A few weeks ago, I had a thought, how would a con man survive in the EEA? That is, imagine a clan group whose size maxes out at 150. Then imagine a tribal group on the order of thousands. This would be the constrained world that most people would be expected to move in. Modern con men shift from community to community and manufacture new clean identities once their game is implemented and their capital of confidence exhausted and their yield secured. In the EEA this obviously would not work, screwing over your fellow clan members would likely be a one-shot affair, and moving to the next marks would be difficult because cultural groups would probably be small enough that informal information networks would be efficient at spreading someone's reputation around.

Though I have serious qualms about David Sloan Wilson's work on "multi-level selection," he is someone who has explored the differences between individuals in terms of their compunction toward amoral manipulation, that is, machiavellian vs. non-machiavellian personalities. In Animal Behavior and Game Theory Wilson has a chapter where he reviews the literature on machiavellian personalities and their impact on group dynamics. There is a lot of red meat that might be fodder for GNXP posts, but one thing that I found interesting was that though machiavellian personalities are often attractive in the short term there is some evidence that others become aware of their tendencies over a longer period and avoid interacting with them in any situation that they could exploit. Inserting this in the context of the EEA makes sense of the idea of "cheater detection," if these machiavellian personalities existed in the EEA, it would be good to extract them out of the social loop as soon as possible since they tend to be parasitic defectors by inclination. Wilson eventually concludes with suggestions for paths of research in the area of machiavellian personalities (it is related to his interest in altruism), and asks about various ESSs that might exist to maintain a balance between high machiavellian and low machiavellian personalities.

The idea of evolutionarily stable strategies made me wonder: wouldn't a machiavellian con man flourish in the anonymous mass culture of the modern era in comparison to the EEA? (that is, have higher fitness) After all, con men can keep moving from community to community with various aliases, and often leverage institutional credentials and manage to subborn the relatively clumsy legal authorities that are often one step behind them. Does crime pay more today than it did 10,000 years ago?

Of late the evidence that human social intelligence reached a ceiling tens of thousands of years ago has moved me back from the position that the high density cultures that have thrived over the past few thousand years might be conducive to shifts in the balance of personality phenotypes prevelant within human subpopulations. But with the relatively anonymous modern world that has outgrown its social intelligence capacities one could argue that machiavellian individuals have a wealth of marks at their disposal in a way that was impossible in the EEA. It could be argued that the Roma Gypsy subculture of Eastern Europe promotes a normative lifestyle that could be described as machiavellian in the context of non-Roma. This obviously could never have come about thousands of years ago when large cultural complexes did not exist to feed off of in a parasitic fashion.

Assuming far larger panmictic breeding populations it seems that there might be greater variation in personalities today for natural selection to work with as many more polygenic variants are possible (response to selection is proportional to heritable variation). It might be that "sociopathic" personality types always emerged from the genetic background because a mix of personality trait controlling alleles on various locii produced the fitness optimum in the EEA, that is, there was some element of balancing selection at work. In this scenario the sociopaths would have low fitness, but always persist because they were simply byproducts of optimally fit parents who had both selfish and altruistic tendencies (their mirrors would be totally transparent individuals). As the environmental context changed sociopaths might have found a more favorable niche and so are no longer as ill-favored by the gods of reproductive fitness.

One prediction I might make is that when you have populations who have a long history of mass urban culture, a greater percentage of sociopaths will exist within them because it is easier for them to engage in free riding and exploitation. One might imagine an arms race as sociopaths induce functional changes in the character of the society that they parasitise, as it moves toward more legalist totalitarianism to curtail social norm loopholes utilized by machiavellian individuals. Finally the society might collapse because the cost of the arms race exceeds its expendable political capital, at which point smaller units of governance resurface and the sociopaths are more easily "purified" from the system because they no longer can move so easily to escape more informal socially sanctioned retribution. At this point the various polities might start reaggregating into larger conglomerations because the personality mix is more conducive toward large cooperative political projects, and which point the sociopaths might resurface to exploit the opportunity rich environment. Perhaps this is one of the factors that undergirds the oscillating character of Chinese civilization? I rather doubt it actually, but it is an idea.