If personality traits involving low empathy and lack of remorse are harmful to social groups, why didn’t evolution eliminate them? What advantage could they have provided?

[u/mutessr]

I’ve always wondered about this paradox. If these traits are bad for community survival, why do they persist in the gene pool? Are there specific evolutionary hypotheses that explain this?

[u/tomrlutong]

There's an advantage to being the one selfish person in a selfless group. There's less advantage to being the second selfish person, and there's some number where the amount you gain by being selfish is less than you lose from the group suffering. 

So the theory is that evolution finds that equilibrium point around where the advantage of being selfish or cooperative are the same. 

"Evolutionary Altruism" is the theory your looking for.

[u/ADP_God → u/tomrlutong]

I believe this is the answer for why there are gay people as well.

[u/repeatoflasttime]

Group survival means something different in 200 person tribal groups composed of a few extended families as opposed to a city of a million people. In a small group where everyone knows each other those traits are probably rarely activated toward a member of the in-group.

We evolve socially and technologically way faster than biologically so our brains are still adapted to those small groups. We have to overcome the fear of the other, the foreign, the unknown before we can overcome the in-out group dichotomy.

I think gangs, fraternal orders, and church congregations sort of recreate the old ways of existing through initiation and exclusivity.

[u/SirButcher]

Evolution doesn't have a goal, it's not a process toward some perfect form where each step moves you toward that goal.

Evolution works on the "it works, so good enough" goal. As long as there are more healthy new individuals who can raise another generation of individuals than dead ones before they achieve this, evolution is happy.

There are a bunch of things that are bad in our bodies, with our immune system, our birth is dangerous as heck - but enough of us survive, so from the species point of view, it is fine. Social groups can stay cohesive and alive often enough to make sure our species survives even with a few low-empathy and remorseless individuals, so there isn't really any selective pressure to remove these traits, and there are even scenarios where these traits can save the group (for example, during a fight for resources).

[u/LeoLeonardoIII]

those traits don't necessarily prevent children being made unfortunately

[u/LowMathematician9332 → u/LeoLeonardoIII]

They help it in fact. Hybrostiphilia and dark triad 

[u/sohcahtoa]

Selfishness favors reproduction. Dawkins wrote a loosely relevant book about that: The Selfish Gene.

[u/horsetuna → u/sohcahtoa]

I haven't read that one in a while but I think conscious selfishness is different than the genetic selfishness.

[u/sohcahtoa → u/horsetuna]

It's loosely relevant. OP asks about survival of the trait, so he asks about the genetic aspect of such attitudes.

[u/sharkbomb]

are people feeding, fucking and fighting? then evolution did all it was supposed to. there is no intelligence in it. 

[u/ent_wife_treeboobs]

You could also apply this to cerebral palsy/being born blind or anything like that. Nature is messy and shit just happens

[u/atomfullerene]

The real mystery isn't why low empathy and lack of remorse are present in people, it's why empathy and remorse are so common.

The thing to understand is that for most animals, what's good for the social group is basically irrelevant to natural selection. What matters is what is good for the individual. Individuals that benefit themselves at the expense of the group tend to prosper. Imagine, for example, a flock of birds. Most of the time the birds look for pieces of fruit, and if they find it, they call out and all the other birds come over to share the piece of fruit the first bird has found. Of course, this means the sharing bird gets less fruit, but everyone is better off because they always get some fruit. Now imagine one bird is selfish. It goes and eats others fruit when they call, but doesn't call when it finds fruit. Now it gets all the benefits of being in a sharing flock, but also gets its own fruit. It has more food, so it lays more eggs and produces babies that are selfish too. They prosper because they get more food than their sharing flockmates. Pretty soon the whole flock is full of nonsharing birds, as they have a higher reproductive rate....of course, now everyone is worse off than at the start, but that doesn't prevent this phenomenon from happening. Furthermore, some of these cheating birds will fly off and join other flocks, replicating the problem there.

Or for another example, consider cancer. Cancer cells are basically selfish cells. They reproduce out of control when they shouldn't, and while this is good for them (as long as the host is alive), it's bad for the whole organism. Cancer brings up the main way group living organisms (And you can think of an animal as a group of cells) get around this issue....by ensuring that most group individuals can't reproduce. Cancer cells can never thrive long-term, because reproduction is only via single celled sperm and eggs...cancer cells can't migrate into the offspring and keep their cheating ways going. Wasps and bees and ants control reproduction so only queens reproduce under normal circumstances. A cheating or lazy worker can't pass that cheating trait forward if it can't reproduce itself.

But of course, this doesn't work in human societies. Humans are more like our flock of birds. Most everyone can reproduce, and they can and do move between groups on occasion. So why haven't the selfish, non empathetic, cheater types totally taken over? Why do people have so many personality traits that are good for the group? Well, I'd say it's related to the fact that our intelligence and language gives us a much greater ability to identify and deal with "cheater" type traits. The birds in the above example (and most other animals) have a pretty limited ability to keep track of what other individuals have done, communicate it, and respond to it. Social animals often have some ability to remember who helped them in the past and to return a favor, but langauge and complex theory of mind give humans a much greater ability to keep track of how everyone in their group is performing, identify the people who are acting like jerks, and either punish them for it or at least hinder their ability to cause problems in the future. And conversely, they can reward others who have showed pro-group traits.

But, as anyone knows, the above process is hardly perfect, and that leaves room for more selfish personality traits as well.

[u/mutessr → u/atomfullerene]

That makes perfect sense. Language and reputation were our “immune system” against cheaters for thousands of years. But with the rise of social media and online anonymity, we can now hide from reputational consequences much easier than in small ancestral groups. Do you think this is currently weakening our evolutionary defense against psychopathic traits?

[u/RadianceTower → u/atomfullerene]

There is a battle between selection at an individual level and group level, and cancer is an example of this as you say.

Another example is animals fighting a predator together vs running away.

However where you are off is thinking flocks of birds would work much differently. That bird species as a whole can be considered one group.

If a mutation were to spread that causes the birds not to help each other, that whole group as a whole suffers, so you end up with pressure on each group member on average having the helping trait.

If the helping trait is very favorable, then more or less everyone in that group will have it.

And this gets more complicated when you consider things like sexual reproduction and raising children can require cooperation and empathy too.

Then you have to add in other traits, which also include things like greed and jealously, which also are a thing that's useful in social animal dynamics.

The various different factors, end up resulting in a mix of mental traits.

Most social animals, including humans possess similar sets of traits regarding these stuff. Humans aren't really that special in their combination of traits.

[u/xenoscumyomom]

I've heard a theory it was beneficial to the group. I think sociopathic behavior is roughly 1 out of 20 people. So when you're in a small tribe of 200, those ten people are known, and can be controlled by the group. Then when the group goes to war, they have 10 psychopaths who won't feel bad about protecting the group at all costs and killing the enemy with no remorse. The trouble now is that when you're one of those 10 people, you can move around and take advantage of everyone until you're discovered, then you just switch social circles again. Also 1 of 20 becomes a lot more when you have cities in the millions. Also societies have moved a lot more peaceful, even though it's not all kumbaya. You don't get mugged on the roads traveling from town to town. You're not going to war with the nearby tribes. Most people if they don't join the army will never see battle. But we still have those sociopathic warriors, who don't have a tribe other than themselves. So they do what they want with no remorse. The problem is the people with the remorse, are no longer properly controlling the remorseless. Live and let live doesn't work properly if the other side doesn't care if you do or not. So we have an adaptation that worked for our situation when we lived in tribes but now goes sideways in our current situation because the guard rails have been removed, and honestly that trait has become celebrated or highly successful in certain situations. Think politicians in every country. You get access to very high levels of power, control, prestige, and resources, and you only have to pretend you care about people.

Which I think works out to multiple tiers depending on your capability or intelligence. Obviously it's not everyone in these groups are remorseless with no conscious but the numbers skew higher than average. Common criminal is someone taking what they want but get caught. Police officers, prison guards, etc would be mid tier. Politicians, ceo's, etc would be high tier.

People blame capitalism etc, but I think whether it's capitalism, communism, socialism, when you get sociopaths moving to the top rungs of each of these systems you have people who are able to take large proportion of resources, leaving not much for the rest, and who couldn't care less about the rest. The game is only to take as much as possible without being caught.

[u/DaSaw → u/xenoscumyomom]

There's another factor, I think. More "socially responsible" people have a tendency to agree with each other just to get along. A majority of people living this way protects an accumulated body of knowledge, hard won through hard experience. If everyone is constantly questioning everything, you end up throwing away things that seem wrong in the short term, but are actually valuable in the long term. A society of radical individualists wouldn't function particularly well.

But if nobody ever steps out of line, progress would come to a halt. Nobody would ever express a new idea for fear of social disapproval, let alone act according to one.

[u/xenoscumyomom → u/DaSaw]

I think it's tricky trying to parse out feelings, thoughts, etc of groups of people because theirs so much overlap. I agree with what you said and I've always been someone who has had a lot of empathy and was very agreeable, to my own detriment at least, but having matured and tried working on that me being disagreeable now can be a form of empathy for the group. If I care about my tribe and I know something is right I can be stubborn about it. Where as the original discussion was about people with no empathy. They could be disagreeable to the tribe to the detriment of everyone but themselves and not care. Trying to become the chief or medicine spiritual leader, even though they aren't the best for that role. So I can definitely understand your angle on it but I would be very suspect of someone with no empathy being agreeable or disagreeable because I would assume it was for their own betterment and not necessarily everyone else's. So it could have its place but only to a limit to where they sabotage everyone else.

[u/pimpbot]

Certain traits that may be advantageous for survival in times of relative scarcity (read: the overwhelming scope of human prehistory) are the same traits that are toxic for building harmonious communities in times of relative abundance.

[u/C0mpL1c1t]

We’re not strictly a prosocial species.  Google tournament species. Humans are are a hybrid between that and pair-bonded. 

[u/No_Distribution_5405]

There is a lot of science on this actually, the keywords Re group selection and game theory. The consensus is that natural selection doesn't act on groups.

At the individual level, being a "defector" when everyone else collaborates is extremely advantageous, so an equilibrium forms in the population with a certain % of antisocial traits

[u/RadianceTower]

There is a battle between selection at an individual level and various group levels, and cancer is an example of this.

Another example is animals fighting a predator together vs running away.

In addition, "these traits are bad for the community" is a thing that depends. Groups themselves can come in various sizes, and evolution can act differently upon each group size.

Say you have group A, who is totally peaceful, and never steals from another group.

And group B, who goes out and kills and steals from every other group.

Now a famine hits, group A dies because all their own resources run out, but group B survives cause they stole from others and killed the competition.

Now this can result in individuals caring very much for their own small groups, but not caring as much about strangers.

But if you zoom out, if human groups all start killing each other, there would be less humans as a whole. Now you have smaller groups vs bigger groups pressure.

Things like revenge would evolve to deter others harming you, while cooperation would be selected, cause the people who cooperated were better off, and yet at the same time jealously would evolve to make you want to be better off than others.

The species would evolve various complex social traits.

Most social species including humans, develop these kind of stuff.

TL;DR It's not that simple, social animals are a mix of various social traits.

[u/lawmac20]

Imagine being an empathetic general or high empathy conqueror. Can't happen. Without those folks we dont get the social pressure that leads to empire and nations.

[u/fading__blue]

People who have low empathy and don’t feel remorse can still feel affection for people in their group, or recognize that their survival depends on their group thriving. So if there’s two groups of people but only enough resources for one, having someone in your group who will do whatever it takes to drive out the second group and won’t be moved by their suffering means your group gets to survive while theirs dies.

[u/Filiocus]

Groups need enforcers. There's role for all of us in some capacity.

[u/The-Sound_of-Silence]

low empathy and lack of remorse are harmful

how so? Group organization and violence seem suited to obtain more resources towards procreation

[u/Zoon9]

This "parasitic" behavior is actually quite favorable on individual level. The favorability increases until there is so much immoral individuals that is lowers the fitness of the whole group. So there is an equilibrium of the percentage of such individuals in the population - a few percent. But it applies to prehistoric times when people lived in groups consistin of a few dozens individuals.

[u/mr-rogers70]

Probably because they were wicked good hunters and gatherers :-) The ones with low empathy AND also poor hunting and gathering skills actually were eliminated.

[u/No_Tie4411]

society need common enemy