Help! The Social Instinct or Why do Humans Co-operate?

I never realised just how much in common I have with a cleaner fish? It's not that I'm fish (though some may remark I drink like one) or even that I'm particularly clean (I'm not, I'm dirty - in both good and bad ways). It's more that sometimes I do things that could broadly be considered altruistic. I see the benefits of co-operation and believe people working together for a common purpose is better than the 'everyone for themself' theory of life.

It's why, politically speaking, I align much closer to socialism than to capitalism. But, like those cleaner fish, I like to be seen to be good almost as much as I like to be good. Like them too, I understand that if my actions are honourable it won't just be those at the end of them that will benefit. I will too, often in indirect ways. Also like the cleaner fish, sometimes I get a bit greedy, take a bit more than I should. Then I feel ashamed about it and end up getting punished for my actions.

Either by myself or by society in general. But, at my core, I am a social creature - and that's because I am a human being and human beings are social creatures. They co-operate and co-operation is the ultimate human superpower. It's how we've survived and it's how we've thrived. It's how we've come to take over the entire globe. For better and for worse.

I spent last night sat at home staring at a computer screen (much like most days and nights of my life these days) but instead of arguing with strangers on social media, I attended, via Zoom (it'd been a while, I nearly forgot how it works) the Humanists UK Voltaire Lecture 2021 with Professor Nichola Raihani. She's a a Royal Society University Research Fellow and Professor in Evolution and Behaviour at University College London (UCL) and she's written a book, The Social Instinct: How Cooperation Shaped the World, which covers the research she's done on human co-operation and how, as well as if, that is reflected in the animal kingdom.

If the book is anywhere near as good as the talk (and I suspect it is even better) then it's definitely worth reading. Professor Raihani was an engaging speaker and, at times, a funny one. Her subject was interesting anyway but the amount of research she'd put in, from deserts to tropical islands to laboratories, meant that she was supremely qualified for the task in hand.

Raihani's first slide was an image of rush hour on the tube in London. Most of us will be familiar with that - or something similar. It's very busy. The tube train opens its doors at the station. Lots of people get off and lots of people get on. Most of the time, this passes off without incident. Now imagine if chimpanzees travelled to work and back on underground trains. 

The situation would play out very differently. It's likely many passengers would end up covered in bites, scratched, or with faeces smeared all over them. The Northern Line can be tough but, with chimps on board, it's quite easy to imagine a much less pleasant commute. A tube full of chimps would be a very dangerous place to be.

That's because our closest ancestor, the great apes - chimps, gorillas, orangutans, aren't big on the whole co-operation thing. Mostly because they have considerably smaller brains than us. Because the ape brain is small the diet required to feed it, primarily fruit and leaves, can usually be found near to home relatively easily. Our large human brains demand an energy rich diet and to get that mix of food, historically, we have had to work together with our fellow man to find it.

Be that hunting together, creating farms and allotments, or inventing grocery shops and supermarkets. Evolution demanded co-operation of us and we responded favourably. If we had not, we'd probably not be here. I'd not be here, you'd not be here, and even this blog wouldn't be here - which is a pity as I think we can all agree it is the pinnacle of all human achievement thus far.

That's a joke by the way (some people have trouble identifying them on the Internet). More seriously, and back on topic, what is co-operation? It's not the bland team building exercise our corporate owners force us to undergo (often involving doing lots of weird things with our hands - see below). It's acting in ways that benefit others.

Sounds pretty straightforward. But very few other animals do it. Some do though - and it's not necessarily the ones you might have imagined. Step forward meerkats, mole rats, pied babbler birds, white-fronted bee eaters, ants, and, yes, the cleaner fish.

One form of co-operation is teaching, helping a pupil to learn skills that will be useful to them later in life. It occurs, in some form, in every human society on Earth but is not unique to humans. Let's take our old friends, the chimps. While it's easy to find evidence of young chimps watching older ones perform tasks in order to learn there is no conclusive proof that the adult chimp is intentionally teaching.

Young chimps are so good at learning by observation there is simply no need for formal education. That's not the case with us humans and that's not the case with the meerkat. When they're not endlessly parroting their repetitive 'simples' catchphrase, meerkats love nothing more than chowing down on a tasty meal of scorpion. But catching scorpions is anything but 'simples'.

So adult meerkats teach their young how to safely handle them. To begin with the young meerkats are given dead scorpions to deal with. When they've mastered that they're upgraded to damaged scorpions (often ones who have had their sting removed) and when they've got the grip of that they're finally allowed to receive their prey live and intact.

I'm not sure if I totally buy the next point but it has been suggested by some that this is the reason that cats bring dead mice and birds into their owner's homes. Being cats, obviously they think we are their pets and not vice versa. So what they're, supposedly, doing is showing us how to kill mice and birds so that we don't starve.

How kind of Tibbles. The pied babbler uses Pavlovian conditioning in its life lessons. When food is delivered to the young it is announced with a call. Much like your mum shouting 'your dinner's ready' when you're a kid. When there is a perilous situation, the pied babbler will let out its 'dinner's ready' call to lure its chicks to safety. 

The little liars! The ultimate sacrifice is to give one's own life for the benefit of the group and, in Brazil, there is a certain type of ant (Forelius pusillus) that does this. Not because it's depressed. It seems unlikely ants experience depression. The Forelius pusillus ant nests underground but forages on the surface. After a day's foraging the ants all return to the nest but to evade predators some ants stay behind and conceal the entrance to the nest.

In doing this the ant ensures its own death as it is not possible for ants to survive overnight outside in the temperatures they have there. That's elevating taking one for the team to the next level. A collection of dead ants would be a seriously big clue as to the whereabouts of the nest so the heroic ants walk away from the nest and die elsewhere.

The Captain Oateses of the insect world. Some animals co-operate not just with their own family or even their own species but, like us humans, with complete strangers. The bluestreak cleaner wrasse, or cleaner fish, offers a cleaning service for other, often larger, fish on Pacific coral reefs.

Larger fish, like groupers, pull up at the cleaning station and the cleaner fish remove these 'client's' dead skin and any parasites on it - by eating it. Which gives them a meal. The problem is that the cleaner fish prefer the much tastier mucus and living tissue of the larger fish than they do the ectoparasites that live on the surface of thm.

Every now and then one of them can't resist a nibble at a client. Punishment can be swift but effective. The larger fish will chase the nibbler and for fear of being eaten themselves they learn their lesson. Sometimes even bystanders, other fish in the queue for a clean, intervene.

We had previously thought this kind of 'third party punishment' is unique to humans. Sometimes a male and female cleaner fish will work together at the cleaning station and it has been observed that should the female take a bite out of a client she will be instantly reprimanded by the male fish. Should a male fish have a little nibble, the female fish will let it pass.

Make of that what you will. In human society, punishment often results in retaliation rather than enforcing co-operation. For punishment to work in our society it must be seen to be legitimate and it must be paired with rehabilitation. Retribution on its own, an eye for an eye and all that, is ineffective in creating an ordered society.

A great example of a company who provide rehabilitation for ex-offenders is Timpson, the high street shoe repairer, dry cleaner, photo processor, and key cutter. 10% of their workforce are ex-offenders and job retention is very high. Training is given in all their services with the notable exception, amusingly and for obvious reasons, of key cutting!

Human co-operation, or what we might call altruism, is often done, at least partly, because of the reputational benefits it provides for the person performing the good deed. This lead Raihani down an interesting avenue of research. She started studying online fund raising pages, people running marathons for charity etc;, and looking at the psychology of donations.

If a man visited a donor's page and gave a larger sum than average, the men that followed him would often get into what we might call a 'generosity tournament' and try to donate even more. Women would be more inclined to simply match the previous amount. Interestingly should the person carrying out the charity activity be a woman, and even more so an attractive one, the male donations tended towards the larger side.

Men showing off to impress women is hardly anything new (and we took an interesting diversion into extreme religious shows of devotion, sticking spikes in your own skin etc; and found that even there it was men who performed the most unpleasant looking acts of self-harm, as if impressing God is even more important than impressing a woman) but it seems here there is an element, too, of simply showing off.

To other men as much as women. It has been noted that cleaner fish are much less likely to bite their clients if there is an audience watching in the form of a line of future customers. These are side effects, both advantageous and undesirable, of our capacity for co-operation but, elsewhere, there are genuine victims of the human instinct for co-operation.

The first example given was of Uber drivers arriving at an airport, collectively turning off the apps that announce their availability, and waiting for a price surge before turning them on again. Thus making more money for themselves, and even more for Uber, but raising the price for their customers.

If it's hard to feel sympathy for international jetsetters and Uber customers, there are cases that are far more deserving. Co-operation can lead to cronyism and nepotism (slides of Johnson and Trump needed no background explanation here) and sometimes, inside our own bodies, some of our cells decide to work together against the interest of others.

We call that cancer and that's the sort of co-operation that we could do without. But, on the whole, co-operation has been good for humans. Despite creating overpopulation, we saw only recently how well we all co-operated when, during the height of the still ongoing Covid pandemic, we really had to. Our next challenge will be to co-operate to solve, or mitigate against the worst of, the existential climate crisis.

So far we have failed. My personal take is that nations, especially nations led by some of the dreadful leaders we have now, don't co-operate as well as individuals. If you've ever found yourself wishing for a 'strong leader' you're probably guilty of electing these people. People who don't seek to solve our problems but merely look to exploit them for their own benefit.

I'm glad that Professor Nichola Raihani collaborated with Humanists UK, their Chief Executive Andrew Copson, and chair for the evening Professor Alice Roberts (current President of Humanists UK) to put together such a varied, fascinating, and fun talk. I didn't even get to write about menopause theories (of mammals it is only humans and some whales that switch off their ability to breed so long before they die) and I was never quite certain why so many pictures of Marge Simpson appeared on my screen.

Although I was pleased to hear the Animal Magic theme tune, Group Forty Orchestra's Las Vegas, accompany one video (even if it made me feel old, Animal Magic was last aired thirty-nine years ago and Johnny Morris died in the last millennium). Thanks to all involved in this evening and thanks to Adam for the heads up. A day after the death of Cabaret Voltaire's Richard H. Kirk what could be more appropriate than attending a Voltaire Lecture? Other than, of course, co-operating with my fellow humans by sharing this account with them. If only cleaner fish could read.