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Survival of the Nicest: How Altruism Made Us Human and Why It Pays to Get Along, by Stefan Klein

Having recently moved back to the Washington, DC, area, I purchased a wooden desk via Craigslist, a well-known Web site that allows individuals to buy and sell items. After I drove to a meeting place to see the desk I purchased it, in cash, from someone who was moving out of the area in a few weeks. The wooden desk was far too bulky for me to take with me, so our agreement was that if I paid full price the seller would also deliver it. Transaction complete. But why did I trust him to actually do as he agreed and not just take my money and keep the desk? Or if he did follow through, why did I expect him to take good care of the desk during the delivery, as opposed to delivering it damaged? If he was totally rational, he would take my money and the desk, but that’s not what happened. The seller delivered the desk the next day and also helped me unload it from his truck. I offered him extra money for his assistance in moving it, but he refused. If he was acting rationally and wanted to maximize his own benefit, he would have accepted my offer of extra money, but he did not. In The Survival of the Nicest by Stefan Klein, the author sets out to examine why economic rationalism, as in the example just cited, does not always hold true for humanity. In my psychoanalytically informed reflection that follows I attempt to (a) add a psychoanalytic context to this book, in general, and (b) offer my own psychoanalytic associations to the book following the order in which it is written, especially as material may relate to practicing psychoanalytically informed psychiatry. In The Survival of the Nicest Klein specifically questions the premise of the everrational and self-interested homo economicus. Instead, he takes us through economic game theory by summarizing psychological, evolutionary, and neuroscientific ideas regarding humans’ ability to trust others— and to be nice. The work adds another blow to those who consider human behaviors outside of relational, social, interpersonal, group, and organizational contexts. In that way, it harkens to Harlow’s (1958) experiments with monkeys, where infant monkeys are presented two choices: to accept milk from a cloth figure, similar to an actual mother, or to take milk by itself. The infants chose the cuddly cloth figure. Harlow’s behavioral experiment chips away from the somewhat mechanical Freudian edifice of considering motivation primarily driven only to satisfy biologically based drives,