All organisms “think” in the sense that they respond to their environment.
One-celled organisms think by running their cell chemistry differently in different conditions. Animals such as humans think both by changing chemistry and by using their brains.
There are many, many kinds of thinking but I’m going to break human-brain thinking into two broad categories: Instinctive thinking and adaptive thinking.
Adaptive thinking happens when the brain encounters a situation that is strange. A classic case is a child learning to ride a bicycle. A child doesn’t know how to ride a bicycle. There were no bicycles in Neolithic Village or even the Agricultural Age; the first chain-driven bicycle was invented in 1885.
So to ride a bicycle a child has to learn. He or she practices and the brain figures out what has to happen to do this action successfully. This is adaptive learning.
Likewise learning to read, write, and do mathematics are all cases of adaptive learning. Much of what we do in the civilized lifestyle takes adaptive learning to master.
The converse is instinctive thinking, the kind the body is hard-wired to do. Extreme examples of instinctive thinking are vision and hearing. Mother Nature has been experimenting with them for billions of generations and the results are now so good that modern computers still can’t match the performance levels of mammal vision.
All human learning is on a continuum between vision and bicycle riding. Those problems that humans deal with regularly and have for a long time are handled almost exclusively by hard-wired instinctive thinking. Those problems that are new or come up only once in a while are handled mostly by adaptive thinking.
Both are very useful but adaptive thinking is more like an insurance policy: For day-to-day use it’s slow and it’s expensive. When you need it you’re sure glad you have it, but most of the time you’d rather be using instinct. Instinctive thinking is fast, comfortable, and easy to do.
Since humans have been living in the Neolithic Village environment for thousands of generations, the human brain has been steadily adding hard-wiring that is well suited for that environment. About five hundred generations ago, the brain started adding hard-wiring for the Agricultural environment. It was only ten generations ago that the Industrial environment first appeared. And until 2020 or so we won’t have even a single grown-to-maturity Information Age generation.
Note that this new thinking is added on top of the old thinking. The old thinking is not lost, it’s just not used as much. But it’s there, ready to be used, and it would love to be.
So much for review. Now what are some examples of old-style instinctive thinking showing up in modern situations?
Neolithic Village insider/outsider thinking shows up in a lot of places and a lot of ways. Being part of a small group is a very easy thinking pattern to adopt. Here are some famous examples.
In 2008 Bernard Madoff, a well-respected Wall Street insider, revealed that he had been running a Ponzi scheme for over a decade—at times he was not making enough money from his investments to meet his promises to investors so he had been using new money to pay off older obligations when they were called. When the crisis was finally revealed his investors were out around $50 billion.
Fifty billion dollars! You can fight a war in Iraq for more than a year with that kind of money!
How did this come to pass?
Bernard Madoff was a master at taking advantage of old Neolithic Village insider/outsider thinking. He made people feel comfortable that he was an insider and by letting him invest their money they would become insiders too.
This kind of crime falls into the general category of a confidence crime. It is perpetrated by a confidence man who gains trust then betrays it.
This crime and many, many activities that are not crimes play off the old Neolithic Village instinct to trust insiders and be suspicious of outsiders. A non-criminal example is gaining confidence in a product after seeing it advertised many times.
In Neolithic Village times, late teenagehood was the time for most fertile women to start having babies. This modern incarnation is a classic case of instinctive thinking sneaking into modern times.
Cults and other small groups where the members isolate themselves from the normal flow of the community around them are stimulating this same Neolithic Village insider/outsider instinct. This thinking can become very, very comfortable in some people. So comfortable that when people are forced out of the group they get very unhappy. It is part of the lifestyle that some people are forced out of such a group. Exile of dissenters and troublemakers is very much a part of the Neolithic Village living process.
If such cults exist for long, they develop a circle of ex-cult cult haters around them.
Fashion is about women looking beautiful. It works because, as previously stated, helping young, healthy, potentially reproductive women helps the community. Note that this desire to help young women springs up in both men and women, and for this reason fashion is as much about appealing to women as it is to men.
While the details of what is fashionable change, there is one theme that remains constant: A woman who is fashionable looks like she is making a big sacrifice. In contemporary times, keeping weight low, wearing cosmetics, walking in high heels, and getting tattoos and piercings—usually not all at the same time—are all examples of sacrifice.
Examples of sacrificing for beauty in older times.
Less extremely, in Napoleonic times women’s Empire styles were often dampened to cling more closely to the body.
Did many get cold and then sick? Yes! But they did it anyway.
These sacrifices are made because they are well recognized and consistently responded to by the rest of the community as signals that the young woman wants to be cooperated with.
Older women pursue fashion because they want the same benefits as younger women; they want the cooperation, too.
Sacrifice for beauty is a constant of young women’s bride thinking and responding to it is a deep instinct of the whole human community. But the details of the sacrifice keep changing! Why is that?
Here’s my theory—currently a fun speculation, nothing more: I suspect this is a defense mechanism to protect younger women from older women.
Older women were younger women just a few years earlier. They remember well the cooperation they got but they tend to forget the bride thinking they had to do to get it. What the older women see instead is the power of the visual signals—the power of beauty.
So they work hard to look like young women, too—they work hard to look beautiful. To the extent that they succeed, they are “gaming the system”—the system is designed to give extra support to younger women who are having their first children, not older woman who can now fend for themselves.
So to fend off the older imitators, each cohort of young women comes up with a different way to look beautiful. The stakes are high—lots of community cooperation—so there is a lot of tension in this relation and that’s why the fashion business tends to be so uncertain and exciting.
Fashion is a billion-dollar industry built on Neolithic Village thinking. This is an example of an instinct coming through in modern times.
It is a common and chronic complaint that campaigning politicians don’t talk about issues. Why is this?
When you survey a person about how they feel about something you’re asking for instinctive thinking to answer. If you ask a person to analyze the situation then you are asking for adaptive thinking to answer. Issues are based on adaptive thinking, which isn’t comfortable thinking. What’s comfortable is instinctive thinking.
Most people vote on their gut feeling, not issues, which means they are letting instinctive thinking make the decision. This is why politicians talk as if they were addressing a Neolithic Village crowd—in such a condition issues are death and the bandwagon is everything.