An adaptive bias toward something, means your brain has evolved to reason adaptively based on its hard-wired experiences.
Have you ever been near a snake? How was your feeling all the time when it was in your sight? I bet it was worse when you can no longer find it!
Have you ever been in a car? How was your feeling all the time the car was driving?
Most people report incomparable anxiety near a snake than actually being in a car. Being near a snake can cause sweating, heart rate increase, losing focus on surroundings and utmost focus on that snake. In a car most people are relaxed, listening to some music, an audio book, or chatting with a friend.
The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates that 81–138 thousand people die each year from snake bites worldwide; while approximately 1.35 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes. That’s around 12x more with a 1133% increase (against an average of 109.5).
Shouldn’t it be more logical to fear cars more? And panic 12x more every time we go into a car?
But what is logic?
The Science Behind Adaptive Bias
“Logic is the science of reason; a study of which arguments represent valid inference (conclusion follows from the premises) and which are inherently invalid (fallacies).”
An argument has two parts: premises and conclusion.
We can say, all cats are mammals, and a lion is a cat, so a lion is a mammal. Both the premises are true, so the conclusion must be true to, and we say this is a valid argument or logical argument.
To stay focused on our topic today. I’m not going to go into details of deductive and inductive arguments, or invalid arguments. Perhaps on some other day. What we’re going to do instead, is try to logicalise why we fear snakes.
In 1971 American psychologist Martin Seligman in his paper (Phobias and preparedness). Seligman proposed that primates possess an evolved preparedness to associate ancestral threats such as spiders and snakes with fear; thus explaining the high occurrence of specific phobias for these stimuli.
In 2017, a group of researchers from Austria and Sweden. Stefanie Hoehl, Kahl Hellmer, Maria Johansson and Gustaf Gredebäck. The group conducted a study (Itsy Bitsy Spider…: Infants React with Increased Arousal to Spiders and Snakes) based on Seligman’s proposition, and multiple other premises from scientists who have hypothesised that fear may have been evolutionarily necessary in prehistoric times for humans to survive threats such as predators. The study concluded with evidence that:
“Infants at 6 months of age respond with increased arousal, as indicated by pupillary dilation, to spiders and snakes compared with flowers and fish. We suggest that stimuli representing an ancestral threat to humans induce a stress response in young infants. These results speak to the existence of an evolved mechanism that prepares humans to acquire specific fears of ancestral threats.”
We Need Fear to Survive
It’s hereditary and evolutionary inherited behaviour to be afraid of snakes or spiders. These infants didn’t have a chance yet to learn about the dangers of snakes, yet they reflected signs of stress when they saw these creatures.
We need fear to survive, it’s what made our ancestors stay alive with snakes for millions of years and learning to stay away from them. Our ancestors needed it, or we likely wouldn’t be here.
As an argument, it’s logical that we feel fear from snakes, but why don’t we fear car accidents the same way we fear snakes?
Scientists hypothesise that modern risks like car accidents or falling of the stairs -and from an evolutionary perspective- have only existed for a short time. There has been no time to establish reaction mechanisms in the brain from birth. Parents then started teaching their kids how to be careful while driving cars.
Even though you might live in a city and these animals hardly pose a threat to you today. Your probability to be in or near a car is far greater, we still fear snakes more. It’s because we’re adaptively biased to venomous snakes that have been dangerous for our ancestors for 40–60 million years of coexistence; possibly allowing primates to evolve mechanisms to quickly detect these potential threats.
Perhaps only after you’ve had a serious car accident experience in your life, you became extremely conscious of your behaviour every time you ride a car and for a decent period of time after that. Perhaps after another million years, our descendants will freak out just being in whichever spaceship will be the way of transportation at that point of time.
So, you can learn fear, but can we unlearn it?
Unlearn and Rationalise your Fears
It looks like that we can unlearn fear. Look at snake tamers, as one example. They’ve learned how to overcome their anxiety and rationalise their inherited fear. They took a moment, and thought, why should I fear snakes when I have an antidote right next to me? Or that the nearest hospital is just 20 minutes away?
They recognised the error in their logic. See that’s the definition of rationality.
Logic and rationality can sometimes mistakenly used in many conversations as synonymous. In fact, they’re completely different in definition.
We’ve defined logic at the beginning. Now let’s define rationality.
Epistemic and Instrumental Rationality
Rationality is basically trying to achieve accurate beliefs about the world, learning to recognise errors in logic and correct them.
Rationality can be split into two types, epistemic rationality and instrumental rationality.
Epistemic Rationality is about asking yourself why do I believe that? Is there a good reason for believing something in a certain way? Or is it just a belief I took for granted and I haven’t put it to scrutiny before?
While Instrumental Rationality is about how you behave toward those beliefs. How you take those beliefs, “instrument” them into actions, and turn them into your own behaviour to achieve your goals. A goal can be anything from having better relationships, to making a better you and learning a new skill.
Unlocking Awareness of Your Adaptive Bias
There are plenty of people who are very good at epistemic rationality. They’re good at figuring out what the most effective way of achieving their goal would be but then they don’t actually do that. You already know that it’s better to speak calmly to someone if you want to change their mind, and you try to practice it; they say something that triggers you, and you end up yelling at them anyway. This would be an example of epistemic rationality not translated into instrumental rationality.
You can ask. Why was I triggered? There’s something new to discover, something new to reveal about yourself awareness and added to your epistemic stock. Next is turning this knowledge into action and be a better-calmer person in your future talks with that same person.
So, our fear of snakes is logical, it’s built in our genes. With the moderate lives of ours, it’s irrational to hold that fear or act upon it. We’re adaptively biased to fear them to “survive”.
Adaptive Bias Definition
Wikipedia definition of adaptive bias is nice. It goes like this:
“Adaptive bias is the idea that the human brain has evolved to reason adaptively, rather than truthfully or even rationally, and that cognitive bias may have evolved as a mechanism to reduce the overall cost of cognitive errors as opposed to merely reducing the number of cognitive errors, when faced with making a decision under conditions of uncertainty.”
To an untrained mind, when you’re faced with a snake, your mind is uncertain what it should do; it’s better and safer that you fear it and run away. It’s adaptively better for you.
We learn cognitive biases from our parents, our environment and from interacting with the world around us. It’s irrational actions that we do blindly based on preceding beliefs that might not be in our best interest in our own lives. We’ll talk more about cognitive bias in a different post and will continue to focus on adaptive bias in this one.
So, rationality is learning to recognise your biases whether adaptive or cognitive and compensate for them.
Logical but Irrational
Think of it; how many times in your life have you behaved in a way that made you stop and say why did I behave this way? What could have I done there to make the outcome better?
If you haven’t done this practice, try to do it. Scrutinise every behaviour you do in your life against your adaptive biases.
Let’s examine closely a couple of examples about some adaptive biases most of us went through so you can relate.
Example 1
You’re wearing a new shirt with a group of friends. Most of them are showing their liking to your shirt, but one of them suddenly says something snarky or sarcastic about it. Now you’re fixated on that negative comment, stuck there. Your mood flips. Each one of us react to this situation differently. Some gets disturbed in silence; others humour the attention away from them; some might even get defensive or angry.
Take a moment, rationalise why you behaved the way you did. We’ve evolved to live in groups. Living in groups has advantages in our survival. In scarce resources situations, weak links got kicked out of the groups, to save more resources for the remaining-more-fit group members. Survival of the fittest.
By terms of natural selection, our ancestors must have always found their way around avoiding being the weakest link in a group, to avoid being left stranded to the wild.
When you’re degraded in a group by mockery, that’s your stimulus, you don’t want to be received as the weakest link there, you try to cover it up, and end up behaving like one.
Think of it. In our modern life; do you really need to worry about getting kicked out of a certain circle? We’re no longer living in caves. You can simply move from one circle to another.
So, it’s logical that you feel threatened of being the weakest link in a group, you’re adaptively biased to feel that, but after millions of years, and with our current social structures, it’s irrational to feel that way, because your life no longer depends on it.
The next time someone mocks your new shirt, take it easy, and genuinely laugh with them. Your life doesn’t depend on people admiring and approving your new shirt.
Example 2
You’re trying to cut down on your weight, you see a cheesecake, or whichever your sugary-fatty craving is. You feel weak and tempted, you know that you shouldn’t eat that (epistemic rationality), but you fail the temptation (no instrumental rationality), but why is it that hard?
In scarce environments with limited access to sugar and fat substances, our ancestors must have evolved into all-you-can-eat mode to maximise every rare opportunity of access to sugar or fat and survive until the next opportunity.
Think of it, rationalise why you behaved the way you did. You fell for your adaptive bias once more!
It’s logical that you feel this craving, but irrational, because we all know by now, how badly too much fat and sugars can affect your body.
Our species developed this craving for millions of years, but with our modern lives, sugar is abundantly available in almost every product on supermarket shelves.
The next time you crave something that will ruin your diet, think wisely, you don’t really need to eat that, you can survive without it, and maintain reaching your goal weight.
Scrutinising our logic and fighting against our hard-wired minds is not easy, it’s tough to stop doing something that we’ve been doing for all those years of human evolution, but we have to rationalise our behaviour against our modern lives and current necessities and needs.
It will be a tough journey at the beginning, but a most rewarding one once you get the hang of it. A journey away from human-default mode, to a better and upgraded version of YOU.
