As industrialized products have become more and more processed and further removed from their raw ingredients, there has been a reactionary movement to value natural products in society. This has appeared in many facets of life from food consumption with the emmergence of the paleo diet to architecture where designers are increasingly incorporating natural elements into their various buildings and landscapes. But as the naturalistic fallacy highlights, something is not good simply because it is natural. For instance, smoking tobacco is not good for you even though it is a natural resource. This same logic applies to the evolution of the human mind and all of the complex mechanics and behaviors that it supports. Humans, thriving in nature based mostly on our brains that are especially adept at communication, have adapted to have many mechanisms that are helpful in many cases for survival purposes, but can have some serious repercussions if abused or used in the wrong manner. It must be stated that these repercussions are negative when looking at them from a western moral perspective. Evolution has no moral compass, as can be seen easily with adaptive infanticide in some species of primates, so inevitably some of its byproducts will have some immoral consequences. The rest of this paper will highlight four examples of mechanisms of the human mind that in some cases can be adaptive and helpful, but in others are harmful or immoral. In this manner, we will disprove the statement that a human behavior or tendency being natural means it is good.
We will begin by looking at how the greenbeard effect can lead to a false sense of perception. The greenbeard effect is the tendency for any individual to favor another individual based on their similarities, specifically ones that can be visually seen. Exhibiting this behavior is advantageous because organisms who support and help other organisms that have similar phenotypes or cultures are more likely to be supporting relatives or organisms that they can trust. Looking at this through the lens of natural selection, and specifically kin selection, this trait is adaptive because helping someone who shares similarities with you means that this person who probably shares genes with you is more likely to pass on their genes. However, this greenbearding can easily turn to bias and prejudice in many situations. For example, look at this study from the Perception lecture called They Saw a Game: A Case Study. Following an especially rough and competive football game between Dartmouth and Princeton, researchers asked students from both of these schools who started one distinct fight that occurred during the game. Even though the fight was obviously started by Dartmouth, only 35% of Darthmouth students admitted it while 86% of Princeton students said it was started by Dartmouth. They were much more likely to say that it was started by “both teams” with 53% of Dartmouth students submitting that answer. This goes to show that greenbeard effect can literally change someone’s perception of events and that our perception is not nearly as objective and unbiased as we might think. Obviously sports conflicts aren’t that big of a deal, but when it comes to other boundaries like with race, gender, sexuality, nationality, religion, etc. it can become very problematic. It raises questions like how much can we trust witnesses during trial when we can’t even accurately recount who started a fight.
Another example of how human adaptations can sometimes perpetuate biases and prejudices are through the way we learn skills. Humans are amazing at learning new skills fast, and the main mechanism for doing so is through mimickry. We have a huge amount of neurons called mirror neurons that activate both when we do an action and when someone else does the same action. This has been amazingly beneficial for humanity as we have been able to pass on skills between generations easily and been able to teach new skills to young children very quickly. But it can also be used maliciously as seen in Bandura’s study from the Social Developemnt lecture which explores the transmission of aggression through imitation. If kids will mimic whatever behaviors they are shown, then if all of their mentors and role models demonstrate aggressive behavior then they will reflect that same level of aggression. The researchers from this study showed different groups of children either aggressive or nonaggresive models for how to treat a Bobo doll. Following this, the researchers allowed the kids to play with the Bobo doll and found that those who had witnessed people being violent and hitting the doll were much more likely to replicate that behavior than the other group. So even though mimickry allows children to learn very quickly, it does not discriminate between different kinds of behaviors that are replicated, and thus various prejudices and violent behaviors can easily be perpetuated through culture.
Another example that involves how evolution has skewed humans’ perception of reality is our use–and overuse–of heuristics. The world is very complex and in order to process complicated problems with ease, the human brain makes many huge simplifications. These simplifications, called heuristics, are certain assumptions we make about the world that make it easier to interpret information. One example of this is the availability heuristic which is the brains way of prioritizing information that is recalled easily. This is helpful in most cases because it would be intractable to include all the available information in the world into every decision we make. This is because (especially before modern society), the things that come to mind easily are usually the most likely scenario because that’s what you see most. But now with mass media publicizing rare (and often disastrous) events, we are more likely to overestimate the likelihood of infrequent events. This can also be seen in a study from the Thinking lecture called Ease of Retrieval as Information: Another Look at the Availability Heuristic. For this study, the researchers asked participants to list either 6 or 12 examples of themselves being assertive. They were then asked to rank how assertive they think they are. The researchers found that people who were asked to list 12 examples rated themselves on average as less assertive than the other group. They believed that this was because it was difficult to remember 12 examples, so they assumed there weren’t 12 examples. This study, demonstrating the availability heuristic in action, shows how easily we misinterpret reality based on merely how readily accessible information is in our brain. The accessibility of information, which is usually affected by emotion and other beliefs, is sometimes a terrible way to judge the world or ourselves. This is how the mass media confirms biases against outgroups by only publicizing violent or cruel events however infrequent they may be.
This final example shows how irrelevant quantities such as the number of people who need help and the number of bystanders decrease someone’s willingness to help. Humans are not evolved to interact with more than a few hundred people in their lifetime, so when we hear a fact like “there are over 26 million refugees in the world”, our brain has no idea what to do with this information and just ignores it. We are much more inclined to help when we hear an individual story because we can empathize much easier with individuals than with groups. A similar effect called the bystander effect explains the phenomenon that people are less likely to help in an emergency situation as the number of bystanders increases. From the lecture on Prejudice, there was a study called The Neural Basis of the Bystander Effect which confirmed using fMRI that the neurological processes associated with helping others is activated less when there are more bystanders present. To measure this, the researchers placed participants in an fMRI doing an unrelated color matching task and when a fake emergency situation arose, they measured their brain activity and compared it to the number of bystanders at the scene. This effect could be seen as adaptive because involving oneself in an dangerous situation should be avoided unless there is no one else there to help. But this also means that as more people ignore a problem, it becomes easier and easier to ignore it yourself. It’s this form of social conformity that makes it so difficult to get people to care about global catastrophes like climate change or wars or other various humanitarian crises.
Clearly, evolution has no moral compass. All that it cares about it self preservation and the preservation of related individuals. So when we judge its various creations with a modern day sense of morality, it isn’t surprising that many of them are highly problematic. But hopefully by enumerating both the benefits and drawbacks of these various adaptations, I have convinced you that the human mind is a tool. It is neither good nor bad, but the way we use it can be. So the most important thing we must learn from psychology is that we must be very intentional about the way we act so that we bring out the best in ourselves. Being aware of these shortcomings is only the first step in combatting them. For instance, there is no avoiding the fact that greenbearding is a process deeply engrained in the human mind. But knowing that, we can hack it to highlight to kids the similarities between all of the various subcultures of earth and not the differences. And we can be intentional about setting good examples for our children so that they grow up to be the change we want to see in the world. And we can change the way we present information online so that readily available thoughts about other cultures are more positive. And we can change the way we address worldwide crises to make humans more likely to personally act. There is much work to be done, and finding the problem is only the beginning.