Small Town Shame

Why do I get mad when the people in my neighborhood don’t stop at the stop signs on the nearly empty streets of our peaceful community? They are not driving dangerously and it really should not matter to me at all. But it does... and I think it is because I grew up in a small town.

You don't see the connection? Let me explain my theory.

We humans are a social species that evolved to thrive through collaboration. This means we are pre-programmed to establish rules that benefit the community, to hold one another accountable to those rules, and to feel shame when caught breaking them. The evolved capacity to "feel shame" is the essential glue that facilitates coordinated action and collective success for a social species. That's part one.

Small towns are the closest thing we have to the rudimentary tribes where almost all of human evolution occurred. Small groups breed familiarity between the members, which is a key ingredient for feeling ashamed when caught acting selfishly. Humans are far less likely to care about how they are judged by strangers compared to how they are judged by people they know. That's part two.

So we all evolved to hold our tribe members (neighbors) accountable to a set of socially agreed rules, but unless you spent your formative years in a tribal (or small town) setting, with reasonable familiarity across the group membership, you may be a city-slicker who never internalized this core value. Remember, identical genomes express themselves differently when nurtured in different environments, so having DNA that predisposes shame for selfish behavior does not mean you will definitely develop that personality trait. Many of my neighbors surely did not.

I grew up in a rural county with a population of about 20 thousand residents scattered across a dozen or so small towns. In that environment, adhesion to agreed behaviors became a deeply ingrained value for me. To this day, I feel a responsibility to obey the rules of my small community (neighborhood), and I often feel offended by those who break them. I see the rule breakers as selfish and, according to my evolved nature, I bear a responsibility to signal my opposition to their uncooperative behavior.  My anger is actually my DNA reacting to behavior that I perceive as "against my community".

The problem is that humans evolved very slowly, over millions of years, to thrive in small groups. However, in a much shorter time frame, thousands of years, we transitioned to living in large cities. Evolution hasn't caught up. 

Small town values don't jive with big cities and dense populations... that makes me mad.