Thinking Beyond Science

Yuval Noah Harari, historian and author of Sapiens, offers a compelling lens on why humans have come to dominate the planet. The story, it turns out, isn’t just about intelligence, opposable thumbs, or brute force—it’s about something almost magical: our ability to believe in shared fictions.

The Limits of Animal Societies
Consider the way bees and ants cooperate. These creatures organize vast, intricate societies and accomplish awe-inspiring feats—think hives, colonies, tunnels, and farms. Yet, as Harari wryly notes, you will never see a bee plotting a revolt or dreaming of a bee republic. Their social order is rigid, instinctual, and hierarchical, leaving little room for innovation or dissent. This cognitive inflexibility, while allowing for efficiency, also limits their spot on the food chain.

Chimpanzees and monkeys, on the other hand, are highly intelligent with complex social ties. But even their societies have an upper limit. Psychological studies suggest that primates (and humans, too) can maintain only about 150 meaningful relationships—the so-called “Dunbar’s Number.” Beyond this threshold, trust and coherence break down; a troop of monkeys dissolves into chaos if forced to go bigger. The sophistication of their minds is surpassed by the complexity of the group, and this serves as a natural cap on how expansive monkey civilization can become.

From Social Bonds to Social Stories
Where does that leave humans? The architect of human society isn’t just our brainpower—it’s our imagination. Unlike other primates, we can weave, share, and act upon elaborate stories about things that don’t tangibly exist. As Harari puts it, “As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled.”

A monkey could warn its troop, “There is a caribou by the river.” But only a Homo sapiens could say, “The caribou by the river is the spiritual guardian of our city.” This quantum leap in imagination enables humanity to dream up gods, laws, corporations, and nations—constructs that would leave a bee baffled and a chimp scratching its head.

These fictions become so embedded in our lives that they take on the heft of reality. The State of Alabama, the Catholic Church, the Constitution, even the idea of “inalienable rights”—none of these exist outside our collective belief. Acting as if these things are real, we create frameworks that allow millions to cooperate, trust, and coexist. This, says Harari, is why “Sapiens rule the world, whereas ants eat our leftovers and chimps are locked up in zoos.”

The Grandest Fiction of All: Money
If cooperation through fictions explains our societal triumph, then one fiction stands above the rest: money. In Harari’s words, “Money is the most universal and most efficient system of mutual trust ever devised.” Money is not valuable in itself—pieces of paper or sparks of electrons in a bank database have value only because we all agree they do. These shared economic hallucinations underpin markets, stock exchanges, and global commerce. Trying to understand economic systems without this psychological underpinning misses the most critical factor: people’s beliefs.

The Double-Edged Sword of Shared Belief
But shared narratives aren’t unequivocally good—they are powerful, yes, but that power can go astray. Human reason, argue philosophers Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber, evolved more to shore up group beliefs than to seek objective truth. We are better at defending our cherished stories than we are at questioning them.

Imagine someone in a tightly-knit community encountering evidence that contradicts a deeply-held political belief. Accepting even a truthful, logical argument can be costly—it may alienate friends, break social ties, and force a person to publicly admit, “I was wrong.” Such changes are socially corrosive and emotionally taxing, which is one reason why beliefs are often stubbornly resilient, even in the face of overwhelming evidence.

Contrast this with the animal world. If a gazelle hears rustling in the grass, instinct kicks in—run or risk being eaten. There’s no elaborate rationalization, only survival logic. Animals that fail this test don’t live long enough to pass on their genes. In the human world, however, the ability to rationalize, to weave comforting or unifying stories, often wins out over cold logic.

The Power—and Price—of Storytelling
This uniquely human ability to trust, defend, and even die for stories has built nations, markets, religions—and sometimes led us astray. Our institutions rise and fall on the strength and adaptability of our shared fictions. Harari’s insight is profound in its implications: to truly understand humankind, we must not only study our inventions but also the stories we invent.

As Mercier and Sperber succinctly put it, “Habits of mind that seem weird or goofy or just plain dumb from an ‘intellectualist’ point of view prove shrewd when seen from a social ‘interactionist’ perspective.” The fictions we spin are simultaneously our greatest strength and our enduring vulnerability, enabling cooperation at unprecedented scales—while sometimes blinding us to inconvenient truths.

In the end, the real creative act that sets humans apart is not simply reason—it’s our wondrous, dangerous, world-shaping imagination.

Source : The Behavioral Investor: How psychology shapes wealth, risk, and investment decisions by Daniel Crosby

Goodreads : https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/36960014-the-behavioral-investor