Survival Of The Friendliest Quotes

In our modern democracy, shamelessness can be positively advantageous. Politicians who aren’t hindered by shame are free to do things others wouldn’t dare. Would you call yourself your country’s most brilliant thinker, or boast about your sexual prowess? Could you get caught in a lie and then tell another without missing a beat? Most people would be consumed by shame – just as most people leave that last cookie on the plate. But the shameless couldn’t care less. And their audacious behaviour pays dividends in our modern mediacracies, because the news spotlights the abnormal and the absurd. In this type of world, it’s not the friendliest and most empathic leaders who rise to the top, but their opposites. In this world, it’s survival of the shameless.

This progression is a manifestation of synaptic pruning. When our brains are growing, we make more neurons than we need. As we navigate our lives, solving problems and adapting to different environments, we use certain networks of neurons more than others. These commonly used networks become more numerous and better able to compute information; then they streamline their connections and become more efficient. By the time we are adults, our brain networks are stripped down and specialized. We lose plasticity, but our cognition becomes better at solving the problems we are most likely to face.

While our species converged with bonobos in our friendliness toward strangers, in humans, this friendliness extends only to some strangers. Love for our own groups enhances our fear and aggression toward strangers with a different identity.

If groups could come together in low-anxiety situations, they discovered, these strangers would have the chance to empathize with one another... Most policies are enacted witht he assumption that a change in attitude will lead to a change in behaviour, but in the case of intergroup conflict, it is the change in behaviour- in the form of contact - that will most likely change attitudes.