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Email Scrambles Our Ancient Social Drives
The Mbendjele BaYaka people are made up of hunter-gatherer tribes
scattered through the forests of the Republic of Congo and the
Central African Republic. They live in camps called langos,
containing, typically, somewhere between ten and sixty individuals.
Each nuclear family in the camp lives in its own hut, known as a
fuma. The Mbendjele BaYaka lack food storage technology, which
makes food sharing a crucial activity for tribal survival. As a result,
like many previously studied hunter-gatherer tribes, they’re highly
cooperative.
From a scientific perspective, the Mbendjele BaYaka are
interesting because they help us understand the social dynamics of
hunter-gatherer tribes. These dynamics remain relevant, as we spent
the entirety of our history before the Neolithic Revolution living in
such arrangements. We can therefore hope that by studying these
tribes (with suitable caution
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) we might learn something about how
our species is hardwired through evolutionary pressures to interact
with one another. And by doing so, we might perhaps improve our
understanding of why our modern inboxes stress out our ancient
minds.
—
In a 2016 study, published in Nature Scientific Reports, a group of
researchers from University College London studied three different
Mbendjele BaYaka camps in the Likoula and Sangha regions of the
Congo’s Ndoki Forest.
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Their goal was to measure each individual’s
“relational wealth,” a technical term for what we might call
popularity within the tribe. To do so, they deployed an established
technique called the honey stick gift game, in which participants are
each given three honey sticks—a highly prized food—and asked to
distribute them among other tribe members. By measuring how
many honey sticks each participant ends up receiving, the
researchers can approximate their relative standing in the tribe.
They discovered striking differences in how this relational wealth
was distributed, with some tribe members receiving many more
honey sticks than others. More important, these differences
correlated strongly with factors such as body mass index and female
fertility, which, in a hunter-gatherer tribe, play a major role in
determining whether you succeed in passing your genes to the next
generation. Many prior studies have documented what the
researchers call “psychological and physiological reinforcement
mechanisms encouraging the formation and maintenance of social
relationships.” This work helps explain why these mechanisms
evolved in the first place: in the types of social settings that defined
our Paleolithic past, being popular increased the chance your lineage
survived.
A natural next step is to ask how someone becomes popular in a
hunter-gatherer tribe. A follow-up study of the Mbendjele BaYaka,
published in 2017 in the same journal, provides some insight into
this question.
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In this work, the researchers persuaded 132 adults in
a BaYaka camp to wear small wireless sensors around their necks for
a week. These devices captured and logged one-on-one interactions
between subjects, deploying short-range signals every two minutes to
record who was near who.
The researchers then used these voluminous logs of interactions
to create what’s known as a social graph. The process here is
straightforward. Imagine that you start with a large blank sheet of
paper, pinned to a wall. You first draw a circle for every subject who
wore a sensor, scattering them evenly across the page. Now, for every
interaction event in your log, you draw a line between the circles that
represents the two subjects interacting. If a line between them
already exists, you can thicken it slightly. When you’re done
processing all the interactions, you’re left with a spaghetti pile mess
of lines of varying thickness connecting the circles on the paper.
Some circles, like busy transit hubs, emanate thick lines in all
directions, while others are only sparsely connected; some
collections of circles may have very few lines between them, while
others are deeply interconnected.
To a normal human observer, these social graphs seem like a
complicated jumble. But to scientists in the burgeoning academic
field that has become known as network science, these graphs, once
coded into digital bits and fed into computers to be analyzed by
algorithms, can provide deep insight into the social dynamics of the
groups they describe. Which is exactly why the authors of the 2017
research paper went through the trouble of persuading the
Mbendjele BaYaka to wear wireless sensors.
They found that by studying the social graph generated by these
logs, they could accurately predict the number of living offspring of
the BaYaka mothers involved in the study. The more robust
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their
connection into the network, the higher their reproductive success.
As learned in the previous study, in a hunter-gatherer tribe,
popularity makes a difference in genetic fitness—more popular tribe
members got more food and support, making them healthier and
therefore more likely to have healthy children. The new study found
that this popularity was captured by the record of one-on-one
conversations: those who managed these direct interactions properly
thrived, while those who didn’t struggled to pass on their genes.
One-on-one conversations are crucial to the Mbendjele BaYaka.
It is therefore a small leap of evolution-inspired theorizing to expect
that we are all hardwired to treat such socializing with great
psychological urgency—if you neglect interactions with those around
you, they’ll give their metaphorical honey sticks to someone else.
This leap seems small in part because it describes something we
already so clearly feel. The drive to interact with others is one of the
strongest motivational forces humans experience. Indeed, as the
psychologist Matthew Lieberman explains in his 2013 book, Social:
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