"Better Safe Than Sorry"

Image Courtesy: Jason Blackeye, Unsplash.com

While we are all trying to cope with the no business-as-usual times, it is to be acknowledged that this constant bombardment of the threat of the virus affects our behavior. According to research, due to some deeply evolved responses to disease, fear of contagion and containment of entire colonies lead us to become more conformist and tribalistic, and less accepting of eccentricity. So naturally I wanted to understand the origins of our current response to this pandemic.

Proponents of evolutionary psychology posit that as our ancestors confronted problems they developed ways of solving them. In doing so, they gained advantages that have been passed down for generations and have taken the shape of innate behavior. The most basic example is, language. At some point in history, early man developed language skills beyond grunting and pointing. It was beneficial to communicate complex thoughts for human survival and as a result we have been talking ever since. Our instinct to fight when threatened or trade information emerged on the Savannah Plains some 200,000 years ago and is still on display in our behavior. Hence, some traits that we carry are shaped by our evolutionary past (just ask Charles Darwin).

“The fear of corona virus is changing our psychology” by David Robson helps us understand our response to disease and it all begins with how our ancestors responded to illness before the birth of modern medicine. It would be deeply threatening for the survival of our ancestors. Being sick would mean they would not have been able to undertake essential activities for their survival, like hunting or gathering. Falling ill would not only be threatening but expensive too, since rise in body temperature results in a 13% increase in the body’s energy consumption. When food was scarce, that would have been a serious burden. Therefore, anything that reduces the risk of infection in the first place should therefore have offered a distinct survival advantage.

For this reason, we evolved a set of unconscious psychological responses – which Mark Schaller at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, has termed as “behavioral immune system” – it acts as a first line of defence to reduce our contact with potential pathogens. Also our behavioral immune system operates on "better safe than sorry" logic, says Lene Aaroe at Aarhus University in Denmark.

The disgust response is one of the most obvious components of the behavioral immune systems. When we avoid things that smell bad or food that we believe is unclean, we are instinctively trying to steer clear of pathogen contagion. Research suggests that we also tend to more strongly remember material that triggers disgust, allowing us to remember the situation and avoid it, thereby reducing our risk of infection.

Our behavioral immune system is fascinating because it plays out in ways that explain our behavior and attitude. Here are three research based behavior outcomes of this evolved defence system explained by David Robson in his article "The fear of corona virus is changing our psychology":

Conform or Leave

Various experiments have shown that we become more conformist and respectful of convention when we feel the threat of a disease. The experiment conducted by Schaller revealed that participants who were worried about illness tend to prefer “conventional” or “traditional” individuals and less likely to feel an affinity with “creative” or “artistic” people. It seems that freethinking becomes less valued when there is a risk of contagion.

More Vigilance

Schaller argues that many of our tacit social rules-such as the ways we can and can’t prepare food, the amount of social contact that is and isn’t accepted, or how to dispose of human waste-can help to reduce the risk infection. “Throughout much of human history, a lot of norms and rituals serve this function of keeping diseases at bay,” Schaller says. “Folks who conform to those norms served a public health service, and people who violated those norms not only put themselves at risk but affected others as well.” As a result, it’s beneficial to become more respectful of convention in the face of a contagious outbreak.

The same logic may explain why we become more morally vigilant in an outbreak. Studies have shown that when we fear contagion, we tend to be harsher when judging a breach of loyalty or when we see someone who fails to respect an authority.

Fear of Outsiders

Besides making us harsher judges of the people within our social group, the threat of disease can also lead us to be more distrustful of strangers. Our heightened distrust and suspicion also shapes our responses to people who appear different from us (culturally or homely features).

We do not yet have any hard data on the ways that the coronavirus outbreak is changing our minds – but the theory of behavioral immune system would certainly suggest that it’s probable. This probability has turned into hard-core evidence in the society I live in. There is a group of “non-conforming” individuals to lockdown guidelines by the Government. Our behavior immune system is revealing itself in all the above-mentioned ways. From ridiculing them to judging them and staying focused on teaching them a lesson, establishes our personal reactions to the threat of the virus around us.

So whether we are expressing a conformist opinion, judging another’s behavior or trying to understand the value of different containment policies, we might question whether our thoughts are really the result of rational reasoning, or whether they might have been shaped by an ancient response that evolved millennia before the discovery of germ theory.