Are Humans Naturally Good, or Intrinsically Evil?

The notion of humans being evil predates Christian theology and pervades modern philosophy from Hobbes on. Social psychology contributed the bracing insight that most of us are capable of casual homicide. Are all these thinkers right?

Evolutionary Perspectives

The concept that life forms are inherently selfish is widely shared though most likely wrong. Ecologists are discovering that plants are connected in mycorhizal networks that trade glucose and other nutrients for their mutual benefit, for instance. Plant communities participating in these cooperative networks actually do better than if they were independent.

The case for evolved cooperation among humans is surprisingly strong when our species is compared with most other primates. Even young children are intensely social and excel at following social cues to find hidden rewards, a test that chimpanzees and other apes flunk (1). Young children are also very good at imitating others.

These social characteristics are best explained by acknowledging that humans are adapted for social cooperation in ways that do not apply to other primates (with the possible exception of bonobos who manifest unusually low levels of social aggression) (2).

What makes these findings so compelling is that humans do not have other clear cognitive differences compared to the apes. This reality refutes persistent claims of human intellectual superiority (3).

If humans are strongly prosocial, how is it possible that we would participate in destructive wars and genocidal conflicts around the globe from Cambodia to Germany, and from China to Rwanda?

The Critique of Human Depravity

Social psychology set about determining whether evil actions are intrinsic to our species. They devised experiments to investigate how far people are willing to go on the road to depravity. According to influential researchers from Stanley Milgram to Phillip Zimbardo, the answer is quite a long way.

Inspired by what is called the banality of evil revealed in Nazi trials at Nuremberg, and Jerusalem, the social psychologists concluded that anyone can turn homicidal if they are subjected to social pressures of conformity and obedience. They might fatally electrocute the subject in a fairly pointless learning experiment when instructed to do so by an authority figure, for example. They concluded it is the situation and not the person that is to blame.

Some of these iconic experiments have been subjected to investigative journalism and have not emerged at all well (4). There were numerous procedural problems and experimenter biases, including failure to follow published protocols and the use of coercive procedures that would not be permitted today. The experiments were so staged and manipulative, that they tell us little to nothing about naturalistic human behavior or psychology.

Of course, this critique does not get us past the unpleasant reality of ongoing brutal wars and genocides.

Why Actual Tyranny Lives On

No one can ignore evidence of actual evil in the world but that does not compel us to see human beings as naturally depraved. Far from it!

There are two key points in the emergence of tyranny that are often overlooked by social psychologists. It is not just a matter of the person and the immediate situation. We must also consider the broader societal context.

The horrors of a Pol Pot dictatorship or the excruciating experiences of North Koreans under the Kim dynasty are peculiar to complex modern societies. They simply could not exist in the egalitarian world of hunter-gatherers where communal food-sharing was standard.

Simpler societies lack an authoritarian power structure and are based on voluntary cooperation in the sense that individuals may migrate between subsistence groups to avoid interpersonal conflict. Conflicts mostly arise from reproductive tensions between men that can turn deadly.

These societies generally do not commit group atrocities, however. They get involved in warfare only in specific situations where sedentary groups are based on valuable and defensible resources, such as the game and fish at Lake Turkana, the only archaeological evidence of hunter-gatherer warfare (3).

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Authoritarian power structures arise only in complex societies. These are quite recent, emerging some five thousand years ago in Mesopotamia (5). They depend on a well-developed status hierarchy. (Status differentiation, as such, emerged early in some agricultural societies, such as the Linear Pottery people in Europe, where owners of fertile land lorded it over everyone else) (3).

The concentration of wealth in early cities was associated with endless warfare, slavery, and the many brutalities brought on by “civilization.”

Money may well be the root of all human evil. We are living in the midst of nightmarish inequality where a handful of “Big Men” billionaires stand astride the globe. Contemporary business greed is waging an ongoing war of property against humanity and trashing the planet in the process.

Humans may be inherently good but we have assembled a horrifyingly long rap sheet over the past five thousand years, and it is not getting any shorter.