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Forthcoming (August 2011) Future Science edited by Max Brockman, Vintage Press, New York.
with the group. Shame regulates social behavior and serves as a forewarning of punishment:
Conform or suffer the consequences. The earliest feelings of shame were likely over issues of
waste management, greediness, and incompetence. While guilt is evoked by an individual’s
standards, shame is the result of group standards. Therefore, shame, unlike guilt, is felt only in
the context of other people.
The first hominids could keep track of cooperation and defection only by firsthand
observation. Many animals use visual observations to decide whether to work with others. Reef
fish in the Red Sea, for instance, watch wrasses clean other reef fish, to determine whether or not
they’re cooperative, as biologist Redouan Bshary discovered. Bshary went scuba diving off
Egypt’s coast to observe this symbiotic relationship. Bluestreak cleaner wrasses (Labroides
dimidiatus) eat parasites, along with dead or infected tissue, off reef fishes in more than 2,000
interactions a day, each of which can be considered an act of cooperation. Wrasses are tempted
to eat more than just the parasites, but if the reef fish loses too much flesh in the deal, it will
refuse to continue working with the wrasse. Reef fish approach wrasses that they see cooperating
with their current clients and avoid the wrasses they see biting off more than they should chew.’
Like the Bluestreak cleaner wrasses, humans are also more cooperative when they sense
they are being watched. Researchers at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne examined the
effect of a pair of eyes on payments for tea and coffee to an honesty box. Alternating images of
flowers and human faces were posted above the box in the university coffee room each week for
ten weeks; researchers found that people paid nearly three times as much for their drinks in
° R. Bshary, “Biting cleaner fish use altruism to deceive image-scoring client reef fish,” Proc. Roy. Soc. Lond. B
269: 2087-93 (2002).
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