Digital Products and Evolution(Part 1) - Belongingness and the Self
Mechanisms behind the anxiety of waiting for ‘likes’ on your last pout selfie post on Instagram or the urge to collect the complete set of ‘stamps’ in a game, date to millions of years before digital social networks to the times when your ancestral tree-dwelling chimpanzees had to adapt to living in a tightly-knit and complex social structure just so that their genes, which make up a large part of you, could be passed down the generations¹.
This article will be the first of the series of articles where we shall look deeply into hooks and levers behind successful digital products and understand them from evolutionary psychology lens. However this article can also act as the third in my series on Google Pay Diwali Stamps Gamification(Part 1, Part 2).
In this article, we shall discuss how, in addition to our desire for social belonging and validation, our desire to collect(Collection Bias) and emotional discomfort of inconsistency between belief and action(Cognitive Dissonance) are simply outward manifestations of random but beneficial byproducts of Natural Selection(or Evolution) like ‘Reciprocal Altruism’ and ‘Sense of Self(esteem)’.²
Decades of time-span of modern digital and social infrastructure, in which above discussed behaviours are noted, or for that matter even 100,000 years of time-span since our ancestors moved out of Africa to eventually colonize the world, is trivial compared to cosmic scale of time in which natural selection works. Therefore to understand this complex machinery of our minds we must understand the environment in which the mind (modules) evolved. (Instead of defining mind as a single mechanism, it is more accurate to define it as a set of interdependent modules, which evolved separately and in different environments)
Selfishness behind the desire for acceptance and validation
Living in groups was already in place by the time our ancestor primates appeared on earth 60million years ago. (On some other occasion we could see the prequel to this story all the way up to 3.5 billion years ago when the first self-replicating cell came up.) When hunting for food and saving oneself from becoming food to others were primary concerns of the day, living in group conferred individuals with a survival advantage by providing an extra defence against predators. When we humans split from the lineage of chimpanzees, we began to live in much larger groups and forming alliances and friendship became all that more important.
While it is tempting to think that we have been social creatures for millions of years now and the need for acceptance and interconnectedness has been wired into us, it is important to recognise the underlying selfish individual interest. At this juncture, it pays to clearly understand the principle of natural selection which states
“Traits that enhance survival and reproductive success increase in frequency over time.”
Here we should carefully note that selection takes place not so much at the level of an individual or a group (who are just the carriers of genes and are meant to die someday anyway) but happens at the level of genes which make the individual exhibit those traits. Genes can be regarded as the pattern of instructions (in the form of DNA) to create proteins under given interaction with the environment (intentionally simplified). While some proteins are responsible for the creation of body organs, many have a lot to do with behaviours, feelings and thoughts.
Thus while evolution works at the level of survival of genes the control happens through emotions and impact is seen at the level of behaviour and traits. Thus the true immortal entity is the pattern of information encoded in the genes. In this particular discussion of the human need for belongingness, it could roughly work like this: A random gene mutation that made the organism ‘feel’ the need for social companionship and strike friendships, enabled the organism to better hunt food and escape predators, and in turn, helped it live longer and reproduce more. Eventually, the gene which induced those behavioural traits became abundant through heredity and more cooperation and group living ensued.
Thus social contracts like friendship, community groups or social network interactions like ‘liking’, ‘poking’ done for the sake of acceptance are simply modern-day adaptations of what can be called as ‘Reciprocal Altruism’ or in simpler terms ‘You scratch my back, I scratch yours’ policy which got evolved during the times our ancestors dwelled on trees.
Rise of status and hierarchy
Once the groups were large enough, the status and hierarchy order was inevitable because a few individuals would have been more ‘capable’ than others and it would have made pragmatic sense for others to submit. Higher up the order meant larger access to both food and mates and a gene that could impart a competitive spirit soon became abundant.
This hierarchy was always in slight but constant flux, with members sending the signals of ‘status’ or ‘capability’ in different ways as a means to implicitly renegotiate the order.
In case of our ancestor chimps, it may have been thumping the chest after winning physical combat to gain a food reserve or in our case, it could be sharing an accomplishment of collecting a set of ‘stamps’ in a game.
It is important to note that none of these mechanisms works at conscious logic level but work at the level of underlying emotions that would have been shaped by natural selection in the environment of our evolution.
What helped individuals move up the order was not just the true capability to gather food or avoid predators or beat the rival competitors but also something we refer to as Self Esteem.
Self and Self Esteem
By ‘self’ we generally mean the feeling of ‘I’ and refer to the conscious decision-maker acting through the body and mind systems. We all like to believe and advertise that we are beneficial and effective people who have things in control. We think highly of ourselves, believe ourselves to be above average in our social skills, attribute our success to our skills and hard work.
However recent experiments have begun to cast doubt on the very foundation of the ‘conscious self’. Michael Gazzaniga’s famous split-brain experiments show that the brain seems to be initiating actions much before the individual becomes aware of deciding to initiate the action. It seems to suggest that ‘conscious self’ may be deluded by design to think that it is calling the shots when it is not.
These experiments show that entire ‘self’ could be yet another evolutionary mechanism meant to aid the survival and reproduction of individual (carrying the genes) mostly through the function of ‘self-image-enhancement’(and in some cases through ‘self-deflation’). Why else would most people believe that they are above average in social abilities while it is impossible that most people are above average?
Why would natural selection ‘design’ a brain that would lead people to have a degree of self-deception? One answer is that if one believes something truly about oneself, it will help one to convince other people to believe in it. In a social group, it would serve well for an individual to have high esteem to fake ‘capability’ more convincingly or take on a competitor or approach a potential mate more confidently (for the meek ‘self-deflation’ served better).
The misplaced belief of a ‘conscious doer’ would also have been to the benefit of the genes of our hunter-gatherer ancestors to convince the world that they are coherent, consistent actors who have things in control. Cognitive dissonance could simply be the ‘emotional lever’ in this regard. Various other things like collecting rare resources (collection bias) not just helped to ‘advertise’ the status, it also helped to boost one’s self-esteem. High self-esteem served individuals to live longer and reproduce better.
Ending Notes
It is not in the interest of natural selection to make us see reality clearly. If there is a sense in which natural selection ‘cares’ about anything - that isn’t us but the information coded in the sex cells. For that, if natural selection ‘wants’ it can imbue individuals with several biases that distort the perception of reality. In the course it can ‘build’ a structure as complex and capable like a human brain which can decipher the machinations behind its’ own designer or can design machinations to explore its own tendencies and vulnerabilities. Recent addictive digital Apps and Game designs are results of the latter. Mostly unknowingly the designers pull the same emotional levers natural selection built, altogether for a different purpose.
Notes
¹: Survival and transfer of genes is not a conscious process. Natural selection works such that beneficial traits which aid organisms to survive and reproduce accumulate over time and pass onto successive generations. But for the sake of simplicity, I have written as if natural selection is a conscious designer.
²: I shall talk about how variable rewards are more effective tools in inducing behaviour change in a separate article in the future.
Disclaimer
1. Ideas discussed here solely represent the thoughts and beliefs of the author and have nothing to do with organizations he is part of.
2. Ideas represented here are at best relative truths. The ultimate truth is beyond words. Tat Tvam Asi.
