Jim was breaking new ground in a number of ways. If the results are so obvious, then why haven’t clinical psychologists incorporated it into their practice? Why do they assume that the individual is the unit of treatment? Why was Jim surprised by the old soldier’s request to have his wife present and doubly surprised when the physical act of holding hands was required? Jim’s clinical and academic training had blinded him to the calming effect of holding hands, however obvious it might have been to his mother.

Perhaps most important, Jim’s experiments were beginning to address what actually goes on in the brain when a person feels socially connected or isolated in a stressful situation. This was new for everyone, including Jim’s mother. Yet Jim’s efforts to understand the brain’s activity patterns were going nowhere until one of his departmental colleagues, Dennis Proffitt, offered two pieces of advice: First, think of the person holding hands as the normal condition, not the person facing the situation alone. Second, read An Introduction to Behavioural Ecology by Nicholas B. Davies, John R. Krebs, and Stuart A. West.3

According to Jim, taking this advice revolutionized his understanding of the brain and allowed him to make sense of his own experimental results for the first time. Here is how Jim described to me in a 2016 interview the impact of reading An Introduction to Behavioural Ecology.

I think “meteoric” is the right way to describe its impact on me. By the time I had finished the first chapter I was already thinking about my own work, and indeed, thinking about psychology as a broad discipline completely differently. The book starts out introducing principles that organize behavior—that when you give them even a little bit of thought make complete sense. Principles like the management of bio-energetic resources; that if you’re going to engage in a behavior as an organism, to accrue resources, you have to invest resources that you have in store. That is a very risky business, so you need a certain amount of information about the demand of the environment and your own resource cache. That entails certain principles that get built into the genome over time about keeping an excess, having a surplus, and maintaining a surplus.

I had a kind of personal and intellectual crisis, where I thought “Holy shit! What have I been doing all this time? I’ve been thinking about constructs that aren’t tethered to any ultimate goals or any ultimate constraining principles.” In psychology, anything goes, because the thinking isn’t constrained by these imperatives of biological organisms across evolution and ontogeny. Then I started going through chapter after chapter, example after example, of these principles existing not just as logical arguments but as empirical data. It was enough to almost make me cry.4

Jim’s conversion experience will sound strange to many people who assume that because an academic discipline such as psychology or neuroscience is sophisticated in some respects, it must be sophisticated in all respects. In fact, as broad disciplines, they have done a poor job addressing Tinbergen’s function (how our psychological and neurological traits contribute to survival and reproduction) and history (the particular evolutionary trajectory of our species) questions, as strange as this might seem. When these two questions are poorly addressed, then research on Tinbergen’s mechanism and development questions often heads in unprofitable directions.

An Introduction to Behavioural Ecology filled in the function and history questions for Jim. The first edition was published in 1981 and helped to consolidate Tinbergen’s four-question approach, as I recounted at the beginning of this book. It showed that if we want to understand how a given species behaves, we must understand how its behaviors were shaped by natural selection. This, in turn, requires understanding the species in relation to its ancestral environment (which might or might not be different from its current environment) and the historical contingencies of its evolution. Asking the simple question “How would this species behave if it were well adapted to its environment?” leads to hypotheses that provide excellent starting points for scientific inquiry, even if not all of them prove to be correct. This is called “adaptationist” or “natural selection” thinking, and it is one of the most powerful tools in the evolutionary toolkit, as I showed in chapter 2.

Natural selection almost always involves trade-offs, based on the familiar principle that a jack-of-all-trades is a master of none. Doing one thing well requires doing other things poorly. The shell of a turtle protects it against predators but also prevents it from moving fast. Penguins are agile swimmers but look ridiculous as they waddle about on land. Pigmented skin protects against ultraviolet radiation but prevents the synthesis of vitamin D. Every species is a bundle of trade-offs, based on the selection pressures acting upon it over evolutionary time.

The way an organism behaves during its lifetime also reflects trade-offs. A turtle’s shell is an anatomical trait. A turtle pulling into its shell when it senses danger and coming out of its shell when the danger passes are behaviors. Both can be understood in terms of trade-offs. The idea that behaviors evolve, just like anatomical traits, was the point made by Niko Tinbergen and came to fruition with An Introduction to Behavioural Ecology. Yet such is the isolation among academic disciplines that these developments in the study of animal behavior didn’t spread to the study of human psychology and neuroscience, at least as far as Jim’s training was concerned. That’s what he meant when he said during our interview: “In psychology, anything goes, because the thinking isn’t constrained by these imperatives of biological organisms across evolution and ontogeny.”

As a born-again behavioral ecologist, Jim became obsessed with the question “What is the ecology that humans are adapted for?” Here’s how he described his quest in our interview.

As I kept pulling on that thread, the only thing that kept coming up over and over again was “other humans.” This is part of the model that we developed called the social baseline model. When you average everything out that humans have experienced, over millennia, the only thing that’s constant is other humans. We’re so adaptable, we’ve been to so many places; we live in the arctic and the equator. We eat whale blubber and unrefined grains. We’ve been to the moon and practically at the bottom of the ocean. The only thing that’s constantly there is other people. I don’t think I could have had that insight if I hadn’t started depending upon evolution and behavioral ecology as a framework for forming questions and for asking what comes next.

It’s not just other people that have been a constant throughout our evolutionary history, but other cooperative people in close-knit groups. Don’t get me wrong—conflict has taken place throughout human history, but much of it has been conflict between groups, which means that individuals are cooperating with members of their own groups. Jim’s central insight was that the human ancestral environment was to be surrounded by cooperative others and that this is reflected in the design and mechanisms of the human body and brain. That’s what Jim’s colleague meant when he said that holding hands was the normal condition and that facing a stressful situation alone was abnormal as far as the adaptive design of the brain and body is concerned.

In Jim’s social baseline model, when the human brain and body make trade-off decisions, they automatically take social and personal resources into account. To see how this works, imagine that you are standing at the base of a long hill. How steep does it look and what is your willingness to climb it? These might seem like separate questions, but a series of ingenious experiments by Dennis Proffitt, Jim’s departmental colleague, shows that they are entwined in our minds.5 Proffitt had people estimate the slope of a hill under various conditions, such as with and without a heavy backpack, with and without a prior period of fasting, or with and without a prior physical workout. It makes sense that people would be less willing to climb the hill with a heavy backpack, after a period of fasting, or after a workout, but the surprising result was that they estimated the slope of the hill to be steeper under these conditions. Their willingness to climb the hill influenced their very perception of the hill.

These examples show how our brains take our personal resources into account when making trade-off decisions. But Dennis also had people estimate the slope of the hill when they were alone compared to standing next to a friend. The mere presence of a friend caused the slope of the hill to appear less steep. The brain had taken a social resource into account (the presence of a friend) as effortlessly and unconsciously as taking personal resources into account (carrying a heavy backpack, fasting, and having already had a workout).

I have already made the point in chapter 6 that small groups are a fundamental unit of human social organization, required for individual well-being and efficacious action at a larger scale. Jim’s social baseline model shows that the need to be surrounded by cooperative others is deeply written into our brains and bodies. We are hardwired to live in the presence of cooperative others, and facing the world alone places us in a state of alarm. Chronic aloneness is injurious to our mental and physical health. This is paradigmatically different from regarding individuals as the basic building block of human societies, which underpins modern economic theory and other forms of individualism.

How steep is this hill?

The practical import of Jim’s research is clear: If you want to improve your own well-being, then surround yourself with cooperative others. The role of handholding and touching per se is a fascinating topic for future research. Is it possible that the brain relies upon tactile contact to assess social support and that a cooperative group without touching won’t work as well as a cooperative group with touching?6 If so, that might cause us to reconsider well-meaning but misguided “no touch” rules in schools and workplaces. Only future research can answer these and other questions that are vital for individual well-being.

THE NURTURE EFFECT

Tony Biglan is a senior scientist at the Oregon Research Institute, an organization that has been working to understand human behavior and improve the quality of life since 1960. In his seventies and still in robust health, Tony has “been there and done that” with research on a panoply of problems that manifest themselves as destructive behaviors such as substance abuse, obesity, delinquency, and early sexual activity. Tony’s research has been funded through numerous branches of the National Institutes of Health, including the National Cancer Institute, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the National Institute of Mental Health, and the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. He is a former president of the Society for Prevention Research and served on a committee convened by the Institute of Medicine, a part of the National Academy of Sciences, which reviewed the progress that the United States has made in preventing these problems. Few people have a broader understanding of the sprawling world of the behavioral health sciences than Tony.

Tony has synthesized this knowledge for a general audience in his book The Nurture Effect: How the Science of Human Behavior Can Improve Our Lives and Our World, which was published in 2015. The message of Tony’s book is disarmingly simple: Prosociality—people nurturing other people—is a master variable. Those who are surrounded by helpful others develop multiple assets. Those who are surrounded by indifferent or hostile others develop multiple liabilities. Of course, this is where Jim Coan’s research also points. If we could say only one thing about making the world a better place, to be reflected in our social policies and our personal decisions, it would be to increase nurturance throughout the life span and especially during its early stages, starting before birth.

The novelty of this message is illustrated by all of those institutes that have supported the research of Tony and his colleagues over the years. They signify that the behavioral health sciences are divided into research communities that treat problems in isolation. The majority of behavioral health scientists are not like Tony. They spend their careers studying a single problem behavior and have a hard time seeing the forest for the trees. In fact, there is little incentive to see the forest when your next grant comes from an organization that wants you to see your particular tree in ever greater detail.

Tony escaped this fate in part because he was influenced early in his career by the tradition of behaviorism and its most famous proponent, B. F. Skinner. As I recounted in chapter 5, when behaviorism was purged from academic psychology by the cognitive revolution, it didn’t go extinct but continued to thrive in the applied behavioral sciences. Behaviorism’s central insight for practical change efforts is captured by the phrase “selection by consequences.”7 When we act a given way, our bodies and minds are wired to sense whether the consequences are positive or negative. Did the action produce pleasure or pain? Did it cause others to smile or frown? Based on this feedback, which is automatic and takes place largely beneath conscious awareness, we either ramp up or tamp down the expression of the behavior the next time around. In this fashion, we adapt as individuals to our environments in much the same way as populations adapt to their environments by genetic evolution.

Behaviorism might have fallen out of fashion in academic psychology, but for people such as Tony trying to solve behavioral problems in the real world, it was too useful to be discarded. The fact is that our behaviors are shaped by their consequences to a large degree—and the environments that select our behaviors are in large part our social environments. As we have seen, we lived in small and highly cooperative groups for most of our evolutionary history. We received a lot of nurturance and were expected to give in return. If we tried to boss others around or do less than our share, we quickly received social feedback to mend our ways. The more we contributed to common goals, the more social approval and material benefits we received. This made succeeding at the expense of others a dangerous game and succeeding by working with others the surest way to survive and reproduce as an individual. We are genetically adapted to crave social acceptance and will do almost anything to achieve it.

Even so, nurturance within groups is not the whole picture of our evolutionary history. Succeeding at the expense of others might be a dangerous game, but it’s still a game worth playing under some conditions. Genetic evolution has endowed us with skills for selfishness in addition to skills for cooperation. Consider the most intimate bond that can be found in mammals, the relationship between a mother and her offspring. Even this bond is not entirely nurturing. Mothers are shaped by genetic evolution to maximize their total reproductive success over the course of their lifetimes, not the success of any particular offspring. Offspring are shaped by genetic evolution to value their own welfare over the welfare of their mother and siblings. Fathers in many mammalian species are shaped by genetic evolution to maximize their reproductive success by mating with as many females as possible and not contributing to childcare at all. There is even an evolutionary logic to infanticide—the killing of current offspring to have other offspring in the future.8

Conflict between mother and child begins before birth, as the fetus seeks to extract more resources from the mother than she is necessarily inclined to give.9 The mother-offspring interaction at this stage of the life cycle is a biochemical tug-of-war that isn’t even mental. After birth, human parents and “alloparents” (a catch-all term for anyone who participates in childcare)10 are genetically prepared to withhold nurturance from children under harsh conditions, and children are genetically prepared to make the best of a bad job when they are not receiving the nurturance that they need. Many of these physiological and neural mechanisms evolved in the mammalian lineage long before we existed as a species and even before primates existed as a branch of the mammalian tree.

To make things even more complex, social interactions among groups is a different matter than social interactions within groups, as we saw in chapter 4. A group whose members nurture each other might have amicable or hostile relations with other groups, depending upon the circumstances. Amicable relations such as trade and the exchange of marriage partners extend far back in our evolutionary history,11 but so do hostile relations such as raiding, cannibalism, and the all-out extermination of other groups.12 Our ability to make distinctions between “Us” and “Them” and to confine our nurturance to “Us” might seem paradoxical and hypocritical from some perspectives, but it is only to be expected from an evolutionary perspective.

Once our ability to evolve as individuals was coupled with the ability to transmit learned information across generations, then human evolution flipped into warp drive, as I recounted in chapter 5. We spread over the globe, adapting as small-scale societies to all climatic zones and dozens of ecological niches. Then, with the invention of agriculture about ten thousand years ago, we expanded into the mega-societies of today. That’s enough time for some but not a lot of genetic evolution. Our ability to function as members of large-scale societies, and the ability of these societies to function as well as they do, testifies to the open-ended behavioral flexibility of our species, which is the heart of the behaviorist tradition.

The story that I have just recapped is not only evolutionary, it also invokes evolution in many ways and at many different timescales. How does someone like Tony use this overarching theoretical framework to address behavioral problems in the modern world? One basic prescription is to do everything possible to re-create the ancestral social environment of small groups of nurturing individuals who know each other by their actions. Provide such an environment, and prosocial child development and adult relations will take place with surprising ease. In the absence of a nurturing social environment, the shaping of behavior will lead in a very different direction—survival and reproductive strategies that are predicated on the absence of social support; that benefit me and not you, us and not them, today without regard for tomorrow. That’s what Tony means by calling nurturance a master variable.

More insight can be gained by taking seriously the concept of an individual as an evolving system. If you are getting the hang of evolutionary thinking, then you know that what counts as adaptive in the evolutionary sense of the word is not necessarily adaptive in the normative sense of the word. This is because what’s normatively adaptive is typically good for everyone over the long term, whereas what’s evolutionarily adaptive is often good for only a subset of everyone, often at the expense of others and the whole, and it often only leads to short-term gain without regard for long-term consequences. The situation is not hopeless—social environments can be constructed that align adaptation in the evolutionary sense with adaptation in the normative sense—but work informed by knowledge of evolution is required. Here is an example in an everyday setting that most of us can relate to.

Imagine that you’re in a supermarket observing a small child having a tantrum. Maybe the mom gives in or maybe she gives her kid a verbal or physical licking. Either way, nobody is having any fun, including the onlookers. The brilliance of seeing this mundane problem from an evolutionary perspective is to realize that both the mom and the kid were behaving adaptively in the evolutionary sense of the word. Every time kids get their way by behaving obnoxiously, they are more likely to repeat it the next time around because their behavior has been reinforced. Every time the parents get their way by delivering a verbal or physical licking, their behavior is also reinforced, so they will likely repeat their behavior the next time around. The parents and their kids are locked in a behavioral coevolutionary arms race, similar to the genetic arms race between cheetahs and gazelles to run ever faster. Never mind that the behaviors aren’t good for the family or society as a whole. Evolution is relentlessly relative and the family members are adopting the behaviors that maximize their relative advantage within the family. It’s not even necessarily conscious on their part—what’s conscious is just the tip of the iceberg of what takes place. In Skinnerian terms, it’s just a form of personal evolution that happens to be poorly aligned with normative goals. Call it “the tragedy of the family commons.”

You can escape a tantrum in a supermarket just by changing aisles (unless it’s your kid), but you can’t escape the societal consequences of kids whose social skills have been honed to a fine edge by countless iterations of obnoxious interactions with their parents and other caregivers. When these kids go to school, they don’t know how to behave differently and are likely to trigger negative reactions in their classmates and teachers. In response to rejection, they are likely to ramp up their obnoxiousness. It’s how they’ve been reinforced to respond. As they grow, they are likely to fall in with others who deploy the same social strategies, reinforcing each other’s behaviors in deviant peer groups, similar to their own families. As adults, they might have trouble finding or keeping work, increasing their likelihood of engaging in criminal activities. As parents, they are likely to perpetuate the cycle.13 Coevolutionary arms races such as this can be highly stable. The fact that they are socially pathological in the normative sense of the word is beside the point. Nature is replete with similar examples, such as cancer cells that destroy multicellular organisms and species such as the crown of thorns starfish that bring down entire coral reef ecosystems. Evolution does not make everything nice!

Before we try to solve the problems of world peace, let’s see if we can solve this one…

Yet most of this havoc can be avoided with a little evolutionary know-how. “Selection by consequences” need not be a race to the bottom. It can also result in a virtuous coevolutionary spiral. The golden rule is “Abundant rewards for good behavior, coupled with mild punishment for bad behavior that escalates only when necessary.” Note that this accords with Elinor Ostrom’s fifth core design principle, concerning graduated sanctions, which are needed for families along with all other kinds of groups. Also, it is important for the reinforcement to come from meaningful others, such as respected adults and well-liked peers. From these people, rewards and punishments can be as simple as a smile and a frown.

Many parents and caregivers of children employ these rules spontaneously, without needing to be taught. Others need to be coached, or more accurately, their behaviors need to be shaped by a new set of consequences in the form of an active intervention. Those reality shows where families from hell are visited by Super Nanny are not entirely divorced from reality, even though they are highly scripted. To learn more about the science behind the Super Nanny shows, I recommend visiting the website of Triple P, which stands for “Positive Parenting Program.”14 Triple P makes the scientific research conducted by people like Tony available to families around the world. Coaching tips that you can learn include “planned ignoring,” “spending quality time,” and “creating a learning environment.” Doing nothing in response to an unwanted behavior prompts a child to try something else—perhaps a more positive behavior that can be reinforced, especially when you are spending quality time and there is something cool and interesting to be learned. “Time out” is one of the tips, but it is only employed when other efforts to reinforce good behavior have failed. When family life is running smoothly, it doesn’t need to be triggered at all.

If these coaching tips seem manipulative, remember that we are always manipulating each other in one way or another. That’s what it means for a person to be a product of social interactions. The reason that the word “manipulation” sounds sinister, in contrast to the more neutral phrase “social interaction,” is because it implies influencing the behavior of others in a self-serving fashion and against their interests. This particular connotation of the word is indeed something to be avoided and what the CDPs discussed in chapter 6 protect against. Even small children benefit from social environments governed by the CDPs, as we saw with the Good Behavior Game, and this can be true for families as well as schools.

There is nothing sinister about the testimonials that can be found on the Triple P website. One divorced father expressed gratitude that he was now able to take his eight-year-old son to Disneyland without any behavioral meltdowns. Before he received coaching from Triple P, “I was having a lot of difficulty with him, getting him to do what I wanted him to do, and listen to me.” Afterward he reported his relationship with his son as “from chaos to peace.”

As a highly science-based method, Triple P has gone way beyond testimonials and working with single families. Consider a massive study conducted by Ron Prinz, Carolina Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of South Carolina and one of Tony’s colleagues.15 Ron selected eighteen South Carolina counties that were roughly comparable in terms of size and demographics. Nine of these counties were randomly chosen to receive coaching in Triple P. The other nine counties formed a comparison group. This was a randomized control design, similar to what Rick Kauffman and I did with the Regents Academy described in the last chapter but on a much larger scale.

How do you coach an entire county in Triple P? Ron employed a multilevel approach. Level 1 used mass media to reach all parents, no matter what their parenting style. Level 2 provided advice to parents from childcare providers and social service workers who frequently contact parents, in the form of brief consultations and ninety-minute seminars. Level 3 provided more intensive training for the parents of children exhibiting problem behaviors. Additional levels provided yet more training for families dealing with a wider range of issues, such as parental depression and marital discord. The goal in all cases was to get parents off the negative spiral of reinforcing obnoxious behaviors and onto the positive spiral of reinforcing prosocial behaviors. One advantage of this multilevel approach is that the families who need the intervention the most are not stigmatized. They are taking advice that is being offered to everyone.

Implementing all of this in nine counties while tracking outcomes in eighteen counties was a big job—but the results were worth it. Using the comparison group as a baseline, counties that implemented Triple P experienced fewer cases of substantiated child abuse, fewer out-of-home placements due to child abuse problems, and fewer hospital-reported child injuries. Stated in raw numbers, in a community of 100,000 people, Triple P resulted in 688 fewer cases of child abuse, 240 fewer out-of-home placements, and 60 fewer children needing hospitalization. Using very conservative estimates of cost-effectiveness by an independent assessor, every dollar spent on Triple P saved over six dollars that would have been spent attempting to address the problems that Triple P prevented.

Implementing Triple P wasn’t easy, but it was the kind of hard work that has a reliable payoff at the end—and this is only one of the intervention programs with proven results that Tony describes in The Nurture Effect. According to Tony, we already know what works, once we view individuals as products of social interactions from an evolutionary perspective.

NOT MY MOTHER’S THERAPY

Meet Steven C. Hayes, Nevada Foundation Professor of Psychology at the University of Nevada at Reno. Steve is one of the most prolific and widely cited psychologists in the world, having authored over 35 books and 500 academic articles. He is best known for a type of psychotherapy called Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT, pronounced as one word), which was featured in a six-page article in Time magazine in 2006. His ACT self-help book Get Out of Your Mind and into Your Life has sold over half a million copies.16

For many people—including myself before meeting Steve—psychotherapy has a reputation for being slow, inefficient, and unscientific. My mother was a devoted follower of Freudian psychoanalysis and visited her analyst once a week for most of her adult life. She felt that she gained from the experience, but when this kind of therapy was scientifically assessed, it proved to be no more effective than talking with one’s pastor or a sympathetic friend.17 Freud was a medical doctor but his methods weren’t even remotely scientific. And while he was clearly on to something with his theory of the unconscious mind, there were no techniques that could take him beyond sheer speculation.

In contrast, consider one of Steve’s publications.18 Foreign students who study in America can become highly stressed, which is manifested as anxiety and depression. Steve and his colleague recruited seventy Japanese students studying at the University of Nevada and randomly assigned them to two groups. The first group read Steve’s self-help book and worked through its exercises. The second group did the same after a two-month waiting period. Their physical and mental health was monitored with widely used assessment tools, such as the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) and Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS).

Sigmund Freud, an icon of the twentieth century, requires substantial updating from a modern evolutionary perspective.

The Japanese students who volunteered for the study were highly stressed, with nearly 80 percent exceeding clinical cutoffs on one or more measures of the DASS. Individuals in both groups, on average, became less stressed after reading Steve’s book and working through its exercises. The fact that the second group didn’t improve until two months after the first group identifies Steve’s book as the causative factor, ruling out unmeasured factors that would have influenced both groups at the same time. This was the reason for randomly assigning the participants to two groups and having them begin at different times.

Using the GHQ and DASS enabled Steve to compare his results to many other studies that used the same assessment tools. Based on this comparison, Steve can say with authority that “bibliotherapy”—reading his book without any therapist at all—provides about 30 percent of the benefit of seeing a trained ACT therapist. In a second study, he achieved similar results with public school teachers who were suffering from burnout.19 Most self-help books boast on their covers that they will cure what ails you, but Steve can prove it!

If you read Steve’s other scientific articles, along with hundreds of studies by other authors, you’ll see that psychotherapy can be fast, efficient, and scientific. Even better, the “T” in ACT can stand for “Training” in addition to “Therapy.” No matter what your current level of functioning, you can probably benefit from ACT and related techniques, just as athletes at all skill levels benefit from coaching.

What ingredients make ACT capable of achieving such impressive results? Increasingly, Steve is describing ACT as a managed process of personal evolution.20 To see how this works, imagine someone in desperate mental circumstances who looks upon “normal” people with envy. We are accustomed to thinking of such a person as abnormal, as if their brain is not functioning as it should. Now consider the possibility that there is nothing organically wrong with this person, by which I mean that they have the same basic mental equipment as everyone else. Their only problem is that evolution has taken them where they don’t want to go and that’s what is causing them discomfort. With a little know-how, evolution can also become their solution.21

As with all forms of evolution, our personal evolution requires variation and selection. If we don’t behave in different ways, then by definition we are stuck doing the same thing. If we do behave in different ways, then our actions will typically have different consequences, which we will sense in terms of pleasure or pain, social approval or rejection, and so on. Based on these consequences, the complicated machinery that genetic evolution endowed us with will cause us to ramp up the most rewarding behaviors and tamp down the most punishing behaviors the next time around. We probably won’t know that this is happening, because most of the mechanisms take place beneath conscious awareness.

A visual metaphor called an adaptive landscape, which has a venerable history in evolutionary thought, can explain how someone’s personal evolutionary process can trap them in desperate circumstances.22 Imagine that you inhabit a land with many hills and valleys, with some hills much higher than others. Your only desire is to climb upward. The higher you go, the happier you become. You therefore start merrily climbing the slope of whatever hill you are on. If it is the slope of a tall hill, you become very happy indeed. If it is the slope of a short hill, you get to the top and look around you with despair. You can see taller hills in the distance, but every step that you take brings you down.

Welcome to the world of the depressed person, who finds staying in bed more rewarding than facing the day. Or the alcoholic, who finds the next drink more rewarding than abstinence. Or the person with an anxiety disorder, who will do anything to avoid a panic attack. All are behaving adaptively, by choosing the behavior that is most rewarding compared to the alternatives. The problem is that they are standing on top of very short hills.

Fortunately, there is a solution to this problem, because our perception of up and down depends on how we think about it. This is one way that ACT includes but goes beyond the behaviorist tradition of B. F. Skinner and even begins to incorporate the valid elements of Freud’s thought. We are highly distinctive and perhaps even unique in our capacity for symbolic thought. In almost all other species, mental associations are closely related to environmental associations. A rat will associate cheese with the word “cheese” only as long as you pair the two with each other. In contrast, if I say the word “cheese” to you a million times without presenting you with cheese, you might smack me but you won’t forget the association. We even have words for things such as “troll” that don’t exist in the real world!

In short, all of us live in a symbolic world inside our heads in addition to an external world. One of Freud’s great contributions was to recognize and begin to explore this inner space, whose very existence poses an evolutionary puzzle. What good is a symbolic world if it doesn’t directly correspond to the external world? The answer, from a modern evolutionary perspective, is that every set of symbolic relations inside our heads results in a suite of actions that take place in the external world. Trolls might not exist, but belief in them alters behavior. More generally, if we call your particular symbolic world your “symbotype” and your measurable behaviors your “phenotype,” then there is a “symbotype-phenotype relationship.” This wording is useful because it provides a parallel to the phrase “genotype-phenotype relationship” used for the study of genetic evolution, where each person’s set of genes (their genotype) results in a corresponding suite of measurable traits (their phenotype).23

This comparison, between our genes and our symbols, is full of implications for psychotherapy. Consider how we already think about genes. Species are different from each other because they possess different genes. At the same time, in sexually reproducing species every individual is genetically unique because of recombination. Despite the immense complexity of gene-gene and gene-environment interactions, a single mutation can result in a different phenotype. We are beginning to exploit this fact with so-called gene therapy, in which we surgically alter our genotypes to cure diseases or enhance our abilities. If symbotypes are like genotypes, then the same possibilities exist for psychotherapy—and we can find evidence by looking at the psychological literature in the right way.

As one example, imagine that you are a college student taking a large introductory psychology class. The professor gives you a curious assignment: Spend fifteen minutes writing about matters of importance to your life. Do this three separate times spaced a week apart. Unbeknownst to you, only half of the class received this assignment. The other half (randomly assigned, of course) was told to write on comparatively neutral topics such as sports or current events for an equivalent amount of time.

This experiment has been performed numerous times by James W. Pennebaker, a health psychologist at the University of Texas.24 The results are astounding. Compared to the students who write about neutral topics, students who write about matters of importance to their lives get better grades and get sick less often over the course of the semester. Forty-five minutes of self-counseling, without the help of any expert, causes them to think about their lives in a way that alters their personal evolution for the better.

Here is another example. Imagine that you’re a college freshman. Your new life is exciting but also filled with uncertainty: Will you make friends? Will your grades be as good as they were in high school? You take part in a study that informs you about a survey of college seniors reflecting upon their freshman experience. The seniors reported that they felt uncertain, just like you, but they soon adjusted and everything worked out fine. This was the experience of both genders and all ethnic groups, according to the survey.

Next, you are asked to write a short essay describing how your own experience echoes the results of the survey and to turn the essay into a speech that you read in front of a video camera, to be shown to future students to ease their transition to college. All of this requires one hour of your time. During every day for the next week, you are asked to complete a short survey reporting your experiences and how you felt about them, including your sense of belonging. Unbeknownst to you, students in a control group went through the same procedure with the exception that the survey was about sociopolitical attitudes rather than adjusting to college.

This experiment was performed by Gregory M. Walton and Geoffrey L. Cohen at Stanford University.25 The essay and speech were clever ways of getting the students to internalize the results of the survey. Three years later, when the participants of the experiment were seniors, they were asked to complete an end-of-college survey and to make their academic transcripts available.

Amazingly, the one-hour intervention had a transformative effect for African Americans in the study but no effect for European Americans. Compared to African Americans in the control group and at Stanford as a whole, the grade deficit for African Americans in the adjustment-to-college group was cut in half. The percent of African Americans in the top 25 percent of their class tripled. The health deficit between African Americans and European Americans, measured by self-reported feelings of health and visits to a doctor’s office, was eliminated entirely. All due to a one-hour intervention during their freshman year!

The daily surveys completed for a week after the intervention revealed what was taking place in the minds of the participants. For African Americans attending an elite university, the question “Do I belong?” was never far from their minds. It surfaced whenever something bad happened. The same was not true for European Americans, who interpreted bad things in other ways. The intervention allowed African-American freshmen to interpret the events of their daily lives as typical of incoming freshmen as opposed to unique to just them. As Walton and Cohen put it: “The intervention…untether[ed] their sense of belonging from daily hardship.” In evolutionary terms, their symbotypes had been altered, a form of “symbo-therapy” conceptually similar to gene therapy.26

Let’s take stock of our progress. The reason that I began this trio of chapters at the group level is to emphasize the primacy of the small group as a unit of selection in human evolution. I began this chapter on individuals by stressing that individuals are products of social interactions. Just because I can measure something about you, such as your grade point average, your physical health, or your mental health, doesn’t mean that it’s an essential property of you. Jim Coan’s work shows that the human brain is wired to seamlessly integrate personal and social resources. Tony Biglan’s work demonstrates that nurturance, or prosociality, is a master variable for human welfare. Now we have learned through the work of Walton and Cohen that success in college depends strongly on a sense of belonging, a feeling that we are part of “Us” and not “Them.” If a one-hour intervention cut the minority academic deficit in half, what would a more comprehensive effort to increase a sense of belonging in marginalized students produce?

Also, it is the perception of belonging that counts. Walton and Cohen did nothing to alter the lives of the participants. They only altered the worldview of the participants, touching upon another major theme of this book: that the theory decides what can be observed. Returning to the metaphor of an adaptive landscape, it begins to make sense that the topography can be changed by the way you think about it. Viewed one way, you might be standing on top of a tiny hill, envying those atop taller hills, but unable to get there because every step that you take brings you down. Viewed another way, you can be magically placed on the slope of a mighty peak. As you chart your ascent, you might have to work around obstacles but every step can take you uphill. That’s what ACT and related therapies can do for you. It doesn’t necessarily require a lot of time and can improve your well-being in many ways, including but not restricted to your sense of belonging.

ACT works on both the variation and the selection part of your personal evolutionary trajectory. The variation part requires increasing your psychological and behavioral flexibility—to try out some new things rather than sticking to your old routines. The selection part requires you to reflect upon what is really important in your life so you can choose the behaviors that take you toward your valued goals.

One especially fast and effective form of ACT is called the Matrix, which is a space divided into four quadrants.27 The lower half represents your symbotype, the world of thoughts and feelings inside your head. The upper half represents your phenotype, the actions that take place in the external world. The right half represents the thoughts, feelings, and actions that take you toward your valued goals. The left half represents the thoughts, feelings, and actions that take you away from your valued goals. Starting with the lower-right quadrant, spend a little time reflecting upon what is really important in your life. For example, think about a person who means a lot to you. Why is this person important and what are your positive thoughts and feelings toward him or her? Draw the Matrix on a blank piece of paper and write some words in the lower-right quadrant if you like.

The Matrix is an exceptionally rapid form of ACT training. Prepare to evolve your own future…

Now move over to the lower-left quadrant and spend some time thinking about negative thoughts and feelings that you have toward this person, much as you love them in other respects. Perhaps you become jealous when he or she pays attention to other people, become irritated by certain habits, find it difficult to forgive some past actions, or sometimes become angry to get your way. Moving into the upper-left quadrant, how do these negative thoughts and feelings manifest as actions that move you away from the relationship that you would like to have with this person? Finally, moving into the upper-right quadrant, what are the actions that will take you toward the relationship that you want? When you are done, imagine yourself at the crosshairs of the two lines. At any given moment, try to notice where your thoughts, feelings, and actions are located on the Matrix. Merely recognizing them as “toward” moves or “away” moves can help you to work toward your valued goals.

Congratulations! You have had your first ACT session, without charge and without needing to recline on a couch. You have increased your psychological flexibility (variation) and you are selecting the behaviors that take you toward your valued goals. You are beginning to consciously guide your evolution.28

Although the Matrix is a reflection that you undertook as an individual, it was also social (or could be) in three different ways. First, you were reflecting upon a relationship with a valued person. Even if I hadn’t prompted you to do this, you probably would have reflected upon your social relationships in one way or another.

Second, Steve and his colleagues are increasingly imagining an individual person as a group of personas, with therapy a method of selecting for cooperative rather than conflictual interactions within ourselves. This is similar to imagining the genotype of an individual as a social group of genes.29

Third, the Matrix is proving to be a useful reflection for groups to increase their organizational flexibility and move toward valued collective goals. In the practical method for working with groups that I briefly described at the end of the last chapter, we begin with the Matrix as a warmup for reviewing the core design principles, as I will relate in more detail in the final chapter. In this fashion, we can consciously guide the evolution of our groups and multicellular societies in addition to our personal evolutionary trajectories.

Jim Coan, Tony Biglan, and Steve Hayes are at the peaks of their respective professions. At any time during their careers, they would have told you that they accepted Darwin’s theory of evolution as a matter of course. Evolution figured here and there in their formal training, most notably in the behaviorist tradition of B. F. Skinner, who truly grasped the concept of individuals as evolving entities in their own right. But they didn’t “get” the full application of an evolutionary worldview the way they do now. Only during the last decade or so have they first discovered, then adopted, and then contributed to a fully rounded approach to their subjects in which evolution appears at almost every juncture. They are at the forefront of completing the Darwinian revolution.

Now that we have considered groups and individuals, let’s see what we can do at larger scales, and ultimately for the entire planet.