The Social Biophilia Hypothesis (by guest blogger Dan Haybron)

Two posts back I suggested that people may have evolved with psychological needs for which they lack corresponding desires, or at least strong enough desires given the significance of the needs. For certain needs may have been met automatically in the environment in which we evolved, so that there wouldn’t be any point in having desires for them. Today I want to suggest a possible example of this: a need for close engagement with the natural environment.

Biologist E.O. Wilson and others have defended the “biophilia” hypothesis, according to which human beings evolved with an innate affinity for nature. They have noted a variety of results pointing to the measurable benefits of exposure to natural scenes, wilderness, etc. (E.g., hospital patients with a view of trees and the like tend to have better outcomes.) To be honest I have not read this literature extensively, but the root idea strikes me as very plausible.

Indeed, I suspect that human beings have a basic psychological need for engagement with natural environments, so that their well-being (in particular, their happiness) is substantially diminished insofar as they are removed from such environments. And yet we don’t perceive an overwhelming desire for it, because the need was automatically fulfilled for our ancestors.

I can’t offer much argument here, but one reason to believe all this is that dealing with wilderness places intense cognitive demands on us, presenting us with an extremely rich perceptual environment that requires a high degree of attentiveness and discernment. (I don’t mean enjoying a hike in the woods, perceived as a pleasant but indiscriminate blur of greens, browns, and grays—I mean *knowing* the woods intimately, because the success of your daily activities depends on it.) The selection pressures on our hunter-gatherer ancestors to excel in meeting these demands must have been intense, and I think this is one of the things we are indeed really good at. Moreover, it is plausible that we really enjoy exercising these capacities (recall Rawls’ “Aristotelian Principle”). Insofar as we fail to exercise these capacities, we may be deprived of one of the chief sources of human happiness (see, Michael Pollan’s excellent “The Modern Hunter-Gatherer.”) I suspect that most artificial environments (think suburbia) are too simple and predictable, leaving these capacities mostly idled, and us bored. (Perhaps many people love cities precisely because they come closer to simulating the richness of nature.)

At the same time, we are obviously social creatures, most of whom have a deep need to live in community with others. Living alone in the forest is not a good plan for most of us. Distinguish two types of community: “land communities,” where daily live typically involves a close engagement with the natural environment; and “pavement communities,” where it does not. Virtually all of us now live in pavement communities.

Here’s a wild conjecture: human flourishing is best served in the context of a land community. Indeed, only in such a community can our basic psychological needs be met. Call this the “social biophilia hypothesis.” Plausible?

I suppose this will seem crazy to most readers, and maybe it is. For one thing, there is a conspicuous paucity of discussion of such ideas in the psychological literature. Why isn’t there more evidence for this hypothesis in the literature? I would suggest there are two reasons. First, current measures of happiness may be inadequate, e.g. focusing too little on stress and other states where we would expect to find the biggest differential. Second, psychologists basically don’t *study* people in land communities. Almost all the big studies of subjective well-being, the heritability studies, etc., focus on populations living in pavement communities. And there is virtually no work comparing the well-being of people closely engaged with nature and those who are not (but see Biswas-Diener et al. 2005). If the social biophilia hypothesis is true, then this would be a bit like studying human well-being using only hermits as subjects. (“Zounds, they’re all the same! Happiness must be mainly in the genes.”) The question is, how can we study the effects on well-being of living close to nature while controlling for other differences between people who do so and people living in pavement communities?