May 12, 2025 04:52 PM
https://www.wsj.com/tech/humans-evolved-..._permalink
EXCERPTS: Neurotransmitters are chemical signals that tell neurons whether to fire or not, and one of the most important is dopamine, the brain’s pleasure signal. As neuroscientist David Linden has written, dopamine release is associated with all kinds of pleasurable activities, including “shopping, orgasm, learning, highly caloric foods, gambling, prayer, dancing till you drop, and playing on the internet.”
The MRI scan showed activity across a wide variety of regions in the brain when “the teens saw their own photos with a large number of likes,” Sherman reported. Strikingly, she also found that “viewing photos with many (compared with few) likes was associated with greater activity in neural regions implicated in reward processing, social cognition, imitation, and attention.” In other words, we don’t just like to receive likes; we also like things more when other people have already liked them.
Why do we like likes so much? According to Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist and physician at Yale University, it is because “the like button is built, in a very deep and distant way, on the back of evolutionary biology.”
[....] only certain primates have the ability to learn from the experience of other individuals. “Social learning” conveyed immense evolutionary benefits, allowing early hominids to raise their chances of survival by avoiding the mistakes they saw others making, and emulating the successful moves.
This helps explain why human beings are prone to “homophily,” a preference for people we recognize as similar to ourselves. Just as birds of a feather flock together, a vast amount of research has shown that humans have a deep-seated predilection to gravitate and respond positively to sameness.
This tendency can lead to tribalism and prejudice, but it is also connected to humans’ powerful advantage of social learning. When we observe others who are similar to us, we have higher confidence that their experiences are relevant to our own journey through life.
Another human strength is our affinity for what has been called “mild hierarchy.” Hierarchy is useful for any group of individuals that wants to achieve a shared goal—it saves time and energy to have someone acting as the leader providing directions others will follow. In the animal kingdom, leaders achieve their preeminent positions by force and maintain them by threats of violence...
By contrast, human social sorting is based on who is perceived by others as the group member from which they learn most. In this kind of mild hierarchy, members of the rank and file gravitate to individuals they see as the best sources of useful knowledge [...] This, Christakis says, is why politicians like to be photographed surrounded by people: the group shot signifies that they are perceived not as aggressors but as bestowers of value... (MORE - missing details)
BACK-UP SOURCE: https://www.msn.com/en-us/science/sociol...r-AA1EpurG
EXCERPTS: Neurotransmitters are chemical signals that tell neurons whether to fire or not, and one of the most important is dopamine, the brain’s pleasure signal. As neuroscientist David Linden has written, dopamine release is associated with all kinds of pleasurable activities, including “shopping, orgasm, learning, highly caloric foods, gambling, prayer, dancing till you drop, and playing on the internet.”
The MRI scan showed activity across a wide variety of regions in the brain when “the teens saw their own photos with a large number of likes,” Sherman reported. Strikingly, she also found that “viewing photos with many (compared with few) likes was associated with greater activity in neural regions implicated in reward processing, social cognition, imitation, and attention.” In other words, we don’t just like to receive likes; we also like things more when other people have already liked them.
Why do we like likes so much? According to Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist and physician at Yale University, it is because “the like button is built, in a very deep and distant way, on the back of evolutionary biology.”
[....] only certain primates have the ability to learn from the experience of other individuals. “Social learning” conveyed immense evolutionary benefits, allowing early hominids to raise their chances of survival by avoiding the mistakes they saw others making, and emulating the successful moves.
This helps explain why human beings are prone to “homophily,” a preference for people we recognize as similar to ourselves. Just as birds of a feather flock together, a vast amount of research has shown that humans have a deep-seated predilection to gravitate and respond positively to sameness.
This tendency can lead to tribalism and prejudice, but it is also connected to humans’ powerful advantage of social learning. When we observe others who are similar to us, we have higher confidence that their experiences are relevant to our own journey through life.
Another human strength is our affinity for what has been called “mild hierarchy.” Hierarchy is useful for any group of individuals that wants to achieve a shared goal—it saves time and energy to have someone acting as the leader providing directions others will follow. In the animal kingdom, leaders achieve their preeminent positions by force and maintain them by threats of violence...
By contrast, human social sorting is based on who is perceived by others as the group member from which they learn most. In this kind of mild hierarchy, members of the rank and file gravitate to individuals they see as the best sources of useful knowledge [...] This, Christakis says, is why politicians like to be photographed surrounded by people: the group shot signifies that they are perceived not as aggressors but as bestowers of value... (MORE - missing details)
BACK-UP SOURCE: https://www.msn.com/en-us/science/sociol...r-AA1EpurG
