How - Dov Seidman [39]
Let’s think about what binds groups of people together. One of the primary ways societies and organizations fill the interpersonal synapses between their members is with common beliefs or values. These could be as simple as “If we hunt together, we will get more food,” as primal as “We take care of each other no matter what,” or as psychologically complex as “Our spiritual beliefs prescribe that we act in a certain way toward one another.” Like trust, values are to some extent also hardwired into our brains; they are the outgrowth of the neurological effect of trust on our attention-focusing, memory, and error-recognition faculties. However, they are more flexible and more learnable, a more conscious process than automatically released oxytocin and its neurological by-products. We learn values like a vocabulary, from the people around us, and their behaviors set an example of the behavior norms of the group.
Children absorb their society’s values in the same way they learn the language of their society—a child in France learns French, a Saudi child learns Arabic, and so on. Culture exerts a powerful influence on values formation. A behavior obligatory in one culture could be prohibited in another culture, while a third culture might not care one way or the other. The content of values is largely culturally determined and culturally sensitive. Each society reinforces its own hierarchy of values: what is important and what is less so. The traffic accident study we discussed in Chapter 2 demonstrated that both U.S. and Korean cultures prize the values of respect for law and obligations to friendship, but each society assigns them a different priority in its hierarchy of values. Likewise, a child raised in one society may have certain moral boundaries that do not translate into another society.
Below the surface of the societal norms, however, there are certain values that translate across sociopolitical boundaries. Historically, societal values have had evolutionary impacts on how human societies have flourished. Anthropologist Joseph Shepher, for example, studied people raised communally on kibbutzim in Israel, where children spend much of the day in a group. He discovered that people have a strong tendency not to be sexually attracted to those with whom they were raised, irrespective of genetic relationship.14 Something in the group experience over time interrupts the biological urge toward procreation. Shepher’s work reinforced the nineteenth-century hypothesis by Edward Westermarck that this tendency is a mechanism for incest avoidance. Back in the earliest human societies, someone you knew from childhood was probably your cousin, and thus not a prime candidate for reproduction. Therefore, the cultural aversion to incest stems from our physical hardwiring.
So it seems that culture and values are not solely learned; evolution also ingrained them in our biology. Dr. Richard Joyce from the Australian National University, author of The Evolution of Morality, calls this “fitness-survival.”15 Joyce is a remarkable thinker, as anyone who speaks with him would quickly realize. His work combines the study of evolutionary anthropology with the study of moral philosophy to provide another model that has far-reaching implications for how we function in organizations and networks. “Moral thinking [the capacity to conceive of social behavior in terms of values] can be found in every culture and throughout history, tracing back even to the Epic of Gilgamesh or ancient Egyptian writings,” he said.16 Joyce believes this ubiquity of moral thinking raises an important question: “Is there a biological predisposition toward values-based thinking,” he asks, “or are we just smart, rational creatures who are social and sort of naturally invent morality as a way of getting on as social beings?”
In other words, if we want to play to our strengths, to which strengths should we play?
Joyce’s conclusion? Moral thinking goes