Sublime

The discovery that capuchin monkeys are averse to receiving unequal outcomes, much like humans, suggests that these tendencies are evolved rather than learned.

Suppose we took you and forty-nine of your coworkers and pitted you in a game of Survivor against a troop of fifty capuchin monkeys from Costa Rica. We would parachute both primate teams into the remote tropical forests of central Africa. After two years, we would return and count the survivors on each team. The team with the most survivors wins. O

Create healthy competition among teams, not individuals. As McNeill said, soldiers don’t risk their lives for their country or for the army; they do so for their buddies in the same squad or platoon. Studies show that intergroup competition increases love of the in-group far more than it increases dislike of the out-group.53 Intergroup competitions

Nous allons tenter d’expliquer cette bizarrerie sociale par une approche cognitiviste, comme nous l’avions fait précédemment en évoquant les limites de la psychologie individuelle. Cette fois-ci, c’est au philosophe Jean-Louis Vullierme que nous devons les fondements de ce point de vue sur la psychologie sociale. Ce qui déclenche l’action d’un indi

that altruism is mostly aimed at members of our own groups.

Like bees, our ancestors were (1) territorial creatures with a fondness for defensible nests (such as caves) who (2) gave birth to needy offspring that required enormous amounts of care, which had to be given while (3) the group was under threat from neighboring groups. For hundreds of thousands of years, therefore, conditions were in place that pu

Part III is about the third principle: Morality binds and blinds. The central metaphor of these four chapters is that human beings are 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee. Human nature was produced by natural selection working at two levels simultaneously. Individuals compete with individuals within every group, and we are the descendants of primat