Why It Actually Might Be 'Survival of the Friendliest' | Nat Geo Explores

[Music] It's a dog-eat-dog world: winner takes all, survival of the fittest. But is it really? If the biggest and baddest always win, how come there are so many more of them than them? Strength is helpful, but friendliness might actually be the key to evolutionary success.

[Music] They're hugging! I think dogs are exhibit A for the survival of the friendliest. Meet Dr. Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, co-authors of the book "Survival of the Friendliest." A group of wolves decided to start hanging around human settlements, and the friendliest among them started to breed together. Their bodies changed, their minds changed; they became more communicative and cooperative with us. They became... But what's unique is our communication with them.

What are you doing? Dogs understand communicative gestures. If you point or you look in a direction, you're trying to tell somebody where something is or what you want. Dogs are really good at reading those intentions in our gestures. That is a crucial ability in human development. Domestication is selection for friendliness, and that's why our dogs are so good at telling us what they need.

So, if dogs use friendliness, what about survival of the fittest? Survival of the fittest is this misconstrued idea of what Darwin actually meant. Somewhere along the way, it got kind of twisted so that the most dominant was going to do the best. But that's not what they meant at all. They were talking about fitness as in your ability to reproduce. Friendliness, we find, in nature is a much more successful strategy. And, of course, one of the friendliest animals is us.

We often credit our big brains, language, or technology as the keys to survival, but we now know those characteristics weren't unique to just us. One defining factor that contributed to our evolutionary success was our ability to get along. Humans developed this new social category called the in-group stranger—someone that you've never seen before and that you've never met, but you immediately identify as part of your group.

So, in early humans, this could be someone adorned with some kind of decoration or maybe a facial pattern. This would say immediately, "I'm connected to you, and we should be friends." That allowed us to expand our social networks beyond those we grew up with to hundreds of people. Now, you're learning from hundreds of people, you're cooperating with hundreds of people, and now cultural innovation can explode.

That's what was the friendly spark that made our species different than all the other species. But it has a darker side—a darker side that’s easy to see when you look at the differences between these two. I love bonobos because they really do teach us how to be better people. They don't have any of the lethal aggression that we find in other great apes, including humans. The females sort of dictate the way the culture goes, which means that males don't get too aggressive, and the babies are always unharmed. They're just like an amazing model.

You can talk about chimps. Thanks! Um, chimps, while they can be kind and friendly and wonderful—I love chimpanzees—they, like humans, have a darker side. They commit lethal aggression, just like this homicide. There’s chimp society; they wouldn’t share with a stranger because strangers might hurt them. That cost doesn't exist in bonobos.

And then that's where humans become really interesting because we can be extremely pro-social to strangers, and we can be really aggressive towards strangers. Our ability to feel love for these in-group strangers also drives our ability to be extremely violent with those threatening our group members. But how does friendliness help today?

We've become much more of a winner-take-all society, and there can't be very many winners. [Music] So it just kind of puts you into that mindset of being in a competition with other people. If somebody else wins, it's going to be at your expense. Dr. Jennifer Crocker examines our social motivations.

Of ecosystem and ego system, we are preoccupied with our self-worth, both in our own eyes and in other people's eyes. The ecosystem is this other paradigm for thinking about relationships with other people, where instead of thinking about what I want from you, I'm thinking about, "Oh, what do you need?" If the other people in my social context are thriving, that's going to be more likely to help me thrive.

So this might seem like just an idealistic thought, but the research actually points to health benefits. Being responsive to other people's needs actually predicts increases in self-esteem because people feel like they can make a difference for other people. That support predicts decreases in symptoms of anxiety, symptoms of depression, and making a difference for others is good for your sense of self-worth.

I don't think of ego system and ecosystem motivation as being traits. Everybody has the capacity for both of these motivations, and the question is which one is activated at a particular moment. [Music]

There's this paradox of human nature: how can we be simultaneously so kind and so cruel? We're wired to connect with one another, but along the way, we started seeing others as well, others. This ability to relate also led us to divide. The best way to understand that we're all human is through cross-group friendships. Through all our research, it's really been one of the main ways that you can sort of diffuse the cycle of dehumanization.

[Music] [Music] You.