The pandemic exposes human nature: 10 evolutionary insights

The pandemic exposes human nature: 10 evolutionary insights. Benjamin M. Seitz, Athena Aktipis, David M. Buss, Joe Alcock, Paul Bloom,  Michele Gelfand, Sam Harris,  Debra Lieberman, Barbara N. Horowitz,  Steven Pinker,  David Sloan Wilson, and Martie G. Haselton. PNAS November 10, 2020 117 (45) 27767-27776; first published October 22, 2020; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2009787117

Abstract: Humans and viruses have been coevolving for millennia. Severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19) has been particularly successful in evading our evolved defenses. The outcome has been tragic—across the globe, millions have been sickened and hundreds of thousands have died. Moreover, the quarantine has radically changed the structure of our lives, with devastating social and economic consequences that are likely to unfold for years. An evolutionary perspective can help us understand the progression and consequences of the pandemic. Here, a diverse group of scientists, with expertise from evolutionary medicine to cultural evolution, provide insights about the pandemic and its aftermath. At the most granular level, we consider how viruses might affect social behavior, and how quarantine, ironically, could make us susceptible to other maladies, due to a lack of microbial exposure. At the psychological level, we describe the ways in which the pandemic can affect mating behavior, cooperation (or the lack thereof), and gender norms, and how we can use disgust to better activate native “behavioral immunity” to combat disease spread. At the cultural level, we describe shifting cultural norms and how we might harness them to better combat disease and the negative social consequences of the pandemic. These insights can be used to craft solutions to problems produced by the pandemic and to lay the groundwork for a scientific agenda to capture and understand what has become, in effect, a worldwide social experiment.

Keywords: COVID-19evolutionevolutionary medicineevolutionary psychologycultural evolution

Insight 1: The Virus Might Alter Host Sociability

Insight 2: “Generation Quarantine” May Lack Critical Microbial Exposures

Insight 3: Activating Disgust Can Help Combat Disease Spread

Insight 4: The Mating Landscape Is Changing, and There Will Be Economic Consequences from a Decrease in Birth Rates

Insight 5: Gender Norms Are Backsliding, and Gender Inequality Is Increasing

Insight 6: An Increase in Empathy and Compassion Is Not Guaranteed

Insight 7: We Have Not Evolved to Seek the Truth

Insight 8: Combating the Pandemic Requires Its Own Evolutionary Process

Insight 9: Cultural Evolutionary Forces Impact COVID-19 Severity

Insight 10: Human Progress Continues

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Insight 7: We Have Not Evolved to Seek the Truth

Humans evolved in small groups under threat of starvation, predation, and exploitation by outsiders—and generally lived brief lives, favoring short-term strategies for consuming resources that could support successful reproduction (59). We have not evolved to think clearly about long-term threats like pandemics—which are statistically abstract and global. And yet, for at least a century, we’ve understood that the threat of a deadly pandemic is real and ever present (60). How should we have responded to this knowledge?

We should have prepared for the next pandemic in advance. But, to do this, we would have had to feel the need to prepare—and been willing to incur actual costs in the face of what could have seemed, in the absence of dead and dying people, like nothing more than morbid speculation.

Unfortunately, most of us are terrible at weighing risks presented as abstract probabilities (61). We also heavily discount the well-being of our future selves (62), along with that of distant strangers (63) and future generations (64), and in ways that are both psychologically strange and, in a modern environment, ethically indefensible. We’re highly susceptible to conspiracy thinking (65), and display an impressive capacity to deceive ourselves, before doing the hard work of deceiving others (66). These predispositions likely endowed our ancestors with advantages (67, 68), but they also suggest that our species is not wired for seeking a precise understanding of the world as it actually is.

Thus, our conversation about most things tends to be a tissue of false certainties and unhedged bets. We look for evidence to support our current beliefs, while ignoring the rest (69). When we encounter friends or family in thrall to some fresh piece of misinformation, we often lack the courage to correct them. Meanwhile, behind a screen of anonymity, we eagerly confront the views of complete strangers online. Paradoxically, the former circumstance presents an opportunity to actually change opinion, while the latter is more likely to further entrench people in their misinformed views (70). Although these predispositions did not cause SARS-CoV-2 to first enter the human population, they are, at least in part, responsible for the pandemic that ensued.

Scientific Agenda.

Evaluate methods to combat shortcomings in reasoning due to mismatches between the demands of the ancestral past and the present, conspiracy thinking, and the spread of misinformation, both in face-to-face communication and on social networks, particularly as they relate to the pandemic and health-relevant information.