Be Nice

For a supremely social creature such as ourselves, reducing interpersonal friction and arriving at a state of agreeable pleasantry is a worthy goal. In some sense we all know this is true, especially at Thanksgiving dinner, but at other times as well.

Temptations to not be nice – to judge, challenge, provoke, tease, bait, and be sarcastic – frequently lie across our path. People often are not nice and run-of-the-mill conflict can and does turn into long-standing feuds and dislikes. Human behavior can cause an unpleasant ruffling of feathers despite our preference to smooth our interactions. Injunctions to be nice seem to us an undercurrent for social control and idealized behavior.

We evolved as small group social animals where cohesiveness and conforming to the group imperatives were adaptive to survival. This is the root of nice behavior. If, on the other hand, too many went their own grumpy way, the lions had a field day. Our ancestors had to resolve differences within the band or family kin group and thus we’ve always had pressure to “toe the line” and be nice to our in-group members.

Warm, cantankerous, funny, reflective, quiet, acerbic, inventive – our varied traits as individuals are well known. In daily life all these must be kept in balance for a group to remain cohesive. The invention of religion was a highly adaptive strategy for group cohesiveness. And when larger, state society was formed, being nice, i.e. being moral and ethical, came to mean treating strangers with the same consideration as one would small, sub-group insiders. Hospitality became a social imperative.

Why can’t we all just get along today? It may be because there are too many of us from too many different subcultures. Cultural evolution has not kept pace with our biological propensity to behave in parochial, small group ways. In this sense, we’ve got an evolutionary hangover. Our biologically-based, small group oriented capacities can’t wrap around the diversity and scale of cultural content we’re forced to deal with every day.

The Biblical Tower of Babel is a great metaphor; we can’t understand our fellows, the language and cultural codes for unlocking meanings are different and that breeds a constant undercurrent of not-niceness. Being nice, however, remains adaptive; reciprocity still works. Our social toolbox remains effective should we choose to use it and enlarge the scope of when to be nice, and to whom.

When things are not nice, should we go buy a niceness self-help book? Will we find answers in philosophical or political content? Should we just give up and be grumpy? One possible method of being adaptive today would be to extend the empathy we reserve for kin and fictive kin to the entire human race. Perhaps by being nice to others who display minor variations on the human theme, we can develop the large-scale cohesiveness necessary to handle the negative effects of our technological, economic and social miracles.

The dissonance between adaptive-based small group parochialism and the enormity of our present Tower of Babel cultural content has placed us in a bind. We suggest being nice, or at least more tolerant. We might find the good will to come together and collectively use our storied smarts to handle the large-scale problems of our own making.

SUN Editorial Board