Chatgpt: Leaders, decisions, followers, obedience

 

We have an instinct to want to submit and worship as well as to dominate. It likely comes from the need of the group to have leadership. No decision is the worst possible decision. We also have an instinct to believe what we were taught as children. Again evolved for group cohesion. These instincts work by means of pleasure (joy, peace) and displeasure (fear, guilt) emotions.

There’s a lot of solid intuition in what you’re saying, but it’s also doing that classic human thing of turning a messy bundle of tendencies into a clean evolutionary story that may be a bit too neat.

The “submit/worship vs dominate” framing does map onto real social behavior. Humans do track hierarchy extremely quickly, and there’s good evidence that status-seeking and deference are deeply baked in. But I’d be cautious about treating it as a single paired instinct with a clear group-selection purpose like “the group needs leadership, therefore these drives exist.” Evolution doesn’t really aim for “good group outcomes.” It just preserves whatever produces reproductive success in particular environments, and hierarchical behavior can emerge for lots of proximate reasons: resource competition, coalition-building, parental investment strategies, and so on. The group benefit sometimes exists, but it’s more like a side effect than a design goal.

The “believe what you were taught as children” idea is also broadly right in outcome but tricky in mechanism. Children are indeed highly credulous—there’s a strong developmental bias toward accepting testimony, especially from caregivers. But again, it’s not purely for cohesion. It’s also brutally efficient: most knowledge a child needs is too complex or dangerous to rediscover independently. So evolution “pays for” a lot of false positives (believing some bad ideas) in exchange for avoiding catastrophic ignorance (not learning language, food safety, social rules). The system is tuned more for speed and survival than truth.

Where your framing gets especially interesting is the emotional enforcement layer you mention. That part is very much on target. Emotions like guilt, shame, pride, awe, and fear do function as internalized social regulators. They basically let external group pressure become self-maintaining behavior. You don’t need someone watching you all the time if your own nervous system supplies the reward/punishment signals.

One tweak I’d make, though: it’s not just “pleasure vs displeasure” in a simple binary. These systems are multi-layered and often in conflict. The same person can feel awe toward authority and resentment toward it at the same time; or feel loyalty to early teachings while intellectually rejecting them. That tension is not a bug—it’s kind of the default human condition.

And “no decision is the worst decision” is sometimes true in evolutionary terms (inaction can be fatal), but in cognition it’s more mixed. In many environments, delaying or refusing to act is actually adaptive, especially under uncertainty. So the brain is constantly balancing urgency against caution rather than defaulting cleanly toward action.

If you wanted to sharpen your model, I’d probably phrase it less as “instincts exist to support group needs” and more as “brains evolved heuristics that often produce group-stable behavior because social survival is a major selection pressure.” That keeps your insight but avoids the hidden assumption that evolution is aiming at group coherence as a target.

If you like, we can push this one step further: there’s a pretty interesting question of whether modern institutions (states, religions, online communities) are basically “hijacking” those exact emotional control systems—or whether they’re just what those systems inevitably produce when scaled.

I don't think I actually said what you imply or accuse me of saying. I just said what you said in simpler terms.

Fair pushback — and you’re right to flag it.

You didn’t explicitly claim group-selection “design intent” or anything like that. What you did was describe a functional alignment: instincts that tend to stabilize groups, with emotion as the enforcement mechanism. That’s a perfectly coherent framing on its own, and I expanded it into a more theory-laden evolutionary story than you actually stated.

So the correction is: I over-interpreted your explanatory structure as if it were making a stronger claim about evolutionary purpose than it needed to. That’s on me.

If we stick closer to your wording, what you’ve got is something like this:

Humans show reliable tendencies toward (a) hierarchy sensitivity—both submission and dominance behaviors—and (b) epistemic trust bias in early learning. These tendencies are socially useful because they reduce coordination costs in groups. And both are implemented through affective reinforcement: emotions that reward conformity/acceptance and punish deviation or social threat.

That’s a clean, defensible way to put it without importing extra assumptions.

The only real nuance I’d still gently keep on the table is that even “group usefulness” is sometimes an emergent property rather than the reason the trait exists—but that’s more a clarification of evolutionary language than a contradiction of your point.

If anything, your framing is already quite close to how a lot of cognitive science talks informally about social heuristics; it just uses more compressed language than academic writing tends to allow.

About decision making, I had in mind behavior, not opinion. In business a decision has to be made; the decision itself can be to do nothing, but it must be a decision, not a default. You are quite right that when it comes to questions of science, often a deliberate refusal to say is best as more observations are made.

Ahh, that clarification tightens it up a lot—and I think your original point becomes sharper once you separate behavioral decision-making from epistemic judgment.

In action domains (business, logistics, war, medicine, even daily life coordination), “no decision” really does tend to collapse into a decision anyway. Systems keep moving, opportunities expire, other agents act, and inertia produces outcomes that are effectively choices made by omission. So in that sense, your idea that “no decision is the worst decision” is basically about the cost of uncontrolled default trajectories. Organizations therefore formalize “do nothing” as an explicit option precisely to prevent hidden drift.

Where your framing is especially strong is that it highlights something decision theory often emphasizes: refusing to decide is still selecting a policy, just one that delegates control to time, randomness, or other actors. So business process design tries to force explicitness—because explicitness is what makes accountability and optimization possible.

Your contrast with science is also well drawn. In epistemic domains, “withholding decision” (i.e., withholding belief or conclusion) is often not only acceptable but rational. That maps cleanly onto Bayesian thinking: you don’t have to output a crisp binary commitment; you can maintain uncertainty and update with evidence. In that space, premature action or premature belief is the real error, not delay.

So there’s an interesting symmetry here:

• In action space, delay = implicit commitment.

• In belief space, delay = preservation of information integrity.

The tension shows up when the two get mixed—like policy decisions under scientific uncertainty. That’s where humans often struggle, because institutions demand action even when the epistemic state is still fluid.

One small refinement I’d add: even in business, “must decide” doesn’t always mean “must choose an action now.” Sometimes the best explicit decision is to set a trigger condition (“decide when X threshold is crossed”), which is a way of converting urgency into a rule rather than a moment-to-moment choice. That’s basically how people try to avoid the cognitive overload of constant forced decisions.

But your core distinction holds up well: behavior forces resolution; knowledge can legitimately suspend it.

The main ingredient of all this is that there must be deciders and the decisions need to be followed. This doesn't happen always in reality, but when someone doesn't follow leadership they experience negative emotions about it and when the do they tend, even they see the decision as wrong, to feel better.

Yes — what you’re pointing at is very real, and it sits right at the intersection of social psychology, authority, and emotion regulation.

At a basic level, groups only function if there is coordination plus compliance. So humans evolved strong sensitivity to cues like “who is deciding” and “what is expected of me now.” Once a decision is perceived as legitimate (or even just socially binding), a second system kicks in: the one that pushes behavioral alignment, not necessarily agreement.

That’s where the emotional effects you’re describing come from.

When someone follows a decision they disagree with, they often feel relief or reduced tension. That isn’t because the decision suddenly became correct; it’s because internal conflict gets resolved. Holding “I disagree” while also doing “I must resist / I might be punished / I might harm group cohesion” is cognitively and emotionally expensive. Compliance reduces that load. In psychology terms, this is closely related to dissonance reduction and to the way external authority can substitute for internal certainty.

On the flip side, not following leadership tends to trigger negative emotion not just because of punishment risk, but because humans are highly tuned to social exclusion cues. Disobedience implicitly risks: loss of belonging, loss of protection, and loss of predictability in others’ behavior. Even when no punishment occurs, the prediction system often behaves as if it might.

There’s also a subtle mechanism you’re circling around: once a decision is socially “closed,” the brain tends to reclassify it from choice to reality. After that point, resistance feels like friction against an existing world-state rather than a neutral alternative action. Compliance then produces relief because it restores coherence between perception, expectation, and action.

But there’s an important caveat that keeps this from becoming too deterministic: people don’t always feel better when they comply. If the authority is seen as illegitimate, or if personal identity stakes are high, compliance can produce resentment, shame, or erosion of trust. So the emotional payoff of obedience is conditional—it depends heavily on perceived legitimacy, autonomy, and whether the person feels coerced versus participating in a shared system.

So a slightly more precise version of your idea might be:

Groups function by creating deciders whose decisions become psychologically “binding” for participants, and humans often experience emotional relief when aligning with those decisions because it reduces uncertainty, conflict, and social risk—even when the decision is not personally endorsed.

That preserves your core insight, while keeping room for the cases where the system breaks or backfires.

Now these general principles tend to apply in slightly different ways in nations, in religious organizations, in businesses, in families.

Yes — and that “same machinery, different costumes” intuition is actually one of the more useful ways to think about social life.

What changes across nations, religions, businesses, and families isn’t the underlying human psychology so much as the structure that channels it: who gets to be a decider, how decisions are communicated, what counts as legitimacy, and what the cost of disobedience is.

At the most basic level, all of these systems have to solve the same coordination problem: many individuals, limited shared information, and the need for synchronized behavior. So they all end up building versions of hierarchy, authority, and norm enforcement. But they differ in how “hard” or “soft” those mechanisms are.

In a nation, authority is usually formalized and backed by institutions—law, enforcement, bureaucracy. Compliance isn’t just emotional; it’s also procedural and often coercive in the background. The emotional layer still matters, but it’s reinforced by legal reality.

In religious organizations, authority is often more internalized. The enforcement mechanism is heavily emotional and identity-based: guilt, sanctity, belonging, fear of spiritual loss, or hope of transcendence. Compliance can feel voluntary even when it is strongly structured by belief.

In businesses, authority is more conditional and transactional. It’s tied to roles, contracts, and performance. Emotional compliance still exists, but it competes more directly with exit options (you can quit), which changes the balance. That tends to make legitimacy and perceived competence of leadership especially important.

In families, the system is the most biologically and emotionally embedded. Authority is often asymmetrical but also deeply relational. Compliance isn’t just about rules; it’s tied to attachment, affection, dependency, and long-term emotional memory. That makes family authority both very powerful and very unstable depending on context.

What’s interesting is that in all four, your earlier point still holds: once a decision is perceived as “the path the group is on,” the emotional system tends to reward alignment and punish friction. But the source of legitimacy differs:

• Nations: law + institutional continuity

• Religions: sacred authority + moral framework

• Businesses: competence + contractual structure

• Families: attachment + dependency + role expectation

And when those legitimacy sources weaken, you tend to see the emotional effects you described invert: obedience no longer produces relief, and noncompliance no longer produces guilt—sometimes even the opposite.

So your underlying model is pretty consistent: humans are highly sensitive to coordinated direction, and emotional systems are deeply involved in keeping behavior aligned with perceived legitimate authority. The interesting variation is just how each domain constructs “legitimacy” in the first place.