Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices

At the level of the family, the ideal of marriage as a union that must be preserved through thick and thin is being undermined by a view that marriage is an economic contract that sets out the expectations of the parties involved and can be readily annulled if either party does not feel it is getting its expected returns from the exchange. (View Highlight)

We began our own work of coming up with a fresh synthesis regarding human nature by challenging one of the time-honored assumptions of economics: that people are rational maximizers of their own self-interest, with these interests best served by unrestricted markets. We had long been uncomfortable with this view. (View Highlight)

Four ideas survived our testing process. We concluded that all people do have a persistent drive to acquire objects and experiences that improve their status relative to others. In other words, they are indeed motivated, in part, by self-interest as defined by economics. But human beings also have three other basic drives: to bond with others in long-term relationships of mutually caring commitment; to learn and make sense of the world and of themselves; and to defend themselves, their loved ones, their beliefs, and their resources from harm. All four of these primary drives have been established in the human brain as a result of Darwinian evolution, because the existence of these drives improves the odds that the genes of their individual carriers will pass into subsequent generations. (View Highlight)

They had discovered that Albert Einstein’s inferior parietal lobe-the part of the brain that is now known to process mathematical concepts, three-dimensional images, and spatial relationships-was significantly larger than normal. This certainly does sound like the skill set with which Einstein was specially gifted. (View Highlight)

He argues that as neural messages are routed from the sense organs through the limbic centers of the brain they are evaluated, picking ttp what he calls “markers” that indicate whether the representation is registering as beneficial or harmful in terms of basic human purposes or drives. (View Highlight)

Human drives are located in the limbic region of the brain. This part of the brain has, until recently, been referred to as the most primitive part of the brain, the home of the most primitive impulses. Now, following Damasio’s lead, neuroscientists are finding out much more about it and its central, sophisticated role in the entire functioning of the modern mind. It turns out that the limbic center, the seat of subconscious drives, is very closely wired to the prefrontal cortex, the seat of consciousness, meaning, and choice. It is this connection that Gage apparently lost. When an incoming perception is routed through the limbic center it is coded for strength of relevance to basic human drives. (View Highlight)

The range of terms they employ is informative: ultimate motives (Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby- among the founders of evolutionary psychology),14 primary values (Durham-a pioneer of evolutionary anthropology),’ S goals (Pinker), epigenetic rules (Lumsden and Wilson),16 and value centers (Edelman). Wilson states, “Without the stimulus and guidance of emotion, rational thought slows and disintegrates.”’Pinker pulls this whole line of analysis of the brain’s functioning together: “Intelligence is the pursuit of goals in the face of obstacles… . The emotions are mechanisms that set the brain’s highest-level goals… . Emotion triggers the cascade of subgoals and sub-subgoals that we call thinking and acting.”’ (View Highlight)

the drives we hypothesize are the drive to acquire (D1), the drive to bond (D2), the drive to learn (D3), and the drive to defend (D4). (View Highlight)

It is our hypothesis that in archaic Homo sapiens, the drives to acquire and defend were the primary, ultimate drives; the drives to bond and to learn were secondary or derivative drives. (View Highlight)

In the second set of Whitehall studies, two decades after the first, the sample consisted of over ten thousand male and female civil servants aged between thirty-five and fifty-five. Again, the researchers found a strikingly similar relationship between the risk of death at any given age and position in the status hierarchy. Furthermore, they found that not only the death rate, but the rate at which civil servants experienced long illnesses (defined as an absence of more than a week that was supported by a required doctor’s certificate) was also inversely related to employment grade. For instance, relative to their highest-ranking female colleagues, women in the lowest employment grade were four times more likely to have been ill for extended periods. (View Highlight)