Eat or be eaten? This is the single most crucial decision any animal makes, one we share with even worms and amoebae.1 Over the millions of years our ancestors’ brains were being shaped, we were both predators to those species we could eat and prey to those who dined on us.
The evolutionary arms race between predators and prey has made these among the most primal modes in the human repertoire. “To know ourselves, we have to know our own animal nature first,” says Ian McCollum, a Jungian analyst. “The game we are playing is a shared one. It’s called survival. The psychological instincts of the predator are in our history and in our blood.”2
In thinking about how we humans manifest our predator-like and prey-like modes, we need to separate them from their original function during the hunting and gathering years of our species. Today they surface in far more subtle ways: as thoughtless entitlement on the one hand or self-sacrifice on the other.
The predator-like mode, in the sense I mean it, can manifest as being controlling, entitled, lacking in empathy in varying degrees, and even being manipulative (and so the mode can be thought of as predatory control, or predatory entitlement, and so on). These are destructive qualities in any relationship, whether in partnerships between people or between nations.
How often do people approach each other with hidden agendas, preferences, or wants, without tuning in to what’s going on for the other person? This controlling aspect mode gives us a blind spot for another person’s needs in the moment. As Bob says, “Don’t put your purpose before your connection.”
Once you learn about the subtleties of such predator-like behavior, you may recognize it in all kinds of interactions. For instance, some sales-people treat customers this way, pouncing on them the moment they enter a store and trying to coerce them to buy something. This alienates customers, who are then less likely to return.
Research on sales stars shows that they start with empathy—the ingredient missing in this mode. They first try to understand what the customer wants, and then act on their behalf. They discourage their buying the wrong thing even if it means losing a sale, thereby winning their trust, loyalty, and repeat business.
There are people who act in such mildly predator-like ways all too often. They try to get their way, to dominate. In this mode, people are aggressive, self-interested, and ready to take over. They can be effective in some ways—taking bold risks, getting things done—but at an emotional cost to those they push around.
Leaders in this mode tend to be clear about what they want and confident in moving toward their goals; they can have charismatic qualities. But when such narcissistic leaders lack genuine empathy for those they lead—and everyone else—they often end up torpedoing their own careers. The potential upside of the mode comes when empathy gets added; then a leader can have clarity and confidence without resorting to a command-and-control style.
Entitlement can be another aspect of the mode, when someone projects an arrogant image of superiority when he actually feels flawed underneath. Narcissists often have this dynamic and are oblivious to the needs of those around them.
On the other hand, the human expression of the prey-like mode leaves us passive, doing what other people want us to, as though we were helpless. This mode often means surrendering to someone else’s predator-like mode in order to preserve the connection, or from a self-sacrificing habit where we are out of touch with our own needs.
That connection is nothing like joining up. It can come at the cost of letting the other person control or neglect us. But when someone in this mode engages with people who are not controlling, it can show its upside: attuned cooperation and collaboration, the human version of herd dynamics.
For evolutionary psychologists, much of what we think of as human nature can be reduced to the modes, or programs, we all have hardwired in our brains. Our minds come pre-packed with modes of operating that represent deep habits engineered to solve the problems early humans faced. Each was essential in the ancient past, during the epochs our earliest ancestors survived by hunting and gathering, but may be irrelevant or maladaptive for life today.
These primal modes were not just for challenges, such as escaping predators or catching or gathering food, but also for needs, such as fighting or creating harmony, falling in love, raising children, and protecting our loved ones and us. The operating modes that were successful then live on in us today as primal, automatic programs for engaging life.
This legacy makes our minds something like crowded zoos, with ferocious hunters, frightened prey, cunning commanders, brave leaders, eager lovers, caring parents, and many more vying to take the helm and pilot us through one or another challenge.
The Herd Hierarchy
The art of whispering has revolutionized how people relate to horses (at least in the Western world). For centuries people have used sheer force to break a horse’s will. In the past few decades, though, horse whispering has begun to change that radically by treating a horse as a full partner in cooperation.
I was working with Sandhi and Bob, and had decided to bring Sandhi to another field, a meadow with high grass that she loves but was rarely allowed on because she might overeat and founder.
So I started walking off, leading her with a rope. But Bob stopped me, saying, “You can’t just walk off like that. You just abandoned her!”
Sandhi had been completely present with me when I suddenly cut off my attention to her. Bob added, “You’ve got to tell her what you’re doing! Connect with her first, bring closure to what you’ve done, and then tell her what your intentions are.”
He suggested I reconnect by patting her and telling her what she had done really well that day, and how we’re going to another field now to try something else. When I turned back and stroked her mane and told her what we were going to do next, I could feel her heart melt. She nuzzled me, welcoming me back to our connection.
When I had just walked away from Sandhi, I had begun to enter the predator–prey mode most typical of how humans have related to horses and other domestic animals—not to mention other people—over the eons. In that mode, we enter into the ancient dance where one species dominates another by imposing its own agenda.
Prey animals don’t need to be forced to learn; they’re willing to collaborate. They react to forceful control as being predatory, and it can make them resist or want to run. We humans tend to assume they are like us, that they perceive as predators do and so need to be controlled or given punishment when they don’t comply with rules. But if you understand how they perceive, they are happy to comply, without the need for force.
“Taking control of a horse against its will is predatory,” said Bob. “But if the horse trusts you then it will accept you as its leader. Prey animals are relieved when they know they have a leader they can trust.”
When you are joined up, the horse collaborates with you and agrees to learn what you’re trying to teach. You do not need to force it. It’s not about being predatory, not about controlling horses, but about learning together and allowing a horse to trust you as its leader.
After horses learn something, Bob says, they need a little time to chew on it and take it all in. When they retreat, we need to respect their “bubble time.” As Bob advises, “You need to recognize when to retreat; it sets up a connection.”
And always we need to attune to the horse’s rhythm and join up. “Move slowly, like a prey animal,” Bob advises. “Predators move fast. Horses aren’t afraid of predators but of predatory behavior.”
Horses, like many other prey species, have survived by learning to be ever vigilant for predators and nimble in escape. Horses live with a sense of relatedness. As prey animals, they rely on and are highly attuned to each other, joined together in their herd dynamics. While horses graze they often take positions that let them scan a horizon that the other horses don’t see. As a group they create what amounts to a circle of vigilance.
Humans, in the eyes of a horse, are typically viewed as a form of predator. When we treat a horse—or a person—as though it were simply an object to manipulate, we confirm that view.
Nature made humans capable of being both predator-like and prey-like. (Perhaps that explains why we’re a bit confused.) Today this means we are potentially capable of playing either role in our predisposition toward others.
Bob pointed out that the predator–prey dimension interacts with another: dominance and submission. Animals that live in groups establish a pecking order. Some are in control and others submit to that control. This can be quite benign, as with a mother being protective of her young child, or malevolent, as when a mean-spirited dictator controls an entire populace at his whim.
“There’s a natural herd hierarchy among prey animals that can be seen in how they take space,” Bob said. “A dominant horse may want the grass you are on or want to move you to another field.”
“That looks predatory to me,” I challenged him.
“Predators stalk their prey and plan their attacks in a premeditated way,” Bob replied. “Horses don’t do that. For a horse it’s more about having a clear herd hierarchy and a leader who provides safety for the herd—it’s a herd partnership.”
He added, “But with predatory dominance, you see complete control. Predators have an organized, premeditated plan of attack based on what they want.”
Then I raised the question of “enabling” predatory behavior in human relationships. I was thinking, for example, of the dynamic between an entitled narcissist and someone who is resigned to complying with the narcissist’s demands. “Is extreme prey-like behavior too passive?”
Bob thought about it, then said, “If a prey animal’s chance for ‘flight’ is taken away from it—if you cut off its escape routes—it does fight, if it needs to protect itself, even though it would rather run.”
This distinction between prey and predator brings new insight to issues of control and passivity in human relationships. Prey dominance acts as a corrective to predatory dominance, just as being assertive corrects passivity on the one hand and aggression on the other.
For humans, I think of prey-like dominance as assertiveness, which can include tough love. If predator–prey is our only model of intergroup relationships, the outcome is an evolutionary arms race in which two groups must continuously strive to outdo the other. Gazelles run fast, so cheetahs run faster; similarly the Cold War arms race led to “mutually assured destruction,” where if one side started a war, both sides would be destroyed.
This raises the question, when do modes go beyond their functionality, becoming outdated relics of our past? When is it time to move beyond the survival-of-the-fittest mode to one that allows for mutual cooperation, tolerance, and respect?
Evolution offers a peaceable alternative: co-evolution, where two species influence the development and survival of the other. Flowers, for instance, owe their beauty to the insects that pollinate them. A variety called Darwin’s orchid, found in Madagascar, has a narrow, eighteen-inch-long tube that leads to its nectar. When Charles Darwin heard about it, he proposed that there would have to be a flying insect with a tongue that long to pollinate the orchid. And a few decades after Darwin died, a moth was discovered on Madagascar that specialized in pollinating just that orchid—and its tongue was eighteen inches long!
Empathic Pauses
The predator-like mode can manifest in anything from outright bullying or being pushy, to simply imposing our agenda on an interaction without regard for what the other person cares about.
Such moments can be so subtle they often go by unnoticed. I once was taking a sunset-viewing walk on a beach with a group that included a friend who had just seen the last of her many children leave for college. For the first time in her memory she was now on her own, enjoying the freedom from constant preoccupation with everyone else’s needs. She could, say, read a whole book in a day, if she wanted, or travel to places she had never had the freedom to visit.
She was telling me this just as the sun was about to set over the ocean. The light was glowing with the golden hues of dusk when I had the thought that this was the perfect light for a photo. So, inspired to capture the moment, I said with exuberance, “Let’s take a picture!” as I clicked open my digital camera.
Immediately afterward I realized that just then she had been gazing at the sunset with a rapt, reflective look. Even so, she went along with my suggestion and posed dutifully as our group lined up for a photo op.
Now we have that moment frozen in time. But when I see it I can’t help but perceive it in terms of the predator–prey dynamic. I replay my friend’s fleeting look of rapture interrupted, the kind of moment that gets lost in the tumult of our social encounters. And I wonder if my enthusiasm to take that photo—after all, the light was perfect—was subtly predator-like, if only in not first attuning to her in order to sense what worked for her too. Maybe she would have just preferred to continue appreciating the silent beauty of the setting sun.
In horse whispering, the predatory principle refers not to its meaning in the jungle, but to the distinction between using force and sheer control to train and establishing a collaborative connection. That’s what Bob meant by putting purpose before connection: we focus on our goals at the expense of attunement.
It’s not that spontaneity, enthusiasm, or playfulness should be discouraged. My impulse to capture a moment with my friend wasn’t wrong, but I wasn’t tuned in to her. We might not realize the subtle emotional messages we send. Taking empathic pauses lets us check whether our enthusiasms or fixed goals are about to override what’s happening with another person. Are our motivations shared, or are we making an assumption and forcing someone else’s choice?
Any of us can have slight predator-like tendencies, if only by failing to consider how our actions impact other people. For instance, we may be caught up in a hectic rush that’s part of our routine and we don’t notice how dismissive we might be of others, either of our children or of the person next to us at work. Such subtle controlling interactions go on all the time. Once we start to spot them, it’s disconcerting to see how common they are in our lives.
Beyond Melting Down
My husband and I were preparing for a workshop we were giving together. He came into my office and enthusiastically announced, “Here’s what we should do,” with an agenda of his own.
I quietly responded, “I’m in the middle of thinking through my own ideas. I’m not ready.”
At that moment I experienced him as micromanaging. This could have led to triggering my rebellious mode. But I decided to sit quietly and reflect, choosing to take a time-out.
After a bit of reflection I remembered how this was a repetitive mode dance between us: his wanting to take control and my being overly compliant or rebelling. Because this wasn’t our first time, I was familiar with some background aspects of this dynamic.
I also know that when my husband and I get excited about ideas, we can both be a little like kids in our enthusiasm. But there’s a difference between one kid telling another “You’ve got to play the game my way” and both kids making up the rules together as they go along. You can see the influence of predator-like thinking in the words of a youngster to his dad, who was trying to break up a fight between the youngster and his brother: “It all started when he hit me back!”
I saw I had a choice: to react to our usual mode triggers, or remember we had a choice not to play out the same reactive mode dance.
So when we met to plan the workshop I started by saying, “It works better when we make these decisions collaboratively,” and told him some of these reflections, adding some significant things I was learning that might give us both some insight into the spiral of mode-triggering between us. With a spirit of investigation (rather than indignation), I described all of this to him.
He seemed fascinated and shared his own thoughts on connections he was making. We were both intrigued by this, unraveling an insight into an ongoing, perplexing mystery between us, and we were enthusiastically exploring this puzzle together rather than getting caught up in mode-driven reactions.
It felt like one of those Indiana Jones movies where the guy and the girl courageously enter some “forbidden” zone, like a dark cavern, in the spirit of making some discovery, and then they miraculously discover some long-forgotten jewels and emerge from the danger alive and glowing. Instead of melting down, we were joining up!
This is one of the subtle patterns that often go by unnoticed. But if we can notice the disconnects, which ordinarily occur without our realizing it, we can change course and greatly improve the quality of our communications.
An Evolutionary Upgrade
While I’m working with Bob and the horses, we sometimes get into somewhat philosophical discussions. Bob once told me, “I want this horse to feel safe while I’m working with her so I try to stay attuned to how she might be feeling. If I know she’s feeling anxious about something, I want to do everything I can to reassure her so she feels completely supported by this learning. I’m not forcing a horse to do something in a predatory way—we’re learning together. That’s the art of this work, responding to the needs and changes of the moment and staying tuned in to that.
“The behavioral part of the training is the science,” Bob continued. “People focus too much on the science or the technique of learning something without responding to the needs of the moment, which is the art. We should never sacrifice our principles to get another to do what we want—that’s predatory.”
Letting the means justify the ends, rather than following more humane principles, has led to a long litany of cruelties throughout human history, by people who will do anything to exert control, regardless of how it might harm the connection.
The human version of predator–prey is an I–It relationship, where the other person is regarded as though they were an object, not a person.3 This sort of objectification of the other is one of the roots of cruelty; it goes on in training torturers as well as in the spread of hatred between groups. The first step always involves re-perceiving the other as an “It,” not as a person.
In contrast, in an I–You relationship, we fully attune to the other person and respond to how what we do or say makes that person feel. The I–You builds on empathy.
“Empathy is the opposite of predatory behavior,” Bob said. “If you stay aligned with your principles, with natural laws or a code of ethics, you don’t sacrifice your intention to be empathic.”
“I probably unintentionally engage in some predator-like actions when I try to get my horses to do something I want,” I pointed out. “But I don’t feel they mistrust me because of it.”
“That’s because they know that your intentions are kind and you want what’s best for them,” Bob said. “But horses are often perplexed by how humans act. They’re trying to read our intentions all the time.”
“Isn’t the point that though the human species can be partly predatory by nature, we can evolve into a more compassionate mode of being?”
“That’s the hope.”
Swimmy, as one children’s story goes, was a tiny little fish among a school of other little fish just like him. They lived in terror of bigger fish, which would chase them and try to eat them. Then one day Swimmy had a brilliant idea: he organized all his friends in the school to swim in a formation that, seen from a little distance, looked like one giant fish. Physical safety is vital too—sometimes alone we may not have that safety, but we can find it in a unified group or community.
When I was six I lived in an apartment in Manhattan near Central Park, which became my playground. One day when my mother, brother, and I were riding the elevator back to our apartment after a day in the park, we shared the elevator with a neighbor, his dog … and an adorable baby squirrel. The dog was a ferocious German shepherd with a bad rep for growling with his canines bared and sometimes nipping people. All the neighbors kept their distance. But here we were in the elevator with that mean dog and a tiny squirrel.
The dog’s owner explained he had been out walking his shepherd in the park when the dog had suddenly run over to a tree, then carefully sniffed and inspected something underneath. Against his predatory canine nature and in the gentlest way, he then carefully picked up a lone, infant squirrel, and carried it softly in his mouth back to our neighbor.
Then our neighbor asked my mother if we wanted to take care of the baby squirrel. We decided on the spot that we would.
My brother and I played with him for hours every day, giving him my brother’s small wooden playhouse to live in. He quickly became part of the family and seemed to forget that he was a wild squirrel. He would entertain us, then curl up in one of our laps when it was time for his nap. I named him Perry.
One day Perry found some walnuts in the kitchen and his foraging instinct kicked in. He carried a few nuts over to where I was sitting in a chair with my hand resting on the arm. Perry lifted up my fingers and tucked his walnuts one by one into the hiding place under my hand.
I could tell countless heartwarming stories about our life with Perry, as his human herd. But reflecting on it now, I’m struck by how that “ferocious” German shepherd seemed to surrender to a tenderhearted compassion and protect this vulnerable baby squirrel. And I was touched by how Perry, a vulnerable prey animal, seemed to feel such safety with us. I find it a hopeful case study in how modes can change: even predators can be kind, and prey can learn to trust.
We are born altruistic, with an innate instinct for justice, the Dalai Lama says, but it can be conditioned out of us. Might the opposite be true too? Can our tendencies toward the predator-like mode be overcome by other kinds of learning?
We upgrade our computers and cell phones all the time. But how often do we think about upgrading our humanity? Could we be in need of an evolutionary upgrade?