Morality, Aggression, and Human Nature with Dr. Richard Wrangham

Richard Wrangham (0:00)

The huge story about human society that is different from animal society is the evolution of morality. And when I think of morality, what I mean is the evolution of a sense of what's right and what's wrong.

Michael Gervais (0:26)

Okay, welcome back or welcome to the Finding Mastery podcast. I am your host, Dr. Michael Gervais, by trade and training, a high-performance psychologist. And in this week's conversation, I am super excited to sit down with Richard Wrangham. Richard is a research professor at Harvard. As a biological anthropologist, he is best known for his pioneering work on the evolution of human behavior. Since 1987, Richard has studied the behaviors of wild chimpanzees and other primates, which he has eloquently linked to the roles of warfare, social behavior, and nutrition in human evolution. I wanted to have Richard on after reading his latest book, The Goodness Paradox, which explores the relationship between virtue and violence, and why humans can be both the nicest and the nastiest of species. It's a fascinating phenomenon. Richard's research has fundamentally changed our understanding of human evolution and behavior. And I loved learning from him in this conversation.

Now, you might wonder how a talk about humanity's virtue and violence is relevant to thinking about human performance, and specifically your performance.

Now, understanding humanity's roots is fundamental to better understanding how we can reach our potential, individually and collectively. There are major forces that guide our daily decisions and actions, and some of them come from our culture, some from our families and our friends. Some of them are biological or, for the purpose of this conversation, evolutionary. Understanding the stuff that makes us is key to better understanding our potential, the potential of those around us, and perhaps even the potential for all humankind.

This was a really interesting conversation that took us to places I didn't think we'd go. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did. And if you're enjoying this podcast and haven't already, just a quick reminder to hit the subscribe or follow button and to drop us a review wherever you're listening. It is the easiest and zero cost way to support the show. And with that, let's get right into the conversation with Dr. Richard Wrangham.

Richard, how are you doing?

Richard Wrangham (2:43)

I'm doing just great. Thank you so much.

And you?

Michael Gervais (2:47)

Oh, yeah, I'm loving life. So I'm really excited to have this conversation with you. Your work is foundational. And when it comes to human nature, like getting at that bedrock type of thinking is really important to me personally and to our community. And so when I read The Goodness Paradox, I was like, oh, I gotta find a way to get Richard on. As you have eloquently shared, humans are a mixture of aggression and kindness and society is not to blame for any of this.

It's just what our species are.

Is there anything that we can do to lean toward kindness or is violence inevitable? Do we just give up and accept it?

Richard Wrangham (3:31)

Well, violence is not inevitable because our violence is mostly proactive and proactive violence in animals and humans always depends on the perceived ability to carry it out safely. So if we have safe conditions, people will not be violent.

Michael Gervais (3:53)

Wow, look at that. I love that take.

Can you take a moment to maybe give a flyover about how you think about virtue and violence and then I have a follow on question about the types of violence, which is insightful as well for us to think about, but can you do a flyover of what you mean by virtue and what you mean by violence?

Richard Wrangham (4:17)

My flyover starts in the 17th century. There's been this debate going on for 200 or 300 years or more about the essential nature of human nature. Are we an essentially competitive, competitive, conflict-ridden, violent tendency, cute species that needs to be civilized by growing up in an appropriate educational environment? Or are we an inherently tolerant, cooperative, gentle species that is made worse, corrupted by life? And so you go back to the English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, living in the chaos of the English Civil War in the 17th century. And he said, we are a competitive, violent species that needs to be controlled by, he called it a Leviathan, a state, a monarch, some system for keeping people behaving properly or sending them to prison.

And then in the second half of the 18th century, you've got Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who has become the icon representing humans as a noble savage, a delightful peace-loving species that is unfortunately occasionally corrupted, rather more than occasionally, by ideology, patriarchy, all sorts of bad things. So you've got the Hobbesian perspective were nasty, the Rousseau perspective were nice, and they have been in conflict with each other. And when you say that I'm representing a new voice, the new voice is saying, you know what? Hobbes and Rousseau are not opposites, because both of these tendencies are in us from our biology. We have competitive urges brought to us from our biology. We have an astonishing degree of tolerance that has been given to us by evolution, by natural selection in a way that is quite unusual compared to other primates, other mammals.