To Fan is Human

Humans are smart. Well, maybe we used to be. I say humans used to be smart because many thousands of years ago (over many thousands of years) we switched environmental niches. We used to exist as mid-level foragers, but now we control the food web. What's funny, is that at first, we were not very good at mid-level foraging. Some researchers think that we may have been down to about 10,000 prehistoric humans before we were forced to update our survival tactics. These new tactics had to do with our ability to work together. If we had not tried trusting each other and learned to exist as cohesive groups, our species probably would have not made the evolutionary cut.

Yet there is a small subset of modern humans who I think still act pretty smart: people who join fandoms. This may seem counter-intuitive since fans as individuals can have such a bad rep, but I think paying attention to how fans follow can tell us a lot about proper human behavior. For about a year, I have been sharing the life and times of Claire. She is a cavegirl—but she is also a fan. When we first met her, Claire was a wayward cavedweller who had a choice to make: follow a tribe-leader named Jerome or a tribe-leader named Blaine. She decided to follow Jerome, and because of her choice, Claire has lived a charmed imaginary life. But what if Claire had followed Blaine instead? Her choice would have not only made Claire's life miserable, but it could have slowed our species' theoretic ability to adjust to our environment and changed the course of human evolution.

Blaine was the undisputed boss of his tribe, and it was his job to know what each of his tribe-members was up to. He needed to keep track so he could make informed decisions about what "next moves" his followers should be taking. This arrangement worked well for his tribe and there was a predictable hierarchy so most things worked efficiently. But there was a cap on how many people Blaine could keep track of. In fact, Claire had felt "lucky" there was a job-opening when she first (theoretically) followed Blaine back to his campsite. Claire was going to become part of Blaine's harem!...but she was not made aware of the nature of her new service position right away. Blaine had initially been very patient and kind to Claire. She was treated like a VIP, so she felt safe. But as soon as Claire was old enough to become especially interesting to Blaine, her life got complicated. She probably would have left to find another tribe, but with the very real possibility of being made a meal of, traveling on one's own was basically a suicide mission for a cavedweller. So she made due. As with almost all living things, survival was Claire's goal…even if that quality of life was sub-par.

Of course Claire was unaware of her survival instinct. She was also unaware of the mechanisms that were creating the general tension in Blaine's tribe. The main thing that was missing from his "old-school" leadership style was trust.  Fear and trust are actually on opposite ends of a continuum, so without experiencing trust from her leader, Claire lived in fear. She was scared of things both inside and outside of her living situation. Her leader may have been fearless when it came to protecting the members of his tribe from predators and attacks from other tribes, but he was fearful of his own followers. There was always someone who wanted to take his place at the top, so Blaine basically lived in a semi-paranoid state. Without trust, not much happened in Blaine's tribe without his approval, so adaptive coordination was stifled. Blaine, without knowing it, had limited his tribe's long-term survival. And Claire, without knowing it, was basically living in a cult. 

Even if Claire could have escaped Blaine's tribe, she may still have chosen not to. This is because predictability is the priority if you are a cavedweller. Knowing what was going to happen next was an effective survival tactic. Knowing when it was going to get dark, how much food was available, and what was in one's immediate surroundings all gave prehistoric humans at least a chance of responding appropriately in time to avoid death. So even if Claire had run into Jerome at a watering hole, he would have been a stranger to her, and sticking with the familiar was safer than trying something new. Most of us still carry this assumption around with us. In fact, humans have built predictability into almost every social situation we experience.

We live in a series of "status markets." They are smaller slices of the broader world because we lived in smaller tribal groups when our psychologies were developing. We may work in an office, but tasks are broken into departments. We build our homes in neighborhoods to minimize traffic and increase feelings of safety. Status markets have their own modes of punishment and award structures. We repeatedly rank each other, sometimes unconsciously. We pit ourselves or even our kids against each other at sporting events or at school. Status markets are familiar. They are like the isolated cults our species once thrived in, but we can come and go as we please. And strangers are considered "strange" because we may not know how they fit into our predictable social structures. But this habit is not a mistake. It's just a survival skill we can't quit. 

In Claire's day, the isolation factor that Blaine needed to control his "cult" members was built-in because followers would not be physically willing to leave the safety of the tribe. Modern-day cults, however, have to create a psychological disconnect from the outside world so they can be sure a follower won't follow something else. (And because cult-leaders need predictability too.) The proof of loyalty comes in the form of rituals—and the stranger the ritual, the more convinced a cult-leader might be that someone is committed to a cause. Fraternities and religious groups are good examples of modern cults. Many of these organizations fulfill a former cavedweller's desire for 'oneness;’ the feeling Claire and her fellow tribe members had of a singular purpose in life. Where their goal was finding and sharing food, modern humans hardly ever focus on that or any other singular idea…but our psychologies feel more at ease when we do. The trade-off that comes when people participate in a modern cult or status market is there is automatically an urge to identify the outsider, other, or threat—but that "us or them" impulse does not always happen when someone is involved with a fandom.

I think that groups of fans deserve more respect. I have found in my research of fandoms that there are not enough words that describe fan experiences. For starters, there is no verb (in the English language) that means "To be a fan of" something. So I made one up. "Fander" means to follow with passion, but not blindly. There are certain populations of fans that do not mindlessly follow the way stereotypical fans do. They don't idolize, rationalize, stalk or ignore reality. But even the ones that do are simply following their instincts when it comes to following a chosen "leader." Almost any human reaction that involves unreasonable fan behavior can be explained IF humans did live in cult-like social structures for many thousands of years. Mistakes of efficiency (doing everything a leader does) and predictability (accepting greedy behavior from a leader to preserve the status quo) explain a lot.

In addition to a lack of vocabulary surrounding the state of fanhood, there are not enough categorizations of fans, either. Some fans are win-win and some are win-lose, meaning some fans want a famous person to be successful at their craft (and continue to lead) while other fans want to replace a famous person in the hierarchy. Either type would find themselves interested in the gossip mags at the checkout line; win-win fans want to keep abreast of who is misbehaving so they might re-evaluate who they should be emulating and win-lose fans want to keep tabs on which leaders/celebrities are failing so they might take their own shot at being in charge. Each of these impulses originated as a survival skill Claire might have used. Take a group of win-win fans back in time, though, and they would have chosen to follow Jerome the way Claire originally did. That fandom would have thrown their weight behind a leader who was respectful and had the capacity to trust them...and those fans would have helped with the monumental evolutionary shift away from Blaine's fear-based style of leadership to Jerome's.

Listen to this soundtrack for To Fan is Human

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/5TRaV1p5JZzKQcR8wEpeM3?si=I0MH-_Q6SBeveflUtiYudg

References

Atkin, D. (2004). The Culting of Brands: Turning your Customers into True Believers. The Penguin Group. New York.

Bateman, J. (2018.) Fame: The Hijacking of Reality. Akashic Books, New York.

Bergland, C. (2019). Does "Flow" Open our Minds to Believing in "Oneness"? The Athlete's Way, Psychology Today

Cheng J.T., Tracy. J.L. & Henrich, J. (2012). Pride, personality and the evolutionary foundations of human social status. Evolution and Human Behavior, 31(5), 334-347.

Henrich, J. (2016). The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making us Smarter. Princeton University Press, Princeton (NJ) & Oxford (UK).

Henrich, J & Gil-White, F.J. (2001). The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission. Evolution and Human Behavior, 22 (3) 165-196.

Rath, T. & Conchie, B. (2008). Strengths Based Leadership: Great Leaders, Teams, and Why People Follow. Gallup Press, New York.

van Vugt, M. & Anjana, A. (2011). Naturally Selected: The Evolutionary Science of Leadership. HarperCollins e-Publishers.

Whitehouse, H. et al (2019). Big Gods came after the rise of civilization, not before. Nature, International Journal of Science. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1043-4

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