Innovation of new products is not a uniquely human activity. Chimpanzees strip leaves off branches to fish for termites, and New Caledonian crows fashion hooks out of palm fronds to extract insects from holes in dead trees. These are wonderful examples of animal ingenuity, but even the most cursory glance at our own world indicates that we’re operating on a different level. We create comfortable homes for ourselves in every environment on earth; we harvest, store, and deliver a wide variety of foods to eat; we communicate with one another instantaneously across vast reaches of the globe; and we entertain ourselves with all sorts of complex gadgets.
Many of our inventions are so new that they didn’t exist a generation ago, but our lives look very different from those of other animals on this planet whether you go back one hundred, one thousand, ten thousand, or even one hundred thousand years. In all these time periods, humans protected themselves from predators and the elements, and preyed on much larger and stronger animals, using clothing, shelter, tools, and strategies they invented.
The innovations of our ancestors and peers permeate every aspect of our lives. Their inventions enable me to tell stories to people I’ve never met by tapping at my keyboard, while taking the occasional break to make a meal or a cup of coffee, all without leaving my well-lit and climate-controlled home. Meanwhile, halfway around the globe, my chimp cousins still sit on tree branches, in the hot sun, driving rain, and chilly nights, making a living with their bare hands just as they did when our ancestors bid them farewell six million years ago. The single feature that most notably differentiates our position from theirs is our inventiveness. And herein lies the paradox: technical innovation is the defining feature of our species, but most people never invent anything.
When innovation researchers ask representative samples of people whether they have modified any products at home or created anything new from scratch (such as tools, toys, sporting equipment, cars, or household equipment), about 5 percent report that they have done so in the last three years.* The percentage of innovators varies a bit by country, but never cracks 10 percent. For such an innovative species, one in ten or twenty seems awfully low. Yet, when I reflect on my own life, I can’t recall ever inventing anything. I have a few inventive friends, but I’d be surprised if 5 percent of them have ever invented anything either, let alone in the last three years.
These numbers suggest an extraordinary disconnect between Homo sapiens as a species and individual humans. When you think of other species, their defining qualities are shared by all their members. Elephants are huge and strong, and “huge and strong” pretty much describes every elephant I’ve ever seen. Cheetahs are fast, lions and tigers are fierce, and dolphins are playful, and those adjectives pretty much cover all of them as well.
There are at least three ways to interpret this disconnect in inventiveness between Homo sapiens and individual humans: first, most of us aren’t inventive; second, all the obvious inventions were thought of long ago; and third, most people are inventive but don’t direct their innovative tendencies toward making new stuff.
To start with the first possibility, perhaps most people are ill-suited to innovate and only the rare geniuses among us have the capacity to invent new things. Extraordinary innovations such as the telephone, lightbulb, and jet engine are consistent with such a possibility, as the insights underlying them seem out of reach for ordinary minds. According to this possibility, technical innovations are analogous to genetic mutations; they are rare and mostly trivial or even worthless, but the occasional product sweeps through the population and has an enormous impact on the species. If that’s the case, then the disconnect between our species and its individual members is a fundamental one. According to this possibility, most humans are not innovative at all; we just have the good sense to benefit from the rare geniuses among us who invent things that improve our lives.
Alternatively, perhaps most people are innovative, but all the obvious and simple products have already been invented. Maybe as recently as a few hundred years ago pretty much anyone could invent stuff that had a good chance of being useful. According to this possibility, we happen to live in a unique window of time in which inventions have become so complex that they are now limited to geniuses and large teams of techies. Super-complicated inventions such as the iPhone would seem to support such a possibility, as there are literally hundreds of patents that underlie this one tool. This view of human invention is a common one, and people regularly suggest it when I talk about innovation. I have a three-word response: wheels on suitcases.
At least since the steamship, people have traveled the globe with relative ease and regularity. Yet, across all these generations of travelers, no one thought to put wheels on suitcases until 1970, and they didn’t catch on until the modern version of a wheeled suitcase with a retractable handle appeared in 1987.* This failure to attach wheels to suitcases was all the more remarkable given that once people lugged their nonwheeled suitcases to the airport, they then paid cold, hard cash to a porter who plunked their nonwheeled suitcases on his cart and easily wheeled a whole family’s worth of baggage the last fifty yards to the ticket counter.
If you haven’t traveled with nonwheeled suitcases, you have no idea what a nuisance it is. In the early 1980s, I traveled across the country to college, which meant that I had to carry two large and heavy suitcases back and forth at the beginning and end of every summer. Because I’m not the tallest human on the planet, my suitcases would drag on the ground unless I hunched up my shoulders and bent my elbows to keep them aloft. It looks incredibly pathetic to drag your nonwheeled suitcase on the ground (and it’s hard on the suitcase), so this meant that I was always hurrying across massive airport halls with hunched shoulders, bent elbows, and hard suitcases banging into my shins and knees. By the time I got to the ticket counter, I had a stiff neck, my legs were bruised and battered, and I was a sweaty mess.
It’s hard to imagine a more fitting start to a transcontinental flight than that. But I was a college student, and paying a porter meant one less pizza when I arrived at the dorm, so like almost everyone else, I suffered through it. Not once did it occur to me that I had an opportunity to invent something new and incredibly simple that would make my life easier and earn me a fortune. I don’t have the insight to predict when the next incredibly simple invention will come along that will vastly improve some aspect of our lives, but I can promise you that it will happen again.*
The luggage example brings us to our third possibility: that most people are capable of innovating but are disinclined to turn their efforts toward product innovation. According to this possibility, technical innovation doesn’t necessarily demand genius. After all, wheeled suitcases aren’t exactly rocket science. Rather, technical innovation is rare only because most people focus their energies elsewhere. Where is elsewhere? By way of answering this question, let’s consider an extraordinary sequence of events witnessed by Jane Goodall while she was observing chimps in Gombe, Tanzania. Forgive me for the fact that the story I’m about to relate is an unpleasant one. When I read it, I couldn’t put it out of my mind for days.
The brief background to this story is as follows: Melissa is a chimp who has just had a new baby. Passion is another chimp in Melissa’s group. Pom is Passion’s adolescent daughter, and Passion and Pom are vicious psychopaths. Here is what Goodall wrote, in slightly abbreviated form:
At 17:10 Melissa, with her three-week-old female infant, Genie, climbed to a low branch of a tree. Passion and her daughter Pom cooperated in the attack; as Passion held Melissa to the ground, biting at her face and hands, Pom tried to pull away the infant. Melissa, ignoring this savaging, struggled with Pom. Passion then grabbed one of Melissa’s hands and bit the fingers repeatedly, chewing on them. Simultaneously Pom, reaching into Melissa’s lap, managed to bite the head of the baby. Then, using one foot, Passion pushed at Melissa’s chest while Pom pulled at her hands.
Finally, Pom managed to run off with the infant and climb a tree. Melissa tried to climb also but fell back. She watched from the ground as Passion took the body and began to feed. Fifteen minutes after the loss of her infant, Melissa approached Passion. The two mothers stared at each other; then Melissa reached out and Passion touched her bleeding hand. As Passion continued to feed on the infant, Melissa began to dab her (own) wounds. Her face was badly swollen, her hands lacerated, her rump bleeding heavily. At 18:30 Melissa again reached Passion, and the two females briefly held hands.
What bothered me most about this story was not the cannibalism itself, disturbing though it is, but the fact that Melissa reconciled so quickly with the two killers. Worse yet, this wasn’t an isolated incident. Passion and Pom continued to kill and eat newborn infants in their group for years. One poor mother lost three babies in a row, and it was then that Goodall realized that only one infant had survived its first month in the group in the last three years. Despite the simplicity and predictability of Passion and Pom’s attacks, none of the mothers devised a successful strategy for dealing with this pair of cannibals, and the mother-daughter team devastated the reproductive potential of their group. The other mothers responded much as Melissa had, fighting their hardest during the attack but then seemingly accepting their fate and doing nothing about it. It was their helplessness in the face of such a terrible but solvable problem that haunted my thoughts.
There is no way to know what Melissa was thinking when she held out her hand to Passion while her baby was still being consumed. My guess is that she was stymied by the fact that she could devise no way to defeat Passion and Pom and, lacking any alternative, she thought it best to reconcile. Chimps are awfully clever, but there are strict limits to their cognitive capacities. In many ways, their problem-solving abilities are similar to those of a human toddler. Chimps can and do plan, such as when they prepare a termite fishing stick prior to going to a termite mound, but they can’t create and mentally test complex scenarios that could lead to a variety of outcomes. Rather, the only way for a chimp to test a plan is to physically enact it and see what happens. They are incapable of turning over complex problems in their minds.
Imagination and simulation are some of the major advantages provided by our big brains.* Life is full of problems that are dangerous to solve without thinking them through in advance. Once you’ve started to enact a plan, it’s often impossible to stop and start over. If I discover halfway through my plan to kill Passion and Pom while they’re sleeping that it’s not working because one of them woke up while I was attacking the other, I can hardly ask them to go back to sleep while I go back to the drawing board.
Our large brains have cracked this particular nut via our capacity to build and mentally simulate complex plans that account for numerous contingencies. In the case of Passion and Pom, you need only reflect on how you would respond if someone attacked you and ate your baby to realize that solving this problem is well within the scope of every one of us. If I lived in a world without police or government and Passion and Pom attacked me, I suspect my first impulse would be to attack them back. Knowing that this would be a hopeless battle, however, I would control my initial impulse and would pretend to reconcile while I developed a plan to neutralize these psychopaths.
Perhaps I would attack them in their sleep, or maybe I’d solicit the help of friends who had been victimized by them. The point is not what I would actually do to solve the problem. Rather, the point is that we all have the capacity to make a plan, simulate it mentally to see if it would work, find points of weakness in the plan through this simulation, update and improve it, and continue to iterate through this process until we are satisfied with our approach. Furthermore, we can do all this while lying in bed, sitting by the fire, or driving to work—there is no physical evidence that we are engaged in the process, so no one knows whether we’re busy plotting or just daydreaming. But because such mental processes exceed the capabilities of chimpanzees, the chimp mothers were all helpless in the face of these two deranged cannibals.
In contrast to chimpanzees, hunter-gatherers in every society on earth are adept at dealing with difficult group members. These problems are universally addressed via social strategies such as communal ostracism or coalitional violence against the offending individuals. When the strongest or most aggressive members of hunter-gatherer communities cause problems, their peers typically band together in response. First, they mock the bullies, which serves as a warning that the behavior is unacceptable. If mocking doesn’t bring them in line, the group often pretends that the bullies aren’t there, ignoring them when they speak and talking about them as if they were absent. If that soft form of communal ostracism doesn’t work, then one morning the bully wakes up to find himself alone, as everyone else has packed up in the middle of the night and left. If that doesn’t work, one morning the bully doesn’t wake up at all.
By banding together, our ancestors found that even the strongest and most aggressive individuals in their group were no match for the rest of them. How does that fact explain the disconnect between the inventiveness of our species and its individual members? And what does all this have to do with wheeled suitcases and why we took so long to invent them? The answer to both questions is that our ancestors were social innovators. That is, they solved their problems socially rather than by inventing new products, and so do we. Why? Because the sociality we evolved after we moved to the savannah leads us to direct our incredible problem-solving capacities toward social rather than technical solutions.
Most people find social relationships and social reciprocity rewarding, and as a result they gravitate toward social solutions to their problems even if they are capable of creating a technical solution. This does not mean that we evolved innovation capacities that are restricted to the social domain. The key abilities that underlie innovation, such as scenario building and mental simulation, are useful in a wide variety of domains and can be used to solve social or technical problems. The issue is where we tend to direct those innovative abilities.
If we evolved to innovate socially, this possibility could help explain the extraordinary disconnect in technical innovation between Homo sapiens as a species and individual humans. Technical innovation may be rare because people are preoccupied with the search for social solutions to their problems. If we return to the example of wheeled suitcases, history suggests that our default social orientation (i.e., locate a friend or porter to help us) was blocking our capacity to find a glaringly obvious technical solution (i.e., put wheels on the suitcase in the first place).
Indeed, the competition between social and technical thinking appears to be fundamental to the way our brain itself functions. In Social: Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect, Matthew Lieberman argues that the default, or “resting,” state of our brain is not one of rest at all, but of perpetual activation of the social neural network. We start to activate this network when we are newborns, before we know anything about the social world, and this network continues to capture our thoughts throughout our adult life. Furthermore, activation of the social network is associated with deactivation of nonsocial thinking, and vice versa. As a consequence, when we are freely pondering our world, our social orientation crowds out other problem-solving approaches.
In my own case, whenever I went to the airport laden with luggage, my first thought was whether I could talk a family member or friend into helping out. Barring that, my next thought was whether it was worth hiring a porter. Because these solutions were always at the front of my mind, I (and every other traveler) never considered wheels as an obvious alternative solution. When a luggage manufacturer put wheels on suitcases in the 1970s, and a pilot improved the design in the late ’80s with better wheels and a retractable handle, a very simple technical solution finally pushed its way past our social orientation and into our collective consciousness. The moment I saw a wheeled suitcase for the first time, I knew I needed one, even though it had never occurred to me to put wheels on my own suitcase.
What Are Social Innovations?
Before considering the evidence in support of this social innovation hypothesis, we need to sort out what it means for an innovation to be social, beyond the obvious fact that it involves people. An innovation is a new way to solve a problem—at least, it’s new to the solver if not to the world—and thus a social innovation is a new way to solve a problem through the use of social relationships. The key issue is not the nature of the problem, but the nature of the solution.
For example, the desire to talk to faraway friends and relatives is a social problem, and it can be solved technically, by inventing a telephone, or socially, by passing messages through friends. Similarly, the desire to walk with a broken knee is a technical problem, and it can be solved socially by having your friends assist you or technically through the aid of crutches. When these solutions are novel, they are social or technical innovations; when these solutions are repeated or borrowed from others, they are social or technical solutions but not innovations. Asking for help is a social solution, but it’s not a social innovation (unless it’s the first time it ever occurred to you to ask for help).
If you consider the greatest inventions in human history, it becomes obvious that many of them are social. For example, one of Homo erectus’ most important inventions was division of labor and the resultant social coordination. By dividing up tasks and working together as a group, Homo erectus were able to hunt massive animals with the simplest of tools. Division of labor made groups more than just the sum of their parts, and thereby played an outsize role in making us the success story we are today.
Despite our much briefer time on the planet, Homo sapiens have created exponentially more technical inventions than Homo erectus did, and we have devised countless social innovations as well. For example, although love of money may be the root of all kinds of evil, money is an incredibly useful social innovation. The physical object itself is trivial—what is important about money is the social convention by which everyone agrees on its value. After division of labor, money may be the second most important social innovation in history. Money can be used to acquire anything of value, and thereby enables all sorts of market exchanges that would be nearly impossible if people were required to trade in goods. Imagine the inconvenience of going to the mall to buy a new sweater and bringing along a pig or goat with you as barter. In the world before money, that’s how people shopped.
If division of labor is our most important social innovation, and money comes in second place, what’s next? My choice for third place might sound odd, but I’d be inclined to put waiting in line next. I never gave much thought to the social innovation of waiting in line until I found myself in a situation in which lines didn’t exist. I was trying to cross an international border that allowed only foot traffic and I was coming from a rural area that apparently had no conventions about waiting in line. There were several dozen fellow travelers trying to get their passports stamped by one person in a tiny booth, and not a single one of them waited in line. As I surveyed the swirling mass of humanity enveloping the customs booth, I was reminded of the BBC special Planet Earth, in which emperor penguins huddled together in Antarctica in a giant penguin blob in their effort to stay warm.
Contemplating this human blob, I could feel my heart sink in my chest, and I wondered if I should change my travel plans. But I had to cross the border, so I chose a random spot in the blob and joined in, trying to edge closer to the booth whenever possible. A couple of times I came heartbreakingly close, only to have the current change direction at the last minute. Sometimes I moved forward with surprising speed, and sometimes I moved backward.
After what seemed like an eternity squeezed into this sweaty and dusty mass of my fellow travelers, and just as I was wondering if I should (or even could) extricate myself from the blob and try again the next day, an eddy in the human current plunked me right in front of the booth. I thrust my passport at the harried customs officer, and it seemed like my lucky break, until the crowd started carrying me off while he still had my passport. Out of desperation, I grabbed the plywood counter with both hands. The customs officer slipped my stamped passport between my fingers just before my feet left the ground and I lost my grip. Since then, I have regarded the practice of waiting in line as one of the world’s great social innovations.
Money and lines are ancient inventions, but the internet has recently enabled all sorts of social innovations that our ancestors would have loved. Everyone has a favorite, but I regard social media and dating sites as some of the most important social innovations on the internet.* When I was young, there were basically three ways to meet your life partner. You could hang out in places where your partner was likely to be found, you could be set up by mutual friends, or you could put a “personal ad” in the back of your local newspaper, in which you listed your height, weight, and age, and provided a four- or five-word blurb about why someone should choose you. Newspaper photos were expensive and of poor quality, so people simply claimed to be attractive and didn’t bother to include photos in these ads. My guess is that the hit rate for this method of finding a partner was incredibly low, and it certainly didn’t have a reputation as a great way to meet Ms. or Mr. Right.
Social networking and dating sites have moved us a million miles beyond that world, by offering specialized places for people with particular interests or backgrounds, by allowing people to learn a lot more about each other before they bother to meet in person, and most notably by massively increasing the number of potential partners people can meet. If dating is a numbers game, and I suspect it is, the internet plays a critical role by helping people find their needle in the haystack. Social networking and dating sites get a ton of traffic, and research shows that romantic partners are increasingly likely to meet online.
For example, a study of nearly 20,000 people who married between 2005 and 2012 by John Cacioppo of the University of Chicago and his colleagues found that over one-third of them originally met online. Although the study concluded in 2012, 7.7 percent of those who’d met in person had already separated or divorced, while only 6 percent of those who’d met online had separated or divorced. That might seem like a small difference, but every percentage point in the offline sample is equivalent to another 125 broken relationships.
Furthermore, if we compare the 4,000 people who met on social network and dating sites (the two most common online meeting sites) to the 8,000 people who met at work, through friends, at school, at a social gathering, or at a bar or club (the five most common offline meetings points), we see reliable differences in marital satisfaction. None of these samples who met offline was as satisfied as the online samples, although those who met at school or a social gathering came close. Couples who met through friends or at a bar, in contrast, were least likely to be satisfied in their marriage. These data suggest that relationships that begin online may be more likely to last than relationships that begin almost anywhere else.
To turn to social media more broadly, there are numerous instances of the value of Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat. For example, although the Arab Spring hasn’t worked out very well (yet), Facebook played a critical role in helping relatively powerless individuals coordinate massive protests against totalitarian regimes across the Middle East. Facebook may be ubiquitous and occasionally of great societal importance, and it has helped me reconnect with friends from high school, but my favorite example of the power of social media is YouTube.
When I was a kid, gatekeepers held the keys to almost every route to fame and fortune. If you wanted to be a movie star, someone had to decide that you were star material. If you had an idea for a new type of TV show, someone had to decide that your idea was entertaining. YouTube eliminated these gatekeepers in one fell swoop—now anyone with a computer and an idea can start putting up videos for the world to see. YouTube has demonstrated that gatekeepers have a very limited sense of what people really want. The most compelling evidence I know for this claim is the incredible popularity of YouTubers who film themselves playing video games. It never would have occurred to me that people would want to watch other people play video games, but one afternoon I heard yelling from my son’s room and asked if he was all right. It turned out the yelling was coming from the YouTube channel he was watching, in which people were playing video games and yelling at their screens.
In case you think this is a fringe market, as of this writing PewDiePie is the king of this genre, with more than 54 million subscribers. To put that number in perspective, the most popular TV show in America in the 2015–16 season was Sunday Night Football, with an average weekly audience of 22 million. When I googled PewDiePie’s audience over the last month, he had 147 million views, substantially more than the 90 million views of Sunday Night Football each month. Almost every video he puts up has millions of viewers, who make him a fortune from advertisements (and his videos are a lot cheaper to produce than a football game).
PewDiePie is far from the only success story on YouTube. Various other YouTubers make a living demonstrating different techniques for putting on makeup, kidding around about bizarre conspiracy theories, offering life hacks, and even just showing scenes from their daily lives. And there are no age barriers, as a few small children make huge sums of money just opening presents and playing with them. What I love about the most successful channels on YouTube is how unappealing they are to most adults. None of the most successful YouTubers would ever get past the security guy at a talent agency, much less an actual talent agent, but they clearly resonate with their target audience. Social media has democratized the route to fame and fortune, and in so doing, has filled vast unmet entertainment needs (e.g., to watch people pop their pimples or lovingly unbox sneakers).
The Social Innovation Hypothesis
So how do we explain why some people innovate new products but most people don’t? If humans evolved to solve their problems socially rather than technically, that doesn’t mean that everyone will choose a social solution every time. Rather, we should be able to use this hypothesis as a starting point to predict who will innovate new products and who won’t.
An obvious place to begin such a search is with the prediction that people who are less social should be more likely to innovate technically. Not only do less-social people have smaller social networks and thus fewer people to turn to for assistance, but many of them also find social solutions less rewarding and reliable. As a consequence, less-social people should be likely to orient themselves toward technical solutions to their problems, a proclivity that would lead to a greater rate of technical innovation.
If we conceive of social and technical orientations as somewhat unrelated traits, then we would expect people to lie in one of four quadrants, defined by their technical and social orientations (see Figure 6.1). Given how critical social functioning was to our ancestors’ success, most people are likely to be found in the upper two quadrants of this diagram. Those on the upper left have relatively weak technical skills, so we would expect them to innovate socially. But the key point is that those on the upper right, who have strong technical skills, should also innovate socially rather than technically.
Figure 6.1. Social orientation, technical orientation, and innovation. (Adapted from von Hippel and Suddendorf, in press)
For most of us, social engagement is fun and rewarding, and ever since we left the trees, it has been our default orientation toward the world.* As a consequence, highly social people who have the talent to tinker with objects are relatively unlikely to do so when confronted with a problem. For example, it might be easy enough for some people to wire a can opener to their toaster and an oven timer to create an automatic dog feeder for when they’re out of town, but even people as handy as that would typically prefer to ask a friend to come over to feed Fido while they’re away. Thus, the social innovation hypothesis predicts that most people are unlikely to innovate technically. Of the (relatively few) people who reside in the lower two quadrants, only those who have a strong technical orientation would be likely to innovate technically. So even if technical skills themselves are relatively common, the ubiquity of human sociality would make technical innovation a relatively rare occurrence.
It is very difficult to test these possibilities with ancestral data, but two pieces of modern evidence support the social innovation hypothesis. First, one way of quantifying sociality is to look at the frequency of autism. People on the autism spectrum vary in intelligence, but regardless of their intellect, they struggle with social relations. Impaired social functioning is one of the hallmarks of autism. Even highly intelligent individuals with autism have problems with Theory of Mind, as their brains don’t automatically compute the intentions and feelings of others in the manner we discuss in chapter 2. As a result, people with autism don’t understand neurotypical people very well and struggle to engage them socially.
Given these facts, it’s no surprise that you rarely find people with autism working in sales, and they are also rare in the humanities and social sciences. In contrast, people on the autism spectrum can be readily found in fields in which the dominant orientation is toward objects and away from people, such as engineering and the physical sciences. For example, Simon Baron-Cohen of Cambridge University and his colleagues found that autism is more common in the families of physicists, engineers, and mathematicians than in the population in general.
When Baron-Cohen and his colleagues went on to develop a scale to quantify levels of autism, one of their first comparisons was between students in the sciences and those in the humanities. They found that science students had higher autism scores, including reduced levels of sociality, than humanities students, and this difference was most notable among students studying physical sciences, computer science, and mathematics. Students in the social sciences scored no differently from students in the humanities. Engineering students in this sample had scores that fell between those in the physical sciences and those in the humanities.
Unsurprisingly, engineers and physical scientists are also more likely than people in the humanities and social sciences to hold patents or to innovate technical products for their own use at home. In other words, among engineers and physical scientists, there is a preponderance of people in the bottom right-hand quadrant of Figure 6.1. As a notable example, Silicon Valley is a hotbed of innovation and also features an unusual concentration of people on the autism spectrum.* Of course, such findings are not evidence that sociality is preventing people from innovating technically (as proposed by the social innovation hypothesis), but the fact that sociality and technical innovation appear negatively correlated raises the possibility that one influences the other.
As a second approach, we can look for sex differences in innovation. It’s always dicey business investigating differences between the sexes, given the widespread tendency on both sides of the aisle to extrapolate well beyond the data. But please bear with me through this discussion, and I think you’ll see that the implications make perfect sense. If we take the plunge into this literature despite the obvious risks, we find that one of the most substantial and widely replicated sex differences in preferences is the tendency for men to be more interested in objects and women to be more interested in people. For example, this result was confirmed in an analysis of vocational interests of more than half a million men and women from the United States and Canada.
No doubt such sex differences in interests are partially a function of sex-typed cultural expectations, but research suggests that they are also partly innate and appear to be culturally universal. Many studies document sex-typical differences in toy preferences that are evident in infants in their first year of life (e.g., trucks versus dolls), and the male preference for toy trucks has even been shown in monkeys.
Regardless of whether these differences are driven by cultural expectations or biological differences (or, more likely, both), the social innovation hypothesis suggests that sex differences in sociality are likely to lead to sex differences in technical innovation. Consistent with this possibility, professions oriented toward technical solutions (e.g., mathematics and engineering) boast many more people in their ranks who not only are on the autism spectrum but are predominantly male.
An enormous body of cross-cultural research shows that women typically have stronger verbal than spatial skills and men typically have stronger spatial than verbal skills, so the fact that men are overrepresented in math and engineering might reflect nothing more than sex differences in ability profiles. We are naturally drawn to things we’re good at, and we tend to improve in domains that interest us, so the causal order of these sex differences in abilities and interests is hard to pin down. Women are more interested in people, so perhaps they communicate with one another more and become more verbally skilled. Men are more interested in objects, so perhaps they spend more time manipulating them, which fosters better spatial reasoning. Or perhaps the causal order goes the other way, or both ways.* The key finding, however, is that even among men and women who have strong mathematical and technical skills, men show greater interest in objects and women show greater interest in people.
For example, David Lubinski of Vanderbilt University and his colleagues selected a sample of over fifteen hundred mathematically precocious students across the United States and followed them into adulthood. By the time they had reached middle adulthood, men from this sample were more than twice as likely as women to hold a patent. More important for our purposes, sex differences in social interests matched the sex differences in technical innovation.
When asked about their work preferences, the men in this sample were more interested than the women in “Working with things (e.g., computers, tools)” and “Inventing/creating something with impact.” In contrast, the women were more interested than the men in “Working with other people” and “Having the results of my work significantly affect other people.” Similarly, the women were more interested than the men in “Time to socialize” and “Strong friendships.” Thus, even among mathematically gifted men and women, notable sex differences emerge in their social orientation and technical achievement.
These sex differences in social orientation also predict whether people choose a career that involves technical innovation. The clearest example of such an effect can be seen in a longitudinal study by Ming-Te Wang of the University of Pittsburgh and his colleagues with another national sample of approximately fifteen hundred students. Based on the students’ SAT scores, Wang separated students who had high math and high verbal abilities from those who had high math but only moderate verbal abilities. Several important differences emerged between these two groups of students, despite the fact that they were all great at math.
First, Wang found that the high-math/high-verbal group was two-thirds female, whereas the high-math/moderate-verbal group was two-thirds male. In other words, women who are mathematically gifted tend to be smart across the board, whereas a lot of men are great at math/science and not much else. This turns out to be important because people who are gifted mathematically and verbally reported greater interest in working with people and less interest in working with objects than those who were great only at math.
Wang also found that students who were great only at math were much more likely to go into a career in the physical sciences and engineering than students who were smart across the board. These career choices matched their earlier stated interests; the more they were interested in working with people, the less likely they were to choose a career in physical science, and the more they were interested in working with things, the more likely they were to choose a career in physical science.
These findings are important for several reasons. First, they suggest that women’s underrepresentation in math and the physical sciences might not be a problem in the classic sense that it signifies barriers against women in such fields. Many people have interpreted female underrepresentation in math and science as evidence that women are made to feel unwelcome in those fields. There is evidence on both sides of this issue, but Wang’s data suggest that gender stereotypes and a potentially hostile climate are not the primary factors keeping most women out of these fields. After all, women used to be rare in the biological sciences as well, which they now dominate at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Presumably the climate was no more welcoming to women in biology (or the numerous other fields in which female participation soared) than it was in math, engineering, and the physical sciences (where female participation has risen much more slowly).
Rather, Wang’s findings suggest that most people who are talented verbally as well as mathematically are not terribly interested in becoming physical scientists and engineers. Because women who are good at math tend to be smart across the board, they vote with their feet and choose other careers. This result makes perfect sense to me, as it reminds me of my own career choice. Like one-third of the men in Wang’s study, I have a female-typical brain in that my verbal abilities are stronger than my math abilities. When I was in high school, I considered becoming an engineer, and even took the engineering entrance exams for college before I realized that math and building things didn’t interest me as much as a people-oriented career in the social sciences.
It’s important to remember that I had the luxury of making this choice because I grew up in a wealthy country where people can make a perfectly good living with a liberal arts education.* In contrast, in poorer countries where most of the good jobs are in technology and science, people who are good in math and science tend to follow this career path. This difference in career choices that emerges as a function of the overall wealth of a country leads to an interesting and counterintuitive effect. Poorer countries are typically less gender-egalitarian than wealthier countries, but women are more likely to enter the sciences in these poorer, less gender-egalitarian countries than they are in richer and more egalitarian ones. If sexism or cultural mores about what women should do were keeping women out of science as was once the case, this result is the opposite of what we would expect. In contrast, if underrepresentation of women in math and science is now largely a function of gender differences in interest leading to gender differences in career choice, then this result is exactly what we would expect. Engineering, math, and the physical sciences may simply not be very interesting to the majority of people who are socially oriented and have other options.*
Because women tend to be oriented more toward people and less toward objects, the social innovation hypothesis suggests that women’s innovations will be less likely than men’s to be targeted at technical solutions. The data are largely consistent with this possibility. For example, in a sample of nearly ten thousand patents granted in six European countries in the 1990s, less than 3 percent were held by women. Cultural and historical factors that disadvantage female inventors assuredly play a role in this figure, but it is noteworthy that the percentage of female patents in that sample is four times lower than the percentage of female engineers (approximately 12 percent).
Similarly, in a representative sample of nearly twelve hundred people from the United Kingdom, 8.6 percent of males and 3.7 percent of females reported that they engaged in technical innovation by creating or modifying products for their own purposes in their own home. These data suggest that even when the formal constraints, biases, and barriers involved in patenting are removed, the ratio of male to female technical innovators is still greater than two to one. Even though technical innovation is rare for both men and women, men innovate new products more often than women do, both formally and informally. According to the social innovation hypothesis, the fact that men are overrepresented among inventors is not evidence that women are less inventive, but rather that women’s sociality leads them to innovate elsewhere.*
Contrary to the widespread belief that inventors are a rare breed, the social innovation hypothesis clarifies that almost all humans are innovators, but most people direct their inventive capacities toward social rather than technical solutions. Humans don’t innovate every day, but that’s only because we don’t have to—our shared cultural knowledge provides ready-made solutions to most of the problems we face. However, we are capable of innovating whenever we encounter a novel problem that is of sufficient importance to compel us to solve it. In contrast to Melissa and the other chimp mothers, nearly all humans would be able to innovate a solution to the problem of psychopaths in their group if there were no law enforcement.
Necessity is often described as the mother of invention, but different people perceive their necessities differently, and it is the rare problem that demands a technical rather than a social solution. We can invent a trap to deal with murderous cannibals, but we can also enlist the aid of other members of our group who have been victimized by them to arrive at a novel, social solution for eliminating the threat. The capacity to innovate novel solutions appears to be universal in our species, but the proclivity to direct this capacity at technical rather than social solutions appears to be unusual. With just a little technical training and experience, nearly all healthy adult human minds are capable of creating technical solutions if the situation demands it. In the absence of such demands, technical innovation might be rare even if the abilities that underlie it are universal in our species. People who are interested in people (i.e., almost all of us) simply don’t invent very many new things, regardless of their potential to do so.
Finally, although our inherent sociality might disrupt our tendency to invent new products, it plays a major role in transforming one person’s invention into everyone else’s solution. The human success story is not just one of innovation; it is also one of transmitting new inventions to others who use and improve them. Technical problem solving might be less frequent due to our incredibly strong social orientation, but sociality itself is critical for spreading technical innovation. The irony is that Homo sapiens rose to worldwide dominance due to our hypersociality, but it may be the relatively asocial ones among us whom we have to thank for the technical inventions that so differentiate our lives from those of all the other beasts on this planet.