But is it really?

If the biggest and baddest always win, how come there are so many more of them thin them?

Strength is helpful, but friendliness might actually be the key.

Thio evolutionary success e Think dogs are Exhibit A for the survival of the friendliest Meet Dr Brian Hare and Vanessa Woods, co authors of the book Survival of the Friendliest.

A group of wolves decided to start hanging around human settlements, and the friendliest among them started to breed together.

Their bodies changed, their minds changed.

They became more communicative and cooperative with us.

They became.

But what's unique is our communication with them.

What do you doing?

Dogs understand communicative gestures viewpoint, or you look in the direction you're trying to tell somebody where something is or what you want.

Dogs were really good at reading those intentions in our gestures.

That is a crucial ability in human development.

Domestication is selection for friendliness, and that's why our dogs are so good at telling us what they need.

So if dogs use friendliness, what about survival of the fittest survival of the fittest is misconstrue role of what Darwin actually meant.

Somewhere along the way, it kind of twisted so that the most dominant was going to do the best.

But that's not what they meant at all.

They were talking about fitness, as in your ability to reproduce friendliness we find in nature is a much more successful strategy on, of course, one of the friendliest animals.

It's us.

We often credit our big brains.

Language or technology is the key to survival.

But we now know those characteristics weren't unique to just us.

One defining factor that contributed to our evolutionary success was our ability to get along.

Humans developed this new social category called the In Group stranger, someone that you've never seen before and that you've never met.

But you immediately identify as part of your group.

So in early humans, this could be I'm on, adorned with some kind of decoration, or maybe facial pattern on.

This would say immediately, I'm connected to you and we should be friends.

And that allowed us to expand our social networks beyond those we grew up with hundreds of people.

Now you're learning from hundreds of people you're cooperating from hundreds of people, and now cultural innovation can explode.

That's what was the friendly spark that made our species different than all the other species.

But it has a darker side, a darker side and one that's easy to see when you look at the differences between these two e love bonobos because they really do teach us how to be better people.

They don't have any of the lethal aggression that we find in other great apes, including humans.

The female sort of dictate the way the culture goes, which means that the males don't get too aggressive, and the babies are always unharmed.

They're just like an amazing model.

You can talk about chimps.

Thanks, Um, chimps, while they can be kind and friendly and wonderful, I love chimpanzees.

They, like humans, have a darker side.

They commit lethal aggression.

Just like this homicide.

There's chimp aside.

They wouldn't share with a stranger because strangers might hurt them.

That cost doesn't exist in bonobos, and then that's where humans become really interesting, because we could be extremely pro social to strangers and it could be really aggressive towards strangers.

And so our ability to feel love for these in groups.

Strangers also drives our ability to be extremely violent.

Was those threatening a members?

But how does friendliness help?

Today?

We've become much more of a winner take all society, and it can't be very many winners.

So it just kind of puts you into that mindset of being in a competition with other people.

If somebody else wins, it's gonna be at your expense.

Dr.

Jennifer Crocker examines our social motivations of ecosystem, an ecosystem in the ego system.

We are preoccupied with our self worth, both in our own eyes and in other people's eyes.

And then the ecosystem is this other paradigm for thinking about relationships with other people, where, instead of thinking about what I want from you, I'm thinking about Oh, what do you need?

If the other people in my social context are thriving, that's going to be more likely to help me thrive.

Eso This might seem like Justin idealistic thought, but the research it actually points to health benefits.

Being responsive to other people's needs actually predicts increases in self esteem because people feel like they can make a difference for other people that support critics decreases in symptoms of anxiety symptoms of depression you're making a difference for others is good for your sense of software.

I don't think of ecosystem and ecosystem motivation as being trait.

Everybody has the capacity for both of these motivations.

And the question is, which one is activated at a particular moment?

Yeah, this is paradox of human nature.

How could we be simultaneously so kind and so cruel?

We're wired to connect with one another, but along the way we started seeing others as well others and this ability to relate.

It also led us to divide the best way Thio understand that we're all human is through cross group friendships.

Through all our research, it's really being one of the main ways that you can sort of differ views the cycle of dehumanization.