Recorded on: Sep 22, 2025
In this week’s Frankly, Nate reflects on intraspecies predation (ours) and the impact psychopathic actors have on the mean and median of human behavior – in the past all the way up to our modern society. Human evolution was shaped by both cooperative, pro-social behavior and a competitive, predatory approach for survival – resulting in a balanced distribution for most of humanity’s existence.
But, as agriculture, surplus, and other factors propelled more hierarchical social structure, aggregate human behavior and culture has slowly shifted over time to express more psychopathic traits. This thread of behavior continues to run through our modern society, where a relatively small (but disproportionately powerful) segment of the human population can pull societal behavior towards anti-social and individualistic values – even if the majority of people still inherently operate from a place of reciprocity.
Why might our modern society provide a more fruitful breeding ground for psychopathy than past societies did? What do chickens and eggs have to do with psychopathy and the economic superorganism? And ultimately, what strategies could we begin to think about in order to shift mean and median human behavior back towards a more cooperative, prosocial middle?
Show Notes & Links to Learn More
00:11 – Luke Kemp on TGS (Episodes 1 + 2)
00:14 – Reid Meloy and Nancy McWilliams on TGS Reality Roundtable
00:45 – Economic superorganism
02:06 – Psychopathy
02:39 – Predator
03:18 – Median versus mean
03:43 – 2022 U.S. income distribution
04:34 – The Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania
05:11 – Multi-level selection theory and the Chicken experiment
05:15 – David Sloan Wilson on TGS
05:25 – National Geographic – “The problem with superchickens”
06:14 – The hawk-dove model
06:45 – Tori DeAngelis – “A broader view of psychopathy”
09:10 – Peter Katuščák1 and Tomáš Miklánek – “What drives conditional cooperation in public good games?”
10:04 – Elinor Ostrom – Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Derek Wall – “Commons and Contradictions: The Political Ecology of Elinor Ostrom”
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Have you seen any discussion or research on the kinds of institutions that propagate and nurture psychopaths and those that do the opposite? I think mechanisms which are openly competitive attract and nurture psychopaths – like elections in politics and competitive promotion in organisations – whereas mechanisms with mute this do the opposite. Thus for instance citizens’ juries make power about persuasion, not domination and competition. And the Papal Conclave is an example of merit selection, but one which mutes open competition. Venice's republic ran for 500 years without a civil war or successful coup on a similar system for selecting political officeholders.
But I've not been able to find any serious research on it.