Social Darwinism: TV and human behavior

By Gwynne Dyer

LONDON (JP): The British gutter press hunts in packs, and its headlines on Saturday were all about Nick. Nasty Nick will make a million pounds! screamed the Daily Star. It's not as if I'm a murderer -- Nick replied the Daily Mirror, a tabloid with intellectual pretensions that has been know to use sentences up to fifteen words long. And the Sun predictably purred: Nasty Nick joins the Sun!

"Nasty Nick" is stockbroker Nick Bateman, whose notoriety is entirely due to his role in the leading British version of the isolate-a-bunch-of-strangers-and-then-eliminate-one-a-week "reality" shows that are Flavor of the Year throughout the English-speaking world. But whereas the 28 million American addicts of CBS's Survivor must wait till Aug. 23 for their climactic moment, Channel Four's Big Brother series in Britain reached its climax too soon, with the premature ejection of Nick last Friday for cheating.

Nick Bateman's rapid rise to the status of "most hated man in Britain" came because he is what is loosely known as a sociopath: a person who simply has none of the normal social inhibitions about lying, cheating and manipulating other people. We're not talking here about someone who tells an occasional lie; sociopaths lie all the time to everybody, almost on principle. They show no shame or regret even if caught, and they are amazingly convincing.

Sociopaths are usually male, charming, and highly intelligent (though Nick Bateman falls a bit short in the intelligence stakes). Their non-stop attempts to manipulate everyone around them are distinguished by the fact that they don't seem to know or care that their victims will eventually compare notes. And watching Bateman get his come-uppance last week, I was suddenly reminded of a chilling interview I did some years ago.

I can't find the notes or remember the name now, but I had asked a distinguished academic psychologist if he thought the mere ten thousand years of civilization had produced any evolutionary changes in human behavior. "Yes," he said. "I think the sociopaths are multiplying."

In real Darwinian logic (not the fake Social Darwinism of the Survivor-style programs), every widespread human character trait, like every organ and appendage, ought to have some positive survival value: it should help the individual to live long enough to reproduce. And it's easy enough to see that being a sociopath confers certain evolutionary advantages on an individual.

If you can lie with great persuasiveness and manipulate people around you, obviously you will gain considerable advantages, at least in the short term. If you're a male, one advantage may be that you manage to impregnate a relatively large number of women, most of whom you then leave to raise your children alone.

Having more children is the very essence of evolutionary success, so this should be a very attractive strategy for males. (Lying, manipulative women don't end up with more children, which probably explains why full-blown sociopathy is a mainly male domain.)

But the question then becomes: why have sociopaths always been relatively rare, given the millions of years over which they have been using this strategy. Why, indeed, aren't they the norm?

The answer, my psychologist interviewee suggested, was that until 10,000 years or so ago, all human beings lived in hunting- and-gathering bands of no more than a couple of hundred people. Everybody knew your name and your reputation -- and though ruthless manipulation of other people would bring short-term gains, in the longer run people compare notes, and everybody figures out that you are a liar and a cheat. Then they kill you, or drive you out into the wilderness, or at least ostracize you.

Sociopathy, in that environment, was a self-limiting phenomenon: maybe one or two percent of males were born like that in each generation, but the proportion did not rise over time. Not, that is, until we suddenly moved into the mass societies a few millennia ago, and for the first time it became possible for sociopaths to move on.

Mass societies give sociopaths an endless supply of new victims who have just met them and don't know their reputations. They are a Petri dish in which sociopaths can flourish and reproduce to their heart's content -- and the psychologist believed that this has probably already resulted in a higher proportion of sociopaths in the population everywhere. Darwinian evolution at work.

In that context, it was fascinating to watch Nick Bateman at work under the gaze of the ubiquitous cameras. There he was, oblivious to the fact that millions of people in Britain were watching him scheme and lie and betray, even though he was going to have to live the rest of his life, now well-known, among these same people. He was, I thought, throwing his evolutionary advantage away: even in a mass society, he could never be anonymous again.

Foolish me. No sooner was he kicked out of the Big Brother house for trying to rig the vote on the next week's expellee than he fell into the arms of publicists ready to help him cash in on his notoriety. Chat-show appearances, lucrative endorsements, all the usual perks of celebrity status immediately began to flow in, and Nick stands to make millions -- much more than if he had behaved well and not become Britain's most hated man.

Nice guys finish last?