Some Things You Should Know About Human Power

Are local police departments important rivets in our society?

Social institutions in America have been under heavy attack over the past five decades, specifically political, economic and religious institutions. Social institutions are like rivets that hold a society together.

Remove the rivets from the pieces of metal in the above picture and all of the pieces come apart. Over the past fifty years America has been losing a lot of “rivets” and those loses are changing our nation. Many changes have been for the better, but some have dangerous structural implications. Some of the recent institutions to come under fire are local police departments. This could result in a number of unintended consequences that could have dangerous structural implications.

The June 2015 issue of Scientific American (pp. 52-53) contains an article – Ethology: The Networked Animal by Lee Alan Dugatkin and Matthew Hasenjager – that may offer a hint of what those structural implications may be.

Pig-Tailed Macaques (macaca nemestrina) create multiple networks, such as ones composed of playmates or grooming partners. Networks differ in size, and a monkey might have different favorite partners in different networks. A particular macaque may also play a stronger role in one network than in another. But the various networks share a common feature: they operate under the watchful eye of a few authority figures that keep the peace. These macaque “police,” some of the group’s highest-ranking males, spend time and energy breaking up fights between other individuals in their social networks.

The loss of a low-ranking group member did little to the social networks. But as might be expected, the absence of police led to increased aggression and decreased reconciliation after fights in the population. Less predictably, without the police present, the play and grooming networks also underwent complex restructuring.

With police gone, for instance, group members played with and groomed fewer partners; that is, the “degree” of their play and grooming networks decreased. And the “reach” of the remaining monkeys—the number of friends of the friends of an individual—went down in those networks. At the same time, the cohesion of the entire society weakened; the population underwent a kind of balkanization, dividing into smaller, more homogeneous groups that rarely interacted with outsiders. These observations led Flack and her colleagues to hypothesize that the presence of police allowed for a healthier and denser network, where members had more and friendlier contacts with larger numbers of their fellows.

The authors point out that these studies could help us understand human social networks too.

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