Modern theatre and evolutionary psychology are founded on parallel discoveries of the same first principles. What’s an easy and effective way to translate between the two?
The Web of Human Behavior is a checklist of 20 components of human behavior. It starts with the five fundamental traits of human mental activity, of our instincts for survival and reproduction and our abilities of memory, imagination, and communication. Those create nine patterns of behavior that are also universal traits. How we each use those nine patterns of behavior as individuals is affected by six variable factors.
This gives us a map for following human decision making anywhere we see it, in theatre, film, literature, history, journalism, or real life.
ACT I
Scene 1
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Modern theatre was pioneered in the 1890s.
Evolutionary psychology was pioneered in the 1990s.
They’re founded on parallel discoveries of the same principles.
Theatre artists define them in terms that are easy to talk about with ordinary words. We can say that people always make
[-2 bpm]
the best decisions
they can think of
in the situations
they’re in
for themselves
and the people
and things
they care about.
Artists have used that definition to follow human behavior all the way down to body language, moment by moment.
Evolutionary psychologists define it in terms of evolutionary biology.
All human behavior is the
product of the
attempt by the
individual to
maximize the
survival rate of
his or her
genes.
Another way to say that is:
All human behavior is the
product of the
attempt by the individual to
preserve the survival of
his or her genes by the
most effective means
perceivable to him or her.
Now here we are, with two huge bodies of information that converge on the same point. So how do we translate between the two? Then how do we turn all that into something we can use in real life?
Scene 2
Evolutionary psychologists have taken the first obvious step into zoology.
Mental activity, for us or any other animal species, is the result of the interaction of five mental traits. The first two are our instincts for survival and reproduction. The other three are the three fundamental components of intellect: Memory, imagination, and communication.
All of our feelings, meaning our emotions, are about survival or reproduction. If they aren’t feelings about immediate situations, they’re feelings about situations we can imagine, that we remember, that we’ve heard about from someone else, or some combination of those.
When you have feelings about something that happened to you five minutes ago, yesterday, or a year ago, what’s that? Memory.
When you have feelings about something that could happen to you, or that you think will happen to you, what’s that? Imagination.
When you have feelings about something that someone tells you about, or that you see a photograph of, what’s that? Communication.
Now think of a movie you’ve seen, that you liked because you related well to the characters. Why do you feel the way you do about that movie?
Since it was a movie, that means it’s a story someone told you. That’s communication.
Identifying with the characters means you feel like you’d do the same things they did if you were in their place. That’s imagination.
And these are feelings you have about something from your past. That’s memory.
This is a good step toward understanding human psychology. But it’s only one. We need to take more.
ACT II
Scene 1
Some psychologists have taken another step in one direction.
They’ve identified six basic emotions:
Happiness,
sadness,
anger,
fear,
surprise, and
disgust.
Think about people’s facial expressions that show you they’re feeling each of those.
Happiness,
sadness,
anger,
fear,
surprise,
disgust.
You could go anywhere in the world and recognize people feeling all of those. Because people all over the world use the same expressions for each of them.
All of our other emotions are different degrees and combinations of those. Those are basically the color wheel of emotions.
If you were Bob Ross the painter, you could squirt some happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust on your palette and mix any color of emotion you wanted from them.
Scene 2
This is where the art of theatre was in the 1880s, when Konstantin Stanislavski started his career. Actors identified the emotions their characters were feeling and played them on stage.
Actors had gotten so good at conjuring up different emotions to make themselves feel that Charles Darwin got some to help him when he wrote his last book, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. They described different emotions for him. Then he took photos of actors feeling different emotions and included them in the book. That was a big step for science.
But that still isn’t enough for realistic acting. How do you play someone else’s emotions from their own point of view?
ACT III
Scene 1
That’s the problem that Stanislavski devoted his career to solving.
When you talk to someone else about how you feel, you can start with the name of the emotion. But to get them to understand what you mean, you have to clarify it by talking about why you feel that way.
Stanislavski realized that emotions are infinite, but the motivations behind them are relatively few.
Some other psychologists have taken a step in that direction. The Maslow Hierarchy of Human Needs is a check list of human motivations. Other people have made other observations that clarify items on the list. This shows us a list of nine motivations.
These are what scientists call emergent properties. That means they’re specific results of the interactions of general factors. Each of these nine motivations are a way our survival and reproduction instincts interact with our memory, imagination, and communication.
Many of the decisions people make have more than one motivation. Emotions as people usually talk about them don’t fit into nine categories. But when people talk about why they feel the way they do, the same nine themes keep coming up.
Scene 2
How do you feel about your survival instinct?
Surviving is pretty important, isn’t it?
Your survival motivation is a direct interpretation of your survival instinct.
You react to things that can kill you. You avoid physical hazards and diseases. You provide for your basic physical needs.
You need food, water, and air. You don’t want to get AIDS or Ebola. You don’t want to get murdered, or eaten by a tiger, or drive your car off a cliff.
Scene 3
What about things that threaten your survival but aren’t immediate threats?
That’s your safety motivation.
Things that endanger your health can kill you if they go on long enough, or they can weaken you so you so something else can kill you more easily. You try to avoid things that you feel can cause you diseases or injuries or that can weaken you.
You try to avoid germs from sick people when they cough or sneeze. You’re careful around broken glass and electrical wires. And you don’t want to be too hot or too cold for very long or have nothing to eat or drink all day.
Scene 4
What about your reproductive instinct?
Reproduction starts with sex. But this isn’t just a motivation to have actual sex. This starts with you noticing, and thinking differently, about people you might want to have sex with compared to people you definitely don’t want to have sex with.
If you go to the maternity ward of a hospital, you’ll see a lot of pregnant women there. Hopefully you’ll see a lot of fathers there too.
If you see a woman lying on a bed giving birth to a baby, and you see her husband there holding her hand, that means that somewhere back in their history together, one of them thought the other was attractive. Then they started talking. At some point they both thought the other was attractive. Then one of them asked the other for their phone number. Then they went on a date.
Whatever happened between then and now, you know that nine months ago they had sex. How many things did each of them think and feel about the other that led up to their deciding to start having sex?
All of those things are part of their sex motivation.
Scene 5
How do you feel about your family?
There’s more to reproduction than having sex. Reproduction means keeping copies of your genes alive in other people.
All of your blood relatives have some copies of your genes. That means that anything you do to try to make life better for a family member is part of your reproductive instinct.
There’s a lot of overlap between the sex motivation and the family motivation. If you want to marry someone and have kids with them, obviously there’s a lot of overlap. If you want to marry someone but you don’t want to have children, there’s also a direct connection between sex and family, but it’s not the same one.
If you were put up for adoption and you wish someone would adopt you because you wish you had a mother and father, that’s a feeling about family without any connection to sex. Every time adults feel parental instincts toward other people’s children, even if it’s just a nurse who feels a greater sense of responsibility to child patients than she does to adult patients, that’s a feeling that’s connected to family with no connection to sex.
Reliable birth control, paternity tests, and child support laws are all recent inventions in the 7,000,000 years of our species’ evolution, and the half billion years of animal evolution before that. The feeling of sexual attraction to someone is usually the feeling of believing the other person would be a good choice for someone to have children with.
There are different reasons people can feel that. You can feel that the other person would be a good parent. You can feel like they have exceptional abilities you want to pass on to your children. You can feel like they have some mysterious quality that would be good to pass on to your children.
People’s reasons for wanting to have sex with other people can get complicated. So here’s another way to look at it. It’s easy to think of people you definitely don’t want to have sex with. Would you want to have a child with someone you don’t want to have sex with? Usually not.
In case you’re wondering, this doesn’t rule out homosexuality. Or old people hooking up with each other in retirement communities.
Instincts don’t give us factual information. They give us powerful feelings about the kinds of things we should do.
Our reproductive instinct gives us a powerful feeling that there’s an important connection between sex and family. When people act upon those feelings, most people have children somewhere along the way. People who know they want to have children pursue their sex and family motivations with other people who want to have children. But for other people, the way they feel is best to pursue their sex and family motivations doesn’t lead to pregnancies.
Scene 6
What about making friends? What about being respected?
That’s your social motivation.
People, like all other primates, live in groups so we can cooperate for our mutual goals.
This is a combination of the survival and reproductive instincts. If friends and allies value you, potential friends and allies see good reasons to be on your side, and enemies fear you, all of those help your survival.
You also have to interact with people to attract a mate. If you’re loved by the people who know you well, respected by people who know your reputation, and feared by enemies, those are attractive to potential mates, because that’s a good situation for you and your family.
Scene 7
What about things that just make you feel good, that don’t seem to have any connection to anything else? Like hanging out and relaxing, listening to music or watching a movie, and eating your favorite foods?
That’s your self gratification motivation.
Think about things that make you feel good and things that make you feel bad. You’ll notice that the things that make you feel good make you feel like your life is getting better. And things that make you feel bad make you feel like your life is getting worse.
Good feelings are the immediate reward for doing things that help your survival and reproduction. Those feelings evolved because people who felt good about survival, safety, sex, family, making friends, and so on, were better at surviving and reproducing than people who felt bad about them. Or people who didn’t care either way.
But self gratification has become its own motivation. Because people have found so many ways to make good feelings happen that don’t help us survive or reproduce.
Why does fruit flavored candy taste good?
Fresh fruit has nutrients in it that make us healthy. But the nutrients don’t give the fruit its flavor. Other things in the fruit give it its flavor. So people have isolated the chemicals that give fruit its flavor and made fruit flavored candy with them. That makes the candy taste like fresh fruit but without the nutrients.
People have done the same basic thing with cigarettes and cocaine. Those make people feel good too, but don’t make them healthier.
Scene 8
What about doing things because you just feel like you should do them? Like getting exercise or reading or doing puzzles? Or whatever it is you start thinking about when you get bored.
That’s your self actualization motivation.
That’s the feeling of wanting to use your abilities to make a life for yourself.
Surviving and reproducing depend on you interacting with the world and other people, and you do that by using your abilities. You need to do something to get the food, water, and other things you need to live. You need to do something to meet and attract romantic partners, and to make friends, and to find or create entertainment, and so on.
But using your abilities is a motivation to itself, because some uses of abilities don’t have a clear purpose otherwise.
You can work to save up money without having a plan for what to spend it on.
You can get a new job that gives you work that you like better.
You can take up hobbies, where you spend your time doing things you enjoy mainly because you enjoy doing them.
Scene 9
What’s the next step beyond self actualization? How much do you want to do the things you want to do?
If you’re sitting on your couch with a broken leg, looking out the window and wishing you could go running, how much running are you thinking about? Is that your favorite way to get exercise? Do you want to compete in the state track championship? Do you want to compete in the Olympics?
That’s your self fulfillment motivation.
That means doing things you want to do as much as you want to do them.
Instead of simply going to school, you try to get the best education you can in whatever you like the best.
Instead of just working at a job, you pursue a career you love.
Instead of just finding somewhere to live, you buy a house you want.
Instead of dating people you decide to marry someone.
This is the motivation to pursue the best outcomes you can imagine in individual areas of your life.
Scene 10
What do you get when you take self fulfillment in each of the areas of your life and put them all together?
I call that your fulfillment of self fulfillment motivation.
This is your motivation to pursue the best overall outcome you can imagine in all the areas of your life.
If you work your way up to a job you love and a great marriage because those are the most important things to you, but you don’t like where you live, there’s still room for improvement.
This is the motivation to realize your dreams.
Scene 11
With these nine categories we have a starting point for talking about how people’s two instincts and three basic mental abilities turn into emotions that motivate their decisions.
But we’re still talking in universal terms here, about motivations everyone has. We need to take another step now, to see how this universal framework plays out for each of us differently, as unique individuals.
That leads us to another checklist, of six variable factors.
ACT V
Scene 1
Think of someone you know well who’s a lot different from you physically. How does that affect the decisions you each make?
If one of you is a lot taller than the other, you have different ideas about how to get things off of high shelves.
If one of you is a lot stronger than the other, you have different ideas about what you can lift.
If one of you walks a lot faster than the other, you have to remember that when you walk somewhere together.
Physical characteristics that affect what you can do are abilities.
How much does the ability to see affect your decision making? Put on a blindfold and find out. If you need glasses you already have an idea what this means because you change how well you can see every time you put your glasses on or take them off.
Some decisions depend on combinations of abilities.
Hiking up a mountain depends on strength and endurance. If you have that much strength and endurance, a mountain looks like something you can climb. If you don’t, it doesn’t.
What about the mental abilities we’re born with? Not just the mental abilities we have when we’re babies, but the mental abilities we would’ve grown up with no matter what happened to us.
Those kinds of mental abilities are actually physical abilities, because they’re caused by innate differences in the make up of our brains. This is why music or math or any other subject comes so much more easily to some people than to others.
Other abilities are things we think of as parts of people’s personalities.
Do you like spending time alone, thinking? Or do you like spending time talking to other people and getting to know them?
Some things people do depend on them spending time alone thinking. If you like spending time alone thinking, you’re probably better at doing those things than most people. If you love spending time around other people talking, you’re probably better than most people at doing things that depend on talking to people.
Scene 2
Where are you?
What’s around you?
How do those things affect your decisions?
How is spending two hours in a room that has seats in it different from spending two hours in a room that doesn’t have any seats in it?
Environment is your surroundings, to whatever extent they affect your decision making. This means the physical environment, as the physical components of your surroundings. It also means the social environment, as the way other people affect you. We each help create the environment for everyone who’s affected by our decisions.
You learn about both of these when you learn to drive.
Driving safely depends on you knowing how your car handles at different speeds, what the speed limits are, what the weather conditions, visibility conditions, and the road conditions are, how much traffic is around you, and what the other drivers are doing.
Environment is what makes going to a party at a friend’s house different from going to the library. It’s what makes your home different from your grandparents’ home.
The environmental movement has changed many people’s perception of environments, by making us aware of the effects our actions have on the rest of the world, and how the parts of the world we’re affecting affect us. We got into the climate crisis because people didn’t realize what a problem greenhouse gas emissions were. But now that we know that’s happening, we think differently about our emissions, and we’re trying to get other people to think differently about them.
Scene 3
What have you learned how to do?
How does learning to drive affect the decisions you make? How does learning a foreign language affect your decisions? What about learning how to make something or fix something?
Skills are specific things you’ve learned how to do.
It starts from birth, with things we don’t notice we’re learning, like speaking a language, eating, and getting dressed.
Then in our early years of school we learn to read, write, and do math.
Then come skills like art, science, and sports.
Along the way we learn to do other things, like swim,ride bicycles, anduse computers.
Then we learn job skills, either by working at jobs or in school or in job training programs.
Skills change the decisions we make by changing what we know how to do.
When you don’t know how to drive a car, a car looks like something other people drive. When you do know how to drive, a car looks like something you can drive.
When you don’t know how to drive, you ask your friends for a ride. When you learn to drive, you start thinking seriously about buying a car.
If you don’t know how to read Chinese, when you see a book written in Chinese, you wonder what all those marks on the pages mean.
Your friend who knows how to read Chinese doesn’t see it that way. She sees a book full of words, sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. So she can just pick up the book and translate it for you.
When you see a burning building, that looks dangerous, doesn’t it?
Most people would agree with you.
But if you’re a firefighter a burning building looks like a problem to solve.
Scene 4
What’s happened to you in your life?
What’s happened to your best friend in their life?
What have you each learned from that?
They might be a lot the same.
Or they might be a lot different.
Either way, they aren’t identical.
Personal history is everything you’ve learned by experience. This overlaps with skills somewhat. But it also includes things like attitudes and expectations you have toward situations and people.
When you meet someone new, what you expect to happen will depend a lot on what’s happened with all the people you’ve known before that. Believing that you can trust someone or that you can’t trust them, isn’t a skill. It’s an attitude that can help you much of the time, but can also get you into trouble sometimes.
This also includes knowledge and things you’ve learned that can help you do something but that are hard to think of as skills.
Does learning about the history of your country help you do anything?
Learning the street layout in your neighborhood helps you find things in your neighborhood, but does it teach you anything you can apply to anything else?
What does learning a new dance move help you do?
Scene 5
Where are you from?
When you meet new people, which ones remind you of the people you grew up among? And what did you learn from growing up among those people?
Cultural background is the ideas you learn from other people by being part of a group. Learning the ideas of a group helps you function within the group. But if that’s the main benefit of knowing the ideas, it’s easy to equate the usefulness of ideas with truth.
If I say that December 25th is Christmas Day, or that the third day of the week is Tuesday, you’ll agree with me.
But why?
Do we have a copy of Jesus’s birth certificate that says 12/25/0001 on it?
Or is it because people say Merry Christmas to each other on December 25th?
It’s a fact that we call the third day of the week Tuesday. But does that make it a fact that the third day of the week is Tuesday? Where does a fact like that come from?
We’re surrounded by cultural values, norms, and traditions like these.
Some of them are based on facts. Some are completely arbitrary. But we’ve learned to treat them as facts by being surrounded by other people who treat them as facts.
Cultural backgrounds affect our decision making all the time. But we notice them most when we meet people who have different cultural backgrounds. Whatever you believe about abortion or climate change, it’s easy to find people who believe the opposite, and who will be glad to tell you why they believe what they believe.
Scene 6
What do you want to do today?
What do you want to do this year?
What do you want to do over the course of your life?
Goals are what you’re trying to do right at the moment, over the course of your life, or anywhere in between.
Our instincts and our motivations are universal. But our goals are our individual priorities for satisfying our instincts and motivations.
Even though you and I want the same things overall, we think, feel, and do things differently according to which motivations we feel are most important right now or on any other time frame.
If you and your friends are having a party you’re acting on your social and self-gratification motivations by getting together and having a good time.
Whoever is trying to hook up with each other is acting on their sex and maybe family motivations, even though nobody’s trying to conceive a baby that night.
You’re probably acting on your self actualization motivations too, if you’ve been waiting all week to get away from your normal boring weekday routines and finally get to do something you enjoy.
But if you make too much noise at 1:00 in the morning and keep your neighbors awake, you’ll be threatening their survival in a small way, because you’ll be keeping them from meeting their goal of satisfying a basic physical need.
If the police come to break up your party, they can threaten your survival and safety with their clubs and their guns, they can threaten your self actualization and self gratification by threatening to fine you or throw you in jail, and they threaten your social status by treating you like criminals instead of law abiding citizens.
Scene 7
These six things together create our personalities.
We make different decisions because of what we’re able to do, which includes different ways of focusing our attention and different ways of making connections among ideas.
We make different decisions because of the skills we’ve learned for how do things.
We make different decisions because we’ve learned different attitudes about what we want and how we should do things from our personal history and cultural background.
The decisions we make are a reaction to our environment, because that’s a huge part of our situations when we make
the best decisions
we can think of
in the situations
we’re in.
We make different decisions because we start with different goals.
Then we use our abilities, skills, personal history, and cultural background in our environments to try to reach our goals.
I call this the Web of Human Behavior.
Chorus
Survival
Reproduction
Memory
Imagination
Communication
Survival
Safety
Sex
Family
Social
Self gratification
Self actualization
Self fulfillment
Fulfillment of self fulfillment
Abilities
Environment
Skills
Personal History
Cultural Background
Goals
ACT VI
Scene 1
With two instincts, three mental abilities, nine motivations, and six variables, we have a checklist for talking about the origins of anyone’s feelings using ordinary words.
Many people feel that new discoveries are always about new ideas and require new words for talking about them. But this is what makes evolutionary psychology different from any other field of science. These aren’t discoveries of new ideas. These are discoveries of new ways to think about feelings we’ve always had.
Stanislavski anticipated this. He intentionally developed as few new ideas and words as he could for talking about his work.
In most fields, people learning new words for talking about ideas that most people outside the field don’t know about is sign of professionalism. But the goal of modern theatre is to replicate real life. Stanislavski realized that a professional vocabulary would set professional actors apart from everyone else. But what professional actors really need is to be very connected to everyone else in real life.
People have been trying to understand feelings for at least as long as we’ve been able to talk, with things like poetry, music, art, storytelling, and philosophy. So it’s a good bet that people have already thought of most of the ideas we need, and that we already have words for them. The main thing we need is a new way of seeing connections among ideas.
Scene 2
The Web of Human Behavior shows us 20 fundamental components of human decision making.
With that we can see how writers, directors, and actors develop characters in theatre or film, to make them who they need to be to play their parts in the story.
We can also use the Web to understand character development from the audience’s perspective, as they get a feeling for who the character is by seeing what they do in the story.
We can use the Web to understand human evolution from chimpanzees walking out of the forest and into the grassland, to the new abilities they evolved by surviving and reproducing in their new environment.
We can use the Web to understand the evolution of cultures and societies, beginning with stone age hunter gatherers 50,000 years ago, who spread through the world and adapted to the different situations that affected them.
We can use the Web to understand people through current events and documentary filmmaking, where the creators blend the principles of art and science together, using film and facts to tell a story.
All of these types of storytelling depend on the same 20 components.
That’s what I’ve been doing in this series from the beginning.
I’m telling you about the Web now, but I’ve been using it all along. That’s why all my stories about animals are stories about the interaction between their abilities and their environments. And why those lead into the stories of people evolving abstract thinking. And why those lead into stories of all the different ways people use their abilities and ideas in their environments to do all the different things people do now.
All those individual stories fit together to tell a much bigger story because I’ve been using the same framework and vocabulary to tell them all.
Scene 3
The Web of Human Behavior is basically the Periodic Table of the Elements of Human Behavior.
If some of these categories are too general, you can add to these lists to specify parts of them. It might make the list easier for you to use if you classify interests separately from goals, for instance.
A number of psychologists have proposed revisions to the Maslow Hierarchy of Human Needs. The point of this list is that this is the minimum number of categories you need to be able to encompass all of human behavior. So while you can add to this list, you can’t take anything away from it and still talk realistically about the entire realm of human behavior.
The Web of Human Behavior is a map for following people’s decision making.
But it’s not the end of the story. We need to take another step.
When you meet someone new and feel like you have things in common with them, you don’t need a psychologist or a film director to explain their entire life to you.
How do we see through each other’s unique differences and mainly notice our similarities in an instant?