How to Survive the Modern World With a Stone-Age Brain

If a family from a traditional hunter-gatherer society were transported into the modern urban world, they would think they’d landed in paradise: Self-driving cars, hand-held electronic devices that can prevent you from getting lost and even direct you to a nearby supermarket stocked with colorful, fresh blueberries, strawberries, and bananas, homes with air conditioning and plush mattresses, and refrigerators to store all that produce from the supermarket. Wow. Not to mention the ability to call in an order of fresh-baked pizza and some double-chocolate-fudge ice cream for dessert.

The hunter-gatherers would probably be aghast to learn that people living amid all of these luxuries are often miserably depressed and anxious. What’s wrong with us?

In a book released this week, Solving Modern Problems With a Stone-Age Brain: Human Evolution and the Seven Fundamental Motives, my son Dave Lundberg-Kenrick and I try to answer this question. We use our renovated pyramid of human needs as a framework to compare modern humans with our ancestors in terms of addressing six fundamental goals:

• Surviving
• Protecting ourselves from the bad guys
• Making friends
• Finding mates
• Keeping those mates
• Taking care of our families

Ironically, the powerful evolved motivations that helped our ancestors achieve those goals are often miscalibrated in the current world. Worse, those powerful motivational systems often open us up to being parasitized by modern technology.

In the book, we also tap research from modern psychology to suggest how to reach these fundamental human goals in more effective and fulfilling ways and to avoid what we call “robo-parasites”—technological advancements that prey upon our previously adaptive motivations.

Dave, who has a background in both film production and psychology, is the Media Outreach Program Manager for ASU’s Psych for Life program, for which he films psychological experts addressing the question of how research can inform us about living more fulfilling lives.

The two of us have spent many hours walking and biking around, pondering the question of how that research could help us raise his younger brother and his own son and daughter.

To write the book, we delved not only into research on evolutionary and positive psychology but also into anthropological findings about life in traditional, small-scale societies. It was eye-opening learning a bit about the everyday lives of the !Kung, the Maisin, the Ya̧nomamö, the Kapauku Papuans, and the Aché, and comparing their lives to ours.

In each chapter, we open up with a case example of someone with a peculiarly modern problem, such as Walter Hudson, who reached 1,197 pounds and was unable to leave his bedroom for over a decade, or William Bulger, a university president who faced the question of whether to help the authorities capture his brother Whitey, who was on the FBI’s 10 Most Wanted list. We then take a look at the evidence about how people in small-scale societies handled similar problems of survival or family relationships, for example, and how their problems differed from the problems we confront today. We then review evidence to suggest a few solutions to these recurrent problems.

One of the issues that come up repeatedly in the book is the naturalistic fallacy—or the idea that what is natural = what is good. This has led to a misconception that evolutionary psychology advocates living the life of someone like Genghis Khan—doing whatever it takes to take as much as possible for yourself and spread your genes widely. We argue that life would be more fulfilling if we took as our role model a woman named Osceola McCarty. Osceola was an African American woman born in Mississippi in 1908 who dropped out of school in the sixth grade to help a sick aunt. She never returned to her education but instead washed other peopleʼs clothes up till the age of 87. Although she did not make a lot of money, she had few expenses and accumulated the equivalent of half-million dollars.

When her banker asked how she wanted to invest the money, she replied that she wanted to give it away. She did, setting up a fund for African American girls to go to college. Osceola loved her humble life, and she was loved by others. She succeeded by following a simple formula that many of our esteemed colleagues, some experts on positive psychology, suggested for living a fulfilling life: “Be kind to others.”

One nice thing about writing is that it forces you to learn. As we wrote this book, we learned a lot about anthropology, positive psychology, and why we ourselves often find modern life daunting. Now, if we can only get Dave’s younger brother and his son and daughter off their wonderfully captivating modern technological devices to read the book…