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What is the relevance of this to the
story of the social nature of humankind? Our
research findings have led me to believe that
we all have made Eddington’s error in the way
we have thought about, studied, and tried to
deal with an invisible force that motivates us
to seek and maintain our connection with
others – including the loneliness one feels
when we feel important social connections are
threatened or absent. Historically, the
scientific perspective on loneliness was not
only that it was a painful and miserable state,
but that it was an aversive state with no
redeeming features. All one needs to do is to
reflect on the last time one felt terribly lonely,
and one can appreciate the seemingly self-
evident truth of this characterization. But as
Sir Arthur Eddington’s story shows us, the
obvious and intuitive can sometimes be very
misleading. It is now widely recognized that
many structures and processes of the mind
operate outside of awareness, with only the
end products sometimes reaching awareness.

Humans have evolved to seek
connections with and validation from
other minds, and these social
connections represent an important set of
invisible forces operating on our brain
and biology. The need for social
connection extends beyond kin relations
and beyond face to face relations to
include felt connections with
superorganismal entities such as teams,
political parties, nations, and God. The
unseen forces compelling these
connections can be quantified and
investigated objectively independent of
one’s spiritual beliefs. Underlying these
aspirations are selfish genes that have
produced a social brain which activates
reward regions of the brain when we
cooperate effectively with others (33) or
punish the perpetrators of social
exploitations (34), and which activates
the pain matrix in the brain when we feel
rejected by others (35). When people

feel socially isolated (i.e., lonely)
compared to when they do not feel
lonely, they are more likely not only to
perceive nonhuman objects as human-
like but to believe in the existence of
God (31, 36). To understand the full
capacity of and forces operating on
humans, we need to appreciate not only
the memory and computational power of
the brain but its capacity for
representing, understanding, and
connecting with other individuals and
with the emergent structures, fictional
and real, that the brain can represent.
That is, we need to recognize that we
have evolved a powerful, meaning-
making social brain and a need for social
connection.

References

1. Dawkins R. The Selfish Gene.
1976.

2. Williams GC. Natural Selection,
the Costs of Reproduction, and a
Refinement of Lack's Principle.
The American Naturalist
1966;100:687-90.

3. Wilson DS, Wilson EO.
Evolution "for the Good of the
Group". American Scientist
2008;96:380-9.

4. Hölldobler B, Wilson EO. The
superorganism: The beauty,
elegance, and strangeness of
insect societies. New York: W.
W. Norton; 2008.

5. Bowles S. Did warfare among
ancestral hunter-gatherers affect
the evolution of human social
behaviors? Science
2009;324:1293-8.

6. Haidt J, Patrick Seder J, Kesebir
S. Hive Psychology, Happiness,

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