Why are we not all sophisticated game theorists? Why do we have
vague concepts (this person is "likeable," this group is "friendly")
instead of an awareness of the precise calculations that we perform
without realizing it? There are several good reasons for this lack of
conscious access to inference systems. First, many mental systems are
designed to produce strong motivation and do this by providing us
with rewards in the form of emotions. We would not invest great
effort and resources in picking Mr. or Mrs. Right if this were not an
intensely emotional experience. Emotions goad us in the right direc-
tion much more easilythan abstract descriptions of whatwouldhap-
[250] pen if we made the wrong choice. Second, our inference systems are
very complex. Choosing Mr. Right or selecting reliable cooperators in
a large company is hugely complicated because there is no such thing
as "the right person" in the abstract. It all depends on the context, on
what we need and what we have to offer, on what others need and may
offer, and it all changes as these parameters themselves change.
Attending to vast numbers of relevant cues and constantly reassessing
their significance may well be too intricate for our sluggish deliberate
thought. Finally, our systems for social interaction did not evolve in
the context of vast groups and abstract institutions like states, corpora-
tions, unions and social classes. We evolved as small bands of foragers
and that kind of existence is the context in which we developed the
special features of our social mind. Sedentary settlements, large tribes,
kingdoms and other such modern institutions are so recent in evolu-
tionary time that we have not yet developed reliable intuitions about
them.
THE MAGIC OF SOCIETY
Humans live in very diverse social conditions: in small foraging
groups in a savannah, or in villages of sedentary peasants, or in towns
where many do not actually grow the food they eat, or in modern
urban environments where they depend upon a vast number of others
for every aspect of their lives. In all these different contexts, people
have some explicitdescription of what society is like, what groups
compose it, why this is so, and so on. For instance, people the world
overcategorizetheir social environment. That is, they do not think
they interact with individuals but they tend to see others as members
of more general classes like family, social class, ethnic group, caste,RELIGION EXPLAINED