Hive psychology, group selection,
and leadership
Sage Lecture #4
Dec. 1, 2008
Jonathan Haidt
University of Virginia
6 Lectures on Morality
11/10: What is morality and how does it work?
11/17: The righteous mind: Why good people are divided
by politics and religion
11/24: The positive moral emotions: Elevation, awe,
admiration, and gratitude
12/1: Hive psychology, group selection, and leadership
12/8: The dark side: Why moral psychology is the greatest
source of evil
12/15: The light side: How to pursue happiness using
ancient wisdom and modern psychology
ppt files available at www.JonathanHaidt.com, at bottom
Hive Psychology
Hive Psychology
Humans evolved to be contingent ultra-socialists,
able to operate at any point from ....
to...
We are partway through a major transition in
evolutionary history. We are apes, but with a recent
“slider switch” that makes us temporarily hive-like.
Synchronous activities are among the activators of
that switch.
I) The Function of Music and Dance
Hagen & Bryant (2003) Music and dance as a
coalition signaling system. Brain seems to contain
neural specialization for music. Why?
1) Sexual selection
2) Group cohesion
3) coalition signaling
Sexual Selection?
Talented singers are attractive, but:
--in small-scale societies, music and
dance are especially frequent in war
and politics
--Humans commonly perform music in groups
--Rhythm is uniquely human; seems
designed to coordinate multiple
people
--Adolescents favor same-sex
musicians
Group cohesion?
Obvious hypoth: music & dance help groups cohere;
cohesive groups outcompete other groups.
Individualistic definition of cohesion: group members
perceive they can provide and get valuable benefits;
and/or perceive that they share fitness interests
served by collective action
Reject this because:
--music and dance are not effective at conveying info to
ingroup members about the benefits you can provide,
or about your shared interests
Coalition Signaling?
Look at human history as longstanding intergroup
conflict AND alliance. Music and dance are
honest signals of your coalition’s quality. “Note
that music and dance do not cause social
cohesion, they signal social cohesion” (p. 30)
Yes, they certainly signal cohesion:
--New Zealand Rugby team: All Blacks
--North Korea Mass Games
But They Also Cause Cohesion!
Wiltemuth & Heath, in press (Psych Science)
Study 1: walking in step vs not
Study 2 & 3: move cups around to music, and sing
“O Canada,” in sync or not
In all 3 studies, synchronous movement improved
later performance on coordination task or
common goods game; also improved liking and
trust.
II) The Ecstatic loss of self
William James on conversion: “the process... by
which a self hitherto divided, and consciously
wrong inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and
consciously right superior and happy.”
Involves:
--Loss of worry, sense of peace
--Joy: a “higher happiness” that lasts months or years
--World looks new and beautiful
--Moral commitment, desire to serve
"I thought I saw the Saviour, by faith, in human shape, for
about one second in the room, with arms extended,
appearing to say to me, Come. The next day I rejoiced with
trembling; soon after, my happiness was so great that I said
that I wanted to die; this world had no place in my affections,
as I knew of, and every day appeared as solemn to me as the
Sabbath. I had an ardent desire that all mankind might feel as
I did; I wanted to have them all love God supremely. Previous
to this time I was very selfish and self-righteous; but now I
desired the welfare of all mankind, and could with a feeling
heart forgive my worst enemies, and I felt as if I should be
willing to bear the scoffs and sneers of any person, and suffer
anything for His sake, if I could be the means in the hands of
God, of the conversion of one soul.“
--Stephen Bradley, 1820
So many routes to self-loss!
1) Nature:
Standing on the bare ground, -my head bathed by the blithe
air and uplifted into infinite
space, -- all mean egotism
vanishes... I am nothing; I see
all; the currents of the
Universal Being circulate
through me; I am part or parcel
of God. (Emerson)
So many routes to self-loss!
2) Spontaneous peak
experiences (Maslow)
including
--“unitive consciousness”
--transcendence of dualities
--disorientation in space and
time
So many routes to self-loss!
3) Meditation
Samadhi: “the subject-object
distinction and one’s sense of
an individual self disappear...”
Newberg et al. (2001),
Why God Won’t Go Away
--Meditators show big drop in “orientation association
areas” in parietal lobe; lose map of self, in space; have
self-transcendent experience
So many routes to self-loss!
4) Brain stimulation or
malfunction
--Ramachandran on the “god
spot” in the temporal lobe
So many routes to self-loss!
5) Psychedelic drugs
(Leary; Huxley; Pahnke)
So many routes to self-loss!
6) Repetitive
movements,
especially in a
group
"The ability of human ritual to produce transcendent unitary
states is the result, we believe, of the effect of rhythmic
ritualized behavior upon the hypothalamus and the
autonomic nervous system and, eventually, the rest of the
brain.“ –Newberg, p. 86
III) Synchrony
Keeping together in time
"Words are inadequate to describe
the emotion aroused by the
prolonged movement in unison that
drilling involved. A sense of
pervasive well-being is what I recall;
more specifically, a strange sense of
personal enlargement; a sort of
swelling out, becoming bigger than
life, thanks to participation in
collective ritual.”
--W. McNeill
Keeping together
in time, religious
Keeping together in time, fascist
Keeping together in time, just for fun
The Macarena
The Wave
The YMCA
McNeill’s Question: Why do all societies have
collective dance, singing, ritual, or marching?
Answer: “Muscular bonding” is an evolved
mechanism to shut down “I” and call together “we.”
--Creates OFA-AFO
--Creates “communitas” (Turner, 1969), intense
feelings of social togetherness and belonging, often in
connection with rituals
Communitas of Warriors
"I" passes insensibly into a "we," "my" becomes
"our," and individual fate loses its central
importance... I believe that it is nothing less than
the assurance of immortality that makes self
sacrifice at these moments so relatively easy... I
may fall, but I do not die, for that which is real in
me goes forward and lives on in the comrades for
whom I gave up my life.
--Gray (1973), The Warriors
Communitas of Ecstatic Dancers
“As the dancer loses himself in the dance, he reaches
a state of elation in which he feels himself filled with
an energy beyond his ordinary state…at the same time
finding himself in complete and ecstatic harmony with
all of the fellow members of his community.”
--Radcliffe-Brown (1922, p.251-252)
See also:
--Collective effervescence (Durkheim)
--Techniques of ecstasy (Eliade)
--Ecstatic dance was the norm in
traditional societies
--Met with disgust by Europeans
at time of first contact
--Long battle of Dionysian and
Apollonian tendencies in West
--Apollo won; ecstatic dance
stamped out in Christianity
beginning 13th C.
--Psychology is now poorly
equipped to understand this
portion of human nature
“We lack any way of describing
and understanding the ‘love’
that may exist among dozens of
people at a time… If homosexual
attraction is the love that ‘dares
not speak its name,’ the love
that binds people to the
collective has no name at all to
speak.”
Or is the name “ecstasy”?
“an example of
me on ecstasy”
IV) Multi-level Selection
Many animals are social: live in groups, work together
on hunt, have affection for specific others….
But only 6 kinds of animal are ULTRA-social: massive
division of labor, pervasive altruism, willingness to die for
the group
The 6 Ultrasocial Animals
Hymenoptera: Bees
wasps
and ants
Reproduce only
through queen;
OFA-AFO
Also: termites…
and naked mole rats…
The 6th Ultrasocial:
Not kinship; Massive ingroup cooperation for the
purpose of cross-group
competition. Held together
by norms and emotions.
Multi-Level Selection
Evolution = variation + selection + inheritance
What are the units that get selected?
--Groups of animals in an ecological niche
--Individual animals in a group
--Cells in body
--Sub-cellular units (e.g., genes)
Competition occurs at multiple levels simultaneously.
Selection pressure at one level favors adaptations
that suppress competition at lower level.
Major Transitions in Evolution
Independent genes  Chromosomes

Major Transitions in Evolution
Bacterial cells  Eukaryotic cells

Major Transitions in Evolution
Eukaryotic cells  multi-cellular organisms

Major Transitions in Evolution
Multi-cell organisms  colonies

Major Transitions in Evolution
Multi-cell organisms  armies, nations, empires

Cohesion and Competition
“Drill, dance, and battle belong together. All three
create and sustain group cohesion; and the creation
and maintenance of social groups -- together with
resulting rivalries among groups -- constitute the
warp and weft of human history” --McNeill
Darwin: Morality was the Binder
A tribe including many members who, from
possessing in a high degree the spirit of patriotism,
fidelity, obedience, courage, and sympathy, were
always ready to aid one another, and to sacrifice
themselves for the common good, would be
victorious over most other tribes; and this would be
natural selection. At all times throughout the world
tribes have supplanted other tribes; and … morality
is one important element in their success
--Descent of Man, Ch. V
The Gospel, 1976-2007
Cooperation caused by:
1) Kin selection
2) Reciprocal altruism
(extended by indirect
reciprocity)
Free rider problem dooms
group selection
Multi-level Selection Blessed
--When free rider problems
are solved at one level,
selection at next level
becomes important
--Culture enabled many
solutions, caused a “major
transition”
“In a thread woven throughout
the narrative, they argue that
colonies of social insects should
be seen and studied as superorganisms, a naturally selected
level of organization a step above
individual organisms.... They hold
that ‘[t]he principal target of
natural selection in the social
evolution of insects is the colony,
while the unit of selection is the
gene.’"
--James Hunt, in Science
V) Why Haven’t Psychologists Seen This?
--They did, long ago: Spencer, Wundt, McDougall...
The psychological crowd is a provisional being
formed of heterogeneous elements, which for a
moment are combined, exactly as the cells which
constitute a living body form by their reunion a
new being which displays characteristics very
different from those possessed by each of the
cells singly (Le Bon, 1896, p.30).
Blinded by Individualism
There is no psychology of groups which is not
essentially and entirely a psychology of
individuals. Social psychology must not be placed
in contradistinction to the psychology of the
individual; it is a part of the psychology of the
individual, whose behavior it studies in relation to
that sector of his environment comprised by his
fellows (Allport, 1924, p. 4).
Blinded by Individualism
“Methodological individualism dominates our
neighboring fields of economics, much of
sociology, and all of psychology’s excursions into
organizational theory. This is the dogma that all
human social group processes are to be explained
by laws of individual behavior”
(Campbell 1994, p. 23).
Blinded by Liberalism too?
--Universalism: nations are bad
--Anti-racism as central identity, sacred value:
groupishness = racism
--Knee-jerk distrust of tight groups: fascism
Liberals 2 channels, Conservatives 5
Endorsement
Harm
Fairness
Authority
Ingroup
Purity
Liberals are often anti-I,A,P
Science writers John Horgan & George Johnson, talking
about 5 foundations on bloggingheads.tv
VI) Application: Leadership
Corporation: "a collection of many individuals united
into one body, under a special denomination, having
perpetual succession under an artificial form, and
vested, by policy of the law, with the capacity of
acting, in several respects, as an individual… “
(Stewart Kyd, 1794)
Major transitions in commercial history
1) Production by families (kinship)
2) Specialization by guilds (fraternity, caste)
3) Industrial revolution, assembly line (self-interest,
synchrony?)
4) Modern corporation: thousands of people,
massive division of labor, held together by….
American model:
Japanese model:
--Self interest
--weak corporate
culture?
--Fictive kinship
--Fraternity
--Self interest
--Synchrony
The moral psychology of leadership means…
understanding our ultrasociality and using it
wisely and honorably to structure environments,
rhetoric, and action to move one’s team closer to
OFA-AFO
How to grow a hive:
A) Institutional Design:
--Shared fate (all in the same boat)
--Heightened similarity (e.g., uniforms, not diversity)
--Moving together in time (drill, ritual)
--Outgroup competition
--Noble goals, noble means
How to grow a hive:
B) Leader Behavior: Integrity + charisma
--Must be worthy of respect, admiration, and awe
--impartiality: followers can trust, and cede control
--self-sacrifice: shows shared fate, commitment
--eloquence: noble words uplift and inspire
The “slider switch” of selflessness
Perfect
Perfect
Selfishness
Selflessness
--Am I working for myself, or for others?
--Is my teamwork just for my own benefit, or would I
really “take a bullet” for these guys?
--We can all function at all points on the continuum.
VII) Application: Positive Psych
Relatedness Hypotheses:
1) The Dyadic hypothesis: People need relationships to
flourish.
2) The Moral Community hypothesis: People need to be
bound in to a community that shares norms and
values in order to flourish.
Moral-communal capital: Social capital, plus
institutions, traditions, and norms that guarantee that
contributions and hard work will be rewarded, and that
free-riders, exploiters, and criminals will be punished.
Traditional Morality: Uses every tool in the
toolbox to increase MCC
Relatedness Hypotheses:
1) The Dyadic hypothesis: People need relationships to
flourish.
2) The Moral Community hypothesis: People need to be
bound in to a community that shares norms and
values in order to flourish.
3) The Hive-Psych hypothesis: The self can be an
obstacle to happiness, so people need to lose their
selves occasionally by becoming part of an emergent
social organism (like bees in a hive) in order to reach
the highest levels of human flourishing
The Mute Button?
"Had the human self been installed with a mute
button or off switch, the self would not be the
curse to happiness that it often is" (Leary, 2004;
The Curse of the Self, p. 46).
Does the self have a button? The “biotechnology of
dance”? Synchronous movement, within cultural
institutions and traditions that suppress “I” and
bring out “we”?
VII) How to study hive psych empirically?
Synchrony & self-loss in IVE
Research question: Does moving in synchrony push the
slider switch? Make us hivish and cohesive? Self-loss,
and OFA-OFA? Pleasure? Liking for peers,
persuadability by peers?
Basic Method:
IV:P moves in synch (or not) with 12 (or 1) agents
DVs: enjoyment of task, openness to persuasion from
agents, willingness to sacrifice for agents
The New Synthesis in Moral Psych
1) Intuitive primacy (but not dictatorship)
--so look at the moral emotions
2) Moral thinking is for social doing
--moral emotions change relationships
3) Morality binds and builds
--pos moral emotions are about selftranscendence; I becomes WE
4) Morality is about more than harm and fairness
--look to the ancients, and traditional morality, to
broaden the narrow modern imagination
The New Synthesis in Moral Psych
1) Intuitive primacy (but not dictatorship)
--so look at the moral emotions, and embodied
methods of creating shared morality
2) Moral thinking is for social doing
--Often functional for GROUP, not just for individ.
3) Morality binds and builds
--pos moral emotions, and synchrony, are about
self-transcendence; I becomes WE
4) Morality is about more than harm and fairness
--it is about making groups possible...
Morality re-defined:
“Moral systems are interlocking sets of values,
virtues, norms, practices, identities, institutions,
technologies, and evolved psychological
mechanisms that work together to suppress or
regulate selfishness and make social life
possible” (Haidt, in press, Handbook of social
psych)
More information at www.JonathanHaidt.com