Introduction
Over the 2024 Christmas/New Year season I have been getting an introduction to cognitive science and a bit of a refresh on evolutionary psychology. Yeah, that’s my idea of fun. I wanted to start off 2025 with some fresh insights.
Below I will reflect on a few ideas I have developed in previous posts. You might think that I am drawing a long bow at times, but bear with me.
Thinking in the right scale
Anatomically modern humans have been around about 200,000 years. What we call civilisation is around 6,000 years old. That suggests that our ancestors had something like 194,000 years living in tribes or villages. You’d expect that’s plenty of time for we humans to have developed deeply ingrained behaviours and attitudes ideally suited to groups of around 150 people.
By comparison 6,000 isn’t very long to adapt those behaviours and attitudes to larger more complex communities. This is especially so when we remember that small rural communities were still a thing for most of those 6,000 years.
Our concerns about bias and inclusion maybe began a few centuries ago but became a major theme only in the 1960s – in the midst of the technological, economic, and social changes that were triggered after World War 2. That’s a scant 60 years ago.
Reflex and aspiration
The conditions under which we live now [physically, technologically, and socially] are nothing like our ancestors knew or could have imagined. The momentum of change seems to be relentless.
I have been reading Thriving with Stone-Age Minds by Justin L. Barret & Pamela Ebstyne King. As a text on evolutionary psychology, I found it immensely useful, and while I do commend it, I should caution the reader that it does have a religious context which may be challenging to some.
The premise of the book is that we have ‘stone-age’ minds, but we mostly live in settings utterly unlike where those minds/brains were developed. How do you thrive in a contemporary metropolis with psychological tools created for jungles, forests and savannas?
Our reflexes are stone-age, but our aspirations are space-age.
As we evolve our understanding of our psychology, we must surrender mistaken ideas and myths about our nature and behaviour. There are times when information is sufficient to activate changes in behaviour, and there are times when it is not. A sign saying that a bridge is out is usually sufficient to induce a person not to drive across it. But a message saying ‘be inclusive of people with disability’ is not. This is because very different reflexes are involved in the response to the different messages.
We need to understand what reflexes are triggered in what situation and set our expectations and methods of communication accordingly.
When virtues become vices
Our stone-age tribal reflexes still serve us well in many settings – in small communities, in families, in teams for instance. We favour in-group members. We are more tolerant of them, we grant them indulgences and preferences, we may also take risks or make sacrifices for them.
In a tribe or village those reflexes would never be questioned. And when they include exclusion, it is usually in response to a threat of some kind – an enemy or competitor, or someone very strange.
In larger communities, exclusion may be activated simply because we are psychologically stretched beyond that 150 mark. We must be selective about who is counted in that belonging-to group. We prefer people like us. Bias is a cognitively efficient tool to express that preference.
It has been argued that it is our strong sense of community or need to belong to a group that has made being human distinct, and not our capacity for tool making. Our ability to develop tools and refine them exists as it does only because of the group – or tribe – or village. Dedicating the time to refine tools is safer in a community.
But in civilisations those reflexes which were fundamental to the survival and flourishing of tribes and villages become problematic, and in some settings impediments to collective well-being. In fact, these reflexes can also become the basis for abusive or criminal conduct.
We don’t have civilisation specific reflexes yet. Consequently, there is a constant tension between what we aspire to and what we deliver.
Adaptive evolution is hard
We are constantly adapting and evolving our physical and social environment, and as a result, we also evolve. But we are talking evolution and not transformation. The core of a thing remains. The first car is still recognisable in our contemporary cars. The first plane is still recognisable in contemporary planes. The stone-age mind is still recognisable in the space-age citizen.
Cores are refined, not transformed. They adapt – provided intent and effort are applied. Any evolutionary process is difficult and requires skill. Our ancestors went from using found rocks to creating sometimes exquisitely formed tools from flint. Then we transformed our tool making when we developed the ability to work with metal.
Our stone-age minds are evolving at a slow but steady pace. There is no transformation yet on the horizon, so we are going to have to stay with our inherited psychological technology and continue to refine it. To do so effectively we must first understand it, discard wrong ideas, develop strategies that work with, not against, it, and implement them with empathy and respect.
Conclusion
Contemporary organisations [whether businesses, government agencies, or NGOs] are novel iterations of old forms. They operate in an unprecedented cultural environment. They are ‘space-age’ entities operated by people who often allow their ‘stone-age’ minds more latitude than serves the common good.
Its not that anybody is doing anything wrong. Its more that we don’t yet have adaptive strategies that work as well as they could.
Its hard enough for staff to flourish in many contemporary operating environments as it is without adding the extra demand to be less biased and more inclusive in a non-insightful way. What we need are strategies that trigger actions that are sufficiently rewarding so people will put in the extra cognitive effort to change their behaviour. This will require deep self-reflection by those who want to be effective change agents.
Let’s ensure there will be opportunities in 2025 to re-imagine how to evolve more inclusive workplaces and communities.
Michael Patterson
31 December 2024