If you are like me and are interested in how people work, keep reading.
In one of the books I’ve read this week (by Jonathan Haidt) there is a discussion about the law of reciprocity. This law (as I presume you all know) states that we humans find it very difficult not to return a favor we have recieved. There is a lot of research done on this by Richard Caldini that I won’t go into here, but it’s awesome. His book “Influence” is by the way required reading for anyone claiming to be a communicator.
Haidt links this law of reciprocity to evolution. It has been a very succesful bit of evolution; basically a law of collaboration, to a degree which separates us from most animals.
Collaboration requires language, which we have developed, and we have also developed gossip as a means of encouraging good collaborative morale (the importance of gossip is therefore gravely underestimated). But what’s interesting is that it seems that this feature is what has required us to develop such enormous brainpower, and thus enormous brains, and thus enormous heads. It turns out that the size of a mamals brain is proportionate to the size of the group it must keep track of, and the average human peer group is somewhere around 150 people.
In fact, we have such big heads now that we humans can barely give birth to our young. And when we do, the toddlers are just half baked (to keep head size down), unable to move properly, and have to be carried around for two years or so.
This incredible evolutionary sacrifice as a trade off for social skills puts new perspective on the importance of social networking and gossip doesn’t it?
Now there has been a revolution! We have invented Facebook and other similar social aids to help us keep track of an even larger number of people.
Weighing the evolutionary sacrifice of headsize against the invention of Facebook can therefore only lead to one conclusion. Facebook will eventually shrink our heads.
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