Back in April - what seems an age ago now - I wrote how, early on in the Covid-19 crisis, panic buying, from toilet rolls to tins of baked beans, defied rationality but was a product of our reactive evolutionary behaviour ( https://timboatswain.wixsite.com/website/post/how-blogging-is-turning-into-the-new-online-magazine ).
Another baffling element of human behaviour exposed by the Coronavirus has been the failure of most of the world’s governments to prepare for this pandemic when health scientists have been for years warning that such a crisis was likely to happen. Both these phenomena, in terms of humans' ability to plan, suggest that short-term thinking dominates our behaviour. Such short-termism is obvious in animals who live in the present and just react to immediate circumstances but it is more of a conundrum for homo sapiens with all our incredible mental skills: conscientiousness, our ability to understand and to imagine the future.
Our lack of forward-thinking and short-term behaviour has been explained by what is often referred to as the ‘Collective Action Problem’, which is when there is a situation where groups of humans would be better off cooperating but fail to do so because their individual interests override joint action. The immediate needs of the individual trump a longer-term group advantage: a common theoretical example of this is that of the logger who cuts down the last tree in the forest. If the tree had been left standing the forest would renew itself over time and the community as a whole would benefit but the logger has to think about the survival of himself and his family so his short-term economic need means he cuts down the tree.
The problem for humans that stimulates this particular behaviour is the arbitrariness and uncertainty of the future, so the individual’s focus is on the present and coping with day to day survival rather than thinking about the common good in the future. In less developed economies the emphasis has to be on avoiding starvation and making it through to tomorrow where there is always a chance the situation might improve, so that long-term thinking, like managing climate change, inevitably, takes a back seat.
We are, it seems sometimes, still stuck in evolutionary terms with an almost autonomic reaction, along with animals, to seize the short-term reward over a longer-term benefit. However, of course, this is not the whole story and human cultures have created societies where there is collective behaviour which has resulted in long term benefits. This ability to think longer-term and repress the desire for a short-term reward takes me back to the Social Brain Hypothesis I wrote about recently (https://timboatswain.wixsite.com/website/post/big-brains-and-social-groups).
The argument I put forward in that blog was that human brains have developed and grown in size over evolution in order to relate to and manage larger numbers of social contacts which is in contrast to our primate cousins. It also seems that our ability to discount an immediate reward in favour of a longer-term advantage is dependent on our big brains and in particular, the Prefrontal Cortex which is responsible for internal, purposeful mental action, i.e.reasoning, and is that part of the brain that sits behind our foreheads. However, all too often our more primitive instinct to have a short term gain is not overruled by big brains, in the same way emotion can so easily dominate rational thinking.
You could argue that human failure over equality is a product of human competitiveness rather than co-operation; a product of a short-term, get-rich-quick at any cost mentality rather than a thought-through strategy for the greater good of the whole community. Such short-term thinking and lack of long-term planning result in the negative elements of the global economy, causing among other problems an obscene disparity between the rich and the poor. This inequity of access to resources and power understandably can cause resentment and lead to unrest and even social breakdown.
The Coronavirus pandemic is a timely reminder that humans need to be mindful that their political and economic structures should have a long term vision whereby planning for the well-being of communities is the imperative and not just the economic advantages that short-term thinking appears to provide. The 'new normal' must benefit everyone in the community!
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