In the past, early human communities were more reproductively successful than isolated individuals, because it is more effective to be in a group when you must face predators or you must provide access to food and sexual partners. For that reason, it was progressively more successful in a natural environment if it had previously been successful in the social environment .
The individuals most apt to live with others, then, were the ones who finally had the best opportunity to spread their genes, and that prosocial ability was inherited by a long lineage that continues to this day.
In other words : if our survival depends on our community, the more we need to be social, the greater our likelihood of acceptance and survival. And, therefore, we also feel the need to touch, caress and hug, and vice versa, as a way of communicating that social connection in a more intimate and trustworthy way.
The pleasure of collaborating
Even though we are Homo sapiens and began to communicate more through 2.0 environments, without real human contact, this evolutionary dynamic left a deep and lasting imprint on our genes, and the way our brain has been configured.
While it is true, then, that we can live at the expense of others, we will ultimately be going against millions of years of evolutionary pressure to do just the opposite. As this, in the long run, is difficult and even sad or painful, we extract pleasure when we seek the company of others to interact . In this way, human beings are not like other elements of urban furniture, such as banks, wastebaskets or the bus, since we do not receive the same reward in the form of oxytocin when we interact with non-human objects.
Oxytocin is a neuropeptide produced in the hypothalamus and secreted by the posterior pituitary gland. It has long been established that it plays an important role in childbirth and maternal bonding and more recently it has been identified as a brain chemical involved in determining our social interactions .
Thus, oxytocin increases prosocial behaviors such as altruism, generosity and empathy; making us more willing to trust others. For that reason, the most selfish people can become altruistic after having administered oxytocin through the nose, a study published in Nature in 2019 suggests.
Given that the brain seems to be designed to enhance and facilitate social interactions, there are several studies that suggest that people who do not develop such interaction may be victims of psychological problems and disorders.
Physical contact is also important, especially in the first years of life . Numerous experiments on children in hospices who had little contact with their caregivers suggest high levels of depression and even a high mortality rate, which is why psychologists demanded a change in child care in the 1940s, advising nurses to take children in arms to cradle, caress, comfort them and give them a feeling of intimate contact.
Thus, if we are made to collaborate with others and to caress or be caressed, to hug and be hugged, Jeremy Rifkin asks the following question for reflection in his book The Empathic Civilization : “Is it possible that this nature [ the human], instead of being intrinsically evil, interested and materialistic, be empathetic, and that all the other impulses or instincts that we have considered primary (aggressiveness, violence, selfishness, greed) are secondary impulses that arise from repression or denial of our most basic instinct? “
