The Human Nature We Create
This Thursday, we’ll speak with psychologist Barry Schwartz about why we work. One topic we’ll explore is how our ideas about human nature, whether true or false, can shape the workplaces we create, an idea Barry has explored throughout his career. Below is an introduction to the idea and Barry’s work, as well as links to several related articles, books, and his 2014 TED talk on the topic.
Remember to RSVP to the event here to receive the Zoom link for this Thursday’s conversation at 12pm ET. For the full agenda, head here.
— Evan
In Chapter 8, we find out that Bud Calhoun has innovated himself out of a job. The sweet-talking Georgia gadgeteer, and lover to Paul’s secretary Katharine, invented a machine that made himself—and seventy-one other petroleum managers—redundant.
“Ouah job classification has been eliminated,” Bud tells Paul and Katharine. “Poof.”
The three of them try to figure out what Bud might do now that “personnel machines all over the country would be reset so as no longer to recognize the job as one suited for men.”
“Oh, it makes me sore,” Paul says. “Whatever got into them to give you a Petroleum Industries assignment anyway? You should be in design.”
“Got no aptitude for it,” Bud says. “Tests proved that.”
“That would be on his ill-fated [personnel] card too,” we’re told. “All his aptitude-test grades were on it—irrevocably, immutable, and the card knew best.”
“But you do design,” Paul presses on. “And you do it with a damn sight more imagination than the prima donnas in the Lab . . . You’re not even paid to design, and still you do a better job of it than they do.”
“But the tests say no,” says Bud.
“So the machines say no,” says Katharine.
What can we learn from Bud’s predicament about our own work?
It’s not that Bud doesn’t have skills and knowledge that could be useful to the economy and society. It’s that once he’s no longer needed in the petroleum terminal, there’s no punch-card notch for what Bud offers. In the EPICAC-planned economy, his skills and knowledge simply don’t show up.
But here’s the critical part: his skills and knowledge exist in a system where they can’t show up.
And this brings us to Barry’s thinking about work and the way we understand the concept of human nature. Central to understanding both—work and human nature—is what Barry calls “idea technology.”
“In addition to creating things,” Barry explains in a 2014 talk, “science creates ideas. Science creates ways of understanding. And in the social sciences, the ways of understanding that get created are ways of understanding ourselves. And they have an enormous influence on how we think, what we aspire to, and how we act.”
What influence do our ideas about ourselves have on our actions?
“If you think your poverty is God's will, you pray. If you think your poverty is the result of your own inadequacy, you shrink into despair. And if you think your poverty is the result of oppression and domination, then you rise up in revolt,” he says. “Whether your response to poverty is resignation or revolution, depends on how you understand the sources of your poverty.”
“This is the role that ideas play in shaping us as human beings, and this is why idea technology may be the most profoundly important technology that science gives us.”
But there’s a key difference, Barry points out, between a “technology of things” and a “technology of ideas.”
A “thing technology” has to work. A toaster has to toast, a microprocessor has to process, and a battery has to store energy. And they’ve got to do it better than whatever currently exists. If the technology doesn’t work, it doesn’t spread.
That’s not so with ideas about ourselves. “False ideas about human beings will not go away if people believe that they're true,” he explains. “Because if people believe that they're true, they create ways of living and institutions that are consistent with these very false ideas.”
In the world of Ilium, the leaders of society believe that economic efficiency is humanity’s ultimate aim, that machines are better workers, that computers are better thinkers, that you’re either smart enough to meaningfully participate in society or you’re not, and they create social institutions based on those ideas.
The Ilium Works, the Reeks and Wrecks, the Army, the college entrance exam, and the classification system are all social institutions built on a certain set of ideas about human nature.
What happens when you build social institutions based on a certain set of ideas about human nature, even if those ideas are false?
You create human nature.
Adam Smith and B.F. Skinner, two of the most influential social scientists in history, show us how.
“Adam Smith was convinced that human beings were by their very natures lazy, and wouldn't do anything unless you made it worth their while,” Barry explains. “And the way you made it worth their while was by incentivizing, by giving them rewards. That was the only reason anyone ever did anything.”
What happened next?
“We created a factory system consistent with that false view of human nature. But once that system of production was in place, there was really no other way for people to operate, except in a way that was consistent with Adam Smith's vision.”
Barry builds on this point in an essay in Behavioral Scientist’s print edition “Brain Meets World.”
“Smith might have been wrong about people when he wrote The Wealth of Nations. But the monumentally influential book ushered in a set of changes in the economic and cultural landscape that made his ideas true,” he writes.
“Said another way, Smith’s idea about human nature—his ‘invention’ or ‘creation’—was a piece of technology every bit as world changing as a microchip, a search engine, or a social network.”
Based on Smith’s view of human nature, businesses created workplaces stripped of meaning, purpose, and development, which created people stripped of meaning, purpose, and development.
One hundred and fifty years later, we find a similar pattern in Skinner’s behaviorism. Barry writes:
“Skinner was deeply committed to the view that we could understand almost everything about human behavior by understanding how behavior was affected by rewards and punishments . . .
"To develop this view, Skinner invented—created—tightly controlled environments in which simple repetitive behaviors of deprived animals (typically rats or pigeons) could produce outcomes they needed (typically food or water).
"In these simple environments, manipulation of contingencies between behavior and outcome allowed an extraordinary degree of prediction and control of the animal’s behavior.
“From results obtained in settings like these, Skinner argued that he had created a perfect microcosm for understanding human behavior in the real, complex world. We could understand factory workers pressing slacks for a wage in a clothing factory by studying rats pressing levers for food in a Skinner box.”
But had Skinner discovered human nature or created it? Barry writes:
“This Skinnerian logic seemed compelling to me. It presented a picture of human nature that I did not find appealing, but there was no arguing with the data . . . Or was there? . . .
“I slowly came to believe that the reason Skinner drew the conclusion that rewards and punishments were all that mattered was that he had created a world in which rewards and punishments were all that could matter. What was true inside the Skinner box might not be remotely true outside it—unless you engineered the actual world so that it became an extension of the Skinner box.”
We’re used to thinking of human nature as something fixed and permanent. Humans are X, have always been X, and will always be X. But what Barry’s saying is that human nature, to a far greater degree than we realize, is conditional and dynamic. Humans can be X, might be X, and won’t necessarily always be X (see his book The Battle for Human Nature).
To see how profoundly different the consequences of these views are, insert “selfish” for X.
Under a fixed and permanent view of human nature, nothing can be done about people’s selfishness, so when you build your social institution you try to make sure you create rules and protections against people who would otherwise get one over on you. You create a company that aggressively monitors your employees' computer activity to ensure they don’t “steal time.” You set up a government food assistance program with a difficult and lengthy application process to stop people from cheating the system.
Under a conditional and dynamic view of human nature, selfishness is something that might appear under certain social, economic, or cultural conditions, so when you build your social institution you try to create conditions where selfishness is less likely; you try to elicit the parts of human nature you want to see instead. You create a company that trusts its employees to manage their own time. You run a government housing program that makes it easier for already time- and resource-strapped families to get the benefits they need, so they don’t slip further into poverty.
“Human beings are unfinished animals,” Barry says, quoting the respected anthropologist Clifford Geertz. “What he meant by that," Barry explains, "was that it is only human nature to have a human nature that is very much the product of the society in which people live.”
Here’s the kicker: “Human nature, that is to say our human nature, is much more created than it is discovered. We design human nature by designing the institutions within which people live and work.”
In Ilium and beyond, what kind of human nature are the social institutions—the Works, the Reeks and Wrecks, the Army, the college entrance exam, the classification system—designing?
There are a number of signs.
We see Bud, even though he’s a clever designer, express the belief that he isn’t. Because tests “proved” it.
We see Private First Class Elmo C. Hacketts, Jr. march and turn and stand at attention in a military show for the Shah of Bratpur (chapter 7), all the while a mind-numbing internal dialogue detailing his “ambitions” plays out in his head. The extent of his hopes and dreams are: carrying a real rifle instead of a wooden one, getting shipped off to another country where he might get laid, and, his most frequently mentioned aspiration, telling off any Army officer he comes across when his service is over . . . in 23 years.
We see Edgar and Wanda Hagstrom, of the average family the Shah visits in Chicago, devoid of any real purpose (chapter 17). “I’m no good to anybody, not in this world. Nothing but a Reek and Wreck,” Edgar tells Wanda as he confesses his infidelity. “A guy’s got to have kicks or he doesn’t want to live—and the only kicks left for a dumb bastard like me are the bad ones.” Wanda replies, “It’s me that’s no good to anybody . . . Nobody needs me.”
We see engineers Lawson Shepherd and Fred Berringer take a conniving, me-first, ends-justify-the-means approach to both their work and friendly competition at the Meadows.
We see Anita focus all her energy on social climbing.
Resignation. Stupidification. Desperation. Rampant self-interest.
The fixed and permanent view of human nature in Ilium—that economic efficiency is humanity’s ultimate aim, that machines are better workers, that computers are better thinkers, that you’re either smart enough to meaningfully participate in society or you’re not—is designing human nature through its social institutions. In fact, like Smith’s factory and Skinner’s box, these social institutions are designing the very human nature they are supposedly responding to.
And to take it a step further, we can think about what might happen over time to both the people and social institutions. Over time, this newly designed version of human nature could undermine the very social institutions that gave rise to it. How long will the powerful engineers provide for “John Averageman” (chapter 21) if they begin to look down on him more and more? How many Bud Calhouns have to lose their jobs, before people like him stop suggesting new innovations? (See Barry’s The Battle for Human Nature and The Costs of Living for more on this argument.)
But this is not the only view of human nature in Ilium. The Ghost Shirt Society offers a different perspective (chapter 30). In the open letter written on behalf of Paul, we find:
- “That there must be virtue in imperfection, for Man is imperfect, and Man is a creation of God.”
- “Men, buy their nature, seemingly cannot be happy unless engaged in enterprises that make them feel useful.”
- “Without regard for the changes in human life patterns that may result, new machines, new forms of organization, new ways of increasing efficiency, are constantly being introduced . . . I propose . . . that the effects of changes in technology and organization on life patterns be taken into careful consideration, and that the changes be withheld or introduced on the basis of this consideration.”
In this view, we find a human nature that is more conditional and dynamic—one considerate of the “human life patterns” that change as a result of new technology and new ways of organizing society.
What kind of social institutions would this view create? What kind of human nature would this view create?
At the end of his 2014 talk, Barry poses a question. It’s one that we can ask ourselves now, as we consider our own workplaces, homes, and communities.
“Just what kind of human nature do you want to help design?”
Sounds like a task for someone like Bud, if he could just get the chance.
Additional resources
The above TED talk, provides a great eight-minute introduction to the topic. Next, take a read of Barry's essay, "Social Science, Ideology, Culture, & History," which appeared in our print edition, "Brain Meets World."
For more on "idea technology," check out Barry's essay on the topic.
Three of Barry's books deal directly with the topics discussed here. I highly recommend each:
Remember to RSVP to the event here to receive the Zoom link for this Thursday’s conversation at 12pm ET. For the full agenda, head here.
