Peacocks, Penknives and Power

ABSTRACT

This article conceptualizes evolutionary theory as a bridge between existing theorizing in strategic communication on the one hand, the mind sciences on the other. It discusses six core concepts of evolutionary psychology that have a bearing on strategic communication theory: a) the human as a highly flexible social species; b) the regulation of individually-minded vs. collectively-minded behavior; c) advanced, symbolic communication as a mode of regulation and its second-order problems; d) a consilient conceptualization of communication; e) evolutionary psychology’s role as a heuristic; and f) the limits of cognitive capacity and the role of heuristic shortcuts. The article concludes with a note on the theory of science in strategic communication research and cautions against the common misunderstanding of evolutionary psychology’s agenda.

Introduction

On the following pages, we sketch a preliminary answer to the question why strategic communication exists and how it works. Our argumentation draws on evolutionary psychology to give a high-level account of why humans are easily manipulated by other humans, why that is necessarily so and why it is not always bad. Our account will not feature any fundamental surprises. In an intensely human affair like communication, it is highly unlikely that generation after generation of scholars got it all wrong. What it sets out to do, however, is to conceptualize evolutionary psychology as a bridge between existing theorizing in strategic communication on one side, and the mind sciences on the other.

Although our thoughts are meant as a contribution to a theory of strategic communication, we do not aim at such a theory here, at least not in the narrow sense. In the narrow sense, strategic communication management (SCM) is a modern management concept and practice, while strategic communication research (SCR) is an academic discipline. What we try to explain is the emergence of the phenomena that SCM tries to manage and SCR tries to research. To put it differently, once cultures acquire a certain level of complexity, it is almost inevitable that humans would become reflective about ‘getting one’s way’ in society. Similarly, it is inevitable that late-capitalist organizations under conditions of volatile hyper-competition would discover the success potential of societal positioning. While we benefit from hindsight as to what happened, what we seek to explain is why.

Some scholarly communities continue to resist evolutionary psychology, often by branding it as ‘controversial’ without saying why and where. However, since the publication of landmarks like The Adapted Mind (Barkow et al., 1992), the perspective has come together in a body of knowledge that is summarized with remarkable clarity and cohesion in textbooks (Barrett et al., 2002; Buss, 2019). Key arguments and results have also been widely received outside the field. Over the last 25 years, evolutionary accounts have been used to embed the study of social phenomena into the larger context of the natural world. Perhaps the most influential and bestselling example was Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind (2011), which seamlessly blends evolutionary, cultural and technological analysis. In political science, Francis Fukuyama devotes considerable space to human evolution in his two-volume study The Origin of Political Order (2011). Azar Gat relies heavily on evolutionary psychology to study the (pre-)history of organized violence (Gat, 2006), a topic which inspired whole handbooks like The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Violence, Homicide, and War – and one that was spearheaded by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson‘s groundbreaking study Homicide (Daly & Wilson, 1989). The comparative study of religion is another topic where evolutionary psychology has given rise to a whole new subgenre. The works of Robin Dunbar (2022) and Ara Norenzayan (2013) are two among many here. As for evolutionary psychology’s home discipline, a chapter discussing the evolutionary perspective has become standard even in the most prestigious psychology text- and handbooks, e.g., in the Oxford Handbook of Personality and Social Psychology (Deaux & Snyder, 2012). Closer to strategic communication, Gad Saad (2011) views marketing through the lens of our evolutionarily determined ‘wiring’ and, e.g. asks what juicy burgers, Ferraris and pornography reveal about human nature. On the home field, the works of Charles Marsh (2017) and Cary Greenwood (2010) have drawn extensively on evolutionary psychology, as has our own work (Nothhaft, 2016; Seiffert-Brockmann, 2018).

With such a broad scope, there is the danger of lumping together what does not belong together. For ease of reference, we distinguish between core assumptions of evolutionary psychology on one side, and derivative consequences on the other. That the brain gives rise to the mind and is subject to evolutionary pressure just like toes and fingers is a core assumption, for example. That evolutionary pressures would rather favor a domain-specific than a general-domain intelligence is a derivative consequence suggested by evolutionary psychology’s core but remains a hypothesis subject to empirical scrutiny. We furthermore identify an extended body of research, which consists of work that draws on evolutionary psychology for inspiration and justification but stands on its own merit. Jonathan Haidt’s work in moral psychology is a case in point. Although Haidt is careful to furnish an evolutionary explanation for every one of his moral taste buds, his Theory of Moral Foundations (Haidt, 2012) ultimately rests on empirical data. Haidt’s work is made more plausible because of evolutionary reasoning, but it does not rest on it. From the three widening circles of evolutionary psychology, one must finally distinguish pop psychology. Although pop psychology shares many of the premises of evolutionary psychology proper, it lacks its rigor.

Our account draws on a variety of arguments from the core of evolutionary psychology as well as a discussion of relevant debates in the derivative field, with the occasional lifting of the head to the associated research. Because the arguments are interconnected, we proceed in three steps. First, we give an overview. Second, in an interlude, we address misunderstandings that stand in the way of adequately understanding evolutionary reasoning; here, the distinction of core evolutionary psychology and pop psychology comes in handy. Third, in the admittedly most speculative part, we suggest some consequences and implications of our argument for SCR centering on the so-called ‘meme’s-eye view’. The article concludes with an attempt to guard against the misconception that we wish to ‘biologize’ away any critical potential that SCR might possess. The opposite is the case. “Power” may be the last word in the title, but it is not the least.

Core concepts

In the article’s first section, we will discuss six core concepts of evolutionary psychology, which we believe have a bearing on research in strategic communication: a) the human being is a highly flexible social species that not only can adapt its individual behavior but also the ways it organizes its collectivity; b) the fundamental problem that a flexibly social species needs to solve is the regulation of individually-minded vs. collectively-minded behavior, while not giving up the advantages of flexibility; c) humans rely to a great degree on advanced, symbolic communication to achieve this; however, this mode of regulation creates second-order problems of its own – problems which SCR studies; d) communication as a means of regulating individual vs. collective behavior is inadequately understood, as conceptualizations of communication in the humanities and social sciences are not fully consilient; e) evolutionary psychology’s role is not only one as a material theory, but also as a heuristic: even if one only partly accepts its more far-reaching insights, evolutionary psychology can serve as a guide in theorizing about human affairs; f) the human being is well-equipped to deal with many problems, be they familiar or novel, but the number of problems to which deliberate problem-solving can be applied is limited by cognitive capacity; thus, heuristic shortcuts have to be taken, and this, in turn, opens up opportunities for mutual manipulation – again, the topic of SCR.

A flexibly social species

Our account begins by noting that humans are a ‘flexibly social’ species. That humans can adapt to a great variety of environments, i.e., find or make a viable ecological niche almost everywhere, is evidenced by the fact that homo sapiens has colonized almost the whole planet (Wilson, 2012). Human adaptivity does not only rest on high individual flexibility, however, but extends to the social level. These are topics covered by anthropology when it comes to societies deemed less complex than one’s own, and by political sciences and sociology when it comes to one’s own. Humans not only cooperate and organize in social structures – they adapt their social structures to the environment. For example, while polyandry is relatively rare in most human societies, it has been found in Himalayan societies, where arable land is scarce (Diamond, 2005). Several husbands, often brothers, bonding with one wife makes it easier to support a family and controls population. The adaptability of social organization, perhaps more than anything else, has proven the species’ recipe for success.

Individual vs. collective

Pursuing that avenue further, we suggest, secondly, that the key problem of human sociality is to balance individual and collective, egoism and altruism, without negating the advantage of flexibility. While prosocial behavior, e.g., cooperative hunting, is comparatively easy to explain (Bliege Bird & Power, 2015) the exact pathways by which sociality and its most extreme form, eusociality, evolved remain controversial. It is obvious that wolves gain advantages by pack-hunting, which entails submission to a dominance order, but how come that individuals sacrifice their own chances of reproduction, and even their lives, for the benefit of the collective, like ants, bees and termites do? As for humans, biologists do not even agree on how to fit ourselves into biological categories. No-one doubts that homo sapiens is social, but authors like Wilson (2012) theorize that the success of the species is due to a weak form of eusociality. In a similar vein, one of the world’s foremost evolutionary biologists, Martin Nowak, speaks of humans as “SuperCooperators” (Nowak & Highfield, 2011). Surveying the whole of human history, Harari points out that humans considered as individuals and even as members of small groups remain “embarrassingly similar to chimpanzees” (Harari, 2011, p. 42). How different the species are emerges only when one considers large, impersonal collectives, Harari argues: “If you tried to bunch together thousands of chimpanzees into Tiananmen Square, Wall Street, the Vatican or the headquarters of the United Nations, the result would be pandemonium. By contrast, sapiens regularly gather by the thousands in such places” (Harari, 2011, p. 42). In line with Wilson’s argument of weak eusociality and the social conquest of the planet, Harari concludes: “The real difference between us and chimpanzees is the mythical glue that binds together large numbers of individuals, families, and groups. This glue has made us the masters of creation” (Harari, 2011, p. 42). Jonathan Haidt makes a similar argument with his formula that the human is 90% chimp and 10% bee (Haidt, 2012).

Even if one lays aside the many cases where collectively oriented behavior ultimately benefits the individual, like e.g., the indirect reciprocity of patronage (see Marsh et al., 2023), the core issue is that humans do display submission to the collective to the point of altruistic behavior, or seemingly so. Amongst humans, we find spontaneous acts of self-sacrifice, where soldiers cover hand grenades with their bodies to shield their comrades. We also find long-term, clearly deliberate commitments to a childless life of devotion to others. Rational-choice theory – i.e., they will have their reasons – leads into a dead end here. However, strategic communication scholars should not content themselves with a biologized version of rational choice either. My genes made me do it is not a great improvement. The question is where these reasons come from, how they are controlled, and what role advanced, symbolic communication plays here.

Advanced symbolic communication and its problems

Advanced communication clearly plays a central role in regulating and enforcing collectively minded behavior, but our third assertion is that symbolic communication creates new and different problems on the next higher level. These second-order problems are perhaps the original domain of SCR. As political science has largely relinquished popular culture as a subject, we do not see any other discipline equally well-suited to explore how social rights and duties are negotiated by means of communication.

Social species with behaviorally flexible individuals face a problem that ‘superorganisms’ like ant colonies do not face. For genetic reasons, to which we turn later, individual ants are best understood as a cell of the colony in the same way as a liver cell is part of the body. The ant colony is not a proto-political body of ants; it is the ‘extended phenotype’ (Dawkins, 2016) of the queen. The individual ant has no life of its own, no incentive to cheat the colony.

In species with behaviorally more autonomous, fully reproductive individuals, collectivity cannot work the same way. In collectives that aggregate individuals who are not closely related, the situation becomes even trickier. The flipside of more autonomy and behavioral flexibility is the capacity to defect and betray. Individuals might have incentives to work for the collective, but they equally well have incentives to improve their individual situation, including their offspring and other kin, at the expense of the collective. Gat summarizes the dynamic as follows: “People in any kin circle struggle among themselves for the interests of their yet closer kin (ending in themselves and their offspring), while at the same time tending to co-operate against more distant circles” (Gat, 2006, p. 428).

It is here that the second-order problems begin. While it is good to rig social structures that inspire and require everyone to lay down their life in defense of the collective, it is even better to rig the system so as to encourage and oblige others to self-sacrifice, while legitimately excluding oneself, one’s kin and allies (Pinker, 2012b). This fundamental problem arises in every collective as soon as the individual interest diverges from the collective interest, but it is exacerbated in humans. What makes it particularly troublesome is not only the autonomy of the individual but the way we regulate collectivity. In the only other known mammal species that are borderline eusocial, the naked mole rat (Heterocephalus glaber) and the Damaraland mole rat (Fukomys damarensis), the fact that most individuals altruistically refrain from breeding is by and large chemically regulated. In humans, we would argue, advanced symbolic communication plays a much greater role. Humans use symbolic communication to exchange information about others. By doing so, essentially by gossiping (Dunbar, 2010), they keep track of individuals’ pro-social and anti-social tendencies, and ascribe status and prestige accordingly.

Social regulation through symbolic communication brings flexibility but it also brings complications. One disadvantage is that communication is relatively easy to fake. Words on their own are cheap, especially when they concern the past, future, or the hereafter (as in traditional, aspirational, or religious narratives), hidden qualities (like fertility, as female humans do not clearly signal ovulation) or unverifiable intentions (“I didn’t mean to do any harm”). This might explain the centrality of costly signaling in human affairs; it serves as a counter to the cheapness of symbolic communication. Another disadvantage, on the opposite end of the spectrum, lies in the Eigendynamik of communication, which non-symbolic forms of communication lack. As theorists like Habermas have pointed out, symbolic communication is not a cause or a force in itself, because it can be subjected to rational scrutiny. Contrary to hormones, arguments can be discursively questioned. In fact, much of what is going on in society under the label of ‘politics’ is exactly that.

Communication

Given its centrality, one would expect that communication is well-understood in SCR. Yet one of the great problems in SCR, and this is our fourth point, is the disconnect between communication theory on one side, and the mind sciences on the other. What holds the discipline back in coming to grips with second-order effects, we maintain, are overly relativistic and subjectivistic epistemologies in conjunction with conceptualizations of communication that fail to fully consider a) communication; b) the objects or states that communication references; and c) the cognitive-affective wiring that gives meaning to certain states or objects.

The last point, the neglect of cognitive-affective wiring, is where scholarly communication theory is most underdeveloped. For many humanist scholars, meaning seems to emerge out of itself. But the plumage of the peacock does not attract the females of the species because the peahen necessarily consciously understands the rationale. The rationale only explains why a feature that practically disadvantages a male could become sexually attractive for females. Similarly, accounts that conceptualize human cooperative behavior as rooted in rational insight into the advantages of cooperation got the wrong end of the stick. It is doubtful that indirect reciprocity rests on rational insight alone.

In a grand attempt to come to grips with human behavior, Robert Sapolsky (2017), whose work belongs to extended evolutionary psychology, traces the genesis of an ‘act’ – be it touching the arm of a suffering person or pulling a trigger. Sapolsky goes backwards in time, from milliseconds and seconds, to minutes, hours, days, and years before, then further back to adolescence, infancy, prenatal stages, then even further back in evolutionary time. Sapolsky reviews in detail when and where existing synaptic connections, hormones, brain plasticity, habituation and socialization, genes, or evolutionarily shaped tendencies come into the picture. On the most fundamental level, however, Sapolsky’s message boils down to ‘it’s complicated’ (Sapolsky, 2017). Once human behavior is viewed through a causal lens, the insight is, in Sapolsky’s words, “[n]othing seems to cause anything; instead everything just modulates something else” (Sapolsky, p. 674).

Wiring I: gene-culture-coevolution, the heuristic function of evolutionary psychology

Our fifth point is that scholars and social scientists, when theorizing about the human condition, ought to be more sensitive to insights like Sapolsky’s: Human affairs are dynamics modulated by many factors and on many levels. The grandees of sociological thought – luminaries like Marx, Weber, or Foucault – tend to have preconceptions about sapiens that go hand in hand with their grand designs yet not always hold up to empirical scrutiny. Other luminaries, like Talcott Parsons or Niklas Luhmann, try to avoid the issue altogether. Even if one does not accept evolutionary psychology’s material insights, it can serve as an antidote. Evolutionary psychology can guide theorizing by serving as a plausibility criterion against which to test any ideas. Goldfinch (2015), one of its fairest critics, sees evolutionary psychology’s strongest suit here.

Although the tenets of evolutionary psychology are well-known, it is perhaps advisable to review the argument in the light of its heuristic function. The first premise of evolutionary psychology is that the human mind is ultimately a function of the workings of the human brain, and that the brain evolved just as any other organ. The second premise is that evolutionary forces would necessarily select for functions that solve concrete and specific problems the organism faces at a particular point in evolutionary time: be it physical-material problems like calculating the trajectory of a thrown item, be it social problems like cheater detection, mate selection or parental investment. The terminus technicus for problem-solving in a given environment is adaptation, which can be structural (change of beak form), physiological (sweating or shivering as responses to heat or cold) and behavioral (fight, flight, freeze). Human evolutionary psychology, of course, is most interested in behavioral adaptation. An individual that is behaviorally well-adapted to the problems of its physical and social surroundings, the reasoning goes, would be successful. In the ancestral environment, a successful individual would be by and large more likely to pass on her genes, although obviously many intervening variables, including luck, play a role here. Behavioral adaptations, although perhaps harder to trace, spread in very much the same way as structural and physiological ones. That does not mean that every trait must have been shaped by evolutionary pressure. Some features are subject to random, function-free variation, like e.g., the concave or convex shape of one’s bellybutton. Yet again others are by-products of some otherwise useful function. Humans did not evolve the capacity to read and write, but they did evolve the capacity to identify relatively small objects (nuts, seeds, letters) and store information about their meaning. Moreover, some traits simply prevail due to random chance, as expressed in the concept of genetic drift.

The third premise, finally, acknowledges that in the case of homo sapiens, uniquely, biological evolution has been accompanied and perhaps overtaken by cultural, and more specifically technological ‘evolution’ – a nexus normally addressed as gene-culture coevolution or biocultural evolution. Evolutionary history, i.e., the time it took to fundamentally rearrange the brain as an organ, stretches back hundreds of thousands, even millions of years. The history of human ‘civilization’ goes back tens of thousands of years at best, and history is measured in millennia. So far, the species spent 99.5% of its time as hunter-gatherers roaming around in small bands, clans or ‘local groups’ of about 25–150 more or less related members. Fukuyama calls the original form of government by means of extended family ‘the tyranny of cousins’ (Fukuyama, 2011, p. 49) – much to the delight of anarchists, the ancestral band must have been quite egalitarian and meritocratic (Graeber & Wengrow, 2022). Contrary to popular perception, genuine tribes came only later, but it seems that despite low population densities several extended family bands belonged together in regional groups or ‘dialect tribes’ that shared a common language and identity (Gat, 2006, p. 13). The average size of regional groups is estimated at about 500, which is consistent with computer simulations that put the boundary condition for stable endogamous marriage circles at about 150–200 (Gat, 2006, p. 14).

Thus, no matter what we accept as secure knowledge about the ancestral environment – and critics point out that we know very little – we can be certain that the environment that shaped our brains differed greatly from a modern office environment. How do these premises guide theorizing about ‘human nature’? The first important criterion to look for is consilience (Wilson, 1998), i.e., compatibility with the rest of the natural sciences. On a very fundamental level, it is causality that makes evolutionary psychology compatible with physics, chemistry, and biology.

The second criterion, of lesser practical but greater epistemological interest, is evolutionary plausibility. If the mind is tied to the brain, and if the brain evolved as any other organ, the postulation of a mind feature should include a plausible explanation how and why that feature spread. In other words, humanist accounts in the form of “homo ludens” (Huizinga, 2016) or “homo faber” (Scheler, 2016) should at least try to explain how the feature in question would have spread in a population of neolithic hunter-gatherers. To show that smartness predicts success in international finance after twenty years of formal education is not enough. One must explain how traits that were relevant for a hunter-gatherer have been repurposed for a modern environment in a so-called exaptation.

The existence of exaptations, i.e., repurposing, finally, gives us a clue what to look for, and where. The classic example of repurposing is bird feathers, which evolved for temperature regulation but were repurposed for flight (Buss et al., 1998), which explains some features that are suboptimal for flight. Similarly, if the way we cope with modern life must necessarily rely on behavioral ‘equipment’ that evolved in a radically different environment and for a different purpose, perhaps that explains seemingly odd, evolutionarily weird behaviors?

Wiring II: domain-general vs. domain-specific

Although the first and second insights are of theoretical importance, the third is most important for our question why humans are so easily manipulated. On a high level of abstraction, an answer might be that the way we go about modern life rests on problem-solving programmes that evolved in radically different conditions and often for different purposes, so there is an aggravated risk of deception and exploitation. Deception and exploitation existed in the ancestral environment as well, to be sure; cheater detection evolved because there was cheating. But the capacity to detect cheaters evolved in conditions where humans interacted face-to-face. In a modern world of limited liability firms, offshore accounts, and troll factories, one cannot look cheaters in the eyes anymore.

One should not forget, however, that humans by and large do cope with the modern environment, as inquirers into conditions of late modernity like Anthony Giddens point out. How come? One of the more controversial subjects among evolutionary psychologists is whether the human mind is a general-domain, multi-purpose intelligence or whether it works in domain-specific ways. The perhaps leading figures in early evolutionary psychology, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, argue for a strongly domain-specific conception. While the humanist account suggests that humans are smarter because they possess a superior general-domain intelligence that can be applied to almost any problem, Tooby and Cosmides maintain that the human mind rather resembles a penknife: a Swiss Army Knife with its various fold-out tools for various purposes like mate-selection, etc. (Cosmides & Tooby, 1997; Fodor, 1983). For modern readers, the comparison with a mobile phone and ‘apps’ with a concrete, circumscribed application, works better.

Cosmides and Tooby based their preference for a strongly domain-specific conception on an evolutionary argument as well as experimental research. As for the evolutionary argument, they doubted that evolutionary pressures would bring about an increase in unspecific domain-general intelligence. What advantage would the raw computing power of Einstein’s brain bestow in the ancestral environment? Experimental research showed furthermore that humans find it far easier to solve a logical puzzle – in Tooby’s and Cosmides’ case, the Wason Selection Task – when it is couched in terms of social policing as opposed to formal logic (Cosmides, 1989).

The far-reaching conclusions the first generation of evolutionary psychologists drew from the Wason Selection Task have been widely criticized (Goldfinch, 2015), especially as it is obvious that humans do possess the capability to engage in deliberate reflection: Kahneman (2011) famously speaks of System 1 and System 2. Newer experimental research suggests that the strong modular perspective takes matters too far. In very broad terms, our intuitions – System 1 – might arise from mind-complexes that are modular in character, but we are not at the mercy of our impulses all the time. Famously, the visual perception of differing lengths of lines in the Müller-Lyer-illusion does not go away even after measuring, but respondents typically accept the measurement as more objective than their eyes (Henrich et al., 2010).

For SCR, the question whether domain-general or domain-specific remains important, but perhaps more important is to understand their co-existence and interaction. When and why are domain-specific ‘apps’ employed, when and why does deliberate reasoning come to the fore, what is their relation, and what drove the build-up of ‘processor power’ evolutionarily? For strategic communication, the issue is that humans can apply deliberate reflection, but they cannot do it everywhere and always. In other words, whether they like it or not, people choose areas of strategic concern and non-concern.

Clarifications: evolutionary and pop psychology

As outlined earlier, evolutionary psychology begins with three premises: a) that the mind is a function of the workings of the brain; b) that evolutionary forces would select for functions that solve specific problems in the ancestral environment; and c) that in the case of homo sapiens, uniquely, biological evolution has been overtaken by cultural, more specifically technological ‘evolution’. In principle, evolutionary psychology shares these assumptions with pop psychology. However, as pop psychology often fails to take a stand against imprecisions, some clarifications are in order.

The mind of a sponge: physio-psychological complex or geist

Although very few maintain that the human brain is not a product of evolution, scholars in the humanities and social sciences tend to distinguish between the physical organ and ‘the mind’; beyond that there is controversy. Philosophy of mind problematizes the view that the brain does thinking in the same way as lungs do breathing. John Searle, proponent of a naturalist view, points out that a purely philosophical approach – i.e., the mostly unempirical debate of ‘−isms’ like dualism, materialism, physicalism, computationalism, epiphenomenalism, cognitivism, etc. – did not lead very far. In his short introduction to the discipline, Searle remarks that philosophy of mind “is unique among contemporary philosophical subjects in that all of the most famous and influential theories are false” (Searle, 2004, p. 2).

Evolutionary psychology begins, we would argue, with the acceptance of a physiopsychological complex, a brain-mind complex, as opposed to a geist separate from the brain, and a consequent application of the evolutionary perspective (see also Lee et al., 2023). Although we might be erecting a strawman, it seems there is a watered-down humanist account of evolution, and that pop psychology avoids taking a stand here. The humanist account, strawman or not, construes the human success story as an evolutionary tale of getting smarter. The assumption appears to be that a more intelligent, internally more complex individual will be more successful than a dumber, simpler one. Smartness, in other words, will self-evidently translate into higher reproductive success, and hence the spread of the smart genes in the population. Sexual selection, i.e., a preference for smart partners for smartness’s sake, supercharges the dynamic.

Hand in hand with pop psychology, the humanist account goes only halfway in its evolutionary reasoning. Evolution does not ‘reward’ smartness – i.e., the ability to mentally represent situations of high complexity – for its own sake. It rewards adaptation to the prevailing circumstances, and ultimately only insofar as it leads to reproductive success, whether via fitness or inclusive fitness. While humanist accounts shy away from the biblical view of sapiens as the crown of creation, they sometimes seem to suggest a teleological mechanism, i.e., a view that nature ‘works towards’ higher and higher complexity. But nature does not select with a view towards a Marie Curie or Mozart further down the road. Ants, rats, or oak trees are by no means ‘evolutionarily inferior’ to the human. As E.O. Wilson puts it: “Our prehuman ancestors were not chosen, nor were they great. They were just lucky” (Wilson, 2012, p. 22). What makes the matter clearer perhaps, is the understanding that many evolutionary processes, even in brain development, are simplifications. Brain power is organically very expensive – the human brain accounts for only 2% of our body mass but consumes 20% of our metabolic energy (Roth & Dicke, 2005, p. 254). As brain is ‘expensive tissue’, it makes no sense for a freshwater sponge to power an apparatus that is capable of great flights of fancy but has very little to do with the everyday requirement of sitting tight and filtering water.¹ Given limited resources, an organism that does not need an organically expensive function is better off without it.

Why is this important for strategic communication? Researchers in evolutionary psychology by and large agree that the sudden and rapid development of human brain power had something to do with the social dimension of human nature, with cooperation and collectivity (Dunbar, 2010; Tomasello, 2014). Once social maneuvering or ‘politicking’ became profitable in evolutionary terms, smartness could easily spread in populations. In another leap, the raw computing power needed for plotting and scheming (and other tasks, like spatial orientation) was repurposed for other concerns (exaptation) such as solving differential equations, developing social theory or inquiry into how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. However, thinking through one’s every move remained organically expensive, i.e., stressful and exhausting. If the cost outweighs the benefit, overthinking is not necessarily a good deal. In other words, smarter humans can gain a fitness advantage, but only if they apply their smartness to high-reward situations. Individuals who compulsively think through everything, even evolutionarily irrelevant situations, probably lower their fitness. In any case, they would do better to rely on heuristic shortcuts for mundane, unrewarding tasks, and reserve brainpower for high-reward situations. Of course, as Zerfass et al. (2018) have pointed out, prioritization is the core assumption of strategizing.

The gene’s-eye view: what about paleo?

In its pop psychology gestalt, evolutionary psychology postulates that the human being did not evolve to cope with a modern society and that all our woes and ailments are due to the mismatch between the way we were designed, and the way modern society forces us to live. If only we ate paleo, we would be eternally happy and healthy. The core of evolutionary psychology, in contrast, does away with the focus on health and happiness. It ultimately acknowledges what Dawkins calls the gene’s-eye view. In the gene’s-eye view, the ‘function’ of organisms is not to live a fulfilled life, but to pass on the gene in question. A gene that triggers a debilitating disease at a later age, after the individual has procreated, can be as ‘successful’ as a gene of health and happiness. While recent debates have problematized the singular focus on the allele and suggest a refocus on the genome, the argument per se still stands. It is misleading to search for the true nature of humanity, the realization of which would make us healthy and happy. What Darwin developed, namely a view of population dynamics over time and in space, is far more fruitful.

Domain-specific vs. domain-general intelligence: of apps and phones

Kanazawa (2010) theorized that domain-general intelligence evolved to cope with evolutionarily novel problems, and that it should consequently show that less intelligent individuals perform as well as intelligent ones in evolutionarily familiar problems, e.g., mating, parenting or pathfinding, since these rely on the domain-specific modules. Research suggests something slightly different. Data from a study by Kaufman et al. (2011) shows a clear connection between general intelligence and success in the Wason Selection Task even when the test is presented in a non-arbitrary, evolutionarily relevant form (e.g., as a social policing problem). Other studies in the field of emotional intelligence show a similar connection. Perhaps unsurprisingly, domain-specific intelligence seems to draw on the resources of domain-general intelligence.

Interestingly for strategic communication theory, current theorizing suggests that complexity, of which novelty is only a subcategory, was the driver of domain-general intelligence. When humans started to assemble in ever larger, ever more complex communities, relying on one’s social instincts did not produce the desired results anymore; presumably, deliberate social strategizing came to the fore. Thus, not necessarily novel challenges, but the everyday challenge of dealing with fellow-humans that develop novel ways of getting their way – strategizing, in other words – drove intelligence. It seems that Tooby and Cosmides underestimated the intricacy of plotting and scheming in neolithic bands. In terms of the mobile phone metaphor, one could perhaps note that advanced apps do require advanced processor power and memory as well.

The modules constitute heuristics that are applied when situations appear simple, with familiarity presumably a strong cue of simplicity. Moral intuitions, for example, are ‘nature’s way’ of enforcing certain behaviors on a behaviorally flexible species by being time- and energy-saving heuristics. Cheater-detection was and is evolutionarily important in a cooperating species, so a moral sense of fairness guarantees that we get angry at free-riders. Once we get angry, our inclination to engage in critical reflection of our moral standards is severely diminished: We have seen this before, we are fed up with it, it is always the same.

Genetics and epigenetics: flipping the switches

The pop psychology version often leaves it open, moreover, whether we remain Stone Age people or whether we have partially overcome our neolithic wiring. Evolutionary psychology’s answer used to be yes, we remain hunter-gatherers, but this categorical assertion had to be qualified thrice in recent times.

One should not subscribe, firstly, to the cliché which portrays the prehistoric hunter-gatherer as a dumb brute. Individual by individual, prehistoric hunter-gatherers were probably the most competent humans that ever walked the earth: “The human collective knows far more today than did the ancient bands. But at the individual level, ancient foragers were the most knowledgeable and skillful people in history” Harari writes (Harari, 2011, p. KL762).

As for the second qualification, the key argument, that evolution by natural selection moves too slowly to keep pace with cultural evolution, still stands. Although recent research suggests that noticeable effects appear faster than expected, it is likely that an infant time-machined from an upper paleolithic band into a modern nursery would not appear out of place. Despite that, however, a closer look at the few remaining communities that have been isolated from modern civilization reveals differences of a profound nature. As Steven Pinker points out in The Better Angels of Our Nature, deadly adult violence found in communities untouched by modern civilization routinely reach horrifying levels. Murder rates amongst the Semai people of Malaysia, who have been described as peaceful in anthropological accounts because they apparently do not conduct warfare, scale up to three times the homicide rate in the U.S. during its worst, most violent decade (Pinker, 2012a, p. 55). There are straightforward cultural explanations why ‘civilized’ societies show less deadly violence: a) socialization and habitualization which rewards peaceful, cooperative behavior and punishes aggression already at kindergarten level; b) a greater power of the state and more effective policing; c) the fulfilment of basic needs in more affluent and equal societies; and d) the power of cultural technologies like monotheistic religions with an omniscient watch god (Norenzayan, 2013). An increasingly coherent mosaic of research suggests, however, that e) epigenetics comes into play as well, especially when thought of in conjunction with the other mechanisms.

Epigenetics, thus, is the third qualification factor. Epigenetics is the study of how the environment and the individual’s behavior in the environment can cause changes that affect the way genes ‘work’, i.e. how the genes are expressed (Moore, 2015). Large-scale studies apparently suggest that the expression of genes in identical twins can vary considerably and that the variations grow over time and with differing lifestyles. While identical newborn twins were epigenetically indistinguishable, different lives lead to different epigenetic states. What sounds as simple as switching genes on and off involves quite complex operations on the biomolecular level, of course. For SCR, the important insight lies in the acknowledgment that genetics are more flexible than previously thought. Nevertheless, the human remains a far cry from the freely impressionable tabula rasa imagined by progressives in the 1970s; in that respect, Pinker’s criticism of the denial of human nature by the social sciences remains fully valid (Pinker, 2003).

Eusociality, sociality and cooperation: the hive switch

Pop psychology tends to agree that humans are social animals and leaves it at that. In evolutionary psychology, the issue is how to make sense of the peculiar brand of human sociality that Jonathan Haidt tried to encapsulate in the formula 90% chimp and 10% bee. Are humans best understood as state-forming, eusocial like ants, weakly eusocial (Wilson, 2012) or ‘supercooperative’ (Nowak & Highfield, 2011) – or are we simply apes capable of forming troops of thousands and millions?

The biological criterion for eusociality is threefold: a) cooperative brood care with some individuals caring for the offspring of others; b) overlap of generations in a colony of adults; and c) a division of labor into reproductive and non-reproductive groups (Wilson & Hölldobler, 2005). Humans do not fully satisfy these criteria, as they live together in groups of related as well as unrelated individuals, and they do not strictly divide into reproductive and non-reproductive castes. Nevertheless, as Wilson, Haidt and other authors have argued, some social arrangements come very close. With both parents often in paid labor outside the home, modern society provides extensive alloparental arrangements (see also Seiffert-Brockmann et al., 2023): nurseries, kindergartens, all-day school, not to speak of nannies and boarding schools common in other ages, or prohibitions of marriage for classes without own homes like servants and soldiers.

Kin selection, group selection, multi-level selection

The standard biological explanation of the evolution of cooperation, of altruism in all its forms, is inclusive fitness theory (IFT), postulated by B.S. Haldane, and developed into a formal theory by Hamilton (1964). IFT postulates that an altruistic gene (an allele coding altruistic behavior) could spread in a population if the benefit to other individuals with the same gene (i.e., kin) outweighed the sacrifice (Hamilton’s Rule). Viewed from the other side, once focus shifts from the individual to the gene and genome, reproductive success can be achieved in other ways than having offspring: namely, by helping one’s siblings, who share roughly 50% of one’s genome. Haldane famously quipped that he would willingly lay down his life for two brothers or eight cousins (Nowak & Highfield, 2011, p. 96). Without detracting from the individual’s kindness, this is IFT’s explanation of the helpful, childless aunt.

Compatible with IFT, the eusociality in some insect species is seemingly underpinned by their genetic make-up: ants are haplodiploid, which means that the females are ‘supersisters’ and share 75% of their genome, i.e., they are closer related to each other than they would be to their own offspring. Even if one treated them as autonomous individuals, their genes would, loosely speaking, benefit more from the inclusive fitness of the colony (i.e., the queen producing sisters) than from their own reproduction. Haplodiploidy, however, is neither sufficient nor necessary for eusociality. Not all haplodiploid species are eusocial, and other, non-haplodiploid species are – most importantly, termites. As mentioned, there are even borderline eusocial mammal species. The naked mole rat and the Damaraland mole rat cope with harsh conditions by allowing only a single queen and a limited number of males to breed (the polyandrous societies in the Himalaya come to mind); the other members of the colony remain sterile, and aid in raising the young, to which they are likely related.

The enigma of human sociality is the ‘mystical glue’ that binds together kin and non-kin. Why can humans create what Benedict Anderson dubbed “imagined communities” (2006)? The insufficiency of genetic explanations centered on IFT has led researchers to suggest other explanations. Martin Nowak, Corina Tarnita and Edward Wilson, in a highly controversial contribution (Nowak et al., 2010), suggested that the eusociality of social insects (ants, termites etc.) began with the establishment of a persistent, defensible, valuable nest. Wilson points out that all eusocial species – without exception and including the human as weakly eusocial species – have one thing in common: that they invest considerable resources in defensible nests. The idea is a simple, two-step process: at some point, one individual, because of some unrelated disposition, occupied a particularly advantageous position. Then, again because of some unrelated disposition, other members of the species ‘joined’ that individual – perhaps offspring stayed with the mother instead of dispersing. In the further course of events, the nest’s advantage proved so overwhelming that those who stayed around flourished, propagating the disposition. In other words, eusociality is not predominantly a result of inclusive fitness, but of adaptive radiation, like the beaks of Darwin’s finches.

Unfortunately, the debate is highly loaded and not always accessible to non-specialists. The three renegade authors combined their defensible-nest theory with a dismissal of IFT and a plea for multi-level selection (MLS), i.e., the assertion that the ‘wars’ of ant colonies against each other were as important as gene-level competition. In fact, as mentioned earlier, their argument is that in the case of ants, gene-level competition mainly happens on the colony-level, i.e., superorganisms competing. Currently, another explanation marks a swing of the pendulum back to IFT, with lifetime monogamy suggested as the key starting point of eusociality (Boomsma, 2009; Fromhage & Kokko, 2011).

Fortunately, as SCR is concerned with humans, there is no requirement to provide a biological explanation for affairs that are not exclusively biological, but due to the human flexibility on individual and collective levels also social, and due to the discursive accessibility of communication also political. The assertion of Nowak et al.’s (2010) that IFT does not bear out, and that MLS shaped the genome of the eusocial insects, might have met with resistance. Yet scholars interested in the genesis of humans, like Azar Gat (to a greater degree) or Francis Fukuyama (to a lesser degree) conceptualize human prehistory as shaped by MLS, i.e., simultaneous competition at the gene, genome, individual and group levels. Thus, what SCR can take away are not the facts about the insect eusociality, but key insights into dynamics:

1. Biological dynamics, such as adaptive radiation (Darwin’s finches), can start small, with only one individual, but under the right circumstances quickly reach a point of no return; certain configurations are ‘locked in’. Although many agents in a system could imagine a more attractive systemic configuration, the successful adoption of that configuration would not only require individual effort but would require a move by others, which is probably not forthcoming. Game theorists study these phenomena under the headline of evolutionarily stable strategies (Dawkins, 2006), of course, but SCR should note how similar the problem is to Mancur Olson’s classic study of collective action.

2. While a point of no return can be quickly reached under the right circumstances, the opposite is true as well. A system might be stable as long as no other incentives are introduced. However, as it does not represent the best but only a stable solution, the equilibrium is delicate.

3. When one postulates a mechanism, one must also inquire into its workings. How, exactly, is relevant information exchanged? In many accounts of kin selection, it is self-evidently assumed that individuals know who their kin are, and even their exact degree of relatedness. As for humans, we know that kin recognition is vague at best (you learn who your kin is, but you cannot sniff the degree of relationship). Thus, what if A is altruistically supportive to B, because she wrongly believes B to be a brother? What if the reason that A treats B as a brother is that he has always been around, or that he adheres to the same rituals, that he seems to have similar values, that he uses the same turns of phrase? With these questions posed, it is time to introduce memes as cultural replicators.

The meme’s-eye view

IFT and MLS provide biological explanations for the evolution of the adaptations that generate cooperative human behavior, i.e., patterns like direct and indirect reciprocity. Via that pathway, biology ultimately underpins social structures, rules, norms, and institutions in the same way as our digestive system underpins what is served in restaurants.

Notwithstanding its fundamental significance, the degree to which Darwinian evolution contributes meaningfully to our understanding of cultural, political, and societal matters remains debatable. It may be nice to fathom how and why the norm of reciprocity evolved, but did we not know already that humans tend to expect reciprocation of favors? What is more interesting, therefore, is how society interacts with cooperative behavior programmes, how culture ‘modulates’ norms of reciprocity. Did medieval peasants in Europe accept that they paid tithe in return for monks praying for their souls, and if so, why? Would it have made a difference if they had been told to deliver their goods without any return? By understanding that, one perhaps gets closer to a more precise understanding of how humans evolved large, impersonal collectives. SCR, in extension, is interested in how these impersonal collectives are regulated, controlled, and manipulated.

The argument begins with not taking for granted collectives of unrelated individuals. Although the mechanisms conceptualized in IFT and MLS explain cooperation, their explanatory power is stronger for small groups. The problem is not only kinship, but the “shadow of the future” (Axelrod, 1984, p. 124). In the smaller worlds of bands and tribes, individuals would meet repeatedly, which constitutes a guard against exploitation and free-riding. But, as Harari has pointed out, small, personal groups are the realm where humans are “embarrassingly similar” to chimpanzees. The challenge is to explain the emergence of vast social systems with thousands and millions in impersonal cooperation. What is the “mystical glue” that holds these together?

It stands to reason that the answer lies with the most obvious difference between humans and other primates: advanced symbolic language. But different authors conceptualize the precise role of language differently. Dunbar (2010) suggests that advanced language allowed humans to bond with larger groups of fellow-humans because language, i.e., chitchat and gossip, can be used to groom many others at the same time; and the abundance of emojis on social media suggests that he has a point. Other researchers, like Norenzayan (Norenzayan, 2013), emphasize the invention of ‘big gods’, i.e., omniscient divine beings that can see into everyone’s heart and mind – a powerful control mechanism, which presupposes not only language but also the capacity to process symbols. With SCR in mind, we want to highlight two other higher-level effects; effects that also broaden the narrow emphasis on language to a wider one on communication. The two higher-level effects are a) recognition of like-mindedness and b) sensemaking devices.

Memes as markers of like-mindedness and sensemaking devices

It has become almost axiomatic that in the case of homo sapiens natural selection of genes has been overtaken by a different kind of evolution, namely gene-culture coevolution. The key insight is that natural selection is slow, but cultural evolution fast. Natural selection is slow, because it is purpose-free or ‘blind’; cultural evolution is faster because it is driven by purpose. Hammers did not emerge gradually by random variation and subsequent selection; they were invented with the idea of hammering, improved over time because of their identified purpose and by way of deliberate experimentation with hammering things. Consequently, the importance of genetic fitness in the crude Darwinian sense, i.e., adaptation to the savannah, was quickly surpassed by other fitness factors. In a band of roaming hunter-gatherers, everyone had to be able to keep the pace and pull their weight. More complex and multi-layered societies found niches for individuals not quite up to scratch but with special skills.

It is important not to conflate technology with culture, or to overstretch the idea of cultural evolution. What holds for tools like hammers does not hold for many other inventions. Cultural evolution may not be as blind and purpose-free as genetic evolution, but culture is clearly not intelligently designed either. Someone may have invented specific institutions like courts or rituals like baptism at some point. But the effective practices are often very different from the original conception, and the reasons for their adoption by no means always in line with the original idea. Strangely enough, while social systems are viewed as too complex to have emerged via blind natural selection, they are construed as beyond deliberate design by humans for the very same reason: too complex. Thus, in absence of an omnipotent god of creation, the ultimate mechanism that created society and culture may not be as different from the one that created organisms, only on the next higher level: the clash with reality of circumscribed designs or ‘ideas’, and the survival of the idea that fits the prevailing conditions and requirements best.

The argument is that evolutionary dynamics remain important in understanding society and, in extension, strategic communication. It is the interaction of the idea with reality, and in context with other competing and cooperating ideas, that is interesting. As Pinker and Bloom (1990) pointed out with regard to complex language, there is no other mechanism than Darwinian evolution that accounts for complex structures, i.e., structures beyond the human capacity to deliberately design. What changes when it comes to culture is our conceptualization of what is subject to evolutionary pressure. Here, we believe, SCR would benefit from a concept that is functionally like genes in denoting a carrier unit, while not obscuring the material differences. Fortunately, that concept has been proposed already. Unfortunately, it currently denotes something simpler, albeit related. The concept is the idea of memes.

The selfish meme?

In the original sense developed by Richard Dawkins in 1976 (Dawkins, 2006), and further by Aaron Lynch (1996), Susan Blackmore (1999), and lately Gad Saad (2020), memes go beyond the familiar concept of ‘internet memes.’ In Dawkins’ original rendering, a meme is defined as “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation (…).” Memes, in Dawkins’ conception, include “tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes, fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches” (Dawkins, 2006, p. 192). Dawkins himself was the first to admit definitional inaccuracies, and that whistling a tune is a long way from making stylish pottery. Nevertheless, we suggest the term as a way of loosely conceptualizing that ideas can be imitated and combined, and that they are selected not for being right but for being useful in the context of other ideas as well as prevailing circumstances. By insisting on a loose conceptualization, ‘meme’ being almost but not quite interchangeable with ‘idea’, we hope to avoid the mistake of the first generation of memeticists rightly pointed out by Coyne in his review of Blackmore’s (1999) book in Nature: namely, that of overstretching the concept (Coyne, 1999).

If we accept that humans use symbolic language to not only denote things in the world but to organize their collectivity, regulate dynamics within it, and adapt it flexibly to the requirements of the environment, the meme can serve as an analytic concept that pinpoints the smallest meaningful unit. In their simplest form, memes constitute ‘virtual’ storage units that contain coordinative and regulative instruction. ‘Internet memes’ currently capture this. Sharing a Pepe the Frog-meme signals to others a similar attitude, and underpins a shared understanding. Thus, internet memes are memes in the sense that they constitute a coordination mechanism; they associate like-minded people in the same way the preference for Doc Martens or a Mohawk does (Seiffert-Brockmann et al., 2023). What troubled first generation memeticists – namely that memes are subject to interpretation, and that their replication is not perfect – is, in our view, inherent in memes. It is here, in the fact that every individual interprets the meme slightly differently, that the flexibility of human collectivity resides.

In the way we conceptualize memes they not only serve as signals, but ideally contain instructions that go beyond ‘use me, and you will belong.’ Genes tell cells what to do; memes tell adopters how to behave. As with genes, the regulating mechanism here normally goes beyond the single meme. Just as genes interact with each other, the relevance of memes begins with interaction with other memes. To look at memes in isolation is like studying single alleles: it can be useful, but often obscures the complexities.

Just as the level of the genome is the more fruitful genetic level of analysis, it is the level of meme complexes, or memeplexes, that yields the insights most relevant for SCR. Once memes are clustered into complexes of ‘co-adapted memes’ and influence the behavior of humans – humans that become consequently interlocked as well –, the gene-meme comparison appears less fanciful. In the simplest of cases, with the meme simply as a signaling anchor, memeplexes lead to nothing more than loose affiliations of like-minded individuals. People who find Pepe positive tend to align on a variety of political issues, although not in a systematic way. In the most complex cases, memeplectic assemblages offer full-blown cosmologies that answer every existential question from cradle to grave – in other words, religions.

In what way is the ‘selfishness’ of memes relevant? It is here, we believe, that Darwinian dynamics come into play. For not only is the interaction of memes and memeplexes with each other relevant, but the interaction of memeplexes with reality. When Dawkins wrote The Selfish Gene, his key point was that genomes constitute blueprints for ‘survival machines’, organisms which from a biological point of view had no other purpose than passing on the gene. Single genes were successful insofar as they were included in a genome that shaped a successful organism, i.e., one that reproduced successfully. The genes that make up our genome today are the ones that made a positive contribution, or at least not a cripplingly negative one (in addition to having the luck of being in the genetic drift). As evolution is blind, nobody suggests that genes know what they are doing.

Something very similar holds true, we would argue, for memes and memeplexes, albeit with a crucial difference. If memeplexes draw individuals into associations and lock them into cooperation, they themselves stand and fall with the success of the collectives they create. The memeplexes that constitute Christianity or Islam are highly successful idea assemblages, for example; many other religious memeplexes have disappeared. One of the explanations of Christianity’s success, of course, is that a rather collectivist and solidaric faith stabilizes the state and communities, i.e., it is useful to rulers and the ruled, and that it contains instructions for its members to begin proselytizing.

Contrary to genes, however, memeplexes are neither physiologically bound to organisms nor are they replicators in the strict sense of the word. The ideas of many ‘dead’ religions are preserved in books, like mammoth DNA in ember perhaps, but they are not practiced anymore and are considered ‘obscure’ nowadays. Since strict replication is not required, obscure ideas can be unearthed and repurposed if they fit with currently prevailing ones. The New Age industry tirelessly rediscovers ‘ancient wisdom.’ In a similar vein, classical scholarship can be understood as a societally funded effort to maintain a reserve pool of once successful but currently discarded memes.

Where does SCR enter the picture? One of the great misunderstandings of Darwinian evolution, like misunderstandings of strategy, is that ‘fitness’ is defined in a circular way: whatever reproduces was fit, what does not, was not. But that is not the case. What contributes to fitness is determined by an analysis of the ecological niche the organism occupies and the strategy it pursues there. A seawater sponge that develops a large, energy-consuming brain and begins to compose inaudible symphonies has not become fitter, even if it reproduces by way of luck. The tenet of Darwinian selection is simply that reality will assert itself in the long run. In the long run, our sponge-composer will not successfully reproduce, and with it the composing gene, unless the heavy physiological musicality investment contributes in some way to its success; especially if fellow sponges concentrate on what sponges do best. The difference to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, in other words, is that the human composer can translate talent into something fitness-relevant; the immobile, mute, and deaf sponge cannot.

If one adopts Darwin’s famous formula, the fittest meme is the one that a) clicks together well with other, currently prevailing memes; b) is attractive and easy to adopt; and c) makes a positive contribution to the memeplex’s survival by influencing the adopters’ behaviors. And it is here, in the simultaneous fulfilment of contradictory requirements, that strategic communication enters the picture.

It will be noted how the three requirements reflect what students learn in campaign planning: a) analysis of the current situation, including societal trends, tells campaign planners which memes are currently prevailing; b) technical and tactical design principles tell planners what makes memes attractive and easy to adopt; and c) strategic analysis conceptualizes which behavior changes are desirable in the organization’s struggle with reality, which ideas will ensure success. What present-day strategic communication theory does not adequately reflect yet, although great strides have been made, is that the big, successful memeplexes will more likely than not conform to certain, evolutionarily emerged forms. Firstly, they will revolve around topics that have been identified as fundamental motives (Griskevicius & Kenrick, 2013), such as the desire to make friends, avoid harm, or gain status. In our arguably most speculative step, we therefore suggest, secondly, that memeplexes will ultimately come with teleological sequences as their core, i.e., stories. Studies suggest that storytelling evolved in early hunter-gatherer societies and proved to be adaptive due to the promotion of cooperative behavior (Smith et al., 2017). For evolutionary reasons that need to be better understood, stories are the primary form of sense-making for humans.

A note on problems of the theory of science

With stories in mind, one must ask in what way the discussion of evolutionary dynamics, of genes and memes helps strategic communication as an academic discipline and research project? Prima facie, adopting evolutionary psychology appears to make matters more complicated. Sapolsky’s causal explanation of human behavior – everything modulates something else – does not appear very helpful.

It is of course naïve to expect that biology should answer questions raised by sociology, political philosophy, or strategic communication. Yet it is equally naïve to expect that evolutionary psychology should furnish satisfactorily simple answers that immediately ‘click.’ The very point of a perspective consilient with the mind sciences is to escape the plausibility trap, i.e., the requirement that explanations, instead of merely accounting for the evidence, must above all be intuitively convincing. SCR runs the risk of circularity here.

We suggested that strategic communication as a practice ‘works’ because humans are preadapted to easily derive reasons from narratives. Story-like devices often constitute the core of memeplexes, i.e., devices that humans use to flexibly regulate their collectivity. Humans can act purposefully, of course, and chart a course of action towards a goal. But when it comes to events outside of our control, stories come to the fore. The sinking of the Titanic is a tale of hubris; diseases like AIDS are portrayed as god’s punishment for sin. These tales reassure us that everything has a reason, that frighteningly arbitrary calamities make sense somehow, that there is method in the madness.

Despite the intuitive plausibility of narratives, the last 500 years of scientific progress suggest that the world, the world of things at least, does not move on the rails of stories. The world only appears teleological because of retrospective reconstruction. The appearance of a dramaturgy in the cosmos constitutes as much an anthropocentric illusion as the self-evident ancient assumption that the earth must be the center of the universe. Barkow, Tooby and Cosmides identified early on that the shift from a teleological to a causal worldview would be far more disturbing to scholars socialized in the humanities than the leap from a geocentric to a heliocentric cosmos, because “the shift from a universe designed to embody a moral and spiritual order to a universe that is undesigned and is structured only by a causal order engendered an immeasurably greater cultural dislocation than that which occurred when Copernicus identified the sun rather than the earth as the center of the planetary orbits” (Barkow et al., 1992, p. 21).

Our point here is, to be very clear, that SCR studies the interaction of anthropocentric illusions with the reality of cause and effect. While it is certainly relevant that the world is structured causally, it remains equally relevant that humans experience their own behavior as reason-driven, that collectives center on teleologies, be they religious like awaiting Judgment Day, or secular like the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals. The sinking of the Titanic goes down in human history as a cautionary tale against hubris; it is only to specialists that the events of April 15, 1912 constitute a causal chain extending backward from hitting an iceberg to dubious design choices in a Belfast shipyard. Viewed that way, SCR is the study of stories that matter. SCR studies how teleologies act as causes.

The twist is that to successfully study stories, SCR cannot stay beholden to stories itself. The hard sciences have overcome circularity not only by going after causal explanations, but also by orientation towards evidence. Quantum electrodynamics is implausible beyond belief but borne out by rigorous experimentation. Obviously, SCR should not blindly imitate the natural sciences by going after unrealistic rigor. At the same time, we should be careful not to limit our theorizing to intuitively satisfying accounts. As an academic tribe, strategic communication researchers feel the need for a powerful story as every collective does. As an intellectual project, SCR will not progress beyond plausibility by means of storytelling and tribal rituals (Nothhaft & Zerfass, 2023). The same holds true on the political and social level. No matter how sophisticated their underlying terminology may be, grand theories that blame all the woes of the world on original sin, capitalism or the patriarchy are ultimately storytelling, and far from the painstaking examination of cause and effect. To be sure, some crude interpretations of natural science fall into the same category. ‘The system made me do it’ is as sterile an explanation as ‘my brain made me do it’ – and the same is true for ‘the memes made me do it’.

Conclusion and caveats

With suspicious terms like ‘evolution’, ‘manipulation’, ‘necessary’ and ‘strategic communication’ abounding, it is important to end with another round of clarifications.

Firstly, we distinguish between strategic communication and human sociality. Strategic communication in its narrow sense is a modern management concept. With sustainable survival of organizations and economy of resource utilization as its guiding principles, it allows the distinction of right and wrong choices, albeit often only in retrospect. To speak of strategic communication presupposes, in our view, an agent with a degree of autonomy larger than the one the average human being normally enjoys.

Second, the conjunction of the terms ‘evolution’ and ‘necessary’ does not constitute an attempt to ‘biologize away’ the critical potential in SCR. To maintain that humans as a social species are necessarily gullible, at least in some areas of their life, does not legitimize highly asymmetrical social orders. Human history displays a great diversity of social orders, and we readily agree that some have been fairer than others. For us, the question is why some unfair ones have endured longer than fairer ones. The answer, we believe, is at least partly biological. It mattered that medieval peasants were told in what way the church reciprocated for the tithe, even if the deal is seen as fraudulous today. Thus, we hope that grounding strategic communication research in a scientific understanding of the human being will strengthen critical potential. In our view, critical potential derives from explaining what is, not from imagining alternative realities predicated on an inexistent alternative human.

Thirdly and lastly, we hope that this special issue does not lead us down the blind alley of nature versus nurture again. Acknowledging that the human being is a biological species and that evolutionary processes play a role in human affairs does not entail denial of culture and socialization. The discovery of epigenetic phenomena should give genetic determinists pause, but it does not make the human a freely programmable tabula rasa either. In the mind sciences, there is consensus that biological evolution and cultural ‘evolution’ are conjoined. At their intersection, critical potential derives from insight into the reality of things. Yes, a mistreated slave could be imagined as happy in the way Albert Camus imagines Sisyphus a happy man. But it is very unlikely that a person at the bottom of an unjust societal order would be happy. The study of the human as a biological organism tells us clearly that low status, loneliness, lack of self-determination, exclusion from reproduction, uncertainty, and fear for one’s life are powerful stressors.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Sponges are generally considered the simplest multi-cellular animals. They begin their lives as animals but once they settle down, they reduce their complexity to the point of resembling plants – in popular parlance, they digest their own brain and become vegetables. As the old biologist joke goes, they resemble academics who get tenure in that respect.