Pride comes before a fall
t is the greatest of vices. Pride, the estimation of one’s own value, has had a bad rap for millennia. The Greeks thought pride brought the capricious anger of the gods, while in Christianity Lucifer’s pride brought about his downfall. But now an international team of researchers has found that it was fundamental to our human ancestors’ evolution and survival. Their research, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, covered 16 nations and numerous cultures.
Humans are quite singular in the extent to which we rely on each other. Perhaps that’s less noticeable now, with 24-hour grocery stores and the police at the press of a button, but that is a new phenomenon. In the past, people only survived through their reliance on community. “Natural selection would have crafted a neural programme — pride — that makes you care about how much others value you, and motivates you to achieve and advertise socially valued things,” says Daniel Sznycer, lead author and a research scientist at the University of California Santa Cruz. The more someone valued you, the more likely other individuals were to look after you if you were ill. “The function of pride is to motivate the individual to cultivate traits and pick courses of action that increase others’ tendency to value them.”
To test this idea, the researchers — based in the US, Turkey and South Korea, among others — crafted scenarios showing behaviours they expected, on evolutionary grounds, people would value. In one scenario, there is a conflict in your community and people ask you to mediate. The researchers divided about 2,000 people into two groups, and asked one to give a rating of how valuable they thought a person would be to the community. The other group was asked to imagine how proud they would feel to be that person, measuring “pride intensity”.
Not all of the scenarios were so obviously for community good. One was, “I am taller than the average person”, a strange metric by which to value a person unless you need to reach the top shelf. Nevertheless, the researchers found a person’s feelings of pride were linked to the community’s estimation of their value.
“Pride appears to be an elegantly engineered emotion: it makes you pursue socially valued courses of action,” says Sznycer. “It facilitates gains in prestige that make those actions worth pursuing.”
The tests were conducted across the world, from Singapore and India to the US (although not in Africa). They found strong similarities in values across different cultures, a blow to cultural relativism. “It’s not just Americans and Italians and Turks and Koreans who like trustworthiness, attractiveness and generosity in others,” says co-author John Tooby, a professor of anthology at the university and co-director of its Centre for Evolutionary Psychology. “The relative values people assign to those positive attributes are astonishingly similar across cultures. This suggests that the underlying grammar of valuation that makes you experience others as more or less appreciated is a culturally invariant feature of human nature.”
THE RESEARCHERS FOUND THAT A PERSON’S FEELINGS OF PRIDE WERE LINKED TO THE COMMUNITY’S ESTIMATION OF THEIR VALUE
There is one major flaw in the research. They have called their theory the Advertisement-Recalibration Theory of Pride. If history has taught us anything, it’s that names matter in science. Just ask the people who are studying the god particle (which has nothing to do with deities, but attracted global attention because it has a really cool name) or dark matter (much sexier than “a substance that fills most of the universe, but we don’t know what it is”).
The advertisement re calibration theory of pride is unlikely to become a household name.