How hardwired is human behavior?

How Hardwired Is Human Behavior?

by Nigel Nicholson

Harvard Business Review Reprint 98406

134

ew fields of science don’t

emerge in a flash, and evolutionary

psychology – sometimes called modern Darwinism –

is no exception. But over the past several years, evolutionary

psychology as a discipline has gathered both momentum and

respect. A convergence of research and discoveries in genetics,

neuropsychology, and paleobiology, among other sciences, evolutionary

psychology holds that although human beings today inhabit a thoroughly

modern world of space exploration and virtual realities, they do so with the

ingrained mentality of Stone Age hunter-gatherers. Homo sapiens emerged

on the Savannah Plain some 200,000 years ago, yet according to

evolutionary psychology, people today still seek those traits that made

survival possible then: an instinct to fight furiously when threatened,

for instance, and a drive to trade information and share secrets.

Human beings are, in other words, hardwired. You can take

the person out of the Stone Age, evolutionary

psychologists contend, but you can’t take the

Stone Age out of the person.

Evolutionary psychology suggests where –and why – managers may be working

against our inner circuitry.

How HardwiredIs Human Behavior?

b y N i g e l N i c h o l s o n

n

Nigel Nicholson is a professor of organizationalbehavior at London Business School, where

he is also dean of research.

artwork by david holmes Copyright © 1998 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.

That said, evolutionary psychologists do not argue that all people are alike underneath. The dis-cipline recognizes the individual differences causedby a person’s unique genetic inheritance, as well as by personal experiences and culture. Further, likeother scientific theories – the Big Bang and globalwarming, to name two – evolutionary psychology is the subject of fierce debate. (See the insert “Evo-lutionary Psychology: A Convergence of Researchand Controversy.”) Indeed, proponents and oppo-nents of the field are becoming increasingly numer-ous and vocal.

But evolutionary psychology is by now well estab-lished enough to merit examination. Understand-ing evolutionary psychology is useful to managersbecause it provides a new and provocative way tothink about human nature; it also offers a frame-work for understanding why people tend to act asthey do in organizational settings. Put another way,evolutionary psychology, in identifying the aspectsof human behavior that are inborn and universal,can explain some familiar patterns. It sheds light onwhy people behave in ways that don’t appear to bebeneficial to themselves or to their businesses. Evo-lutionary psychology goes so far as to raise thequestions: How might organizations be designed towork in harmony with our biogenetic identity? andAre modern-day executives managing against thegrain of human nature?

Natural Selection: A PrimerOne hundred and thirty-nine years ago, the Britishnaturalist Charles Darwin rattled the world withhis theory of natural selection. According to histheory, human beings were not “placed” fullyformed onto the earth. Instead, they were anevolved species, the biological descendants of a linethat stretched back through apes and back to an-cient simians. In fact, Darwin said, human beingsshared a common heritage with all other species.

Since Darwin’s time, scientists have built on thetheory of natural selection with modern discover-ies, most notably in the area of genetics. Today mod-ern Darwinians hypothesize that evolution occursin the following manner: All living creatures are“designed” by specific combinations of genes.Genes that produce faulty design features, such assoft bones or weak hearts, are largely eliminatedfrom the population in two ways. First, specieswith those characteristics simply don’t survive theelements long enough to reproduce and pass alongtheir genes. This is called environmental selection.Second, these same creatures are unattractive toother members of their group because they appear

136 harvard business review July–August 1998

how hardwired is human behavior?

Evolutionary Psychology: A Convergence of Researchand ControversyThe central proposition of evolutionary psychology –that human beings retain the mentality of their StoneAge forebears – gathers its strength from six conver-gent sources of scientific research.

Anthropology. By studying societies past and pres-ent, Darwinian anthropologists are identifying cul-tural universals with regard to gender relations, artand ritual, language and thought, and trading andcompetition. Patterns that recur across all societies,regardless of time and place, are thought to have astrong biogenetic origin.

Behavioral Genetics. Scientists in this field, draw-ing on research in genetics and on a growing numberof studies on twins and adopted children, focus their research on the hereditary components of the mind.They have identified, for instance, several genesthought to control human dispositions, includingaspects of temperament and cognitive skills.

Comparative Ethology. Comparing the mating,status-seeking, and social behaviors of monkeys,chimpanzees and other primates, scientists in thisfield have observed systematic patterns of behavior

weak and less likely to reproduce. They don’t mateand therefore don’t reproduce. This is called sexualselection.

The genes that survive environmental and sexualselection are passed on to succeeding generations.At the same time, genetic mutations occasionallycrop up. They produce new variations – say, im-proved hearing or sharp teeth. The characteristicsthat help a species thrive and propagate will survivethe process of natural selection and be passed on.Those that don’t are weeded out. By these means,species evolve with stable genetic profiles that opti-mally fit the environmental niches they occupy.Thus, fish that live at the bottom of the sea can seein the darkness, and dogs that prey on burrowing rodents have keen senses of smell. Species becomeextinct and new species emerge when radical shiftsin environmental conditions render obsolete oneset of design features and offer opportunities for a new set to prosper.

Darwin and his proponents over the decades haveused the theory of natural selection to explain howand why human beings share biological and physi-

cal traits, such as the opposable thumb and keeneyesight, with other species. Evolutionary psychol-ogists go further. They use the theory of natural se-lection to explain the workings of the human brainand the dynamics of the human group. If evolutionshaped the human body, they say, it also shaped thehuman mind.

Evolutionary psychologists describe the “crea-tion” of that mind in this way: The first two-leggedhominids emerged after a prolonged period of globalcooling approximately four million years ago. Arange of variations in their biogenetic design brieflyflourished and then became extinct, leaving Homosapiens as the all-conquering survivor.

The success of Homo sapiens was no fluke. Thegreatly enlarged brain of the species made survivalin the unpredictable environment of Africa’s vastSavannah Plain possible. Much of that brain’s pro-gramming was already in place, an inheritancefrom prehuman ancestors. But eventually, thanksto natural selection, other “circuits” developed,specifically those that helped human beings sur-vive and reproduce as clan-living hunter-foragers.

For most of our history, this is how people lived,until their world radically changed with the inven-tion of agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago.This suddenly allowed people to accumulatewealth and live in larger numbers and in greaterconcentrations, and freed many from hand-to-mouth subsistence. From this agricultural period,fast and short steps have brought us to modern civi-lization, with its enormous social changes wroughtby advanced technology and communications.

But evolutionary psychologists assert there arethree reasons that these changes have not stimu-lated further human evolution. First, as far back as50,000 years ago, humans had become so scatteredacross the planet that beneficial new genetic men-tal mutations could not possibly spread. Second,there has been no consistent new environmentalpressure on people that requires further evolution.In other words, no eruptions of volcanoes or glaci-ers plowing south have so changed the weather orthe food supply that people’s brain circuitry hasbeen forced to evolve. Third, 10,000 years is insuffi-cient time for significant genetic modifications to

harvard business review July–August 1998 137


and analyzed where they reveal parallels in humanbehavior. In particular, they shed light on our basicprogramming for sexual politics and cooperative behavior.

Neuropsychology. Using a variety of methods, in-cluding electrical stimulation, brain surgery, imag-ing techniques that film the brain in action, scien-tists in this field try to understand which parts of the brain control emotions and how chemicals in thebrain affect thoughts and sensations.

Paleontology. Based on their analysis of fossils andancient human remains, paleontologists believethey have discovered evidence of how human beingslived and how their characteristics adapted to theenvironment they inhabited.

Social Psychology. Studying social behavior in ex-periments and field studies, scientists have testedtheories in evolutionary psychology about the con-ditions under which human beings cooperate, com-pete, and behave aggressively. Their findings aboutuniversal patterns suggest which impulses and reac-tions are hardwired into the human psyche.

Even with the convergence of findings in thesedisciplines, the field of evolutionary psychology iscontroversial. Some scientists, for instance, believethat evolutionary psychology overstates the bio-genetic origin of cultural mores and norms and un-derstates the capacity of learning and language toshape human nature. Further, evolutionary psychol-ogy clearly challenges what some religions, includ-ing Christianity, believe about the creation and freewill. And finally, the tenets of evolutionary psychol-ogy also directly dispute a great deal of popular man-agement theory, which contends that people canchange their personalities if correctly trained or moti-vated. Thus, evolutionary psychology may not be theonly lens through which managers choose to viewtheir work and their world, but it is a challengingperspective that calls for a closer look.

To learn more about evolutionary psychology, seeSteven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York:Norton, 1997); Matt Ridley, The Origins of Virtue(New York: Viking, 1998); and Robert Wright, TheMoral Animal (New York: Little Brown, 1994).


become established across the population. Thus,evolutionary psychologists argue that although theworld has changed, human beings have not.

Managerial Implicationsof Evolutionary Psychology Evolutionary psychology offers a theory of how thehuman mind came to be constructed. And thatmind, according to evolutionary psychologists, ishardwired in ways that govern most human behav-ior to this day. But not all inborn traits are relevantto people trying to manage companies – for instance,an evolutionary psychologist’s view on how peopleare “programmed” to raise children probably belongsin another article. Several key hypotheses amongevolutionary psychologists speak directly to execu-tives, however, because they shed light on how hu-man beings think and feel and how they relate toone another. Let’s consider these topics in turn.

Thinking and Feeling. Life on the Savannah Plainwas short and very fragile. The food supply and other resources, such as clothing and shelter, wereunreliable and varied in quality. Natural life-threat-ening hazards abounded. As weak, fur-less bipeds,human beings’ strength lay in their minds. Thethoughts and emotions that best served them wereprogrammed into their psyches and continue todrive many aspects of human behavior today. Chiefamong them are:

Emotions Before Reason. In an uncertain world,those who survived always had their emotionalradar – call it instinct, if you will – turned on. AndStone Age people, at the mercy of wild predators orimpending natural disasters, came to trust their instincts above all else. That reliance on instinctundoubtedly saved human lives, allow-ing those who possessed keen instinctsto reproduce. So for human beings, noless than for any other animal, emo-tions are the first screen to all infor-mation received.

Today businesspeople are oftentrained to dispense with emotions infavor of rational analysis and urged tomake choices using logical devices such as decisiontrees and spreadsheets. But evolutionary psychol-ogy suggests that emotions can never fully be sup-pressed. That is why, for instance, even the mostsensible employees cannot seem to receive feed-back in the constructive vein in which it is oftengiven. Because of the primacy of emotions, peoplehear bad news first and loudest.

Managers should not assume they can balancepositive and negative messages. The negatives have

by far the greater power and can wipe out in onestroke all the built-up credit of positive messages.In fact, because of the primacy of emotions, perhapsthe most discouraging and potentially dangerousthing you can do is to tell someone he or she failed.Be careful, then, of who you put in charge of ap-praisal systems in your organization. These man-agers must be sensitive to the emotional minefieldsthat all negative messages must navigate.

Loss Aversion Except When Threatened. Humanbeings who survived the harsh elements of theStone Age undoubtedly tried to avoid loss. After all,when you are living on the edge, to lose even a littlewould mean that your very existence was in jeop-ardy. Thus, it follows that ancient hunter-gathererswho had just enough food and shelter to surviveweren’t big risk takers. That doesn’t mean theynever explored or acted curious about their world.Indeed, when the circumstances felt safe enough,that is very likely just what they did. We can seethis same kind of behavior in children; when theyare securely attached – confident that an adult willprevent any harm from coming to them – they canbe quite adventurous. But when harm looms, suchbehavior evaporates. In the Stone Age, this cautiousapproach to loss certainly increased human beings’chances of staying alive – and thus reproducing.Their descendants, with this genetic inheritance,would therefore also be more likely to avoid loss.

Let’s take aversion to loss one step further, beyondliving close to the margin. Sometimes our ances-tors lived below the margin, with barely enoughfood to get by and no secure shelter. Or they experi-enced a direct threat to their lives from a predator, anatural disaster, or another human being. There areno historical records of what Stone Age people did

in such circumstances, but it stands to reason thatthey fought furiously. And certainly those humanbeings willing to do anything to save themselveswould be those that lived to pass on the genes thatencoded such determination.

Thus, we are hardwired to avoid loss when com-fortable but to scramble madly when threatened.Such behavior can be seen in business all the time.Every financial-markets trader can recite the oldsaw, “Cut your losses and let your profits run.” The


Emotions can never be fullysuppressed – that is why giving

feedback can be so difficult.

same traders will also tell you that this rational ruleof thumb is the hardest thing they have to learn onthe job. Their instinct is to take risks as soon aslosses start to mount. A stock starts to fall and theydouble up their positions, for instance. That’s thefrantic fight to survive in action. And similarly, it’sinstinct that drives people to sell while a stock isstill rising. That’s risk aversion in action. That said,experienced traders know how damagingthese instincts are; and they haverules and procedures that basicallyforce them to cut their lossesand let their profits run. Butwithout such rules and pro-cedures, human naturewould most likely takeits course.

Consider what hap-pens when a companyannounces impendinglayoffs but does notspecify which peoplewill lose their jobs. Inthese situations, peoplewill do almost anythingto save their jobs andavoid the pain of such loss.How else can you explainthe kinds of leaps in productiv-ity we see after a company makessuch an announcement? But anotherdynamic emerges when a com-pany announces that entire di-visions will close. The peopleaffected – those who cannot escape the loss – do theunthinkable. They scream at their bosses or per-form other acts of aggression. Instead of acting rationally, they flame out in a panic to survive. Onthe Savannah Plain, these desperate efforts appar-ently paid off. But a flaming out when feeling des-perate is hardly a blueprint for survival in the mod-ern organization.

Besides being aware that people are hardwired toact desperately when directly threatened, managersmust heed another message. You can ask people tothink outside the box and engage in entrepreneurialendeavors all you want, but don’t expect too much.Both are risky behaviors. Indeed, any kind of changeis risky when you are comfortable with the statusquo. And evolutionary psychologists are not sur-prised at all by the fact that, despite the excellentpress that change is given, almost everyone resistsit – except when they are dissatisfied.

But what of those Silicon Valley entrepreneurswho have made a high art form of bet-the-company

behaviors? Evolutionary psychology would tell usthat these individuals are the type of men andwomen who over the millennia have sought thrillsand lived to tell about them. After all, evolutionarypsychology doesn’t discount individual personalitydifferences. Human behavior exists along a contin-uum. On average, people avoid risk except whenthreatened. But imagine a bell curve. At one end, a

small minority of people avidly seek risk.At the other end, a small minority of

people are so cautious they won’ttake risks even when their

lives depend on it. The vastmajority fall in between,

avoiding loss when com-fortable with life andfighting furiously whensurvival requires themto do so.

Managers would dowell to assume that thepeople with whomthey work fall under

the bell of the continu-um. Perhaps the most

concrete take-away fromthis contention is that if

you want people to be risktakers, frame the situation as

very threatening. The competi-tion is going to destroy us with a new

product. Or, our brand has lostits cache and market share isslipping fast. On the other hand,

if you want people to eschew risk-taking behaviors,make sure they feel secure by telling them how suc-cessful the business is.

That advice does raise a question, however. Whatif you want people in your organization to be cre-ative, to explore new ideas, and to experiment withdifferent approaches to business? After all, most ex-ecutives want their people to be neither outlandishfantasists nor mindless robots. The happy mediumis somewhere between the extremes. What is amanager to do? If you invite people to make mis-takes in the name of creativity, they won’t. Theywill see this as empty rhetoric; in fact, instinct willtell them that making mistakes involves loss (pos-sibly of their jobs). But if you come clean and tellthem that mistakes will be penalized, again, you’llget nothing. Sadly, evolutionary psychology bringsthis managerial quandary to the surface but cannotsolve it. Effective managers need to be adept at thevery difficult task of framing challenges in a waythat neither threatens nor tranquilizes employees.



You can take the person out of the StoneAge, not the Stone Age out of the person.

Confidence Before Realism. In the unpredictableand often terrifying conditions of the Stone Age,those who survived surely were those who believedthey would survive. Their confidence strengthenedand emboldened them, attracted allies, and broughtthem resources. In addition, people who appearedself-confident were more attractive as mates – theylooked as if they were hardy enough to survive andprosper. Thus, people who radiated confidencewere those who ended up with the best chances ofpassing on their genes. The legacy of this dynamicis that human beings put confidence before realismand work hard to shield themselves from any evi-dence that would undermine their mind games.

Countless management books have been writtenextolling the virtues of confidence; they cleverlyfeed right into human nature. Given their bioge-netic destiny, people are driven to feel good aboutthemselves. But if you operate on a high-octaneconfidence elixir, you run into several dangers. Youneglect, for instance, to see important clues aboutimpending disasters. You may forge into hopelessbusiness situations, assuming you have the rightstuff to fix them. The propensity to put confidencebefore realism also explains why many business-people act as though there isn’t a problem they can’tcontrol: The situation isn’t that bad – all it needs issomeone with the right attitude.

The truth is, even with self-confidence we can-not control the world. Some events are random.Ask any CEO who has been blamed for a company’spoor performance wrought by an unpredictablelurch in exchange rates. Or ask any young M.B.A.sent in by corporate headquarters to turn around afactory bleeding red. He might go in with highhopes, but a year or two later he’ll be talking aboutall the factors outside his control thathe couldn’t conquer.

What’s the message for managers?Perhaps that it makes sense some-times to challenge human nature andask questions such as, Am I beingoverly optimistic? or Am I demandingtoo much of a certain manager? Suchquestions force us to separate confi-dence from reality, for as evolutionary psychologytells us, our minds won’t instinctively do that.

Classification Before Calculus. The world ofhunter-gatherers was complex and constantly pre-sented new predicaments for humans. Whichberries can be eaten without risk of death? Where isgood hunting to be found? What kind of body lan-guage indicates that a person cannot be trusted?

In order to make sense of a complicated universe,human beings developed prodigious capabilities

for sorting and classifying information. In fact, researchers have found that some nonliterate tribesstill in existence today have complete taxonomicknowledge of their environment in terms of animalhabits and plant life. They have systematized theirvast and complex world.

In the Stone Age, such capabilities were not lim-ited to the natural environment. To prosper in theclan, human beings had to become expert at mak-ing judicious alliances. They had to know whom toshare food with, for instance – someone who wouldreturn the favor when the time came. They had toknow what untrustworthy individuals generallylooked like, too, because it would be foolish to dealwith them. Thus, human beings became hardwiredto stereotype people based on very small pieces ofevidence, mainly their looks and a few readily appar-ent behaviors.

Whether it was sorting berries or people, bothworked to the same end. Classification made lifesimpler and saved time and energy. Every time youhad food to share, you didn’t have to figure outanew who could and couldn’t be trusted. Your clas-sification system told you instantly. Every time anew group came into view, you could pick out thehigh-status members not to alienate. And the fasteryou made decisions like these, the more likely youwere to survive. Sitting around doing calculus –that is, analyzing options and next steps – was not arecipe for a long and fertile life.

And so classification before calculus remainswith us today. People naturally sort others into in-groups and out-groups – just by their looks and actions. We subconsciously (and sometimes con-sciously) label other people – “She’s a snob” or “He’sa flirt.” Managers are not exempt. In fact, research

has shown that managers sort their employees intowinners and losers as early as three weeks afterstarting to work with them.

That such propensity to classify is human naturedoesn’t make it right. People are complex and manysided. But it is illuminating to know that we are actually programmed not to see them that way.This perhaps helps to explain why, despite the bestefforts of managers, some groups within organiza-tions find it hard to mix. The battle between mar-



Overconfidence is part of ourgenetic legacy, but for managers,

that can be a two-edged sword.

keting and manufacturing is as old as – well, as oldas marketing and manufacturing. The techies of ITdepartments often seem to have difficulty gettingalong with the groups they are supposed to support,and vice versa. Everyone is too busy labeling othersas outsiders and dismissing them in the process.

A final point must be made on the matter of clas-sification before calculus, and it comes in the areaof skill development. If you want to develop some-one’s skills, the best route is to givethem ways of classifying situationsand behaviors. Lists are attractive andoften memorable. But advanced mathand science education largely relieson sophisticated models of processes –complex explanations of cause and effect in different circumstances. Italso advocates probabilistic ways ofthinking, in which people are taught to weigh thecombined likelihoods of different events togetheras they make decisions. Many people may come tounderstand and use these methods – weather fore-casters and investment analysts are examples – buteven lengthy training cannot fully eliminate our irrational and simplifying biases.

Gossip. Along with a scarcity of food, clothing,and shelter, and the constant threat of natural dis-aster, the Stone Age was also characterized by anever-shifting social scene. From one season to thenext, it was not easy to predict who would havefood to eat, let alone who would be healthy enoughto endure the elements. In other words, the individ-uals who ruled the clan and controlled the re-sources were always changing. Survivors werethose who were savvy enough to anticipate powershifts and swiftly adjust for them, as well as thosewho could manipulate them.

They were savvy because they engaged in, andlikely showed a skill for, gossip. Even in today’s office environment, we can observe that expert gos-sips time and again know key information beforeeveryone else. That has always been true in humansociety. The people who chat with just the rightpeople at just the right time often put themselves injust the right position. In fact, it is fair to assumethat human beings have stayed alive and increasedtheir chances of reproducing because of such artfulpoliticking.

What are the implications for managers? Rumor –what has been called “unofficial news” – is endem-ic in every organization. And since the interest inrumors is ingrained into human nature, it makeslittle sense to try to eliminate such interest by in-creasing the flood of official communications.Rather, managers would be smart to keep tabs on

the rumor mill. They might even use their own net-works to plug into the grapevine. This doesn’tmean managers should engage in, or encourage,malicious and petty gossip. But when it comes togossip, it may be that managing by wandering aboutis the most effective way to communicate, as longas it is performed in a climate of trust and openness.

Empathy and Mind Reading. Simply stated, thesetwo skills are the building blocks of gossip. People

are much more likely to hear secrets and other information if they appear trustworthy and sympa-thetic. Likewise, people with a knack for guessingwhat others are thinking tend to ask better – that is,more probing and leading – questions. Thus, be-cause empathy and mind reading abet the survivalskill of gossip, they too became hardwired into thehuman brain.

At the same time, people are also programmed forfriendliness. Sharing food was the basis for the co-operative exchange with relative strangers in thehunter-gatherer clan. Human beings, or at leastthose who survived, became adept at buildingpeaceful social alliances and carrying out negotia-tions with win-win outcomes. We can see these“design features” at every turn today – people loveto barter and trade; in fact, both have been key-stones of economies since the beginning of civiliza-tion. (We can see barter and trade even among veryyoung children at play.) And so it is that friendly exchanges of information and favors remain ourpreferred way of dealing with nonfamily and a keyto building political alliances for social success.

The good news for managers on this front is thatempathy and friendliness are, in general, positivedynamics to have around the organization. It pays toempathize with customers, for instance, and we canassume that things like commitment and loyaltygrow when employees are friendly to one another.The bad news is that the instinct for empathy veryeasily leads us to imagine that people are more sim-ilar to ourselves, as well as more competent andtrustworthy, than they really are. Further, the driveto act friendly can make delivering bad news –about performance, for instance – very difficult.

The employment interview is one situation thatexploits the capacities for friendliness and imagina-



Because gossip saved lives inthe Stone Age, it will be with

organizations forever.

A New Science and Its Message for Managers

use emotions as the first screenfor all information received

avoid risky situations whenfeeling relatively secure andto fight frantically when feelingthreatened

feel more self-confident thanreality justifies

quickly classify people, situations,and experiences into categories–good or bad, in or out–ratherthan engage in time-consumingand nuanced analysis

gossip

participate in public competitionsfor status and chest thumpingabout their successes (true of menin particular)

feel most comfortable incommunities with no morethan 150 members

seek superiority or security inhierarchical systems

lead in different ways or notbe leaders at all



Yes, you can train people, teach them about differentideas, and exhort them to change their attitudes. But evolutionary psychology asserts that there is a limitto how much the human mind can be remolded.Proponents of evolutionary psychology assert that,because of natural selection, human beings living andworking in today ’s modern civil ization retain the

hardwired mentality – that is, the needs, drives, andbiases – of Stone Age hunter-gatherers. The theory of evolutionar y psychology is complex, and itsimplications equally so. But below is a summary ofsome points that evolutionary psychologists wouldmake to managers tr ying to understand humanbehavior.

If people arehardwiredto…

• recognize that people hear bad news, such as anegative performance review, first and loudest,even when the majority of the news is good.

• be careful of who is in charge of the organization’sperformance appraisal system.

• understand that people will resist changeexcept when they are dissatisfied.

• realize that people will act and think creativelywhen given space, safety, and support.

• routinely question whether they or theiremployees are understating the difficultyof work-related challenges.

• be careful that the interview process hascontrols for objective judgment.

• realize that mixing disparate functions or teamsmeans having to overcome a deep-rooted humanpropensity to stereotype strangers.

• not waste time trying to eradicate rumors.Plug into the grapevine and make sure it stayshealthy, not malicious.

• encourage employees to refrain fromone-upmanship but understand you arefighting their programming.

• keep organizations from growing too large andbreak them into smaller cells if they do.

• refrain from asking people to identify with morethan one group at a time–such as a regionalgroup and a product group.

• recognize that hierarchy is forever and thatpeople will establish status distinctions evenif the organization tries to remove them.

• understand that the desire to lead is perhaps themost important characteristic a leader can possess.

• accept that people cannot demonstrate leadershipqualities they don’t innately possess, even if thebusiness situation urgently demands it.

then the messagefor managersis to…

tive empathy to its fullest extent. Our natural ten-dency to sympathize with the person across thetable drives us to make excuses for their weaknessesor to read more substance into their work or personalexperiences than truly exists. At the same time, ourprogramming for classification – sorting people intoin-groups and out-groups – can make us harshlyjudge those who appear to be in the out-group. Wewill even focus on and exaggerate the differenceswe perceive. Thus, strict controls and lengthytraining are needed to make interviews effectiveprocedures for objective judgment, and even thenthey remain highly vulnerable to empathy andmind-reading biases.

Contest and Display. Finally, status in tribalgroups was often won in public competitions. (Suchcompetitions were not introduced by human be-ings; indeed, they were dramas commonly playedout by primates.) To establish status in early hu-man societies, people (especially males) frequentlyset up contests, such as games and battles, withclear winners and losers. Likewise, they displayedtheir status and mental gifts in elaborate public rituals and artistic displays. The underlying pur-pose of such practices was to impress others. Suc-cessful – that is, high-status – and healthy maleswere thought to produce strong and intelligentprogeny. For survival-driven females, determinednot only to reproduce but to nurture their babiesonce they arrived, such males were…well, irre-sistible. For their part, women found contestsamongst themselves unnecessary, although theydid seek to be more attractive than one another sothey could have the prime pick of high-statusmales. But more direct forms of contest neitherguaranteed females’ status as attractive mates norhelped them to achieve their ends of protectingtheir young.

And so the ingrained male desire to do public battle and display virility and competence persists today. That should not surprise any denizen of thecorporate world. Men are forever setting up con-tests between themselves to see who will be pro-moted, win a new account, or gain the ear of lead-ers. Winners of these contests are frequently givento public displays of chest thumping. And even inorganizational settings, which would benefit fromcooperation, men frequently choose competition.

What are the implications for managers? The an-swer is sensitive territory, because it gets into theinborn differences between men and women andwhat that means for managers. Recall what hap-pened nine years ago, when Felice Schwartz sug-gested in her article “Management Women and theNew Facts of Life” (HBR January–February 1989)

that companies consider establishing a different ca-reer track for women with children. Some heraldedthe concept of the so-called Mommy Track – a termnot coined by Schwartz, by the way – but manyfeminists excoriated her work.

Suffice it to say, then, that managers should beaware that you can urge men to refrain from one-upmanship, but you may be fighting their program-ming. In addition, companies might ask themselvesif their rules of success were written by men and formen. It might be that the reason most women arenot breaking the glass ceiling is because they findthose rules abhorrent – or at the very least, againsttheir nature.

When all is said and done, evolutionary psychol-ogy paints a rather illuminating picture of humanthinking and feeling. We may wish human beingswere more rational, but our brains, created for a dif-ferent time and place, get in the way. But the truthis, today we need rationality more than ever. Theworld is increasingly complex, and we must makeharder, more layered decisions faster and faster.

Of course, people have devised wonderful instru-ments to help predict and manage uncertainty. Themere fact that there are not many more roguetraders like Nick Leeson, who single-handedlymanaged to bring down Britain’s Barings Bank withhis gaming of the system, suggests that many con-trols are already in place that tame and managethese impulses. On modern trading floors, for ex-ample, computer modeling is widely used to esti-mate risks and probabilities in an unbiased fashion.Traders and managers collectively pore over risk-bearing market positions to limit financial expo-sure. Reward and punishment systems encourageopenness about loss and heavily penalize conceal-ment. Responsibility for different elements of trad-ing deals is divided across functions to prevent anindividual from committing fraud. But even withthese controls and safeguards, it is a sure thing thatenormous costs are still being incurred through theexercise of human irrationality in these and othercomplex information-based environments.

Evolutionary psychologists contend, however,that our primitive psychorationality, so well adaptedto the precarious life of hunter-gatherers, will con-tinue to call the tune whenever it is free to do so. Inthe choices businesspeople make, one can expectthe hidden agendas of emotion, loss aversion, over-confidence, categorical thinking, and social intu-ition to continue regularly to prevail. Evolutionarypsychology thus suggests how important it is for usto have a clear view of our biased natures so that wecan construct a mind-set to guard against theirworst consequences.



Social Living. Along with the workings of the hu-man mind, evolutionary psychology also exploresthe dynamics of the human group. How does naturalselection explain the ways in which people organize?What aspects of social behavior can be explained byour evolved circuitry?

To identify our programming for social living, scientists in the field ofevolutionary psychology have lookedfor common features across humansocieties, past and present, and ex-trapolated from them what must bebiogenetic. The concept of coevol-ution is critical to this method ofanalysis – the idea that cultures and social institu-tions are adaptations that make compromises between environmental conditions, such as foodsupply and population density, and the enduringcharacteristics of human psychology. So, as compar-ative anthropologists have pointed out, when onelooks across the astonishing variety of human soci-eties, one repeatedly encounters common themes,dilemmas, and conflicts. These common factors are inborn and drive many aspects of social rela-tions today.

Evolutionary psychology’s findings about the human hardwiring for social relations have impli-cations for managers in three areas: organizationaldesign, hierarchy, and leadership.

Organizational Design. Like the primates thatcame before them, human beings were never lon-ers. Indeed, the family is the centerpiece of all hu-man societies. Because of the family’s enduringprevalence, modern Darwinian thinkers hypothe-size that human survival was greatly aided by qual-ified monogamy – pair-bonding necessary for theprolonged care of the young. But no family wouldhave survived the Stone Age without additionalsupport. And thus was born the clan, or an extendedfamily built through “marriages” – that is, matingwith other families.

Clans on the Savannah Plain appear to have beensimilar in one key way: they contained up to 150members, according to Robin Dunbar, professor ofpsychology at the University of Liverpool. In his re-search, Dunbar found a linear relationship betweenthe brain size and troup size of social primates. Thelarger the brain, the larger the size of the group.Now, it may appear that other species have groupslarger than 150 members. We see thousands ofmoose together, for instance. But these are not clansin the way people configure or experience them.There is no binding connection or social organiza-tion among moose. They don’t protect one another,for instance, or establish divisions of labor. They

simply gather into mating groups – a single malewith his many female mates and their offspring.

Human beings organize socially. They are heldtogether by the bond of communities, althoughmaintaining such communities is a complex mat-

ter. It involves a lot of brain power – rememberingpeople, forging alliances, and keeping promises areall advanced mental tasks. And given our brain size,the biggest clan a human being can handle, accord-ing to Dunbar’s research, has 150 members.

It may very well be for this reason that we see thepersistent strength of small to midsize family busi-nesses throughout history. These companies, typi-cally having no more than 150 members, remainthe predominant model the world over, accountingfor approximately 60% of all employment. Family-owned companies account for a great deal of bigbusiness, too, especially in the Asia-Pacific region.And in the West, many major companies are under-pinned by substantial interlocking family networks.

Of course, many companies today employ morethan 150 people. And many of these businessesstruggle with the tendency of people to break offinto cliques, or of functions, departments, or eventeams to come into conflict with one another. In re-cent years, many companies have sought to dealwith this complexity through matrix management.Yet it has proved to be one of the most difficult andleast successful organizational forms. The reason?Evolutionary psychologists contend that matrixforms are inherently unstable due to the conflictingpulls toward too many centers of gravity. People areinstinctively drawn toward commitment to onecommunity at a time, usually the one that is closerand more familiar to them. Thus, when a modernbusinessperson is asked to report both to her regionalboss and to a product manager, she is typically drawnto the regional boss because he is physically closerto where the employee works and to what sheknows best. Similarly, when a manager “belongs”to a function and a project, her allegiance to thefunction – her primary assignment – usually pre-vails. The dual loyalties required by matrix man-agement are difficult to sustain in the long term. Itis no surprise, then, that the matrix has workedbest where it has been limited in size and duration



The desire to obtain status inorganizational settings is, simply

put, part of human nature.

and where it has been directed toward the commonend of a finite project – like a temporary assembly ofa section of the hunter-gatherer clan for some majorundertaking such as a game drive.

Evolutionary psychology’s rule of 150 might alsoexplain the success in modern times of cellular andstarburst organizational forms, where subunits arespun off from the main body of a growing company,or where new units are acquired but allowed toretain a high degree of autonomy, such that nosubunit exceeds more than 150 people.Two notable examples are ABB, themultinational based in Sweden,which has become a world-beater by this means, andVirgin, which, especiallyin its early days, cultivateda climate of subunitentrepreneurship andself-management. ABBhas around 1,500 units,each with an averageof 50 people. Virgin al-lowed no more than 50employees at any one siteduring its early years ofphenomenal growth andsuccess.

Hierarchy. We return againto the relationship between thesexes. The hunter-gatherer worldwas certainly more fluid thanours is today in that wealth –represented by food, clothing,and shelter – was less predictable. As noted earlier,those who were “rich” one season could easily be-come poor the next. Still, we can assume that somepeople regularly did better than others and therebyaccrued status. When it came time to make al-liances, they were sought out, and when it cametime to pick leaders, they were chosen.

Wealth mattered in the social relations of StoneAge people, but probably no more than another sta-tus symbol – reproductive quality. Females came tobelieve that dominant males produced stronger babies more likely to survive the elements. Malessought females who appeared healthy and fertile.

By now, you might be wondering, What does thismean for managers? The answer is that the desire toobtain status in organizational settings is humannature. When we try to eliminate it through de-lay-ering, or more radically in experimental communi-ties such as the kibbutz, the human instinct for sta-tus differentiation reasserts itself. Even in smalltemporary groupings of equals, such as training

events that bring together strangers from differentcompanies, the beginnings of hierarchy can beglimpsed immediately in patterns of informal lead-ership and deferential behavior. What we are seeingis the acting out of roles as ancient as our time onthe planet.

Evolutionary psychology’s perspective suggeststhat if managers try to eliminate status markerssuch as the corner office and the assigned parking

space, or if they try to get rid of hierarchicallevels, fresh variations will just

spring up in their place. By allmeans, status and hierarchy

should be managed ina fluid and flexible

way, and all compa-nies know by nowto avoid excessivelylong chains of com-mand. But man-agers would dowell to recognizeand reward em-

ployees throughstatus recognition.

That doesn’t alwaysrequire conventional

rewards such as promo-tions and salary increases;

status can also be awardedthrough responsibilities such as

the temporary leadership ofa product team.

Taken together, the re-search of evolutionary psychology on group sizeand hierarchy helps a manager to think anew aboutteams. Indeed, managers should try to keep teams,such as work groups and committees, to manage-able family-size proportions of up to 12. Moreover,managers should probably not try to run teams asstrict democracies. They should build a commonset of purposes by maintaining an egalitarian ethosof sharing and equal rights but expect and allow in-formal leadership roles to operate. At the sametime, managers should watch out for herding, a nor-mal human tendency to imitate what others – espe-cially high-status individuals – are doing ratherthan making one’s own judgment.

Finally, evolutionary psychology’s observationsabout hierarchy suggest that companies can main-tain an egalitarian ethos of power only under cer-tain conditions. Some small to midsize consultingfirms that “hunt and gather” for clients and proj-ects in a dispersed field of uncertain resources seembest able to cultivate this ideal, just as was done in



Our challenges may be different fromhunter-gatherers’, but our hardwiring is not.

the old craft guilds before industrialization. For themore conventional organization of modern times,we encounter the contradictions so masterfully sat-irized by the Dilbert cartoon strip – employees whoare cynical about empowerment and mistrustful ofde-layering because they recognize that traditionalpower and hidden hierarchy are alive and well andin control of their destinies. The Dilbert characters

seem to know what any evolutionary psychologistwould tell you: hierarchy is forever.

Leadership. As noted at the outset of this article,evolutionary psychology does not dispute individ-ual differences. Indeed, an increasingly robust bodyof studies on twins conducted by behavioral geneti-cists indicates that people are born with set predis-positions that harden as they age into adulthood.Genes for detachment and novelty avoidance havebeen found, for instance, which together appear toamount to shyness. It used to be assumed that shy-ness was induced entirely by environment – if a shyperson just tried hard enough, he or she could be-come the life of the party. The same was said forpeople who were highly emotional – they could becoaxed out of such feelings. But again, research issuggesting that character traits such as shyness andemotional sensitivity are inborn.

That personality is inborn is not news to any par-ent with more than one child. You provide a stablehome environment for your brood – the same food,the same schools, the same basic experiences on a day-to-day basis. And yet the first child is intro-verted and grows up to be an R&D scientist. Thesecond, who never stopped chattering as a child,grows up to become a flamboyant sales executive.And still a third child is as even-keeled as can beand pursues a career as a schoolteacher. Evolution-ary psychology would tell us that each one of theseindividuals was living out his biogenetic destiny.

All three of these children are hardwired for cer-tain dispositions. For instance, each falls some-where along the continuum of risk aversion de-scribed earlier. But each one’s level of aversion torisk differs. The point is, along with each person’sfundamental brain circuitry, people also come with

inborn personalities. Some people are more domi-nant than others. Some are more optimistic. Somelike math better than poetry. People can compen-sate for these underlying dispositions with trainingand other forms of education, but there is littlepoint in trying to change deep-rooted inclinations.

The implications for leadership are significant.First, the most important attribute for leadership is

the desire to lead. Managerial skillsand competencies can be trained intoa person, but the passion to run an or-ganization cannot. This feeds into therather unpopular notion that leadersare born, not made. Evolutionary psy-chologists would agree and, in fact,posit that some are born not to lead.

Second, the theory of inborn per-sonality does not mean that all peoplewith genes for dominance make good

leaders. A propensity for authoritative behaviormight help, but some organizational situations callmore urgently for other traits – such as empathy oran ability to negotiate. There are as many types ofleaders as there are leadership situations. The im-portant thing is to have the personality profile thatmeets the demands of the situation.

Third and finally, if you are born with personalitytraits that don’t immediately lend themselves toleadership – shyness is a good example, as is highsensitivity to stress – that doesn’t mean you can’t bea leader. Rather, it means that you must protectyourself in certain ways. If you have a low thresh-old for stress, for instance, you would do well not to lead from the front lines. You could put yourtrusted senior managers there and position yourselfin the corporate office to focus on strategy.

The worst problem an organization can get itselfinto, this line of thinking suggests, is to have aleader who does not want to lead. Reluctant leaderscan survive as symbolic figureheads but will per-form poorly if asked to manage other people. Themotivation to lead is the baseline requirement forcompetent leadership. After that, other personalitytraits and managerial skills matter. They mustmatch the demands of the situation. But if the per-son in charge is not born wanting to lead, he or sheshould do everyone a favor and follow or ally them-selves with partners who do.

Putting Evolutionary Psychology to WorkWhat are executives to make of the evolutionarypsychologist’s view of the world? One alternative is to disagree, on the grounds that it is nurture, not



The truth is that leaders are born,not made. They are not clones,but all of them share one specialpersonality trait: a passion to lead.

nature, that makes us who we are. Another route isto consider the implications of evolutionary psy-chology as you consider managerial problems. Oron the far end of the continuum, you can use thatperspective as you design your company.

One manager who has done so – apparently with-out any prompting from evolutionary psycholo-gists – is Ricardo Semler, CEO of the Brazilian com-pany Semco. This remarkable Brazilian venturewas organized in accordance with the principles ofevolutionary psychology, even down to Semler’sbelief that groups should contain no more than 150people. In his book, Maverick (Warner Books, 1995),he describes how he threw away his managementtexts and set about trying to find a “natural” way ofmanaging, which turned out to be a highly success-ful self-organizing communitarian system builtaround small subunits. These subunits involvedfrequent trading of people between units, separatedevelopment plans for women, and a flexible use ofhierarchy and division of labor. In the process, Sem-

ler created something close to what evolutionarypsychology sees as our ancestral archetype.

Many other managers, of course, also do some ofthese things even though they are unaware of theevolutionary psychology perspective. For evolu-tionary psychology proponents, this is unsurpris-ing, and a sign that instinctively we recognize andenact what we feel to be true about our nature whenwe are free to do so. However, it might be addedthat more do not do so because – encouraged by theoptimistic recipes of management cookbooks orconstrained by technological and economic imper-atives – they falsely believe that with commitment,resources, and ingenuity, anything is possible. Inthis spirit, time and time again we have tried andfailed to eliminate hierarchies, politics, and interor-ganizational rivalry. Evolutionary psychology saysit’s time to recognize what we are and use this infor-mation to live in harmony with our hardwiring.

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