It’s a dog eat dog world, winner takes all, survival of the fittest. But is it really?

If the biggest and baddest always win, how come there are so many more of them than them.

Strength is helpful, but friendliness might actually be the key to evolutionary success?

I think dogs are ‘exhibit A’ for the survival of the friendliest.

Meet Dr. Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, co-authors of the book, Survival of the Friendliest.

A group of wolves decided to start hanging around human settlements --- and the friendliest among them started to breed together. Their bodies changed, their minds changed, they became more communicative and cooperative with us.

They became…

But what’s unique is our communication with them.

Dogs understand communicative gestures. If you point or you look in a direction, you’re trying to tell somebody where something is or what you want. Dogs are really good at reading those intentions in our gestures. That is a crucial ability in human development.

Domestication is selection for friendliness, and that’s why our dogs are so good at telling us what they need.

So if dogs used friendliness, what about survival of the fittest?

Survival of the fittest is this misconstrual of what Darwin and other biologists actually meant. Somewhere along the way, it got kinda twisted so that the most dominant was going to do the best.

But that’s not what they meant at all. They were talking about fitness as in your ability to reproduce. Friendliness, we find, in nature is a much more successful strategy.

And one of the friendliest animals…It’s us!

We often credit our big brains, language, or technology as the keys to survival, but we know now those characteristics weren’t unique to just us. One defining factor that contributed to our evolutionary success was our ability to get along.

Humans developed this new social category called the in-group stranger, someone that you’ve never seen before and that you’ve never met, but who you immediately identify as part of your group.

So in early humans, this could be someone adorned with some kind of decoration or maybe facial pattern, and this would say immediately, “I’m connected to you and we should be friends.”

And that then allowed us to expand our social networks beyond those we grew up with, to hundreds of people, now you’re learning from hundreds of people, you’re cooperating from hundreds of people, and now cultural innovation can explode, and that’s what was the friendly spark that made our species different than all the other species, but it has a darker side.

A darker side. And, one that’s easy to see, when you look at the differences between these two.

I love bonobos because they really do teach us how to be better people. They don’t have any of the lethal aggression that we find in other great apes, including humans. The females sort of dictate the way the culture goes, which means that the males don’t get too aggressive and the babies are always unharmed. They’re just an amazing model. You can talk about chimps.

Thanks. Chimps, while they can be kind and friendly and and wonderful, I love chimpanzees, they, like humans, have a darker side. They commit lethal aggression. Just like there’s homicide, there’s ‘chimpicide’.

They wouldn’t share with a stranger because strangers might hurt them. That cost doesn’t exist in bonobos.

Then that’s where humans become really interesting, because we can be extremely prosocial to strangers and we can be really aggressive towards strangers, and so our ability to feel love for these in-group strangers also drives our ability to be extremely violent and cruel towards those threatening our group members.

But how does friendliness help today?

We’ve become much more of a winner-take-all society. And there can’t be very many winners. So it just kind of puts you into that mindset of being in a competition with other people. If somebody else wins, it’s going to be at your expense.

Dr. Jennifer Crocker examines our social motivations of egosystem and ecosystem.
In the egosystem, we are preoccupied with our self-worth, both in our own eyes and in other people’s eyes.

And then the ecosystem is this other paradigm for thinking about relationships with other people, where instead of thinking about what I want from you. I'm thinking about, "Oh, what do you need?"

If the other people in my social context are thriving, that’s going to be more likely to help me thrive.

So this might seem like just an idealistic thought, but the research points, it actually points to health benefits.

Being responsive to other people’s needs actually predicts increases in self-esteem because people feel like they can make a difference for other people. That support predicts decreases in symptoms of anxiety, symptoms of depression. Making a difference for other is good for your sense of self-worth.

I don't think of egosystem and ecosystem motivation as being traits. Everybody has the capacity for both of these motivations. The question is which one is activated at a particular moment.

There’s this paradox of human nature how can we be simultaneously so kind and so cruel?

We’re wired to connect with one another. But along the way we started seeing others as, well, ‘others,’ and this ability to relate, it also led us to divide.

The best way to understand that we’re all human is through cross group friendships. Through all our research it’s really been one of the main ways that you can sort of diffuse the cycle of dehumanization.