This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, September 16, 2016. I'm Caleb Brown.

When you scale up small groups to big groups, relationship dynamics change, and necessarily so.

Lita Cosmodes is an evolutionary psychologist at UC Santa Barbara.

We discussed how collective action decisions change with the size of groups.

Our brains are evolved since computational systems.

They're full of lots of different programs just like your phone is full of lots of different programs, just like your phone is full of lots of different apps,

each one specialized for doing a particular task.

A lot of the programs in our head regulate social interaction.

They regulate when you want to share with somebody who you want to share

with, who you want to cooperate with, who you feel rival risk towards, and so on. So people will often ask, well, is human nature basically good or

basically bad? And liberals often say basically good, we're natural socialists, culture, private property,

capitalism corrupts us.

Conservatives will often say human nature is basically bad.

We need, you know, we need culture to rein in all these, the selfishness and exploitative

impulses we have.

From the point of view of evolutionary psychology,

human nature isn't good, it's not bad.

It's a collection of programs that evolve to solve particular kinds of adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gathere ancestors.

Some of them create amazing things like a mother's love for her child.

Others create... like a mother's love for her child.

Others create desires for war or aggression.

Others create desire to share widely with the people around you.

...