Hi everyone,
I want to talk about an interesting subject: Psychology and Behavior, and how these are shaped by biology and evolution. Because I think it is an important topic rarley discussed in fiction. In many works of fiction non-humans like elves and rubber-forehead aliens are depicted as humans but with quirks. Very rarley to works go into depth about how the unique biology of a species affects thier outlook, thier behaviour, what they consider normal and how these things reinforce what kind of values or expectations they have to a society.
But these things are important. Even in RL it is important to be aware how our biology influences basic everyday behavior to a significant degree. And if we are being thorough with non-humans in fiction, then they should have innate differences on what they consider normal. I would like to talk about this topic. Because to me it is very interesting. But also because Warhammer is very good at representing this issue. Intentionally or not, both WFB and AoS put quite a lot of effort in portraying non-human species with very differences psyches. And then they explore stories in which humans and non-humans struggle arraning thier differing priorities and backgrounds.
If you are interested in this topic, I prepared a small essay where I go throguh some real life examples and examples from fiction, especially WFB and AoS. Afterwards I would be interesting to know what you think of this topic, and what your ideas would be to explore it further. With this in mind, I hope you enjoy my small excursion :)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1. Humans are not rational
Humans pride themselves on being able to make unbiased decisions, but this is not true. We have many inborn biases and behavioral patterns which are the result of our ancestral history. To overgeneralize: What we would label “modern society” is roughly 200 years old. What we would label “civilization” is roughly 5000 years old. And what since around 12.000 years humans are permanently settled famers. In contrast the modern human lived for 200.000 years as foragers and hunters. And we are descendants of other humanoids who did the same thing for 7 million years. Our anatomy and our brains are still hardwired to this stone-age survival due to this background.
For example, gambling is an obvious liability. Everyone knows the games are rigged against you, and the house always wins. Still there millions of people all over the world and from various cultural and social backgrounds who become gambling addicts. Why? Because gambling hijacks an old survival mechanism. If you are a predator, your hunts usually fail. Even lions and wolves fail 9 out of 10 hunts of average. Prehistoric humans likely had a similar ratio. And each failed hunt was a massive loss in terms of energy, resources and potentially bore the risk of injury. But if the hunt was successful, your brain flooded with dopamine and other endorphins. The brain told you: “The 9+ failed attempts didn’t matter. Now you did it and that is all that counts!” It was a survival mechanism to keep you going when looking for food or learning a critical skill. And this very same primal instinct is manipulated by gambling systems to make you addicted to them.
Another example: Humans are very bad at making long-term decisions. Because prior to agriculture we never had to. At most a hunter-gatherer must think a couple of weeks or months in advance. A farmer may think from one year to the next. But every decision making that concerns the next couple of decades if not centuries? Not a chance. If I would say: “We world is ending in two days, let’s do something about it now!”, many people would rise up and say “Of course!” But if I say: “The world is ending in 50 years, let’s do something about it now!”, the response is much more lackluster. See all the political and economic decisions which are slowly killing the planet. Short-sighted profits over long term survivability and earnings.
In addition, we are deeply social animals. Isolation makes us sick, both physically and mentally. Indeed, it is a form of torture to isolate people. We need other people around us. Physical contact preferably too. Simple acts like hugging someone to so much for your body and mind. It releases lots of hormones which reduce stress, which is the number one health risk in modern society. If we were beings of pure reason, we wouldn’t need that. It is again, an evolutionary survival mechanism to keep contact in a social group. Humans like to touch each other, much like fellow primates use physical contact to keep the group together. By contrast lots of animals’ hate being touched, especially if they live solitary lives.
And there are many more inbuilt biases and behavioral patterns humans have due to our unique background. And other animals have different biases and patterns depending on their background. For example, predators have to sleep a lot. Cats up to 18 hours a day, canines more than 12. Because hunting is risk driven, exhausting and success varies. So, a survival strategy has been to increase the lengths between hunts by having a very inactive lifestyle. In addition, predators would refrain from attacking other predators due to the risk of injury, unless they really have too. By contrasts prey animals have very short sleeping phases. Because their food is available without much effort, they have to spend a significant part of the day consuming it to get enough energy. And unlike predators, they are at risk of being attacked when asleep.
2. Issues with non-humans in fiction
But why do I talk about all this? Because these things are rarely accounted for in fiction. Fantasy and scifi species are so often treated as “humans with quirks”. Ignoring inborn behaviors, psychology and else which should be very different from humans. These beings are not humans, they should not think like humans, they should not act like humans. Sometimes there are handwaved quirks, such as dwarfs being a bit greedy, elves do not care for death and are arrogant, ogres are stupid, or Klingons being obsessed with warrior culture but think like humans otherwise. But that is most often surface stuff quickly brushed aside. Indeed for klingons there are lots of scientist and no-violent members, but for cultural reasons we rarley see them. Klingons are essentially just a militaristic, feudal society alá knights/samurai in space. In many works of fiction, the innate differences between humans and non-humans is rarley a main issue.
But there are works in fiction which run against this. For example, Lord of the Rings is a good example when we talk about Hobbits and Elves. Hobbits are very different in their mindset and behaviors from humans. Which is an important plot point, as this makes them very suited to carry the ring as they value completly differnet things than humans and elves, and are much harder to corrupt. What things have an inborn importance to them and the naturaly act like is very distinct.
Meanwhile in LOTR elves are immortal. The oldest elven characters in Lord of the Rings are many thousands of years old. Elrond is the elf equivalent of someone being born when the pyramids were built and is still alive in modern day. And he is one of the younger named elves in Tolkiens work. As such elves have a very long-term view. Things far in the future are of concern for them. Which was why they agreed with Sauron to forge the rings of power. As magic was slowly declining, the elves would lose their substance and perish. But this was not an immediate issue. It was a slow process that would take millennia. Even by the events of LotR it is still millennia away from really screwing up the elves (though they already noted issues). But to the elves millennia in the future may as well be tomorrow. So, they agreed with a disguised Sauron to forge the rings, which had the power to keep the magic of the world in a certain place. And by the end of LotR the majority of elves evacuates Middle-Earth instead of spending another couple of millennia before escaping their decline.
3. But what about Warhammer?
Warhammer Fantasy Battle is another great candidate as it has lots of non-human species and most of them are portrayed as alien in their behavior and mindsets. Which I may illustrate with elves, dwarfs and greenskins.
Greenskins first, because they are an utterly inhuman species. They are fungal with very short generation times. And they have an inbuilt need for violence and war. Which makes a lot of sense if you think about it. Evolution favors procreation over survival. Many animals will break down quickly once their reproductive period ended. Indeed, that humans grow much older than their reproductive period is the “grandmother paradox”. And many species of plants only have a single short season to spread their seeds and thus will invest all their energy in doing exactly that. And what we know as mushrooms are the very short-lived fruit bodies of fungi who just pop out to release spores and then die off. Greenskins, as fungal beings, are pretty much this. An orc or goblin can be seen as the mushroom equivalent of a fungal network. It is meant to pop out, spread spores for new fungi to grow and then die. Indeed, dying helps spreading the network, because the body of a greenskin breaks down and all the nutrients in it are a great starter for new fungi to grow. Same for when greenskins kill other creatures. Their dead bodies and remains are also fertile ground for a starter culture of fungi to grow. Out of which new greenskins are born. So, a hyperviolent lifestyle and an inborn aggressive behavior make a lot of sense before this background. The greenskin horde migrates somewhere and spreads spores. The greenskins kill stuff and spread spores. The greenskins die and spread spores. Everything a greenskins do is increase the range of the fungi network that spawned them and cultivates it further. Pacifism or moderation or self-survival would run opposite to this. So they have an inbuilt, sensible reason to be as violent as they are. Which sets warhammer orcs apart from many other works were orcs are simply "a warrior culture". Which way to often means something like stereotpical barbarians/vikings/mongols with tusks.
Then dwarfs, who are obsessed with conservatism, oaths and grudges. Indeed, dwarfs have a very fixed and stiff mind. This is even reflected in their language, where most esoterical terms are connected to physical things. Such as umgi for shoddy work, but also the dwarfen term for human. So, human-work to describe something of subpar quality. Or IIRC the dwarfen term for eternal being the same as mountain. When dwarfs say eternal, they say: “enduring like a mountain”. And indeed, dwarfen minds function on an entirely different level than humans regarding oaths and grudges, having an innate psychological demand to honor these things. In addition, they are also very obsessed with things having their proper place and how things should be done, making them very inflexible to a degree humans cannot really fathom. Some fans compare this obsession with justice and order, a very “by the letter” outlook on life and the need to root esoteric concepts in the natural world as well as the hyperfixiation on a specific craft has caused some fans to compare dwarfs with tropes about autism. This is not to say dwarfs are human autists but instead is meant as a tool to illustrate the differences between dwarfs and humans. Which may be explained that they are a species designed by the Old Ones for a specific task and thus were given highly specialized traits to better fulfil it.
In contrast Warhammer elves also have a very different psychology from humans. They are very close to Vulcans from Star Trek. Vulcans are not devoid of emotions. Quite the opposite, they feel emotions much more strongly than humans. Every joy is a high, every slight anger is intense fury. Vulcans adopted extreme mental discipline and follow their philosophy of logic to avoid issues caused by these intense emotions. And Warhammer elves function similarly. Some fans compare them to teenagers in a hormone rush, but throughout their lives. Which explains the three elven cultures from WFB and many aspects of elven culture in AoS. In WFB the asur try to reign in and control their emotions and behavior with social rules and etiquette. Dark Elves are the opposite, being reckless and excessive and following their whims to an extreme. And Wood Elves are somewhere in the middle. These extreme emotions are also the reason why Slaanesh has this great interest in elves (though in truth all chaos gods should be after elves as all of them feed on emotions). Interestingly, in AoS various elves kinda represent the aftereffects of emotional trauma on a societal level. Daughter of Khaine get obsessed with vengeance and adopt a “never again a victim” mindset, Idoneth try to isolate themselves from all sorts of pain imaginable and pre-spirefall Lumineth were on the believe to be “immune” after their recovery. Anyhow why do these intense emotions make sense? Because elves live so long. They are necessary to avoid ennui. Intense emotions are motivations to act in the present. Why bother do something now, when you could also do that in 50 years? Because the rush of emotions forces you to do so. They keep you focused; they keep you going. In addition, elves frequently use their long lives to learn a lot of crafts and to master them. Something which is easy for them, as they can spend decades mastering a subject, before moving on to the next. Much like with dwarfs, here some fans draw parallels to ADHD, which can also make you emotional and prone to switch your focus. However, where a human with an ADHD hyperfixiation may spent a few days on a subject, an elf has many years. Again, just to better illustrate the difference in the inborn mindset.
And recently AoS has made a similar exploration for other ogres and giants. In older works they were frequently described as stereotypically stupid. But the later Mawtribes and SoB books put emphasize on ogres and giants not being stupid per se. Instead, their minds are hardwired to care about things that concern them in the know. For example, AoS ogres love technology if it suits their lifestyle. Which means the stuff has to be big, easy to maintain and repair, and robust to survive their semi-nomadic and ruggish lifestyle. Intricate machines with lots of sensitive parts are worthless to them as a result. But large cannons and similar objects are not. And on a bit of personal speculation: giants have matriachs as their cultural caretakers and seemingly venerate them a lot. But why? Well given how many resources giants need to feed themselves, they live very isolated lives. A male giant may not be around to take care of the offspring, as his presence would drastically reduce the resources for offspring and the mother. All the raising and education of young giants may therefore be done by the female giants alone. Giants therefore may not have “strong father figures” in their life at all. And all the cultural traditions are also handed down from mother to child too. Giving female giants extraordinary importance and value in giant society. To a giant the concept of a father may be unimportant as a result. At best someone you respect for some deeds which show they qualify as a sperm donor. But of course, giants still gather into stomps, and especially young giants follow mega-gargants around. Which is something many animals do to do. Upon young adulthood they form bachelor herds, exploring the landscapes and figuring out independent lifestyles and try to find their place in the regional hierarchy. For example, young elephant bulls frequently follow around old tuskers to learn from him how male elephants live. Something I can see male gargants doing too in AoS. So the entire social system of gargants may be very different from what humans would consider normal. But to gargants this would be the norm.
4. The End
This has been my overview on the behavior and psychology of non-humans. But of course, this is just an abridged listing. But what innate differences between humans and non-humans in WFB and AoS are you aware off? And what social and behavioral patterns would you expect in non-human species? What would be logical to fun to explore but isn’t? In short what else do you know or would like to speculate about? And could you imagine things in which humans are special, instead of the standard even?