Why "Jerks"? A Hypothesis
[ note 1: this post was largely copied-and-cleaned-up from a series of messages I recently posted in one of my Discord channels. ]
[ note 2: I’ll replicate a disclaimer that topped one of my recent-ish LessWrong posts here, and say that this post is intended to be more didactive or illustrative than anything; I’m not under the impression that I’m saying anything really new here. ]
“The man whose chief preoccupation [while commuting] is being on time is the one who is furthest out [from reality]. With his body at the wheel of his car, his mind is at the door of his office, and he is oblivious to his immediate surroundings except insofar as they are obstacles to the moment when his soma will catch up with his psyche. This is the Jerk, whose chief concern is how it will look to the boss. If he is late, he will take pains to arrive out of breath.”
“There is a bit of Jerk in everyone, but the object of game analysis is to keep it at a minimum. A Jerk is someone who is overly sensitive to Parental influences. Hence his Adult data processing and his Child's spontaneity are likely to be interfered with at critical moments . . .”
— Eric Berne, Games People Play
It is, indeed, in Parent Mode that people are assholes. This seems to have felt natural to Berne. To me, it always demanded some explanation. Here is a possible one.
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The human genome codes for lots of different instincts that will be latent in the final brain [ see, e.g., Tooby, Dawkins, Trivers, Yudkowsky ]. These instincts are expressed according to varying distributions over life stages, sexes, and chronic dominance positions, but the human genome has to code for all of them, because no gene knows what sex or chronic social position it will end up in, and every gene has to function passably at each life stage.
A while ago, I realized that [wild-type, cis] women being the more behaviorally neotenous sex isn’t necessarily totally illusory; there’s no reason it couldn’t be a heuristic/hack by evolution, taking advantage of a behavioral repertoire [childishness] well-suited to the needs of a “kept woman” [or “kept man”, in the case of a low-dominance man], which was maybe not built especially for the set of conditions at hand but was prebuilt for that close-enough-in-some-ways set of conditions, saving on optimization cost.
The idea fell into my head a few days ago that an in-some-respects similar thing, to the Woman program cribbing parts of the Child program, is likely happening with parents acting highly dominant w.r.t. their children - with the twist that the advantage conferred by the transplant of that behavioral repertoire is not directly about the satisfaction of personal needs, but is instead possibly a highly effective social signaling function.
A major instrumental goal, from the perspective of evolution trying to maximize the descendants-cone of a human, is to increase their dominance as high as it can stably go [if they are female, this is of course primarily done by maximizing the stable-dominance of their mate]. But if you start out low in the hierarchy and there are no major destabilizing events to take advantage of, it is very difficult to find opportunities to raise your rank. This is because rank is largely hyperstitional and self-stabilizing: if Alice and Bob happened to bubble to the top as teenagers, then by the time your cohort is in its prime, everyone in your tribe sees Alice and Bob perform dominance, and you perform submission, all day every day - and that’s “reality”, “just facts”, as they know it - they wouldn’t think to reinforce a fantasy.
But your children are a dominance “free space” - a perfect opportunity, from the perspective of evolution, to demonstrate to amenable peers who might otherwise never think of submitting to you, what you are like as a superior.
Of course, apart from seeking their own ascension, humans [especially women] have instincts to cap the amount of churn the dominance hierarchy actually experiences, because too much social instability is bad for every tribe member’s reproductive prospects relative to members of neighboring tribes.
So one of the most desirable features of a candidate superior is the potential to keep their inferiors at heel.
Normally people’s instinctive willingness to do this is held in check to a certain extent, because your inferiors in most ancestral cases were, in terms of social and physical strength, nearly on par with you. If you threatened to keep them too in check, leave them so few resources with which to oppose you that they started to feel uncomfortable, they had every reason to pick a fight with you and might well win.
Not so with your kids.
With someone’s own children, evolution could endlessly showcase their ability to maintain control over inferiors, without fear of retaliation. It would be kind of an empty show, since the whole reason it’d be possible is that children-of-parents practically have no one to defect to [though as I understand it this was less true in the ancestral environment than it is now] but the “emptiness” of such signals rarely stops evolution from plowing along branches of behavior that are adaptive for social/sexual signaling, if the behavior itself has a small cost.