Those of you who regularly follow my blog, or have read The Unexpected Perspective, are familiar with my idea that what Christians call sin is the negative by-product of human evolution. Think of each human behavior as a coin with a "head" and a "tail". The "head" is the positive aspect of the behavior that has helped us succeed, but the "tail" is the negative side of the behavior. A perfect example, of course, is lying and deception: it's clear that the ability to lie and deceive is evolutionarily beneficial, but we all know the bad side of lying. Researchers have shown that primates such as monkeys deceive and steal because it helps them survive. Unlike us, however, monkeys don't understand the negative, sinful side of deception and theft.
Now a new book reinforces the idea as it applies to pride, the first of the famous Seven Deadly Sins. Jessica Tracy, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia in Canada, has written Take Pride: Why the Deadliest Sin Holds the Secret to Human Success. It's a very good book, but in case you'd prefer a video synopsis, check out Tracy's Google talk at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5b46wVZrkQ.
Tracy says her book has three broad messages: 1) pride is an integral part of human nature, found in all societies and cultures; 2) it is evolutionarily beneficial, meaning that it helped us succeed as a species; and 3) there are two types of pride, one positive and one negative.
Tracy has done research in places like Burkina Faso, a small, very poor country in Africa, demonstrating that pride is found in a broad range of cultures, not just in Western ones. She also cites an interesting study that I wrote about in my book. Researchers found that para-Olympian athletes who were blind from birth still physically manifested pride in the very same way that everyone else does, by pumping up their chests and swaggering when they were victorious in competition. The blind athletes could never have observed the behavior, but they acted in the very same way, meaning that it must somehow be innate to humans.
Everyone is familiar with the downside, sinful aspect of pride. Tracy refers to this as "hubristic" pride. Around the world, in every culture to which I've been exposed, boastful behavior is frowned upon. No matter where you live, people tend to dislike braggarts. Nevertheless, hubristic pride can be a successful strategy, according to Tracy, because the braggart can instill fear in, and achieve dominance over, others.
So what, then, could be the positive side of pride? Tracy says that "pride is the reason we bother to learn, discover, and achieve." Moreover, she argues that "pride is the reason we so urgently need to believe we are good." She carefully develops the argument that pride emerged as an aspect of our evolution as humans. She refers to the positive version of pride as "authentic pride." Tracy notes that if you give people a choice, they will seek knowledge from an "authentically" proud person.
This is very consistent with the concept of antagonistic pleiotropy. Readers of The Unexpected Perspective will recognize this as the biological phenomenon that genes not only tend to perform multiple functions, but they can simultaneously have both positive and negative features. I cite the example of Sickle Cell Anemia, a terrible disease that afflicts mainly blacks. The negative side of the disease is that it presents both a number of terrible symptoms, but also dramatically shortens the lives of those who suffer from it. The positive side of the disease is that those who have it, or who are "carriers" of the gene for it, tend to have greater resistance to malaria. While that probably doesn't make much difference in Europe and America, it is a real benefit in sub-Saharan Africa.
I think of Sickle Cell Anemia specifically, and antagonistic pleiotropy in general, as a metaphor for human behavior: each behavior has both a positive aspect and a negative aspect. Just as Sickle Cell Anemia offers the "positive" benefit of greater resistance to malaria, it simultaneously has the "negative" aspect of the disease symptoms. Tracy makes the very same type of argument about the specific behavior of pride, noting that there is a "positive" aspect of pride that corresponds to the "negative" aspect we already know.
In upcoming posts, I'll explore this concept as it applies to other forms of behavior.
