Biologically primary vs biologically secondary thinking

The environment has shaped not only our capacity to think but also the ways in which we do so. Our early environment was not one in which there were cars, civil servants, books, megacities, IT technicians, zoos, and so on. As with other animals, survival of the fittest for humans meant developing quick intuitive responses to typical situations in the physical and social world throughout the Pleistocene (from about 2.5 million to 12,000 years ago). A strong feeling of belonging to a social group (family, clan, or tribe) sat, and still sits, alongside a feeling of distrust of others that do not belong to our in-group. Evolutionary pressures and experience produced fast, automatic, intuitive, generally nonverbal, often 'biased' thinking. The thinking produced by such pressures has been termed 'biologically primary' (Geary, 2005). These are typical of descriptions of Type 1 processes that evolved early (Evans & Stanovich, 2013) and include what can be termed 'folk physics’, 'folk biology', and ‘folk psychology'.

Alongside Type 1, Type 2 thinking evolved relatively recently, is uniquely human, and is linked to language. An expanded LTM and WM gave us the ability to analyze situations, problems, and abstract concepts in some depth despite the time-consuming and effortful nature of this type of thinking. Type 2 is often required to cope with biologically secondary domains such as statistics, astronomy, quantum mechanics, and so on - the cultural inventions of human beings.

Folk physics

While we are born with an innate grasp of basic physics, we continue to interact with and learn about the physical world. If we roll something along the ground, it will eventually come to a stop due to friction. We expect an event to happen either before, after or at the same time as another event. However, Einstein’s special theory of relativity showed that this is not always the case and quantum mechanics offends our sense of how the world ought to work. Our 'folk physics’ can impair our understanding of some important aspects of the physical world such as those discussed in the section on naive physics in Chapter 8.

Folk biology

Newborn babies have the innate ability to look at faces, particularly the eyes of carers, and seem 'prepared' to distinguish between people on the basis of their faces (Johnson & Morton, 1991). Children appear to categorize living things as if they had an underlying essence that makes, say, a dog a dog. Very young children have a belief in animism where not just living things but inanimate objects, particularly ones that move such as the sun or cars, are assumed to be alive. Now, one might argue that children have a different conception of what alive means from that of adults who know more about biological entities, but that doesn’t account for the fact that many adults for many thousands of years have endowed the sun with some kind of animistic spirit (see Chapter 10). There has been Helios and Apollo in Greek mythology, Ra in Egyptian mythology. Inti in Incan mythology, Amaterasu in Japanese mythology, and so on. Wikipedia lists 96 sun deities from all round the world. Some fears and phobias are biologically primary in that we have evolved a fear of certain animals or situations such as spiders, snakes or heights. Some could be construed as biologically secondary and refer to fears we have learned such as coulro-phobia (fear of clowns) or turophobia (fear of cheese).

Folk psychology

Folk psychology reflects the fact that humans have evolved to engage in and cope with complex social interactions with a limited number of others. We are good at ascribing intentions and motivations based on variations in non-verbal behaviour, dominance hierarchies, and the detection of emotions particularly anger and fear, and it would appear that there are evolved mechanisms in children to process information about other people. That is, we are born with a theory of mind (see Baron-Cohen, 1991).

Another aspect of folk psychology relates to folk economics. We have particular intuitive mental models of tariffs, prices, immigration, welfare, and unemployment which are often unfounded and make the job of governments difficult. Boyer and Petersen (2017) have argued that the ways we think about economics and economic policy are based on the kind of social environments in which our cognitive mechanisms evolved:

'We argue that many folk-views on the economy are strongly influenced by the operation of non-conscious inference systems that were shaped by natural selection during our unique evolutionary history, to provide intuitive solutions to such recurrent adaptive problems as maintaining fairness in exchange, cultivating reiterated social interaction, building efficient and stable coalitions, or adjudicating issues of ownership, all within small-scale groups of foragers' (Boyer & Petersen, 2017, p. 3).

In modern, complex society, such intuitive views on issues such as tariffs and immigration can be counterproductive, as can being uncomfortable interacting with people different from us.