Charles Spearman : British Behavioral Scientist

It is not the laboratory but the workplace that is the ideal setting to study human nature, according to Lawrence and Nohria. This book seeks to examine the common drives that shape human behavior, and to show how they evolved, what they evolved to accomplish, and how they still operate in both small and largegroup settings. Although this book has much to say about human psychology, authors Paul Lawrence and Nitin Nohria are not psychologists. Both are professors of organizational behavior at Harvard, and they well know that the individual human cannot be understood distinct from his or her reciprocity groups, of which the epitome is the modern tribe known as an organization. As the authors remark about their own professional backgrounds, they “might seem like unlikely candidates to propose a new synthesis, a unified science of human nature. Yet we feel that we are ideally suited to the task [because] we have spent our entire careers studying the way people behave in that most fascinating setting of human behavior, the workplace” (p. 17). Humans are social creatures through and through. As undergraduate psychology majors universally learn, at its core, all psychology is social psychology. In their succinct, direct writing style, the authors first lay out their assumptions, which are based largely on the thoughts and theorizing of respected social science researchers and writers past and present; the list includes Steven Pinker, David Buss, Leda Cosmides, Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond, Lawrence Kohlberg, Sarah Hrdy, Ian Tattersall, and many others. The assumptions have varying degrees of research backing, but are all drawn from mainstream psychological thought (if evolutionary psychology can also now claim to be a mainstream theory). The evidence is clear, the authors observe, that the modern human is the product, physically, mentally and behaviorally, of the processes of natural selection. Further, they assert, the human brain is de facto a computational device. Our species’ brain has evolved across millions of years, with significant changes happening within the past 100,000 years, in parallel with advances in tool-making, language, and the growing complexity of our social groupings (e.g., the establishment of large communities and cities and the multiple layers of social norms and rules). From these assumptions, Lawrence and