National Post

How our animal instinct to socialize gets hijacked by our devices

We may have an animal instinct that urges us to socialize with one another, but it is constantly hijacked by our devices

- Michael Harris Excerpted from Solitude by Michael Harris. Copyright 2017 Michael Harris. Published by Doubleday Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangemen­t with the Publisher. All rights reserved.

Living in large groups, we have learned, puts a major tax on any animal’s brain— in particular on its neocortex. In fact, all the markers of social complexity among primates—their group size, grooming cliques, mating strategies, tactical deception, and social play— are strongly correlated with the relative size of that primate’s neocortex. The bigger the neocortex, the more social the primate. The more social the primate, the larger the group they can live in without having that group implode with violence and fractious behaviour.

The data bears this out. Anthropolo­gist Robin Dunbar, in developing his “social brain w” theory in the 1990s, found that the relative size of a simian’s neocortex was directly related to how large their groups became: night monkeys and tamarins, for example, have small neocortice­s relative to their brain size and hang out in numbers less than ten; chimpanzee­s and baboons have relatively large neocortice­s and have groups of fifty-plus. Humans, for the vast majority of our history, have hung out in groups of around 150— and we also (no surprise) have the largest proportion­ate neocortex of any primate. Dunbar argues that our big brains may well have helped us become tool users, but the real advantage was that we became able to increase the size of the communitie­s we live in. More peers means more safety, more strength, more chances to pass on wisdom, and, ultimately, more chances for survival.

Something else Dunbar discovered was that the larger a primate group becomes, the more time it devotes to social grooming. All those affections, frustratio­ns, and aggression­s need to be perpetuall­y monitored and managed. Surviving in a large group of primates is a sophistica­ted bit of work. Depending on group size, the amount of time primates spend grooming each other can reach 20 per cent of a given day. Dunbar was struck by the fact that, given our enormous social groups, today’s human animal should be forced to “groom” for enormous portions of each day. So how did we get around Dunbar’s rule? How did we manage to grow our social groups without being forced to spend all our time picking proverbial lice out of each other’s hair?

The answer lies in the gamechangi­ng emergence of language, perhaps a hundred thousand years ago. The preverbal primate must lay hands on a friend or foe in order to groom them. A primate that can speak, that can make complex social suggestion­s beyond raw vocalizati­on, can in effect “groom” several members of his or her social group at once. This is a powerful bit of multiplica­tion. What’s more, a talking ape is not stuck squatting in the weeds while grooming; the talking ape can groom while out on a walk or while foraging for berries. This is a powerful bit of multitaski­ng. The birth of language made grooming highly efficient and viral. With language, our ancestors could export complex thoughts from one mind to another, enabling the coordinati­on of hunting and foraging, and eventually farming. With language we could maintain the stability ( and thus the rewards) of larger and larger social groups.

And we didn’t stop there. We continued to discover new ways to expand and highlight our social grooming; and so the human animal ( toting that mammoth- sized neocortex) was able to live in larger and larger groups while keeping some semblance of structure and safety intact. By this reckoning, every piece of communicat­ion technology— from papyrus to the printing press to Pinterest— has hijacked an elemental part of our minds. These technologi­es, in turn, magnify our ability to groom each other, enabling us to develop enormous cities, and eventually “the global village.” We experience empathy or hatred for humans on the other side of the planet—refugees and terrorists that we’ll never even meet. As I write this sentence there are an estimated 7,401,858,841 living humans, and, for the first time in history, each is potentiall­y connected to all the others; that makes 27,393,757,147,344,002,220 possible connection­s.* So, as I sit here, alone in my little office—my cell—the world outside buzzes with more than 27 quintillio­n possible greetings.

This change is, of course, not yet spread uniformly across the planet. As William Gibson said, “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distribute­d.” Indeed, many iPhone junkies are surprised when informed that less than half of the world’s population has access to the Internet. That said, the change comes fast, and neither poverty nor rural isolation will keep population­s offline for long: in 2006, 18 per cent of the world was online; by 2009, 25 per cent were; and by 2014, the number had climbed to 41 per cent. Such a growth rate is phenomenal. Consider how messaging systems, which dominate this new reality and represent our most direct act of online social grooming, so quickly propagate: WhatsApp, a kingpin of instant message platforms, reached one billion users in 2016.

Aristotle defined humans as social animals and he was only too right. Making sure other people have positive impression­s of us is one of our central motivation­s. And when we use screen- based social media instead of face- toface interactio­ns to groom each other, we’re able to be more strategic about that self-presentati­on. For example, when confronted with a Facebook post about someone’s new job, my lovely but nervous friend Jocelyn may write and rewrite her comment for several minutes before finally landing on the tapioca- scale inoffensiv­eness of “So happy for you!!!” ( If she’s feeling crazy, Jocelyn may add a martini glass emoji.) Unsurprisi­ngly, a 2015 study found that, of the roughly 1.5 billion regular Facebook users, usage spikes among those with social anxiety— in particular, those who have a high need for social assurance. The technology becomes a salve, a way to calm our worries about fitting in or belonging. And, with astonishin­g speed, the compulsion to groom online has been absorbed into our idea of the natural: Only 8 per cent of adults in the United States used social networking sites in 2005; that number blew up to 73 per cent by 2013.5 Meanwhile, nearly half of Americans now sleep with their phones on their bed- side tables, using them as surrogate teddy bears. To be human is to be social; to be human in the age of screens is to be massively social.

And yet. ... In the same way that many people are forced to engineer healthy diets for themselves in a world overflowin­g with the salts and sugars and fats we’re designed to hoard, it’s possible that we’re such compulsive social groomers that we now must keep ourselves from gobbling the fast-food equivalent. Has social media made us socially obese— gorged on constant connection but never properly nourished?

Has the neocortex— the very thing that made us human, the thing that kickstarte­d our cities and our politics, our religions and our art— been hijacked one too many times?

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