Review of How Hardwired is Human Behavior, by Nigel Nicholson appeared in the July-August 1998 Harvard Business Review. Prepared by Terence Ryan for the 21st Century Learning Initiative.

How Hardwired is Human Behavior?

In a particularly interesting article Nicholson describes the evidence for new models of management that the scientific discipline of evolutionary psychology is now offering business. Evolutionary psychology has its roots in a convergence of findings from fields as diverse as anthropology and neuropsychology, and a number of its findings are controversial. Yet, as Nicholson notes “understanding evolutionary psychology is useful to managers because it provides a new and provocative way to think about human nature; it also offers a framework for understanding why people tend to act as they do in organizational settings.”

What is of value to business people could surely be useful to educationalists?

Because human brains are evolved systems, they are organized to an underlying evolutionary logic. Evolutionary psychologists point out that the human brain has not changed – it hasn’t been under any evolutionary pressure to do so – in any significant way over the past 100,000 years, and therefore modern man maintains the “mind” of his Stone Age ancestors. “That mind, is hardwired in ways that govern most human behavior to this day.” Nicholson notes “you can take the person out of the Stone Age, but you can’t take the Stone Age out of the person.”

In business, managers are taking the findings of evolutionary psychology seriously to develop a more “natural way of managing” that goes with our inherited predispositions, rather than against them. For example, in the past businesses always wanted employees to check their emotions in at the door, but it is now clear that due to our evolutionary past we are more driven by our emotions than by logic or reason. Through the process of natural selection our ancestors were “programmed” with their “emotional radar – call it instinct – turned on.”

Their instinct helped them survive in a hostile environment (one populated by large carnivorous predators), because it saved them valuable seconds in making a life or death decision (fight or flight). The primacy of emotions is still with all of us, and the successful manager takes this fact into consideration when deciding how best to balance positive and negative messages for employees. As Nicholson observes “perhaps the most discouraging and potentially dangerous thing you can do is to tell someone he or she failed.”

Another predisposition, useful to managers and educators alike, identified by Nicholson is that “people are programmed for friendliness.” Our Stone Age ancestors survived by cooperating with one another. They shared food and shelter and they found safety in numbers, but only to a certain extent. Human beings have always come together to form communities, but interacting with other people is the most difficult thing a person can do and it requires “a lot of brain power – remembering people, forging alliances, and keeping promises are all advanced mental tasks.”

Evolutionary psychologists argue that given our brain size “the biggest clan a human being can handle has 150 members.” Such understandings are useful to business in deciding how to organize work units, and they raise questions about the practice of organizing students in buildings of 1,000 or more pupils.

As the few examples above show there are valuable insights emerging from evolutionary psychology that are impacting on business management practices. With these experiences and understandings in mind, the Initiative wonders when educational policy makers and researchers will begin to seriously study and discuss what findings from evolutionary psychology, and other fields of research and development, could mean for how we organize education systems?

We believe there are great opportunities waiting to be defined by working smarter.

More articles by Terry Ryan