It’s odd, yes. It looks a lot like a freeze reaction, so my working theory is that it would have been trained out of people growing up in the EEA except for the worst, most immediate dangers (hearing a tiger cough in the bushes twenty feet away), but that it’s triggered by relatively mild stressors in the present day because contemporary life is far less violent. Sort of like the calibration error that has our immune systems going on tilt whenever they catch a whiff of grass pollen, now that they aren’t constantly dealing with mild parasitic infections and unrefrigerated antelope meat and whatever random bacterial spores happened to be in the dirt on yesterday’s tubers and so forth.
That’s evopsych, though, and evopsych explanations always run the risk of turning into just-so stories. My confidence in it isn’t particularly high.
It’s odd, yes. It looks a lot like a freeze reaction, so my working theory is that it would have been trained out of people growing up in the EEA except for the worst, most immediate dangers (hearing a tiger cough in the bushes twenty feet away), but that it’s triggered by relatively mild stressors in the present day because contemporary life is far less violent. Sort of like the calibration error that has our immune systems going on tilt whenever they catch a whiff of grass pollen, now that they aren’t constantly dealing with mild parasitic infections and unrefrigerated antelope meat and whatever random bacterial spores happened to be in the dirt on yesterday’s tubers and so forth.
That’s evopsych, though, and evopsych explanations always run the risk of turning into just-so stories. My confidence in it isn’t particularly high.
Jupp. Was my thought too.