Dominic Johnson

Since the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in April 2010, several reports have been published that investigated the causes of the disaster, who was to blame, and the legal obligations for compensation. Beyond these important issues, however, is a perhaps more striking fact: many of the numerous deficiencies and risks were long known and yet nothing was done to deal with them. It took a disaster of this scale to trigger a systematic rethink of priorities, rules, and regulations about offshore drilling.

President Barack Obama declared in June 2010: “In the same way that our view of our vulnerabilities and our foreign policy was shaped profoundly by 9/11, I think this disaster is going to shape how we think about the environment and energy for many years to come.” It is remarkable that (just as in the case of counter-terrorism in 2001) such a disaster was necessary to stimulate such a clearly needed overhaul of planning, management, and regulation.

A psychological perspective lends insight here, because it turns out that there are good reasons to expect that humans do not, or cannot, make radical revisions to our ways of working until dramatic events or disasters shake us out of a range of biases and traps that preserve the status quo. In our recent article in Current Science, entitled “The tragedy of cognition: psychological biases and environmental inaction“, Simon Levin and I explore this problem and its implications for society’s ability to recognize, let alone act to mitigate, the impending problems of climate change, environmental destruction, and dwindling energy resources.

In an ideal world, people would tackle major crises such as global climate change as rational actors, weighing the costs, benefits and probabilities of success of alternative policies accurately and impartially. Unfortunately, human brains are far from accurate and impartial. Mounting research in experimental psychology reveals that we are all subject to systematic biases in judgement and decision-making. While such biases may have been adaptive heuristics that promoted survival and reproduction in the Pleistocene environment of our evolutionary past, in today’s world of technological sophistication, industrial power and mass societies, psychological biases can lead to disasters on an unprecedented scale. Beyond the exploding ecological and socio-economic research on climate change and how to deal with the ‘tragedy of the commons’, it is a better understanding of human psychology – ‘the tragedy of cognition’ – that may ultimately tip the balance against the seeds of our own destruction.

We often think of “leadership” as a uniquely human trait, conjuring up images of historical giants such as Gandhi or Churchill, as well as infamous ones like Hitler or Stalin. Current events also anchor discussions of leadership to human affairs from the war in Iraq, the election of Barack Obama, the collapse of the banks, to our everyday experience of great bosses or the trials and tribulations of leading others in our workplace. Whether it is done well or badly, political, military, religious and economic leadership dramatically impacts all of our lives.

However, have you ever wondered where our propensities for leadership (and followership) came from? If we step back from our own world of human affairs, we quickly notice leadership and followership in action throughout the animal kingdom. Over the summer months, you may have seen bees following leads to productive flowers, trails of ants forming organized highways from your picnic table into the bushes, and now flocks of birds wheeling across the October skies in their seasonal migration. These are not random or chance movements and gatherings. Each is an example of adaptations for leadership and followership that are crucial to survival.

In a new paper with biologist Andrew King and psychologist Mark Van Vugt (“The Origins and Evolution of Leadership”, Current Biology, October 2009), we examined aspects of leadership and followership that we share in common with other animals. Even humans, it turns out, are subject to some of the same underlying phenomena of mass movement that apply to fish and birds. But our cross-species approach also allowed us to distinguish what is unique about human leadership and followership-big brains change the game-but this difference is where an evolutionary perspective is particularly useful.

Our modern social and physical environment is of course very different to that in which we evolved. But if we understand both the “ultimate” functions of leadership and followership behavior (what is it for? who benefits? who pays the costs?), and the “proximate” psychological mechanisms that cause them, then we can identify areas of “mismatch” where our evolved mechanisms are likely to clash with evolutionarily novel stimuli (the modern world). For example, positions of leadership today are still correlated with age, sex, height, and weight—over and above differences in competence and effectiveness. Are big old male bosses really better than average? Or could this be some sort of hangover from our evolutionary past?

An evolutionary approach to leadership offers a scientific framework that offers new ways to understand, predict and improve leadership and followership—human traits that did not emerge out of thin air, but which we share with countless other species and have been shaped by natural selection for hundreds of millions of years.

See Current Biology webpage

Conference on evolutionary approaches to leadership at London Business School, 14 January 2010

My other work on leadership:

Book chapter “The Mismatch Hypothesis”, with Mark Van Vugt, Robert Kaiser and Rick O’Gorman

Book “Overconfidence and War”

Malcolm Gladwell’s recent article in the New Yorker argues that one of the key causes of the financial crisis was overconfidence among the men at the top, a phenomenon that ranges from the battlefields of history to the banks of the 21st century (“Cocksure: Banks, battles, and the psychology of overconfidence”, New Yorker, 27 July 2009). The important role of overconfidence even in high stakes decision-making is strongly supported by my book “Overconfidence and War: The Havoc and Glory of Positive Illusions”. For all the structural and intellectual obstacles to the effective conduct of war (or banking or any other human endeavor), humans—especially men—are excellent at creating their own obstacles with a remarkably pervasive and powerful overconfidence.

The problem with overconfidence is measuring it. After a disaster, it is easy to find misjudgments that look like overconfidence, given the outcome. However, misjudgments often precede successes too, but are forgotten by history. Gladwell’s example of Gallipoli illustrates this problem well. For all the apparent overconfidence leading to a lack of men and artillery, the British nevertheless “had a ten-to-one advantage over the Turks and could easily have seized the highlands overlooking the bay.” If they taken the initiative and won this “easy” battle, we would not be questioning the lack of men and machines at all.

Still, overconfidence can be tested in controlled scientific experiments. We ran wargames in which men (but not women) turned out to significantly overconfident about their chances of winning (“Overconfidence in Wargames”). Furthermore, those who were more overconfident were more likely to launch unprovoked attacks on their enemies. These confident and aggressive subjects also tended to score highly on personality tests of narcissism. The pattern that Galdwell describes is certainly apparent in the lab as well as in Gallipoli and Wall Street.

The big question is why we have these biases in the first place. From an evolutionary perspective, any bias that causes what are essentially decision-making “errors” leading to disasters should have been stamped out by natural selection. However, for all the havoc that overconfidence reaps, it also appears to bring glory. Not only does a little bit of overconfidence appear to improve resolve, perseverance, and effective bluffing, it is also disproportionately found in people who rise to positions of power. To reach the top (or even want it), you have to believe in yourself, believe that your ideas are better than everyone else’s, and you have to keep on believing that in the face of grinding daily criticism telling you exactly the opposite. Confidence is both a virtue and a vice, simultaneously propelling us towards great—even apparently impossible—things like landing on the moon, but equally to blame when we fall.

Charles Darwin spent two formative years at Edinburgh University Medical School from 1825-1827, so it is highly appropriate that the University is celebrating Darwin’s 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of “On the Origin of Species” with a variety of seminars, exhibitions, and tours throughout 2009.

Given the times in which Darwin arrived in Edinburgh, it is likely his creative ideas were fueled by the Scottish Enlightenment. Head of Collections at Edinburgh University describes the setting: “We have one of the greatest intellectual fireworks displays that ever happened in Europe. And then one of the greatest minds which the UK ever produces happens to settle on it. You would expect something very important to happen” (How Edinburgh inspired Darwin’s Origin of Species, The Times, February 2009).

Tom Dickins of UEL and I are hosting a Darwin workshop at Edinburgh Castle on Sunday, 5 April 2009, on insights from evolutionary theory for “Intergroup Aggression, Security and Terrorism”. Presentations will range in approaches and applications from laboratory experiments to international relations theory. Speakers include John Archer, Oliver Curry, Michael Price, Max Taylor, and Bradley Thayer, along with participants from the policy world (including the RAF, UN, DFID, and US Office of Naval Research).

The workshop is the 2nd of 6 in an ESRC funded seminar series called “Darwin’s Medicine: Evolutionary Psychology and its Applications”, organized by Mark van Vugt (University of Kent, Canterbury) and Robin Dunbar (University of Oxford).

More on the connection between Darwin and Security

All Darwin Events at Edinburgh

Growing evidence suggests that genes, as well as environmental factors, play a key role in aggressive behavior. A new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) by myself and colleagues (Rose McDermott, Dustin Tingley, Jonathan Cowden, and Giovanni Frazetto), provides the first experimental evidence—in a controlled laboratory setting—that a single gene influences people’s level of aggression.

Previous studies had found a correlation between observed and self-reported aggression and a particular gene called Monoamine oxidase A (MAOA). This gene regulates an enzyme that breaks down key neurotransmitters in the brain, including dopamine, norepinephrine, and serotonin. Humans have various forms of the MAOA gene, resulting in different levels of enzymatic activity: people with the low activity form produce less of the enzyme, while those with the high activity form produce more of the enzyme. Only about 1/3 of people in western populations have the low activity form of MAOA. By comparison, low activity MAOA has been reported to be much more frequent (approaching 2/3 of people) in some populations that had a history of warfare, which led to the “warrior gene” controversy. 

Our paper is the first experimental test of whether low activity MAOA individuals display higher levels of actual, behavioral aggression in response to provocation. Subjects genotyped for MAOA played a “power-to-take” game over networked computers. Each subject first performed a vocabulary task in which they earned real money. Then they were told that an anonymous partner, linked over the network, could choose to take some of their earnings away from them. The original subject could then punish the taker by forcing them to eat unpleasantly hot (spicy) sauce—but they had to pay to do so, so punishment was costly. In fact, the “partner” who took money away was a computer, which allowed us to standardize provocation treatments and no one had to burn their mouths out.

The results showed strong evidence for a gene-by-environment interaction, such that MAOA was not associated with the occurrence of aggression when provocation was low (that is, when 20% of their money was taken from them), but MAOA significantly predicted aggression when provocation was high (when 80% of their money was taken from them).

Our study therefore supports previous research suggesting that MAOA influences aggressive behavior, with potentially important implications for interpersonal aggression, violence, political decision-making, and crime. A genetic influence on costly aggression also questions the recently proposed idea that humans are ‘‘altruistic’’ punishers (who willingly punish free-riders for the good of the group). Instead, our results support theories of cooperation that propose there are mixed strategies in the population—some people may punish more than others, and there may be an underlying evolutionary logic for doing so.

The full paper “Monoamine oxidase A gene (MAOA) predicts behavioral aggression following provocation” is available at the “early edition” of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), and will shortly be available on my website.

I recently returned from a workshop on “Evolutionary Perspectives on War” at the University of Oregon at Eugene. This was perhaps the first ever meeting to exclusively examine the links between evolution and war. In attendance were researchers from a number of disciplines including archeology, anthropology, primatology, evolutionary psychology, and political science (including, for example, Sam Bowles, Napoleon Chagnon, Steve LeBlanc, Pat Lambert, Rose McDermott, John Orbell, Randy Thornhill, John Tooby, Phil Walker, Frances White, and Richard Wrangham).

The general message of the workshop was clear. There is a plethora of evidence that warfare stretches as far back into human history and prehistory as we can see, and every reason to suspect that warfare exerted a significant selective pressure on the evolution of human psychology and behavior. Humans, particularly men, display a number of adaptations for forming coalitions, aggression, and warfare. Highlights included the ecology of lethal inter-group violence among chimpanzees (Wrangham), the prevalence of warfare as a cause of death in archeological and ethnographic records (Lambert, LeBlanc, Walker), and the role of personality, inter-group threat, and disease in human conflict (McDermott, Thornhill, van Vugt).

My own presentation explored the implications of Lanchester’s Laws of Combat for human evolution. The basic idea is that, where combat is fought as an all-against-all melee, combat power is proportional not to group size but to group size squared (i.e., a force three times larger than its enemy is actually nine times more powerful in combat). This offers a complementary explanation for why coalitions were so important in human evolutionary history, and why groups of men may be particularly prone to aggression-the costs of violence against smaller groups can be very low.

Links:

Eugene’s Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences

Write-up in New Scientist