Science: How Evolutionary Biology Explains Office Politics

Published: September 21, 2007, 10:00 am

Tags: conflict resolution, mind hacks, office culture, office politics, science, top

There may be ancient evolutionary impulses behind modern-day office politics. If human nature is shaped by our monkey pasts, and the tens of thousands of years our species spent as hunter-gatherers, we might want to use some 100,000 year-old solutions to fights over the printer, snarky sysadmins, and lateral promotions. In that spirit, Stanford neuroscientist and author Robert M. Sapolsky offers Lifehacker some lessons from human prehistory to solve modern-day office dilemmas. How to get a promotion and keep it? Sapolsky gives us this a tale from baboon life: Big sharp teeth and lots of muscle have tons to do with which males become high-ranking; social intelligence and impulse control have everything to do with which males remain high-ranking.What's the best way to keep an office relatively conflict-free? Hunter gatherer society has the solution already, says Sapolsky. He explains that if you want group cohesion, "small social units with lots of opportunity for reciprocity (as

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