MADE

It’s nearly impossible to intimately understand any technological trend unless you view it in the context of human psychology. Most people don’t get what all the fuss is with social media. It seems superficial and arbitrary. It appears that way to most of us because we tend to focus on the technologies rather than the human motivations that power those technologies. The technology and platforms are often free and easy to use. That means there’s virtually no barrier of entry. All you need is ideas and a device to translate your ideas into characters on a screen. But not all ideas are equal. In fact, the vast majority of ideas contain little actionable or spiritual value. And that’s what a lot of people view as the scourge of social media. It lets all the stupid people act as if what they have to say matters.

However, there’s a lot more going on than meets the eye in the average tweet or Facebook wall post. You may have heard that Twitter is a new communication protocol. All that means in plain English is that it’s a new way for people to talk to each other. In fact, all of social media is a new communication protocol. And that’s what makes it so powerful and permanent. But the reason for that isn’t what you probably think; which is that it allows us to keep in touch with people. You can do that by walking over to your friend’s house, emailing him or calling him. Social media would have never gotten so big if that was the main thing that kept it going.

What really makes social media such a cosmic force in society today is that it allows people to express themselves. That’s a cliche-sounding phrase. What does it really mean? There are two levels on which people express themselves to other non-related human beings. One is what I call informational communication. It’s a question or statement who’s purpose is to influence an event now or in the future. The other is what I call “shootin’ the shit” communication. It’s when you say something just for the sake of saying it. It’s non-algorithmic; it isn’t intended to initiate a sequence of logical steps meant to solve a problem in the real world.

The vast majority of human communication falls in the second category. It’s where the lighter side of life lives. It’s the chit chat before the job interview. It’s the idle chatter at a cocktail reception. It’s the playful flirting with a potential mate. But it’s a very important aspect of human relations everywhere. And it’s the foundation of social media. It’s also the reason social media is going to be around forever.

So the question remains: why should anyone care that someone he doesn’t know has just tweeted that he’s finished writing his thesis on metallurgy in 16th century Europe? Most people don’t. But that’s the wrong question to be asking. The right question is why should anyone care to express themselves at all?

There’s only one way to answer this important question. And if you know the answer, you understand social media. When evolutionary psychologists try explain why people do the things they do, they break them down into proximate causes and ultimate causes.Proximate causes are the immediate mechanisms that cause an organism to exhibit a behavior. Ultimate causes are the reasons that behavior came to be in the first place. The proximate cause that leads you to drink a glass of water is that you’re thirsty and want to quench your thirst. The ultimate cause is the evolutionary conditions and events that caused the human body to need to drink water to survive. Ultimate causes tend to be abstract because they have hidden and often complex chains of causation. Proximate causes are immediately accessible to the senses. Many human behaviors can seem counter intuitive or disjointed if you don’t understand these two distinctions.

Let’s look at an example from the world of dating. Why do most women rate confidence as the most attractive up-front quality in a man, but men don’t consider confidence nearly as important when choosing a woman?(in almost all societies, men rate youthful beauty as number one) Women will say things like, “I want a guy who’s funny” or “…a man who’s assertive and knows what he wants.” These are all buzz-phrases for “I want a confident guy.” Any girl will tell you that confidence is sexy. And any dating expert will tell you that self-confidence is the most important quality for a guy to possess when looking for a date. It often more than makes up for deficits in the looks department. But why should a woman care so much about confidence? If you ask the average woman, she’ll say it makes her feel safe to be with a confident man. But safe from what? Most people in developed Western societies don’t have to confront wild animals, raiding tribes or dangerous men. The only way to understand this seemingly outdated and irrational emotion is to look at what social and physical conditions created the hard-wiring that support it. For most of human history, we were exposed to all kinds of real everyday dangers from other people, animals and nature. Men, because of their superior physical strength and more aggressive dispositions protected the women around them. The women who lived around men who weren’t good protectors didn’t survive. The genes that created the psychological hard-wiring to accept non-dominant men as mates didn’t survive to get passed on.

Ultimate causes often seem counter-intuitive because we aren’t aware of them and can only understand them by thinking hard about them. But they’re powerful. The male obsession with nubile, youthful-looking females is a phenomenon with extremely deep and rigid biological roots. It is the single reason that the multi-billion dollar porn industry will never die.

Social media is to a large extent supported by the powerful human desire for self-expression. But that needs explaining too. There must be an ultimate cause that motivates people to express themselves to total strangers. There’s a body of research in behavioral economics and evolutionary psychology which shows that many human behaviors are driven by the desire to display one’s personality traits. There are the five big ones (openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, stability and extraversion) and general intelligence. Together they form what’s called the Central Six dimensions of human personality. [read more about them in my previous post]. Everything that’s worth knowing about what makes a person who they are falls within these dimensions.

Trait display has numerous social and mating advantages. We often unknowingly advertise bits and pieces of our personalities through bumper stickers, clothing, cars, hairstyles and many other things. We put ourselves out there because we never know who might be looking. We often aren’t directly aware of the social and sexual reasons behind wanting to display our traits because they aren’t always directly accessible through our emotions.  We just know that it’s fun expressing ourselves. But the social and reproductive advantages are the ultimate causes of these behaviors. Any major cross-cultural human behavior can be ultimately traced back to these two things.

Much of the chatter happening in social media is trait display. It isn’t so much about letting people know what you’re up to as it is just letting people know who you are. There is no immediate actionable benefit to letting someone you’ve never met know that you’re reading a book about Fermat’s Last Theorum. But it does communicate a lot about your intelligence and conscientiousness levels. The things people say in social media reveal their personalities and abilities. You post links to show people what kind of stuff you read because it reflects on your intelligence and sophistication. Humor says a lot about your wit. Most of social media is a big strut-fest.

The vast majority of people following you in social media don’t really care about you. But some do. And that’s what’s always compelled us to display our personality traits. Enough people care about who we are to make it worth advertising our qualities. And even the ones who don’t, might, if you seem interesting. Throughout human evolutionary history personality traits have had deep social and sexual implications. And that’s what makes trait display an extremely powerful driver of human behavior. It’s what will guarantee a long life for social media.