Human nature evolved to have pride, researchers argue, because it served an important function for our foraging ancestors who lived in small, highly interdependent bands and faced frequent life-threatening reversals. Foraging humans needed their fellow band members to value them enough during bad times to pull them through.
Therefore, in making choices, humans had to weigh their own individual self-interest against winning the approval of others, so that when they needed help others would value them enough to give it.
The researchers’ findings that pride is one evolved solution to this problem appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.