YOU wake up in the morning. Your partner burps and drags on a smelly dressing gown. You can鈥檛 find your toothbrush so you use his, and then wipe some muck off the floor with it. Leaving the house, you step over a turd deposited by a neighbour, then drive into a traffic jam caused by everyone ignoring the lights. In your office, everyone interrupts each other until a spitting match breaks out. Leaving work, ill-groomed strangers press up against you in the lift and one sneezes in your face.
What a grim picture. A world without manners hardly seems worth living in. Yet manners are so ingrained in our lives that we hardly notice them.
I believe they are too important to ignore. We need to better understand manners for two reasons: first, because they are a principal weapon in the war on disease, and second, because manners underpin our ability to function as a cooperative species. In my new book on the evolution of disgust, , I argue that, far from being an old-fashioned set of rules about which fork to use, manners are so important that they should be up there with fire and the invention of language as a prime candidate for what makes us human.
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The first, and most ancient, function of manners is to solve the problem of how to be social without getting sick. Imagine that you and I encounter each other. Although I鈥檇 like to hang around in case you have information or goods to exchange, it might be more sensible if I ran away because, to me, you are a walking bag of microbes. With every exhalation you might emit millions of influenza viruses, and your handshake might transfer salmonella bacteria or scabies mites. More intimate contact could give me hepatitis, syphilis or worse. Your proximity to me is potentially deadly. You too, of course, make the same subconscious calculation. So how can we get close enough to share benefits but avoid sharing our microbes? This is the job of manners.
鈥淵ou are a walking bag of microbes. Your proximity to me is potentially deadly鈥�
Manners dictate that if I want to interact with you I should stay at a safe distance; far enough away not to spray you with microbe-laden saliva. They tell me that I should clean and cover my body, especially the smelly bits where microbes might lurk, and to share my food with you, but not any leftovers that I have already bitten into. And manners tell me to invite you to my dwelling, but only once I鈥檝e cleaned it of my bodily wastes. I do all of this because I cannot afford to disgust you. If I fail in my manners, you may reject and ostracise me and refuse further collaboration. Worse, you may gossip about my lapses in hygiene and tarnish my reputation, denying me access to the benefits of life as a member of an intensely social species.
This ability to be mannerly is supported by two psychological adaptations. One is the system, which motivates us to recognise and avoid potential pathogen hot zones. The other is the ability to feel shame, which, I hypothesise, evolved to help us learn to avoid becoming disgusting to others. A study by , UK, confirmed that . And research from in Sydney, Australia, suggests that to their children. Indeed, I suspect that one of the reasons we evolved the ability to communicate disgust via its characteristic facial and vocal expression is to teach others good manners. By pulling a face and exclaiming 鈥淓eeugh!鈥� we demonstrate disgust for another person鈥檚 poor hygiene. This elicits shame in the target, and as a result they modify their manners, which protects us.
But manners have acquired another function besides disease avoidance. As group sizes grew from related individuals, to clans, tribes and beyond, the problem of how to cooperate with unrelated others became more serious. Individuals who tried to get the benefits of social life without paying their share of the costs could derail the whole cooperative enterprise. Humans became adept at looking for clues as to who was likely to cooperate and who was not. Manners provided an indicator. Those who were careful with hygiene were good candidates, as were those who demonstrated that they put the interests of others before themselves. The child who passes a plate of food before serving herself is showing that she can control her selfish tendencies. In effect, she is saying: 鈥淟ook how well my mother taught me. If I can show such self-control now, how useful a member of this society I will be in the future. In the meantime, you can safely do business with my family.鈥� The child taught restraint with cake now by her mother would be likely to receive a greater total of cooperative cake in her lifetime.
Those who master manners are set to reap the many benefits that come from living in a highly cooperative ultra-society. Manners are therefore a sort of proto- morality, a set of behaviours that we make 鈥渟econd nature鈥� early in life so that we can avoid disgusting others with our parasites and our antisocial behaviour.
There are, of course, exceptions to these rules. A study on manners that my team at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine has just completed in Nepal showed that rules of hygiene are often suspended for close family members. This is probably because sharing saliva-contaminated food with someone who is already an intimate is unlikely to have disease consequences. We also saw that courtesy manners are suspended as guests become more familiar, probably because in an established cooperative relationship there is less need to signal cooperative intent. Of course, in intimate relationships, hygiene manners can be suspended entirely. Perhaps we find kissing attractive because it signifies that one鈥檚 partner is serious, so much so that they will contemplate sharing our pathogens.
We play out a mannerly dance every day, getting close, but not too close, offering tokens of goodwill, but not giving away too much, in every social interaction. Yet we do the dance largely unaware of why we do it. We don鈥檛 rationally calculate how to avoid inflicting our pathogens on others, nor do we consciously calculate that a small courtesy now might lead us to a big trading opportunity later. Instead, we have vague intuitions that it would be better not to disgust a guest by appearing unkempt or by offering them a dirty towel, and we follow the rules of politeness that were drummed into us as children. When we fail in these civilities, the disgust shown by our interlocutor provokes shame and teaches us not to repeat the offence.
My team is now investigating whether we can use manners to encourage better hygienic behaviour, for example, in campaigns to prevent disease by improving and food hygiene in Nepal and Zambia. But it may be that understanding manners can bring us an even bigger prize.
The acquisition of manners was one of the first baby steps humans took on the road to large-scale cooperation, and cooperation, underpinned by our moral sense, was the great leap forward that allowed humans to become a hyper-social species. We have since worked together to achieve technical dominance of the planet. If we can better understand how microbes gave us manners and manners then shaped our morality, it might hold clues for our future as a species.
This article appeared in print under the headline 鈥淲hy manners matter鈥�
