This article was taken from the June 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Evolutionary psychologists like to say that our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind. We employ concepts from Darwinism to modern evolutionary biology to explain how human behaviours get derailed by media, technology and dense populations. However, my favourite concept from animal research -- Nobel Laureate Niko Tinbergen's supernormal stimulus -- hasn't received much attention in psychology. This concept has enormous potential to explain current human woes.
Tinbergen coined the term when he was making dummy objects to test triggers of animal instincts. He found that songbirds would abandon their pale blue eggs dappled with grey to hop on black polka-dot Day-Glo blue dummies so large that they constantly slid off and had to climb back on. Once a chick hatched, parents preferred feeding a fake baby bird beak on a stick if the dummy beak was wider and redder than the real chick's. Hatchlings begged a fake beak for food if it had more dramatic markings than their parents'.
Supernormal stimuli could be produced for all major areas of animal behaviour. Instincts weren't coded for a complex shape of what to nurture or mate with or attack. Animals responded to just a few simple characteristics that could easily be exaggerated. Territorial male stickleback fish ignored a real male to fight a dummy with an underside brighter red than that of any natural fish. Male butterflies ignored a receptive female to straddle small cardboard cylinders if their vibrations and stripes were more intense – the cylinders didn't even need wings. These animal behaviours look funny to us... or sad. But just how different are they from our modern habits?
People sit alone in front of a plastic box streaming Friends instead of going out with their real buddies. They tend Farmville crops while shirking their real duties. Men have sex with two-dimensional screen images when a willing partner may be in the next room. Research finds the cutest babies -- those with the largest eyes and smallest noses -- get the most attention, but Hello Kitty beats any baby's proportions.
Fast-food chains serve up meals concentrating sugar, salt and fat because these were scarce nutrients in the Paleolithic era that formed our tastes. We don't crave green leafy fibre equally -- it was everywhere. Our instincts about exercise basically tell us, "rest when you don't need to be exerting yourself." Any instincts towards more exciting aspects of exercise are now supernormally met by spectator sports. Stimuli for threats don't need to be pleasant, they just need to get our attention. Whether it's media reports about terrorists or a film trailer with a 12-metre lizard heading our way, we want to learn more.
Supernormal stimuli are a driving force in many of today's problems, including obesity, addiction to television and video games, and war. The key is that supernormal stimuli reverse the natural relationship between instinct and object. "Trust your instincts" works only if we're out hunting and gathering, not when we're bumbling around shopping centres. Becoming aware of supernormal stimuli does more than alert us to how these unfettered instincts fuel dangerous excesses. Once we recognise how supernormal stimuli operate, we can craft new approaches to modern predicaments. Humans have one stupendous advantage over Tinbergen's birds -- a huge brain with an especially well-developed pre-frontal cortex. This gives us the unique ability to exercise self-control, override instincts that lead us astray and extricate ourselves from civilisation's gaudy traps.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
