The Psychological Immune System

Searching for Status I recall a teenager telling me a story about an incident that made her reevaluate her importance to her father. She explained that when she was fifteen years of age she was allowed to come and go as she liked. She stated that she would come home at all hours of the morning and even though her mother or father was up, neither would say anything to her. She thought they were pretty "cool" parents, and she loved the freedom she had. She of course hung around with older kids, and she would drink beer and other alcoholic beverages with them and smoke marijuana. One night she came home somewhat high and walked into the room where her father was tending to his coin collection. She inadvertently bumped into the glass case where the coin collection was kept, disrupting slightly the orderliness of the coins. As she described it, her father came unglued. He raved and ranted, despite her apologies, well into the night. As she went to bed that evening the realization came to her that her father''s coin collection meant more to him then she did. After all, he never raved and ranted about her late hours, her drinking, or the people she hung around with. The emotional impact of this revelation left her in a daze. Without a sense of belonging she left her home and never returned. Kids can gain status by hanging around with an older and more experienced group, while adults can gain status by associating with people of high rank and power. Chimpanzees, who split off from the human evolutionary line about seven million years ago, also gain status by proxy. Faben, for example, associated closely with the alpha male Figan and was thus able to share Figan''s sexual possessions and food and was treated with deference by the other chimps in the community. The same thing happened when a chimp named Humphrey became a close ally of Figan. The expression "rank has its privileges” seems to apply equally well to human and chimpanzee societies. Just as chimpanzees have their high-ranking alpha male and his partners, humans have their pharaohs, kings, nobles, emperors, sheiks, dictators, czars, chiefs, prime ministers, and presidents. And if you think chimpanzee displays are awesome, think about some of the displays, past and present, of our leaders. Instead of shaking branches and throwing rocks, humans competing for leadership have thrown armies against each other. They have hurled insults at each other, engaged in shaking rumors and money at the public, and have been as underhanded and devious as the human mind can make them. And they have been experts at rationalizing their behavior. If nothing else, it shows how much more creative we are than chimpanzees. But it also shows that chimpanzees developed social rank and vicious competition for leadership long before we did. Are we just copycats, or is the evolutionary programming similar in chimpanzees and human beings?