Attendees
Emma, Xiaofei, Harish, Martin, Ankur, Alpha, Mingming, Aakash, Jason, Nikhil
Moderator
Discussion Topic
How have we changed and how have we remained unchanged over the last few thousand years?
Introduction
Village is a diverse community of people who are genuinely curious about understanding the world and the people around them better. We get together once a month for moderated discussions on important issues such as sustainability, health & wellbeing, and education. In our inaugural Forecasting Club dinner, we discussed Continuous Learning (read our first post here). Last month, we met to discuss human nature: if and how human nature has changed over time, and if and how it may change in the future. In this post, we’ll take you through each of the main questions we discussed, along with the views expressed by our group during the discussion.
How should we define human nature?
View 1: Biological.
Evolution hardwires humans to compete for resources to survive and procreate. If this hardwiring defines human nature then change comes at the pace of evolution, slow as long as environments are stable but rapid if environments change quickly.
Our behavioral tendencies flow from these chemical impulses e.g. eusocialism within bees.
View 2: Biological + Social.
Recognizes that biology may set the stage for human nature at an individual level but biology alone insufficiently accounts for our nature as a species without considering the social context. Environmental factors may direct how societies evolve - as society changes (i.e. new social structures, different governing philosophies, etc.), we adapt based on the new stimuli.
The importance of traits that are within our nature seems to adapt circumstantially - for example, abundance in society may devalue collaborative behaviors.
How does human nature change?
View 1: Human nature adapts to context.
In societies where basic human needs have been assured (i.e. safety, nourishment, healthcare, etc.), the goal of human beings in these societies may not be to survive but to thrive instead. This may not be a fundamental shift in human nature but rather human nature stays the same and adapts to the changing context.
In today’s world, we don’t need to be as social to survive. We don’t even need to interact with others in order to get basic necessities - everything can be delivered and contact-free. However, it is still human nature to be a hunter-gatherer, we just do this through our phones.
View 2: Variation in perception rather than human nature explains different behaviors.
People may perceive situations differently, leading to ranges of outcomes and differences in the way they react. For example, someone may perceive the experience of skydiving as exciting, someone else may perceive it as stressful. The person who is excited may be drawn to skydive, but the person who is stressed may avoid it. This isn’t necessarily to say that each person’s human nature is actually different - people are still drawn to excitement and people avoid fear, but each individual may perceive situations differently.
View 3: Human nature changes cyclically.
Similar to how broader business cycles swing from unbundling to bundling, the same concept can be applied to human nature. Previously it was more important to collaborate socially in societies where there was a lack of abundance (bundle). Now that there is abundance, it is less important to collaborate and people can be more individualistic (unbundle). As society becomes more individualistic, maybe we will cycle back to collaboration (bundle). And so on, and so forth.
How might human nature change in the future?
View 1: In the near future, societies, countries, and individuals will collaborate less.
There will be less globalization as countries try to become more self-sufficient and focus on their borders (COVID is an example - closing of borders, countries creating and holding their own vaccines, etc.)
Further trends can be seen in unbundling of industries and businesses - Web 3.0 and decentralization follows this same trend of empowering individuals to have more ownership and tools to create things for themselves, rather than through aggregation.
View 2: Humans will continue to collaborate due to the increase in commonalities between people across the world.
People are becoming more domesticated, making people more aligned on collaborative values.
People are engaging with the same types of popular media and culture due to the level of digitization and prevalence of popular media worldwide - this is bridging the gap between cultures and enhancing commonalities between people and societies. We are no longer looking at each other as so different.
View 3: Humans are becoming more individualistic because they have the luxury to do so.
Some people no longer have to worry about basic necessities, and have been afforded the luxury to question why they do the things that they do.
This has led to an increased focus on the self - a drive to understand oneself more since one may no longer have to worry about understanding the world around them in order to survive / thrive.
View 4: Humans may just exhibit more volatile behavior.
People used to follow more consistent frameworks when there was less overload of information and the time-cycle of interactions was slower. The feedback loop now is much faster and may provide positive, destabilizing feedback.
Gradually, more and more information and stimuli are being brought upon humans, and people may be more erratic as a result. There is more prevalence of extreme and sensationalized information, which may lead more people to act in extreme ways. The information age also provides a leverage to individual behavior, exaggerating the effects of that behavior just in the same way that guns empower even the physically weak.
A lot of information is being spread by non-human entities - introducing a new variable that we haven’t been able to experience for long enough to know how it will impact human nature.
View 5: The demise of capitalism, and ultimately human society as a whole.
Arguably the hottest take of our discussion: the fundamental value of capitalism is labor, but more and more non-human capital is taking away labor and jobs, then there needs to be another way to distribute our resources. The whole value system based on labor will collapse.
Because of this, people are actually reverting back to old ways - some societies are becoming more spiritual and shifting away from focusing on productivity. However, as people have more flexibility to focus less on productivity, this may lead to chaos and ultimately more wars / conflict.
Closing Thoughts
While our animal instincts may have been stable for thousands of years and arguably are also found in insects and primates, they are manifested by the emotions and subconscious motivations which only now, can be revealed by neuroscience. The impact of those tendencies are molded by social norms that are determined by the culture and era as institutionalized by the religion, laws and public opinion of that time and place. But those social norms used to provide a survival advantage which may no longer be true due to the advance of technology that erodes the value of labor and the value of collaboration. Meanwhile, the information age leverages the individual. This elevation of the individual would be an unbundling. In the future, the connecting of disparate groups will then act to “bundle.” Ultimately, the trend of unbundling and bundling has been seen over and over throughout history, but to predict the timing of these cycles is another beast entirely.
Let us know what you think about:
How would you define human nature? Differently than how we’ve defined it?
Do you think human nature changes? If so, in what ways do you see it changing? If not, why not?
Which of the views expressed above do you agree / disagree with and why?
Interested in joining us for our next Forecasting Club dinner? Apply to Village here.