HARDWIRING FOR SOCIALIZING

For all animals, living requires killing.

People, like ocelots, deer, and every other animal, must consume cells that are alive or were once living. In our ancestral environment, it was absolutely crucial that we were able to detect living things in our environments. What's that in front of us? Our minds have complex understandings of basic kinds of things. When we see something new, we quickly try to classify it as alive or not alive. If it's not a plant, it might be another person, friend or foe, or it might be an animal that we might hunt or that might hunt us.

In their natural environments, animals can be difficult to see. When our ancestors saw an ambiguous shape, which might have been a fallen log, or maybe a lion, the ones who erred on the side of caution tended to live to have kids who then inherited, genetically or culturally, the habit of erring on the side of caution. Nobody's going to die because they ran away from a log, thinking it was a lion, but somebody sure might die if they hang around a wolf, thinking it's a pile of leaves. Because it has been safer to assume that ambiguous things are animate, we often mistake inanimate things for animate ones.

Humans, like many of our primate relatives, live in complicated, hierarchical social environments, and have done so at least since the dawn of agriculture. An individual's prosperity requires careful tending to a garden of allies, superiors, rivals, lovers, and enemies. Understanding the structure of one's social surroundings, and one's place in them, is crucial for happiness, reproduction, and even survival.

Understanding one's own personal relationships is social reasoning's simplest form. Even dogs know who their friends are. What is more complicated is knowing relations between two other people, such as the relationship between your friend and her spouse, let alone knowing who else knows about this relationship in your social circle. Think of all of the details a person needs to keep track of in his or her circle of family and friends.

Keeping track of all the social intricacies in a community requires a staggering amount of mental power. Those who could not understand and successfully manipulate their complex social ties were probably taken advantage of, outmaneuvered, and, ultimately, outbred by those that could. The people with social smarts lived. It is likely that the importance of understanding social structure has, through evolution, resulted in a deep-seated, primal desire to pay attention to people and social relationships. Just as roasted meat smells good and safe places feel inviting, relationships between people are inherently, irresistibly interesting.

The thesis of this chapter is the social compellingness theory: our bias to perceive and be interested in people means that information about people and social relationships makes everything more compelling.

The theory has two parts. First, people tend to believe patterns have something to do with social meaning, intention, and agency. Sometimes this is called "agenticity," the "hypertrophy of social cognition," an "overactive theory of mind," the "hypersensitive/hyperactive agency detection device," or "anthropomorphism." This is what happens when one sees a face on a Martian mountain or thinks that lightning is thrown by an angry god.

When you see something that has the potential to be very good or bad for you, such as a lion or another person, your mind goes through a series of processes. Your attention is drawn to what you see, and you think less about other things. You actively seek more information, through eye movements or by getting a better vantage point. You might have an emotional response, such as fear, anger, or desire. You might make plans, just in case.

But for human beings, this instinct goes beyond mere animism, that is, ascribing life to something that isn't alive, such as thinking that a log is a lion. Not only are we hypersensitive to detecting life and animate creatures, but we are hypersensitive to the presence of other people — human beings with minds.

Second, social explanations that we hear from other people are more believable. That is, explanations couched in terms of people and their interactions just feel right. When we hear about characters with desires, it resonates with something deep within us. For example, in an economic downturn, an explanation that places blame on a few people can be more believable than an explanation involving chaotic market fluctuations, because it is natural for us to see things happening as a result of human action. When soldiers torture, we find blaming a few bad eggs more satisfying than examining systemic problems that encourage certain behaviors.

According to social compellingness theory, we perceive people where there are no people and we prefer social explanations. So, how does social compellingness affect our love for the visual arts?

My friend Daniel Thompson is an artists' model. He poses so people can sketch him. For a while he brought his dog Phoebe along with him. He said the artists liked that; they would sometimes sketch Phoebe "as a palette cleanser" or might sketch the dog after they sketched him. But they never opted to sketch only his dog.

An art historian told me once that if you look across the arts of different ages and cultures, you find no common characteristics. I countered that nearly all of them feature representations of people, especially people's faces. If you walk through any art museum, the proportion of works featuring images of people is remarkable. Why should our species get such better coverage than dogs? Social compellingness theory predicts that we are very interested in people and the relationships between them. People like pictures of people and find them more memorable. For the visual arts, this means lots and lots of pictures and sculptures of human beings. Ptarmigans do not pay commissions. It would be a very different world if they did.

Exactly how much do people dominate artistic depictions? I asked Carleton University art history student Rebecca Frerotte to record how many people were depicted in each individual work of art found in a large art history book, Art Past, Art Present. Although I will use the word paintings as shorthand in this discussion, the book contained works of art in various media. Of the 420 paintings in the book, 333 had at least one person depicted. There were over three times as many paintings featuring people, at least for artworks famous enough to be included in an art history book.

We can predict more than this, however. We should see more paintings with low numbers of people in them than high numbers. One reason to expect this is because it's easier to paint one person than groups. This is also true for films, where casting is expensive. Second, the more people present,...