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Book Summary & Highlights: Mismatch—How Our Stone Age Brain Deceives Us Every Day And What We Dan Do About It

Book Summary & Highlights: Mismatch—How Our Stone Age Brain Deceives Us Every Day And What We Dan Do About It

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Our brains evolved to solve the survival problems of our Stone Age ancestors, so when faced with modern day situations that are less extreme, they often encounter a mismatch. Our primitive brains put us on the wrong foot by responding to stimuli that - in prehistoric times - would have prompted behaviour that was beneficial. If you've ever felt an anxious fight or flight response to a presenting at a board meeting, equivalent to facing imminent death by sabre-toothed tiger, then you have experienced a mismatch.

Mismatch is about the clash between our biology and our culture. It is about the dramatic contrast between the first few million years of human history - when humans lived as hunters and gatherers in small-scale societies - and the past twelve thousand years following the agricultural revolution which have led us to comfortable lives in a very different social structure. Has this rapid transition been good for us? How do we, using our primitive minds, try to survive in a modern information society that radically changes every ten years or so?

Ronald Giphart and Mark van Vugt show that humans have changed their environment so drastically that the chances for mismatch have significantly increased, and these conflicts can have profound consequences.

Reviewed through mismatch glasses, social, societal, and technological trends can be better understood, ranging from the popularity of Facebook and internet porn, to the desire for cosmetic surgery, to our attitudes towards refugees.

Mismatches can also affect our physical and psychological well-being, in terms of our attitudes to happiness, physical exercise, choosing good leaders, or finding ways to feel better at home or work.

Finally, Mismatch gives us an insight into politics and policy which could enable governments, institutions and businesses to create an environment better suited to human nature, its potential and its constraints.

This book is about converting mismatches into matches. The better your life is matched to how your mind operates, the greater your chances of leading a happy, healthy and productive life.

About Author: Ronald Giphart & Mark van Vugt

Mark Van Vugt

Mark van Vugt is Professor of Evolutionary Psychology, Work and Organizational Psychology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands.He is also Research Associate at the Department for Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, UK. His expertise is in evolutionary perspectives on human social behavior and in applications of evolutionary psychology to fields such as leadership, business and management, economics, sustainability, health, politics, war and peace. professor mark van vugt Mark van Vugt is Professor of Evolutionary Psychology, Work and Organizational Psychology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He is also Research Associate at the Department for Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford, UK. His expertise is in evolutionary perspectives on human social behaviorand in applications of evolutionary psychology to fields such as leadership, business and management, economics, sustainability, health, politics, war and peace.

Ronald Giphart

Ronald Edgar Giphart is a Dutch writer. His best known books are Ik ook van jou, Phileine zegt sorry and Ik omhels je met 1000 armen, all have been filmed. His 2012 book, Het Leven, De Liefde En De Lusten, was published in English as Living, Loving, Longing.

Contents

10. The Mismatch Test

Impacts People Differently

We can safely assume that not every person is affected by mismatch to the same degree. This can be related to where on the planet you live. In some areas the environment has changed so fundamentally that it provokes behaviour that no longer works to the reproductive advantage of humans. Countries such as Singapore and Hong Kong are extremely prosperous and yet hardly any children are born there. In other parts of the world the natural environment has become so polluted (through our own actions) that no healthy children are born. Mismatch can also occur to a lesser or greater degree as a result of the choices people themselves make. Some people become addicted to drugs or internet pornography, which takes over their entire lives. Others choose to go on a diet that resembles that of our ancestors. Some only travel to work in their cars, while others jump on their bikes.
Our supposition is that the better someone’s live is matched, the greater the chance of a happy and healthy life. Conversely, we think that the more severely someone’s life is mismatched, the greater the risks for health and well-being.
Agriculture and the subsequent industrial and digital revolutions have changed our lives fundamentally. These upheavals seem to happen in ever quicker succession. The transformation from farmer to factory worker took our ancestors some ten thousand years, but in less than a hundred years labourers have become digital knowledge workers.

The Ten Mismatch Commandments

  1. Thou shalt breastfeed
  2. Thou shalt invest sufficiently in thine youngest offspring
  3. Thou shalt play outside more often
  4. Thou shalt eat more fruits and nuts
  5. Thou shalt not manage but lead
  6. Thou shalt recycle thy own waste
  7. Thou shalt not idolise celebrities
  8. Thou shalt look each other in the eyes more frequently
  9. Thou shalt read more books and read aloud more to thy children

Thou shalt ingest more scientific knowledge

Giphart, Ronald; van Vugt, Mark. Mismatch . Little, Brown Book Group. Kindle Edition.

Highlights

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The First Mismatch Period For Humans Came From The Agricultural Revolution

In literature this is a called a ‘volta’ or turn, a turn that changes everything. The volta in the life of humanity was the discovery of agriculture. Over the past twelve thousand years, people have learned how to cultivate land for the production of food, on an increasingly big scale. The surplus calories which agriculture eventually produced allowed our ancestors to have more children, leading to a significant rise in the global population. People put down roots in settlements, which became villages and later still towns and cities, huge cities, which were many times larger than the groups of one hundred and fifty in which they had once roamed the savannah. Further voltas followed the advent of agriculture; the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century was superseded by the post-World War II digital revolution, icing the cake for humanity and the planet.

Mismatch

But in order not to sound too smug, there is a flip side. Not all the changes we introduce to our environment are good for us, whether in the short or long term. Sometimes a mismatch occurs, literally ‘a wrong combination’. The notions ‘match’ and ‘mismatch’ are important evolutionary concepts. Biologists began to use the terms in the 1960s in order to classify the relationship between predators and prey within a changing climate. Take migratory birds, for instance, which return from Africa in the spring just as caterpillars are emerging and there is plenty to eat. Global warming means eggs hatching earlier and birds arriving too late to be able to enjoy their snack. Their migratory instinct no longer matches the emergence of caterpillars, resulting in a crash in the bird population. We call it a mismatch when, as a result of a change in the environment the survival and reproductive chances of that particular species’ individuals diminishes. Or in other words: mismatches arise when species are no longer well-adapted to their environment, as a result of which their survival and reproductive chances are impaired. A sudden natural event such as an earthquake or a volcanic eruption can cause such profound changes to the natural environment that the species is no longer able to live in it. Something of this kind happened to the dinosaurs some sixty-five million years ago. A meteorite impact (that, at any rate, is the current scientific view) made the Earth uninhabitable to such an extent that approximately half of the living animal species alive at the time gave up the ghost. Once the dust clouds had lifted, not one single land animal weighing more than five kilos appeared to have survived the aftermath of this intergalactic collision. They were unable to withstand the sudden change in their environment; a mismatch, in other words. Conversely, all kinds of small animals (such as mammals, reptiles and a small group of dinosaurs called Theropoda) were able to flourish as a result of the disappearance of their large competitors, a match in other words. The small mammals eventually evolved into elephants, lions, chimpanzees, whales and humans, and the Theropoda into birds. Viewed factually, dinosaurs as a family group have therefore not died out (at least according to the prevailing theory). Mismatch can also arise when species themselves alter their own environment, resulting in them – and in their slipstream perhaps other species as well – no longer being well-adapted to this new, changed environment that they have created themselves. In this book, we will argue that humans, as a result of their evolved traits, have been able to intervene in their environment to such a degree that they have created countless mismatches for themselves and other species. The consequences of this are becoming ever more clearly and painfully visible. In modern society, we have to contend with a range of Western diseases, and biodiversity on Earth has declined dramatically due to our interference with in nature – both are consequences of mismatch.

Power Of Groups

Throughout their lives, from birth to death, our ancestors were surrounded by close and distant relatives pretty much all the time. They hunted, ate and slept together; as nomads, they literally went around together all their lives. Groups offered protection. A group allowed people to collaborate when they were hunting, picking and gathering. Sharing food was one of the most successful survival strategies. Going around together and sharing was a primeval variant on present-day life insurance, but one that would pay out directly during your life. We are sharers by nature. Social relationships were extremely important. They were so important that we have something which no other primate has: sclera, or the white of our eyes. Proportionally, our eyes are surrounded by a large area of sclera. The advantage of this is that, in a group, you can immediately see what others are looking at. Other primate species concentrate more on which way heads are turned, we look at where eyes are focused.

Disadvantage Of Grouping Children By Age

It goes without saying that in prehistoric times children were not educated in a school. As soon as children were able to walk, they were admitted to the ‘children’s group’. This group was a mixture of very young, young and almost adult children. As the group was relatively small in size, it did not contain many children of the same age. Grouping together a sizable number of children of the same age, as we often see in school forms and sports teams, is a novelty from an evolutionary perspective which can lead to excessive competition and is not conducive to children learning from each other. Children were brought up by their parents, but for a significant part of the time also by other adults in the group, whereby everyone was generally less strict than in later times. In anthropology, this shared child care is called ‘cooperative breeding’. There are present-day hunter-gatherer communities in which parents are barely involved in the raising of their own offspring. They do not stop their children making mistakes and do not protect them against a host of dangers, as they will have to find these out for themselves. It is important that children learn to recognise dangerous situations individually in order to survive in a hostile environment.

Darwin's Three Assumption

First of all (fact 1): individuals are never alike. However much individuals within a species may resemble each other, each specimen differs in aptitude, appearance or behaviour. Let’s take a classic example and introduce a giraffe living long ago called Gerald. He happened to have been born with an exceptionally long neck (not common for giraffes at that time). Raphael, who was born in the same group, had an ordinary, average-length neck, like all other giraffe calves. In other words, there is variation between individuals within a species. Fact 2: Darwin assumed – without knowing anything about genes, the mechanism behind evolution – that the differences between individuals are hereditary, at least to an extent.
Darwin’s third supposition (fact 3) was that there is always competition between individuals within a species, for instance when searching for food or a suitable sexual partner. Some individuals fare better in this competition in that they have particular external or behavioural traits that offer an advantage. Thus Gerald, with his longer neck, was able to reach leaves higher up the tree a little bit more easily than Raphael, which meant he had a little bit more to eat and was able to give his children a little bit more as well.
Darwin’s third supposition (fact 3) was that there is always competition between individuals within a species, for instance when searching for food or a suitable sexual partner. Some individuals fare better in this competition in that they have particular external or behavioural traits that offer an advantage. Thus Gerald, with his longer neck, was able to reach leaves higher up the tree a little bit more easily than Raphael, which meant he had a little bit more to eat and was able to give his children a little bit more as well.

The Traits Of The Stone Age Brain

Ingroup Bias: Interests of family members, who are genetically related to us, weigh more heavily than those of genetic strangers. That’s why we find it so difficult to be as empathetic towards refugees as towards family members in trouble.
Short-Sighted: Thirdly, our prehistoric brain is rather short-sighted. In the past, the future did not really matter, because you had to try and survive from day to day.
What We Can Directly Sense: Our brain is particularly concerned with dangers we can perceive with our senses (so can see, smell, hear or feel) and we are relatively less quickly alarmed by dangers not perceptible to our senses (like climate change). In divisive issues our prehistoric brain tends to let our self-interest prevail over that of others or the population at large.
Copying Other Humans: Fourthly, the human brain is an excellent copier. To our ancestors, the advantage of living in a group was that they did not have to discover everything for themselves the whole time; they could copy the behaviour of others, for instance on how to hunt or light a fire. If someone ran away, you would do better to follow than to stand still. This propensity for conformity was useful in prehistoric times, but in a changing environment can lead to us adopting behaviour that ultimately does not serve our evolutionary interests, such as delaying having children because your hipster friends do.
Status-Oriented: Finally, our prehistoric brain is status-oriented, because during prehistoric times status meant a greater chance of having progeny. By working more, our status in society increases, but we forget to convert this into greater happiness, better relationships and more children.

Psychological Mechanisms We Were Equipped With

Evolutionary psychologists assume that natural selection takes place at the level of psychological mechanisms, resulting in the best mechanisms within the population remaining (i.e. the mechanisms that ultimately lead to the most babies). These mechanisms are also called ‘instincts’, as they influence our perception, thoughts, feelings and actions, often at a subconscious level. These instincts respond to cues from our environment, which in turn influence our behaviour.

Four Irresistible Cues

The decision-making rules in our brain are activated by cues from their surroundings. A cool glass of juice may tempt you to have a drink, for instance. Feeling hungry is a cue for eating, just as it is, for some people, for a visit to the supermarket. Mismatch-lesson: never go to the supermarket when you are hungry, because you will buy too much! Research shows that the human brain only pays attention to one or at most a few eye-catching cues in order to make behavioural choices. We call these the ‘irresistible cues’. A mismatch may occur when our brain reacts to an irresistible cue, or when the correct cue to which our brain should respond is absent. These are the four most eye-catching mismatch cues, ‘the four irresistible cues’, or the 1. Exaggerated cues 2. Fake cues 3. Obsolete cues 4. Absent cues