The hunter versus farmer hypothesis is a proposed explanation of the nature of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) first suggested by radio host Thom Hartmann in his book Attention Deficit Disorder: A Different Perception. This hypothesis proposes that ADHD represents a lack of adaptation of members of hunter-gatherer societies to their transformation into farming societies. Hartmann developed the idea first as a mental model after his own son was diagnosed with ADHD, stating, "It's not hard science, and was never intended to be." ( from: Wikipedia)
The hunter vs farmer hypothesis first proposed by Thom Hartmann in the 1990s has never received much attention from the scientific community. There has been some genetic evidence regarding the dopamine transporter DRD4 7R allele, however, it has never reached any notoriety outside ADHD research.
I only became familiar with Thom Hartmann’s idea after I had the same idea for gifted and autistic children. Whereas Hartmann’s hypothesis was about cognition, mine was about social behaviour and attitudes. I noticed many similarities between my gifted son (who may easily have been diagnosed with ADHD-inattentive in primary school) and the children on the spectrum I knew. Hyperfocus on special interests was one similarity that didn’t escape me, but it was something different that caught my attention even more: my son reacted with extreme defiance towards authoritarian behaviour at school and at home. He would rather cry for an hour than do homework he could have easily done in a few minutes. This behaviour seemed extremely irrational, so I assumed that there must be a kind of evolutionary instinct behind it. The more I read about gifted and ASD children, the more a pattern emerged and it had to do with:
- defiant behaviour towards authority
- frequent tantrums
- extreme sense of justice
- advanced moral development (based on abstract principles like the golden rule)
- sadness about the state of the world and news about events like wars (weltschmerz)
Why the hell would a little child have such strong reactions against well-meant authoritarian behaviour and wars that went on in foreign countries. Why would a little child worry about beggars and homeless people? Then the answer slowly dawned upon me: an egalitarian evolutionary programming could account for all of these behaviours. Of course, hunter-gatherers (foragers) are known for their high sense of egalitarianism and farmers are known to frequently produce hierarchical and authoritarian social structures. What if neurodiverse people (ADHD, ASD and gifted) merely had hunter-gatherer minds and many (though not all) of their comorbidities like ODD (oppositional defiant disorder) and depression (often diagnosed in combination as bipolar or borderline) and many other of those alphabet soup diagnoses (which frequently changed) could be explained by the fact that their forager minds are not adapted to a farmer society.
I started to read up on anything that had remotely to do with foragers and farmers and I dug through a lot of recent (and also ancient) ideas. Michele Gelfand found out that societies and countries could be classified on a tight-loose spectrum. Countries that had a long history of irrigation farming tended to be tight and authoritarian (e.g. China), whereas the loosest societies were foragers like the Inuit or Hadza (of course, this also includes child-rearing practices). Joe Henrich found out that western cultures are WEIRD, in the sense that they are less clannish and endogamous than traditional farming and herding societies (the same is true for foragers). And Jonathan Haidt found out that conservatives tend to have more moral instincts than liberals. Whereas liberals value care and fairness higher than conservatives, the latter tend to value authority, in-group and purity more. Can you see the pattern? This ties in perfectly with Bob Altemeyer's research that liberals are high on egalitarianism whereas (social) conservatives are high on authoritarianism.
If things were this simple researchers would have found out a long time ago about the forager vs farmer distinction. What made the data fuzzy was the presence of a third factor. After all, the political left-right divide often shifts its values. The third factor turned out to be pastoralism, the third major mode of subsistence humans have practised in history. I am aware that there have been all kinds of mixed subsistence strategies, but as a heuristic, the forager vs food-producer (farmers and herders) hypothesis has turned out to be pretty stable across many different kinds of psychological phenomena,e.g. our temperaments and values.
Solomon Schwarz found in the 1990s that there were 10 universal human values across cultures that could be grouped into four profiles:
Research in personality psychology has shown that openness is, of course, correlated with the Big Five factor of openness, self-enhancement is correlated with extraversion, and conservation is correlated with conscientiousness. While I am not aware of any research, I am quite sure that self-transcendence is correlated with the HEXACO factor of honesty-humility. The British think tank cultural dynamics developed Schwartz’s model with the profiles their studies had found, which they labelled settlers (farmers), prospectors (herders) and pioneers (foragers). The fourth profile, transcendence, can be obtained when one splits foragers into hunters (provisioning evolutionary profile) and gatherers (caregiving profile). The evolutionary framework I have been working with therefore looks like this (including HEXACO maxima and MBTI):
I also found that a lot of findings of modern science were already present in the ancient wisdom of the Greeks, Chinese and, perhaps most comprehensively of all, Indian Vedas. Schwartz’s four profiles can be found in the four Purusharthas (values) — artha (wealth or material sectury, farmers), kama (desire or good times, herders), dharma (righteousness or self-transcendence, gatherers) and moksha (liberation and enlightenment, hunters). These may be said to be the four goals of all mankind, but they are to varying degrees, of course. The “three tribes” can also be found in Ayurvedic doshas: vata (foragers), pitta (herder) and kapha (farmer).
These three/four temperaments can only be found purely in a few indigenous societies termed “primitive”. All other societies are mixed, to varying degrees.
Social, political and cultural change can be understood as the dynamic between these various values and forces. What had started out as a mere hypothesis has over the years become a powerful framework that can be used to analyse a lot of phenomena ranging from corporate cultures to current political events. Over the past few years, I have written about diverse topics such as literature and movies, education, politics, innovation, religion, linguistic change and dispersal as well as history.
I have collected many of the main ideas in my book: The Forager-Farmer Framework: A new perspective on personality, society and culture
Comments
Post a Comment