Biologist Steve Stewart-Williams:
When male fruit flies are courting females and close to mating, they become so fixated on the task at hand that they often fail to spot approaching predators. The phenomenon is known as love blindness.
I can think of some intriguing hypotheticals!
I subscribe to Stewart Williams and highly recommend it. It is titled the Nature-Nurture-Nietzsche Newsletter.
Here are two more of the tidbits he offers this week:
A large, longitudinal study found no evidence that violent videogames make people more aggressive or less empathetic. Playing violent videogames is correlated with aggression. However, rather than violent videogames making people aggressive, people who are already aggressive gravitate to violent videogames. [Link.]
According to a fascinating new paper, people tend to assume they have all the information they need to reach a conclusion or make a decision. In a preregistered experiment, participants who were given only half the available information were just as confident in their decisions as those who were given all of it. The authors dubbed this the illusion of information adequacy.
There is a lot more good information at Stewart-Williams’ website! Here’s another one from today, which I found interesting (confirmation bias!) because it confirms my experience on Facebook (FB). For almost two decades I have posted my concerns about authoritarianism, warmongering, bigotry and censorship (among other topics). When my targets are conservatives, I have received pushback online, but it didn’t often turn personal. When the target of my concerns was the conduct of liberals (as it is now because liberals have most of the reigns of power), I have seen a repeated refusal to engage with the issue I’m addressing, coupled with ad hominem attacks and name-calling: personal attacks directed at me. I know that many of these people are a lot smarter and more capable of far more nuance than they express online. The bottom line, though, is that people on the left tend to be far more vitriolic online than those on the right. This is borne out in studies. One of my biggest concerns is that this intolerance is translating into increasing justification for authoritarian rule, which manifested in stark ways during COVID. Here’s the data:
It’s important to note that these findings also support the more general findings (see Sperber) that the brain is more proficient at navigating social spaces than figuring out what is going on in the physical world. As Jonathan Rauch has pointed out in The Constitution of Knowledge, our intellects perform best in narrowly defined environments, such as scientific research (uncontaminated by financial bias) where criticism is invited (and actively sought out) from knowledgeable others similarly seeking true wherever the chips might fall. In other words, free thinking where tribal impulses are kept at a minimum.
