Applying Evolutionary Psychology to Business

Max Beilby (Evolution Institute)

Evolutionary Psychology

“Evolutionary psychology is an approach to psychology, in which knowledge and principles from evolutionary biology are put to use in research on the structure of the human mind. It is not an area of study, like vision, reasoning, or social behavior. It is a way of thinking about psychology that can be applied to any topic within it.”

-Leda Cosmides & John Tooby (Co-Directors of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology, USCB)

Evolution

Natural selection Sexual selection

Cultural evolution

Naturalistic fallacy

David Hume, 1711-1776

"Nothing in business makes sense except in the light of evolution"

Theodosius Dobzhansky, 1900-1975

Our past

Khoisan hunter-gatherers, South Africa

Office primates

Extract from The Elephant in the Brain,Robin Hanson & Kevin Simler

Common complaints

• Office politics

• Working in ‘silos’

• Incompetent managers

• Low engagement

Office politics

Tribalism

Self-serving behaviour

“Many kinds of competition are actually easy for us to acknowledge, even celebrate. We love playful competition, for example, games and sports… What’s much harder to acknowledge are the competitions that threaten to drive wedges in otherwise cooperative relationships: sexual jealousy, status rivalry among friends, power struggles within marriages, the temptation to cheat, politics in the workplace. Of course we acknowledge office politics in the abstract, but how often do we write about it on the company blog?”

-Robin Hanson & Kevin Simler, The Elephant in the Brain

Primates in the operating room

Working in ‘silos’

Dunbar’s number

Robin Dunbar

“Human beings can only hold about 150 meaningful relationships in their heads. Informally, it is the number of people you wouldn’t feel embarrassed about joining if you happened to find them at an airport transit lounge at 3am.”

– Robin Dunbar (Professor of Evolutionary Anthropology, University of Oxford)

Keep business units small

“Effective communication, coordination, trust and cohesion breaks down once the social unit exceeds 150, what has become known as Dunbar’s number. If a business unit exceeds 150 people, firms should cleave the old unit and start a new one.”

-Stephen Colarelli (Professor of Organisational Psychology, Uni of Michigan)

Gore-Tex employees

Incompetent managers

Positive illusions

• Optimism bias

• Overconfidence

• Illusory superiority

Deceit & Self Deception

“Applied more broadly, the general argument is that we deceive ourselves the better to deceive others. To fool others, we may be tempted to reorganize information internally in all sorts of improbably ways and to do so largely unconsciously. From the simple premise that the primary function of self-deception is offensive- measured in the ability to fool others- we can build up a theory and science of self-deception.”

-Robert Trivers (Presidential Fellow, Chapman University)

The Talent Delusion

“One of the problems with talent is that in order to persuade others that you have it, it is often enough just to persuade yourself. From an evolutionary perspective, this is one of the few apparent benefits of overconfidence… [I]f you are unaware of your weaknesses you will probably not convey many insecurities to others, and others may be misled into thinking that you are competent – for you seem confident in your abilities… [B]ut make no mistake; although this can help individuals to fake competence in the short-term, it comes at the long-term detriment to the group or collective.”

-Tomas Chamorro Premuzic (Professor of Business Psychology, UCL. CEO of Hogan Assessments)

Low engagement

Google: Digital truth serum

Evolutionary mismatch

Mismatch“Mismatch occurs when the environment that organisms are adapted to, via a long process of evolution by natural selection, changes so quickly and intensely that it hinders them to fulfil their reproductive goals. A mismatch example from nature is human-caused deforestation which has changed the habitats of many species so profoundly that they are no longer able to thrive or even survive in these altered environments. Yet mismatch is equally important to describe human brains and bodies.”

-Mark van Vugt (Professor of Work & Evolutionary Psychology, VU Amsterdam)

Are Modern Businesses a Mismatch?“Only since the agricultural revolution that took place some 10,000 years ago – the last 1% of human evolution – did our societies grow in scale and complexity. The Industrial Revolution that paved way for the modern business environment is even more recent (dating back only about 250 years ago)…

Small-scale societies have no formal leaders and the status and power differences between individuals were minimal. Yet modern organizations have CEO’s and middle managers in place who in principle can control all aspects of your working life. The result is the risk of job alienation and power abuse. Finally, job stress and burnout result from prolonged exposure to stressors that our immune system is poorly adapted to cope with.”

-Mark van Vugt

Criticisms of EP

• Genetic determinism

• Speculation

• Cross-species comparisons

• Omission of culture

Omitting culture

“My point is that trying to understand the evolution of human anatomy, physiology, and psychology without considering culture-gene co-evolution would be like studying the evolution of fish while ignoring the fact that fish live, and evolved, underwater.”

-Joe Henrich (Professor of Evolutionary Biology, Harvard)

Limitations of applied EP

• Complexity

• Relevance

• Proximate explanations

• Political correctness

“The system that knows itself has better control over it’s own destiny”

Dugald Stermer

Nigel Nicholson, Managing the Human Animal

This View of Business

References • Anderson, C., Brion, S., Moore, D. A., & Kennedy, J. A. (2012). A status-enhancement account of overconfidence. Journal of personality and social psychology, 103(4), 718.

• Arnaboldi, V., Passarella, A., Conti, M., & Dunbar, R. I. (2015). Online social networks: human cognitive constraints in Facebook and Twitter personal graphs. Elsevier.

• Chamorro-Premuzic, T. (2017). The talent delusion: Why data, not intuition, is the key to unlocking human potential. Piatkus.

• Colarelli, S. M., & Arvey, R. D. (Eds.) (2015) The Biological Foundations of Organizational Behavior. University of Chicago Press

• Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1997). Evolutionary psychology: A primer. Center for Evolutionary Psychology, University of California Santa Barbara. Available here: https://www.cep.ucsb.edu/primer.html

• Dunbar, R. I. (1998). The social brain hypothesis. Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, News, and Reviews: Issues, News, and Reviews, 6(5), 178-190.

• Dobzhansky, T. (2013). Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution. The american biology teacher, 75(2), 87-91.

• Giphart, R., & Van Vugt, M. (2018). Mismatch: How Our Stone Age Brain Deceives Us Every Day (And What We Can Do About It). Hachette UK.

• Henrich, J. (2015). The secret of our success: how culture is driving human evolution, domesticating our species, and making us smarter . Princeton University Press.

• Jones, L. (2018) Ethological observations of social behavior in the operating room, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. PNAS July 2, 2018. Available here: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1716883115

• Langin, K. (2018) Yelling, cursing less likely to break out in operating rooms when female surgeons are present. Science Magazine. Available here: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/07/yelling-cursing-less-likely-break-out-operating-rooms-when-female-surgeons-are-present

• Leech, B. L., & Cronk, L. (2017). Coordinated policy action and flexible coalitional psychology: How evolution made humans so good at politics. Cognitive Systems Research, 43, 89-99.

• Kanazawa, S. (2008) Two logical fallacies that we must avoid, Psychology Today. Available here: https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/the-scientific-fundamentalist/200810/two-logical-fallacies-we-must-avoid

• Nicholson, N. (2000) Managing the Human Animal. Thomson-Texere

• NPR (2011) Don’t believe Facebook, you only have 150 friends. Available here: https://www.npr.org/2011/06/04/136723316/dont-believe-facebook-you-only-have-150-friends

• Pinker, S. (2011) The Better Angels of Our Nature: A history of violence and humanity. Penguin

• Saad, G. (Ed.). (2011). Evolutionary psychology in the business sciences (Vol. 197). Springer Science & Business Media.

• Sea Turtle Conservancy (2018) Information About Sea Turtles: Threats from Artificial Lighting. Available here: https://conserveturtles.org/information-sea-turtles-threats-artificial-lighting/

• Schwardmann, P., & van der Weele, J. (2016). Deception and self-deception.

• Simler, K., & Hanson, R. (2017). The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life. Oxford University Press.

• Stephens-Davidowitz, S., & Pinker, S. (2017). Everybody lies: big data, new data, and what the internet can tell Us about who we really are. New York: HarperCollins.

• Todorov, A. (2017). Face value: The irresistible influence of first impressions. Princeton University Press.

• Trivers, R. (2011). The Folly of Fools: The logic of deceit and self-deception in human life. Basic Books (AZ).

• Turchin, P. (2015). Ultrasociety: How 10,000 years of war made humans the greatest cooperators on earth. Smashwords Edition.

• Van Veelen, M., & Nowak, M. A. (2011). Evolution: Selection for positive illusions. Nature, 477(7364), 282.

• Van Vugt, M. & Ahuja, A. (2010) Selected: Why some people lead, why others follow, and why it matters. Profile Books

• Wilson, D. S. (Ed) (2016) TVOL Special Edition: What’s Wrong (and Right) About Evolutionary Psychology? This View of Life Magazine. Available here

• Wilson, D. S. (2007) Evolution for Everyone: How Darwin’s theory can change the way we think about our lives. Delta

• Wilson, D. Van vugt, M. Beilby, M. (2017) This View of Business: How Evolutionary Thinking can Transform the Workplace, This View of Life Magazine. Available here: https://evolution-institute.org/this-view-of-business-how-evolutionary-thinking-can-transform-the-workplace/

Questions?