We are eminently social primates highly susceptible to power dynamics, individual status, and social hierarchies, to the point that we spend a considerable amount of our time and resources in obtaining prestige goods, following charismatic individuals, and accessing or owning places deemed special, sacred, or relevant by our in-group (Shryock and Smail 2011; Paden 2016). If you don’t believe me, just have a look at all the pop items auctioned for jaw-dropping sums of money, from vintage comic books to sport and cinema paraphernalia. In 2003, for instance, comic book artist and creator Todd McFarlane bought baseball player Mark McGwire's 70th home run ball from 1998 for $3 million. Today, Golden Era comic books in good conditions are worth millions of dollars (Fig.1).
FIG. 1. A near mint copy of Batman #1 (DC, 1940) has been recently sold for a whopping $2.22 million. Source: © Heritage Auctions.
It’s not like there are no affordable baseball balls or no reprints of Batman #1. The difference, though, is all in our head. Our psychological biases and computational features include intuitive shortcuts and cognitive limits shaped by species-specific socio-ecological pressures. McFarlane, for instance, spent $3 million on a trivial but prestigious baseball ball in a bid to gain attention and show in-group commitment with the sport industry as he was expanding his entrepreneurial and licence portfolio. Our cognitive skills are tailored to work best within small-scale communities inscribed in a nested multi-level social system characterized by increasing personal distance and decreasing kinship and close acquaintanceship. As an outsider, McFarlane engaged in a successful costly display of commitment that anthropologists call CRED, or credibility-enhancing display (Henrich 2009).
As to Batman #1, and putting aside for a moment market speculations and investment value, whether we own a mere reprint in a recent collected edition or the original item (which, if anything, should belong in a museum), by owning and showcasing such items we become part of a shared, meaningful past and members of an extended kinship, whether or not imaginary. If we factor in our potential emotional attachment to the story itself, we basically engage in mythmaking to build and confirm our moral values, to assert our personal identity, and to strengthen our bonds with our peers (Paden 2016). Indeed, the anthropomorphic biases of our social primate brain are in-group socialization facilitating, intuitively easy, computationally inexpensive, and time-saving: conspecifics are (usually) identifiable as friends or enemies in the blink of an eye (Fig. 2).
FIG. 2. Robin Dunbar’s circles of acquaintanceship. Numbers approx. represent individuals. Italics highlights social complexity in hunter-gatherers, Roman indicates contemporary WEIRD/ultrasocial societies (WEIRD stands for Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic). The asterisk denotes the inclusion of family members; a dotted line marks the overall limit for personal social network and recognizable kinship; dagger signals average upper limit from Jenkins, Dowsett and Burton 2018 (overall range: 1000-10,000). Interestingly, successful civil and military organizations have intuitively adhered to such socio-cognitive constraints and limitations. Adapted and modified from Dunbar 2014: 80. © Leonardo Ambasciano
And yet, as con-men of all stripes, shills of all sorts, free riders, and politicians know too well, it is astonishingly easy to take advantage of our pro-social biases in our urban and digital communities made up of millions of strangers. In a way, our penchant for obtaining or showing prestige goods to show high levels of knowledge, elicit in-group trust, and obtain status is both an answer to the dissolution of face-to-face, contained, kinship-based communities and a boost to create new culture-based pseudo-kinship groups. Post-agrarian and sedentary religions did precisely the same thing, i.e., extending fictive kinship to unrelated people. We’ll come back to this point in a moment.
For the time being, let this sink in for a moment: we are not as clever, nor as sapiens, as we like to think. As a matter of fact, our inborn cognitive capacities are not top-notch, foolproof adaptations either: evolution has neither ultimate goals nor some sort of perfection to attain (Jacob 1977; Gould 1989), and our cognitive hardware is very far from being perfect. Our hominin ancestors actually traded off some key primate cognitive skills during the evolution of their social brain, leading for instance to a loss of contextual interpretation adroitness and mnemonic capacity. A chimp can easily beat us in a memorization skill test (Matsuzawa 2013).
Originally, what would have become part of our inborn biases were just reliable-enough and potential shortcuts that acted as a better safe than sorry reaction in specific environmental circumstances. For instance, there is no harm in overgeneralizing and assuming that any perceived movement, faint sound, or distant figure might be someone or something lurking and waiting with aggressive intentions. It might be the wind blowing through those branches or bushes, but what if there’s a hungry predator or a human foe hiding there and waiting? It is easy to imagine that our most successful ancestors were those individuals who assumed the worst-case scenario as plausible and avoided having their genes filtered out by running for their lives. However, the Baldwin effect resulting from this sieving, combined with our strong inborn penchant for identifying and interacting with our caretakers’ faces as newborns and with our conspecifics later, led in time to cognitive misfiring. As a consequence, for instance, today we see human faces in the clouds or saints appearing in the mould on a wall without any conscious effort on our part (Guthrie 1993; Fig. 3).
FIG. 3. The “singular phenomenon” of the apparition of Padre Pio’s silhouette, or Saint Pio of Pietralcina, on a building wall in Orta, Italy, 27 July 1997. © L. Ambasciano, 2017. Private collection.
Such intuitive biases are legions. We are haunted by a plethora of folk-physics, fol-psychological, folk-biological, and folk-economic inborn intuitions and cognitive schemata, all of which do not offer a reliable understanding of how the world really works but just straight, intuitive, barely good-enough, and sometimes straight-out unreliable categorizing shortcuts (Boyer 2001; Boyer and Petersen 2017). Other biases have been proposed as the evolutionary result of such paramount evolutionary social pressures, e.g., deference to authority, group conformity, prestige bias, and even argumentative reasoning (Mercier and Sperber 2011). Unfortunately, all of these biases can be easily co-opted to boost an “Us vs Them” mindset if disengaged from reflective, thoughtful, slow, critical evaluation and control – the absence of which make us prone to engage in potentially violent behaviours against any given out-group (Atran 2011: 431-440; Turner et al. 2018; Ambasciano 2019: 151-154; cf. Kahnemann 2011).
The serendipitous interaction between (1) inborn, potentially fallacious, and sub-optimal computational processes apt to work within small-scale societies and (2) a ratcheting and runaway technological development typical of several million-strong ultrasocial communities has magnified long-term maladaptive beliefs and behaviours. Even that which might have been somewhat adaptive in the deep history of our genus can lead to utterly maladaptive responses in a rapidly mutating social and technological environment (Martin and Wiebe 2016: 45-128).
Genetically related small-scale kinship was indeed cognitively “tricked and tweaked” to accommodate an extended “imaginary kinship” (Atran 2011: 430-440) through fictive and moralizing “narratives of descent” (Martin 2014: 97). Despite the fact that the hunter-gatherer social baseline of reverse dominance hierarchy prevented (and still prevent in certain places) significant social inequalities from taking place, the institutionalization of sedentism, agriculture, and livestock farming led in time to both overpopulation and the accumulation of economic surplus for an elite of wealth hoarders. This epochal change, albeit geographically limited at the very beginning, tilted the societal balance in favour of the creation of rigidly hierarchical top-down policies, priestly organizations, and dogmas (cf. Boehm 1999; Gowdy and Krall 2016; Scott 2017).
In this unprecedented historical environment, the unadapted intuitive mechanisms of Homo sapiens’ social brain were to be recurrently exploited or hijacked, consciously and unconsciously, to create mythological machines, a concept originally coined by pioneering Italian Religious Studies scholar Furio Jesi (1941-1980) by which we describe
“the dynamic use of [religious] discourses to reproduce power structures and engender an institutional system of authority within an ‘imagined community’” (Ambasciano 2019: 8 for full discussion and bibliography; see Jesi 2011).
The powers that be then built mythological machines to tinker with our innate biases and exert power and control over subordinates. The end result was logically fallacious but attention-grabbing mythographies that “maximiz[ed] in-group cohesion at the expense of out-group relationships,” supporting the social status quo while justifying both in-group hierarchical inequalities and out-group dehumanization (Dunbar 2013: 61; cf. McCauley 2011; Sapolsky 2017).
There have been no crusades for the possession of pop relics such as Golden Age superhero comic books or sport memorabilia yet, but should society morals and economics sufficiently change or collapse (and I have no difficulty in imagining a Mad Max-, Waterworld-, or The Road-like dystopian society) the socio-cognitive mechanisms at play in these hypothetical cases would be exactly those that have fueled the rise of violence between different religious and political factions: an “Us” reclaiming something prestigious from a potentially dehumanized “Them”. Even in the best possible scenario, cherish your original 1993 U.S. Jurassic Park T-shirt while you can… you never know, you might need it to bargain over a bottle of water later on.
I knew this would have come in handy! © Private collection.
Refs.
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