Riada talks to Dr. Brian Hare about his book "Survival of the Friendliest"

I was so excited to read and then host one of two authors of a book about friendliness and how it came to be an advantageous evolutionary strategy. In it, advancing what they call the “self-domestication theory," Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods put forward “a powerful new theory of human nature” which suggests that our secret to success as a species is our unique friendliness. So, in this exciting episode, learn how cooperative communication allowed us to thrive while other humans went extinct. Learn also what led some species to be more cognitively sophisticated than others, and what type of friendliness drove human “self-domestication,” as well as what’s behind it. How and why it is not just a result of artificial selection accomplished by humans choosing which animals to breed, but also the result of natural selection as well? Dr. Hare also explains us the dark side of our friendliness, and helps us understand how do we reconcile our unique friendliness with our capacity for cruelty? How did we come to this idea of social category that we call “intragroup stranger,” and how does it enable us to dehumanize other individuals and then harm those dehumanized social groups? “We are both the most tolerant and the most merciless species on the planet,” the authors of the book write, yet fortunately they also offer some ways forward. From the book and our conversation, learn also about Albert Bandura’s important experiment on dehumanization, why as Dr. Hare asserts, “We did not evolve to be despots,” and about transition from how and when the seeds of despotism were sown, leadings us all the way to explaining the benefits of constitutional and liberal democracies. The authors of the book assert that “In order to survive and even to flourish, we need to explain our definition of who belongs.” So, learn about it all and much more in this thought-provoking conversation with Dr. Hare. Enjoy! Dr. Brian Hare is a core member of the Center of Cognitive Neuroscience, a Professor in Evolutionary Anthropology, and Psychology and Neuroscience at Duke University. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2004, and in 2005, following his work at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, was awarded the Sofia Kovalevskaja Award, Germany’s most prestigious award for scientist under 40. In 2007, Smithsonian Magazine named Hare one of the top 35 scientists under 36. Hare has published over 100 scientific papers and his research has received consistent national and international attention. In 2019, Hare and his research were featured in Steven Speilberg’s documentary series Why We Hate. Hare’s first book with co-author Vanessa Woods, "The Genius of Dogs" is a New York Times Bestseller. "Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity" came out in July 2020.