Brain Buys (18 page)
Authors: Dean Buonomano
An innate fear of angry individuals and strangers, or a propensity to easily learn to fear them, was likely to increase one’s lifespan over most of primate evolution. Chimpanzees can be extremely unkind to strangers, as males have been known to pummel to death outsiders found in their territory. These attacks can be incredibly gruesome, and may include biting off the testicles of the victim.
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The primatologist Frans de Waal states that “there is no question chimpanzees are xenophobic.”
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Even in the artificial settings of zoos it is extremely difficult to introduce a new adult male into an established social group. There are many reasons primates and other social animals are aggressive toward outsiders, including competition for food and females. In chimps, fear of strangers is probably influenced by learning, but like other social animals, there is probably an innate preparedness for fearing outsiders. Humans are unlikely to be any different.
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An innate uneasiness and distrust of outsiders makes evolutionary sense—and is part of basic survival. It is believed that competition and aggression between neighboring groups was constant throughout human evolution, and it is obvious today in the interactions among both indigenous groups and nation-states.
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On this point Frans de Waal recounts a story:
An anthropologist once told me about two Eipo-Papuan village heads in New Guinea who were taking their first trip on a little airplane. They were not afraid to board the plane, but made a puzzling request: they wanted the side door to remain open. They were warned that it was cold up in the sky and that, since they wore nothing but their traditional penis sheaths, they would freeze. The men didn’t care. They wanted to bring along some heavy rocks, which, if the pilot would be so kind as to circle over the next village, they could shove through the open door and drop onto their enemies.
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Paradoxically, many anthropologists believe that the constant warfare between competing groups was also responsible for the evolution of cooperation and altruism.
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Altruistic behaviors, such as going to war for your village or nation, represent an evolutionary conundrum. If one gene resulted in the expression of altruism, and that gene was present in all the members of a social group, the group as a whole would prosper from this selflessness; for instance, a tribe of altruistic warriors will be more fearless and effective in battle, which in turn increases the dominance and growth of their clan. However, any individual lacking the gene will benefit from the altruism of the group without partaking in any of the cost of these behaviors (such as dying in battle). These “defectors” without the altruism gene would reproduce more, and eventually bring the whole edifice of altruism tumbling down. The argument goes that warfare kept this problem in check: groups with a high proportion of freeloaders might from time to time be wiped out by groups that benefited from having the full complement of altruists in their midst.
Regardless of whether intergroup violence played a critical role in the amplification of altruism, it is undoubtedly the case that intergroup warfare has been omnipresent throughout primate and human evolution. Thus it seems likely that a propensity to fear outsiders would remain well entrenched in our genetic code. But how do social animals know who is or is not an outsider? In chimpanzee communities of dozens of members it is likely that each individual knows every other. This is of course impossible in the large human settlements that emerged after the advent of agriculture, and even more so in modern societies. We can determine if someone is from our tribe by using a variety of genetic and cultural phenotypes: the color of people’s skin, what type of clothing they wear, whether they speak the same language or have the same accent, and so on. Unfortunately, the need to know whom to fear, combined with the use of simple traits to distinguish in-group from out-group, helped lay the foundation for the racial, religious, and geographic forms of discrimination that remain so well rooted in human behavior today.
TELE-FEAR
What we fear is the result of a three-pronged strategy devised by evolution: innate fear (nature), learned fear (nurture), and a hybrid approach in which we are genetically predisposed to learn to fear certain things. From these strategies at least two fear-related brain bugs emerge. The first is that what we are programmed to fear is hopelessly outdated, to the point of being maladaptive. The second is that by observation we involuntarily learn to fear a variety of things that are unlikely to harm us.
No matter how many times I witness someone juggle, I will never actually learn to juggle without hands-on experience. Some things simply can’t be learned by observation. Fear is not one of them. Not only can we learn to fear by observation, but vicarious learning can be as effective as firsthand experience. In a study performed by Elizabeth Phelps and Andreas Ollson at New York University, volunteers sitting in front of a computer screen were shown pictures of two different angry faces, one of which was always paired with a shock. A second group of volunteers underwent observational learning: they viewed the subjects in the first experiment receiving shocks when one of the angry faces was displayed (in reality they were viewing actors that pretended to jerk their arms in response to what viewers assumed was a shock). A third group was simply shown one of the angry faces and told that they would receive a shock when they saw that face. Amazingly, the magnitude of the skin conduction response to the angry face was approximately the same in all three groups.
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The vicarious experiences of shocks were as effective as actually being shocked, and this seems to hold true primarily for stimuli like angry faces that we are genetically hardwired to fear.
We have now seen examples in which both monkeys and humans learned to fear something by observation. Both the monkeys and humans were, however, totally duped. They were not actually firsthand eyewitnesses to any threatening events; they were just watching movies. Observational learning is so effective that we learn by watching videos, which may have been filmed at times and places far removed from our own reality, or that are entirely fictitious productions. Most people will never actually see a live shark, much less witness a shark attacking another human being. Yet, some people cannot avoid thoughts of sharks lurking just beyond the shoreline. Why? Because Steven Spielberg, as a result of his exceptional directorial skills, has singlehandedly created a generation of selacophobics. Like the observer monkey who developed a fear of snakes by watching a movie of another monkey acting stressed out over a toy snake, the movie
Jaws
triggered and amplified our innate propensity to fear large predators with big, sharp teeth. This genetically transmitted propensity to learn to fear certain things has been termed
preparedness
or
selective association
and is thought to be the explanation for why we are much more likely to develop phobias of snakes or spiders than of guns or electrical outlets.
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Technology affords us the opportunity to vicariously experience a vast assortment of dangers: fatal hurricanes, wars, plane crashes, deadly predators, and acts of terrorism. Whether these images are real or fictitious, part of the brain seems to treat these sightings as if they were firsthand observations. People can learn to fear pictures of angry faces or spiders even though the images were shown so quickly as to evade conscious perception. So it is not surprising that even if we are aware that the shark attack is not real, at some level our brain is forming unconscious associations, tainting our attitude about venturing into the ocean.
AMYGDALA POLITICS
Excessive fear of poisonous animals and predators can have a significant impact on the quality of life of individuals, but in the grand scheme of things, phobias are not the most serious consequence of our fear-related brain bugs. Rather, we should be most concerned about how vulnerabilities in our fear circuits are exploited by others. Well before and long after Machiavelli advised princes that it “is far safer to be feared than loved,”
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real or fabricated fear has provided a powerful tool to control public opinion, ensure loyalty, and justify wars. In the history of democracy there have probably been few elections in which candidates have not invoked fear of crime, outsiders, terrorists, immigrants, gangs, sexual predators, or drugs in an attempt to sway voters. The use of fear to influence opinion, or fearmongering, has been referred to as “amygdala politics” by Al Gore.
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Regarding the consequences of our susceptibility to fearmongering, he states:
If [citizens’] leaders exploit their fears and use them to herd people in directions they might not otherwise choose, then fear itself can quickly become a self-perpetuating and free-wheeling force that drains national will and weakens national character, diverting attention from real threats deserving of healthy and appropriate concern, and sowing confusion about the essential choices that every nation must constantly make about its future.
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The question is: why does fear hold such powerful sway? The answer lies in the ability of fear to override reason. Much of our fear circuitry was inherited from animals without much up front, that is, with little or no prefrontal cortex. The numerous areas that the prefrontal cortex comprises are involved in what we refer to as
executive functions
, including making decisions, maintaining attention, governing actions and intentions, and keeping certain emotions and thoughts in check.
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Ultimately our actions seem to be a group project; they are the product of negotiations between older brain areas, such as the amygdala, and the newer frontal modules. Together these areas may arrive at some consensus regarding the appropriate compromise between emotions and reason. But this balance is context-dependent, and at times it can be heavily biased toward emotions. The number of connections (axons) heading from the amygdala to cortical areas is larger than the number that arrive in the amygdala from the cortex. According to the neuroscientist Joe LeDoux: “As things now stand, the amygdala has a greater influence on the cortex than the cortex has on the amygdala, allowing emotional arousal to dominate and control thinking.”
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The power of fear over reason is written in history. For example, in the months after the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, tens of thousands of Americans of Japanese ancestry were placed in internment camps in California. This reaction was not only irrational because it was deeply unjust, but because it was nonsensical to believe potential Japanese spies could be eliminated by rounding up all Japanese Americans on the West Coast (in 1988 the American government apologized and issued reparations of over $1 billion for its actions.
There are many dangers in the world, and action and sacrifices are often needed to combat them. However, there is little doubt that in some cases our fears are amplified and distorted to the point of being completely irrational. An additional consequence of our fear-related brain bugs is that they drive innumerable misguided and foolish policy decisions.
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Take the fact that in 2001 five people died of exposure to anthrax after being contaminated through spores placed in letters (the source of the anthrax is believed to have been from the laboratory of Bruce Ivins, a biodefense expert at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Disease).
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It has been estimated that the U.S. government spent $5 billion on security procedures in response to the anthrax-contaminated letters.
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The vision of terrorists using our own mail system to spread a horrific and fatal disease left little room for a rational analysis: it was already well established that, while deadly, anthrax was not a “good” bioweapon—in addition to the difficulties of safely generating large quantities of it and the fact that it can be destroyed by direct sunlight, it has to be aerolized into a very fine powder to be used effectively as a weapon.
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And in the end, the events did not appear to have anything to do with terrorism, but with a disturbed government employee. In retrospect the most effective, cheaper, and practical way to have prevented the five deaths would have been to shut down the U.S. Army laboratories in which the anthrax was made.
In the past 100 years approximately 10,000 people have died as a result of military or terrorist attacks on American soil (most in Pearl Harbor and on 9/11), much less than the number of people who die in car accidents, of suicide, or heart disease in a single year. Yet, in 2007, the United States military spending was over $700 billion,
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while approximately $2 billion of federal funds were devoted to studying and curing heart disease.
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Does spending 250 times more money on something that is thousands of times less likely to kill us reflect a rational cost-benefit analysis, or does it reflect basic instincts involving fear of outsiders and territoriality gone awry?
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Fear, of course, drives much more than security and military policies: fear also sells. As the sociologist Barry Glassner notes: “By fear mongering, politicians sell themselves to voters, TV and print news-magazines sell themselves to viewers and readers, advocacy groups sell memberships, quacks sell treatments, lawyers sell class-action lawsuits, and corporations sell consumer products.”
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The marketing of many products, from bottled water to antibacterial soaps, tap into our inherent fears of germs.
