Unlike other social species, we trust selectively; we choose who we cooperate with...This is not true for our closest primate relatives, so it is an evolutionarily recent phenomenon.
I would like to see some references for this claim. This seems like a big claim which is core to the premise that ‘trust’ ought to be especially fragile & poorly evolved and so plausibly at the root of many problems, and one that seems to contract animal research I am aware of—even just outside the primates like chimpanzees, you have eg. vampire bats tracking & gradually building up histories of interaction in food sharing & grooming, and many mutualistic interactions (down to ‘markets’ in plants & microbes).
“The Social Leap” by William von Hippel. He basically says we diverged from chimps when we left the forests for the savannah not only by becoming more cooperative (standard example: sclera that make our focus of attention common knowledge) but also by becoming much more flexible in our social behaviors, cooperating or competing much more dependent on context, over the last six million years.
I have tried and failed to find a short quote in it to paste here. It’s a long and occasionally meandering book, much more alike the anthropological than the rationalist literature.
I would like to see some references for this claim. This seems like a big claim which is core to the premise that ‘trust’ ought to be especially fragile & poorly evolved and so plausibly at the root of many problems, and one that seems to contract animal research I am aware of—even just outside the primates like chimpanzees, you have eg. vampire bats tracking & gradually building up histories of interaction in food sharing & grooming, and many mutualistic interactions (down to ‘markets’ in plants & microbes).
“The Social Leap” by William von Hippel. He basically says we diverged from chimps when we left the forests for the savannah not only by becoming more cooperative (standard example: sclera that make our focus of attention common knowledge) but also by becoming much more flexible in our social behaviors, cooperating or competing much more dependent on context, over the last six million years.
I have tried and failed to find a short quote in it to paste here. It’s a long and occasionally meandering book, much more alike the anthropological than the rationalist literature.