Some years ago, I was in a conversation with my wife reminiscing on my younger years when I was in the Marine Corps. At times, she could be quite taken aback at stories of the various antics Marines got into, particularly with how we treated one another. Casual interaction often involved talking with each other in ways that most people would consider vicious insults, or horseplay that would in most contexts probably be referred to as assault. On one occasion she asked me, “Why were you guys always so awful to each other?” And my immediate response was “For the same reason monkeys poke each other in the eyes.”
On the off-chance that this doesn’t clear things up for you, let me elaborate.
I had recently read a book called Games Primates Play: An Undercover Investigation of the Evolution and Economics of Human Relationships. The book looks at social behavior among various primates and illustrates how that behavior is also reflected within human institutions and norms. One form of behavior common among primates is loyalty signaling, and alliance building, by means of the infliction of minor harms.
For example, some monkeys take it in turn to deliberately expose vulnerable parts of themselves to another, and allow that other monkey to prod, poke, or grip these areas. Afterwards, the routine is repeated in the other direction. The effective signal here is, “If I had wanted to, I could have just inflicted a devastating injury on you, but I did not. And I allowed you to be able to inflict a devastating injury on me, but you did not either. Now we know that we can trust each other, because we both just had a perfect chance to cause serious harm but didn’t do so.” The book included, among other illustrations, pictures of monkeys taking it in turn to poke each other in the eyes as part of this routine.
A similar cultural norm was always in effect in the Marines. The unspoken understanding was “You can insult me in the most over-the-top ways imaginable and I will not be upset – indeed, I will laugh along with you. And I can do the same to you, and you’ll laugh along with me too.” In the same way, the norm regarding the rough-and-tumble aspect of Marine culture showed the same signal. As was once put by Max Uriarte, the Terminal Lance himself:
The phenomena associated with birthdays in the Marine Corps is second to none. Mention it’s your birthday, someone else’s birthday–even your mother’s birthday–and you will be literally physically assaulted. The birthday in the Marine Corps is a dangerous time, lay low for the day and hope no one remembers tomorrow; lest ye find themselves in a world of angry, blind rage. In a way, this angry hurricane of fist and contusion is the Marines’ way of showing their affection for their fellow companion.
I recall my 21st birthday. October 11th, 2007–Iraq. While I assure you my beating was substantial, I remain confident that it was ultimately out of affection.
While these antics are taken to further extremes in the Marine Corps than it is among normal (civilized?) people, the same ideas apply. When you get to know someone and they fall into the realm of “casual acquaintance,” the social norm is to be polite, overlook flaws, pretend not to notice potentially embarrassing gaffes, and so forth. But when you move into friendship, things change. Friends tease each other, they make fun of each other, they jokingly highlight embarrassing gaffes rather than pretend not to notice, they play practical jokes, and so on. And often, making a move like this is how one signals to another that the relationship has moved from casual acquaintance into real friendship.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who has, at times, felt like such a transition had occurred, and made the first move into “poking friendly fun” at the other person, only to have that person become genuinely upset, making me realize that perhaps they and I hadn’t grown as close as I had thought. (It can’t be just me, right?) And this is also why such behavior is taken to relative extremes in the military. In the Marine Corps, people needed to be able to stick together in extreme, high pressure environments with life-and-death stakes. That kind of cohesion requires that people can’t have walls up against each other – so day to day life greatly depended on regularly demonstrating that all walls were down. So no matter how viciously you insulted me or I insulted you, we would both be laughing about it together over beers at the barracks later that night.
And therein lies the other side of the coin – signaling of this sort doesn’t really send much of a signal if it doesn’t have at least the potential to cost something. Attempting to signal friendship by engaging in behavior that’s indistinguishable from the polite, anodyne behavior among acquaintances sends an invisible signal. Sometimes, signals are misread, and jokes or actions are taken that cause people to become genuinely upset. But if that risk wasn’t there, there would be no signal.
Over the course of my life, I’ve witnessed a number of top-down pushes, both formal and informal, to try to replace these mildly antagonistic forms of friendship signaling in favor of a kinder, gentler society. But if the thesis of Games Primates Play is right, it may not be the case that the kinder, gentler social interaction serves as a real substitute for building social cohesion, because these ideas are deeply embedded in our evolved psychology.
If a monkey committee decided that eye-poking was needlessly antagonistic behavior and prevented monkeys from engaging in these behaviors, the end result would not be a greater level of social cohesion among that troop. It would lead to a breakdown of the social order on which the troop relies. And there’s a real possibility that the modern push to move social environments into “kinder, gentler” places where mildly antagonistic behavior is forbidden may backfire. Rather than strengthening social bonds, it may only serve to weaken the fabric that keeps social bonds strong.
READER COMMENTS
steve
Sep 4 2024 at 10:10am
I kind of miss those days. It was not as extreme in the AirForce or Navy but as a corpsman I got some of that hazing. I think this is fairly common behavior among younger men in higher stress jobs. Note that it was less common, the physical part, among officers. It’s common, the verbal part and not so much the physical, in the higher stress areas of medicine like the cardiac OR, ICU, ED. If you arent especially good at directly expressing feelings, absent beer, it works pretty well and it was also fun. Women handle it differently. I have argued with my female colleagues that what men do is better because of the entertainment aspect but they mostly just roll their eyes.
Steve
Student
Sep 4 2024 at 10:40am
Cool post.
We a similar thing in sports but with much lower stakes… it’s not life or death but teammates do need to trust one another and rely on one another and allow some of them to get the glory while the grunts in the trenches make it possible… without getting jealous, else the team as a group is harmed.
Question: Do female monkeys engage in this sort of thing? I would assume so but it does seem like males do this in a different way than females… It also seems like the kinder/gentler movement is lead by females for the most part.
David Seltzer
Sep 4 2024 at 5:54pm
Kevin: Great post. My 21st birthday was in VP 40 at Sangley Point, P.I. I came into our hut and was immediately met with a blanket party. Only bruises but no broken nose or teeth. Post that, we went to the EM Club where I was forbidden to buy a drink. That honor fell to my fellow squids. Something else comes from that affectionate malice. We could be honest with each other when it was necessary. Umbridge wasn’t taken. Years later, I considered professional boxing. My trainer and dearest friend told me I didn’t have enough talent. I was disappointed but was grateful for his honesty. I once bragged to him, “I have a world class right cross.” His slag, “Yeah! Third world!
Monte
Sep 5 2024 at 2:29am
Men, particularly Marines, have a sacred duty to insult and embarrass each other at all times in every situation. It’s a tough love.
Jane
Sep 5 2024 at 9:30am
Do female monkeys play-fight? All this seems like it’d work incredibly poorly in mixed groups with substantial proportions of older or infirm individuals, pregnant or nursing females and young children. Bonding through extreme aggressive play may be functional in contexts where participants can assume a stable, fairly equal degree of strength across all members of the group; but if you can’t precisely estimate your companion’s level of fitness and strength, you may cause serious injury in the course of playful roughhousing. And nobody is very good at estimating how much punishment other people can handle, except by projecting from what they can handle themselves.
I assume that may be one reason why aggressive-affection and play-fighting are very alien to female social norms. Clearly some women do have this instinct; for instance, sports like roller derby foster that vibe, although I don’t know how much informal trash-talking and roughhousing actually take place outside of the controlled space of the rink. However, to me as a woman, the whole concept feels incredibly foreign and uncomfortable. Outside selected sports, no female social space I’ve experienced has this norm, either around physical or verbal/emotional aggression. Instead, female spaces emphasize maintaining secure relationships through regular small attentions, which I guess is more wasteful of resources, but also much less dangerous for a mixed-strength group.
dmm
Sep 6 2024 at 8:13am
Excellent points. I guess social grooming serves those needs.
dmm
Sep 6 2024 at 8:07am
Very insightful YOU TOTAL RUBE! Too early? Oh, not rough enough. Sorry, I’ve always been socially inept. Thanks.
Jim Glass
Sep 10 2024 at 2:50am
“How guys talk”. 🙂
I once saw a female evolutionary anthropologist describe the way male friends greet each other this way, in stark contrast to how women are just the opposite — they all tell each other how excellent they all are. (You’ve seen videos where people are asked to rank themselves on the 10 scale. Men: “Joe here’s a 4.” “But I’ve got a fast car and that ups me to a 6.” Women: “We’re all 10, 10, 10, each and every one of us”.) But that’s in public, behind the scenes the claws come out and knives go in the back.
She had videos of sports teams in the moments after games finished. The men from both teams got together and mixed friendly, the way we all know. The women were much more hostile, grudge-bearing, rank-claiming, even towards members of their own team.
Then she gave evolutionary explanations for these behaviors dating back to mammoth-spearing times. For men, as you said. For women, they couldn’t afford to give offense because they were socially dependent on each other to take care of their kids and such. And also because, as they were smaller and more vulnerable, if woman one aggrieved woman two and she complained to her man, he might take it out by pounding woman one. Then one’s man might be obligated to fight the first guy – and be upset enough about that that he’d pound woman one as well for provoking the fight. (No resource to police domestic violence squads or family therapists back then,) So women had to be much more indirect and ‘politic’ in their rivalries. And so on. There were other reasons….
Then the speaker paused the lecture, looked at the audience and said: “As a woman, I can’t understand how you men do this. I see it in daily life, study it, video social experiments, write papers about it, know all about it — but as a woman it is totally alien to me. I could never do it”.
See a few different evolutionary scientists give explanations of female behavior along these lines and one can begin to wonder … with women taking control of corporate HR departments and University Administrations, perhaps the “woke” movement’s huge emphasis on identity politics and equality of everybody-with- everybody — trans people being real whatever, women being real men if they want, men being real women (to the point where they have the right to have babies even if they physically can’t — the *joke* of the Pythons that is now serious ideology in some places, to the point where there have been attempts to get that movie censored)…
Maybe it’s all just from women in power being women. Multiplied by the power of social media, which itself is directed to and dominated by women, with the algorithms heavily engineered to engage women’s emotions, especially the negative ones like physical fear, inferior status, and injustice.
Or, I dunno, maybe our world is just tending insane because the fluoride in the water is finally getting to us, or we’re heading to our own Rat Utopia. Whatever.