Nicholas A. Christakis* : We learn more from those we disagree with than from those we agree with

 

Q: Your book makes a fundamentally optimistic case about humanity and the trajectory of our society. How can you look around at Washington, at social media, at the international scene and stick with that view?

A: I honestly think this is a matter of perspective. I do not wish to appear unaware or Panglossian. I know that every century is replete with horrors. And we humans can be awful — prone to selfishness, tribalism, hatred, and violence. But, equally, we are good — prone to love, friendship, cooperation, and teaching. As I argue, we evolved these capacities, and the good must necessarily have outweighed the bad, in order for us to live as a social species. Moreover, what we see depends on where we stand. I would say that the awful features of our current world (which, incidentally, are not even as bad as they have been in human history — just think of the World Wars, for instance), delude us into overlooking the more fundamental positive qualities all around us.

Q: I agree that we’ve far from the lowest of humanity’s low points, but it does seem we’re not going in the right direction. Your book argues that there are powerful innate genetic forces that push society in a positive direction. What are they?

A: Our evolution has made us very unusual among animals. We evolved to have the capacity to be friends with unrelated individuals, and to cooperate with unrelated individuals. These qualities are very rare in the animal kingdom, but they are innate to us, and they are seen everywhere around the world that we have looked.

Let me also emphasize that the forces I am discussing work on very long time-scales and are evolutionary forces, more than historical ones. If anything, however, I would argue that the historical forces acting on our species are just a thin veneer upon more ancient, more fundamental, and more powerful forces. There is no society on earth that has an easy job of suppressing our innate tendencies to love, friendship, and cooperation, as Blueprint shows. To make those things go away — on the rare occasions where this is possible (such as the Na people of the Himalayas, who organize romantic relationships around sex rather than love, or the very rare societies which claim not to have friendship), a very powerful set of culture forces is used.

Moreover, as Steven Pinker and others have argued, even the historical forces, acting over centuries and millennia, are tending to the good. Our world is more peaceful, safer, and healthier than it has ever been, despite the periods and pockets of awful poverty and violence that, alas, are also still with us.

Q: One of the universal forces you discuss in Blueprint is a “preference for one's own group,” or in-group bias. We can see that phenomenon appearing in a negative way at the core of Donald Trump’s appeal to white voters with his attacks on immigrants, refugees, affirmative action, etc. Is there an upside to that bias? Or is there a countervailing universal force in society that pulls different people together?

A: Yes, tribalism is having its day again in the USA. Political polarization and economic inequality are at century-long peaks. And everywhere, it seems to me, we are hearing the sorts of us-versus-them arguments that haven’t been as prominent a part of our political discourse in quite some time. Humans cannot help this, of course, as our species is pre-wired to pay attention to group boundaries, to think better of our own groups than other groups, and to be kinder to them. This is an inalienable part of our evolutionary heritage. And it’s depressing.

Scientists think that this bias evolved in our species as a way of bringing down social interactions to a more manageable scale, so that we might evolve the ability to cooperate, which in turn has been so helpful to us. So: instead of cooperating with everyone, just cooperate with your in-group. By drawing a boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them,’ we became more able to cooperate among ourselves. Peace within groups, and warlikeness between groups. If we had to cooperate with simply everyone, theory and evidence suggest, we would not be able to do that. So, one way we were able to confront the problem of cooperation is to evolve the capacity to prefer our own group.

  

But, crucially, this is not the only way. Our evolution has also equipped us with two other tools to cope with our propensity to tribalism, tools that can help us in our current predicament. 

You can think about our social structure as involving, at the top, a whole population, and, at the bottom, the individual members. Our groups are in the middle.

Q: How does that work?

One solution to the problem posed by over-identification with groups is to go up a level, to the level of the whole population. We can, for instance, use our evolutionarily-shaped capacity to draw group boundaries to broaden the group we care about. We can see that we are all Americans, for instance. This sensibility has always been a part of our history and been recognized by observers, such as Alexis de Toqueville, since our founding. Anyone can be an American. Moving up a level can efface the relevance of the middle level.

But we can also move down a level. To do this, we have to rely on another trait that evolution has — unusually among animals — equipped us with, namely, the capacity to express and recognize our individuality. In our species, we do this with our faces. Every human face is unique. You can look out at a sea of people and tell everyone apart from the others. This is actually an evolutionary luxury. Other animals don’t have unique faces or identities. It’s an evolutionarily costly feature. But we do. Moreover, we have the capacity to recognize these faces. Our brains evolved to be able to tell one face from another, allocating brain space for this purpose.

This capacity, incidentally, is also reflected in our capacity for grief. I was a hospice doctor for many years, taking care of people who were dying and their families, and I have seen grief up close. Grief is a special emotion because it is tied to the death of a particular individual. You might be sad at the death of a stranger, but you grieve the death of a particular loved one.

This innate capacity we have to see people as individuals offers us another time-tested, evolutionarily-shaped way out of the tribalism that afflicts our political life at present. By moving down a level to the level of individuals, we can come to see each person as unique, and not merely as a reflection of the groups the belong to. This, too, is a long-appreciated feature of our society. It underlay MLK’s famous hope that we might one day come to judge each other by the content of our character rather than the color of our skin.

Q: The first time I heard your name was in a controversy over your wife’s email about Halloween costumes at Yale. The angry furor among students became one of that year’s big examples of liberal identity politics run amok. Do you think that the anger you encountered at Yale and the anger at immigrants at a Trump rally stem from the same fundamental source? Was that part of what inspired you to write Blueprint, or did it shape what you wrote?

A: Yes, I think that the desire to prevent others from speaking — to silence them — is quite natural, and common. It’s so depressing. Yes, dialogue is difficult. But I believe it is a key path to learning.  

We learn more from those we disagree with than from those we agree with. Moreover, as I show in Blueprint, we evolved to be animals prone to social learning. Actually, our species evolved something even more profound than merely copying each other: we affirmatively teach each other things. It’s hard to over-emphasize how uncommon teaching is in the animal kingdom, and how crucial it is to our survival. The whole reason we humans have been able to engage in a social conquest of the earth, and able to live in so many diverse environments, is precisely our capacity to teach and learn from each other, to accumulate knowledge and transmit it across space and time, and to have culture.

But in order to reap these enormous benefits, we must be able to express ourselves to each other. I worry about the landscape for free, open and constructive dialogue at present. I had begun writing Blueprint in 2010 and, if anything, the events of 2015 delayed my work. But those events also redoubled my interest in the topics before me: how can we understand the goodness in social life, despite the manifest problems — including mobs, hatred, and the desire to limit what others can say.

Q: You’ve explained to me why fundamental genetic forces inherent to humanity make you optimistic that we’ll get past the problems plaguing the United States at the moment. Are you as optimistic about the culture of elite higher education?

A: I think we will have half a generation of nonsense in higher education. We have had this before and we will have it again. But I am an optimist, and I think the pendulum will eventually swing again to more reasoned discourse.The president of Harvard, Larry Bacow, just this past week argued that the heckler’s veto is not the path that any good university would want to take. Asking for people to be fired for ideas they propose at a university is simply absurd. The only path to truth — which is the fundamental commitment of most of our elite institutions of higher learning — is through dialogue, respect for evidence and reasoned debate. 

Of course, universities are political entities too.  And I admire the energy of young people. But students are at universities to learn, and faculty are (ordinarily) there to teach. Young people are not always right.  Sometimes they do very foolish things. Hopefully the faculty can model what the real commitments of our institutions of higher learning should be. Nevertheless, young people do often lead the way, for the worse, or, more often, for the better. I am willing both to assume responsibility for being a teacher and to place my faith that young people can come to see things in the proper light.

* Sterling Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale University