Evolution made us cheats, now free-riders run the world and we need to change, new book warns

(Press-News.org) University of Cambridge media release  

Evolution made us cheats, now free-riders run the world and we need to change, new book warns  

UNDER STRICT EMBARGO UNTIL 00:01AM (UK TIME) ON TUESDAY 17TH JUNE 2025  

To save democracy and solve the world's biggest challenges, we need to get better at spotting and exposing people who exploit human cooperation for personal gain, argues Cambridge social scientist Dr Jonathan Goodman.  

In Invisible Rivals, published by Yale University Press today, Dr Goodman argues that throughout human history we have tried to rid our social groups of free-riders, people who take from others without giving anything back. But instead of eliminating free-riders, human evolution has just made them better at hiding their deception.

Goodman explains that humans have evolved to use language to disguise selfish acts and exploit our cooperative systems. He links this ‘invisible rivalry’ to the collapse of trust and consequent success of political strongmen today.

Goodman says: “We see this happening today, as evidenced by the rise of the Julius Caesar of our time—Donald Trump— but it is a situation that evolution has predicted since the origins of life and later, language, and which will only change form again even if the current crises are overcome.”

Goodman argues that over the course of human evolution “When we rid ourselves of ancient, dominant alphas, we traded overt selfishness for something perhaps even darker: the ability to move through society while planning and coordinating.”

“As much as we evolved to use language effectively to work together, to overthrow those brutish and nasty dominants that pervaded ancient society, we also (and do) use language to create opportunities that benefit us … We use language to keep our plans invisible. Humans, more than other known organisms, can cooperate until we imagine a way to compete, exploit, or coerce, and almost always rely on language to do so.”

Goodman, an expert on human social evolution at the University of Cambridge, identifies free-riding behaviour in everything from benefits cheating and tax evasion, to countries dodging action on climate change, and the actions of business leaders and politicians.

Goodman warns that “We can’t stop people free-riding, it’s part of our nature, the incurable syndrome… Free riders are among us at every level of society and pretending otherwise can make our own goals unrealistic, and worse, appear hopeless. But if we accept that we all have this ancient flaw, this ability to deceive ourselves and others, we can design policies around that and change our societies for the better.”

 

Lessons from our ancestors Goodman points out that humans evolved in small groups meaning that over many generations we managed to design social norms to govern the distribution of food, water and other vital resources.

“People vied for power but these social norms helped to maintain a trend toward equality, balancing out our more selfish dispositions. Nevertheless, the free-rider problem persisted and using language we got better at hiding our cheating.”

One academic camp has argued that ancient humans used language to work together to overthrow and eject “brutish dominants”. The opposing view claims that this never happened and that humans are inherently selfish and tribal. Goodman rejects both extremes.

“If we accept the view that humans are fundamentally cooperative, we risk trusting blindly. If we believe everyone is selfish, we won’t trust anyone. We need to be realistic about human nature. We’re a bit of both so we need to learn how to place our trust discerningly.”

Goodman points out that our distant ancestors benefitted from risk-pooling systems, whereby all group members contributed labour and shared resources, but this only worked because it is difficult to hide tangible assets such as tools and food. While some hunter-gatherer societies continue to rely on these systems, they are ineffective in most modern societies in our globalized economy.

“Today most of us rely largely on intangible assets for monetary exchange so people can easily hide resources, misrepresent their means and invalidate the effectiveness of social norms around risk pooling,” Goodman says.

“We are flawed animals capable of deception, cruelty, and selfishness. The truth is hard to live with but confronting it through honest reflection about our evolutionary past gives us the tools to teach ourselves and others about how we can improve the future.”

 

Taking action: self-knowledge, education & policy Goodman, who teaches students at Cambridge about the evolution of cooperation, argues that we reward liars from a young age and that this reinforces bad behaviour into adulthood.

“People tell children that cheaters don’t prosper, but in fact cheats who don’t get caught can do very well for themselves.”

“Evolutionarily speaking, appearing trustworthy but being selfish can be more beneficial to the individual. We need to recognise that and make a moral choice about whether we try to use people or to work with them.”

At the same time, Goodman thinks we need to arm ourselves intellectually with the power to tell who is credible and who is not. “Our most important tool for doing this is education,” he says. “We must teach people to think ethically for themselves, and to give them the tools to do so.”

But Goodman cautions that even the tools we use to expose exploiters are open to exploitation: “Think about how people across the political sphere accuse others of virtue signalling or abusing a well-intentioned political movement for their own gain.”

Goodman believes that exposing free-riders is more beneficial than punishment. “Loss of social capital through reputation is an important motivator for anyone,” he argues, suggesting that journalistic work exposing exploitation can be as effective at driving behaviour change as criminal punishment.

“The dilemma each of us faces now is whether to confront invisible rivalry or to let exploiters undermine society until democracy in the free world unravels—and the freedom of dissent is gone.”

Dr Jonathan R Goodman is a research associate at Cambridge Public Health and a social scientist at the Wellcome Sanger Institute.

Invisible Rivals: How We Evolved to Compete in a Cooperative World is published by Yale University Press on 17 June 2025 (ISBN: 9780300274356)

 

Media contacts

Tom Almeroth-Williams, Communications Manager (Research), University of Cambridge: researchcommunications@admin.cam.ac.uk / tel: +44 (0) 7540 139 444

Dr Jonathan R Goodman, University of Cambridge: jrg74@cam.ac.uk

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