“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.“- Theodosius Dobzhansky
The science of psychology shines brighter in the light of evolution. Fully validated biological concepts help us better explain human behavior, both normal and abnormal. Here’s the Introduction to my new book,
A Better Psychology.
THERE’S SOMETHING STRANGE about the science of psychology. A good science explains things—helps us make sense of them, and so helps us deal with them. Since psychology is the science of behavior, it should help us understand and correct our behavior when it becomes irrational or destructive. But too often this science doesn’t help at all. You’d think people would get frustrated with psychology. Mysteriously, though, the failures seem to pass by unnoticed. That lack of awareness is just one of the odd things about this odd science.
These failures have consequences. More than the other sciences, we depend upon the insights flowing from psychology to help us live satisfying lives. But it disappoints just when we need it most, when we struggle with an addiction or some other destructive, out-of-control behavior. Neither is it much help in correcting the many pathological trends in our social, political, and business systems.
Why this weakness? The problem stems from psychology’s peculiar inability to accept that it is part of biology. Because it never adopted biological principles, our current psychology can’t explain even normal habits—and it definitely can’t tell us how a normal habit can turn into a diseased, dysfunctional habit like alcoholism. Biology uses concepts that could enlighten us. But psychology ignores them.
Biology is the larger science that explains living things’ adaptation to their environments. Psychology is a branch of biology, an offshoot, a child of that mother science. It’s about a specific type of adaptation—the kind reflected in animals’ perception, cognition, and behavior. Because it is an offshoot, psychology should properly make use of biology’s concepts to explain both normal and abnormal behavior. Today’s theorists can create a stronger, more useful science by applying the foundational ideas of that more mature science to psychology—especially the concept of natural selection, biology’s guiding light. That’s what this book is about.
The light of evolution
More than a century ago, evolutionary theory transformed biology. Researchers had already uncovered many truths about living things. Then a breakthrough insight—natural selection—brought all their separate discoveries together under a single umbrella. Finally, biologists could glimpse the larger picture behind those individual details—how living things arise, and how they adapt to their environments so effectively. Hundreds of puzzle pieces quickly fell into place, one after another.
Darwin and Wallace framed natural selection as “survival of the fittest.” The animals that were best adapted to their ecological niches lived longer to pass their positive characteristics on to their offspring. Those helpful features gradually accumulated to shape their species. Natural selection explained how the remarkably intelligent designs of living things come into being.
Consider the struggle between the African wildebeest and its predator the lion. In Darwin’s eyes, the strongest, wariest, fastest wildebeest were the ones that escaped the fangs and claws of the lion. So those individuals survived to pass their helpful characteristics on to the next generation. By the same token, the fiercest, strongest, most relentless lions ate better than their peers. So they likewise passed their characteristics on to their offspring. In this way, over the generations, both prey and predator refined their ability to do what they needed to do to survive.
Biology’s mistake
The contest between the lion and the wildebeest illustrates the way natural selection works. Yet the authors of evolutionary theory unwittingly left something quite important out of the picture. In describing the struggle for survival, they had failed to consider the influence of the animals’ parasites—the smaller lifeforms that live in or on them, exploiting their resources. And this omission had consequences far more serious than they might have imagined.
As originally conceived, “survival of the fittest” seemed to imply that fierce apex predators such as lions (on the land) and sharks (in the ocean) dominate the action. But in recent years life scientists have found, in almost every ecosystem they study, that the parasites are the ones actually running the show. [1]
Parasites controlling ecosystems? How could that be? Most parasites aren’t nearly as impressive as lions or sharks. They are most often small compared to their hosts. The majority are even microscopic—bacteria, yeasts, and viruses. It’s easy to see how Darwin and Wallace could have overlooked the influence of something so diminutive and seemingly insignificant. And yet, the evidence says parasites really do have that kind of power.
What kind of power is it? There’s a term, maybe an overly dramatic term, that’s frequently used to describe it. It’s “parasitic zombification.” [2] When the lion catches the wildebeest, it’s often because a tiny internal parasite has changed the wildebeest’s behavior, making it do things it would not ordinarily do, things that aren’t good for it. For example, it influences the animal to stray carelessly from its herd. Being isolated makes it easier for the lion to chase it down and devour it.
But wait! That sounds suicidal. Where’s the logic in a parasite’s arranging for its own host to succumb to a predator? Wouldn’t the parasite die with it? And how in the world could it have such a dramatic influence?
Answers to such questions come easier when we think in terms of natural selection. To complete its life cycle that species of parasite needs to move from inside the prey to inside the predator where the parasite will sexually reproduce. [3] And over millions of generations, the parasite has evolved a means of altering the wildebeest’s behavior to make it more likely to be eaten. This helps the parasite jump from one host to another.
This so-called zombification is kind of creepy. So we might hope that it happens only rarely. But it is far from rare. In fact, zombification is part of every parasite/host relationship. Why? Because of the way natural selection works. The fittest individuals of any species are the ones that survive to pass their characteristics to the next generation. When it comes to parasites, which individuals are the fittest, most likely to survive? The ones able to influence their host’s behavior in ways that favor the parasite. It makes sense, then, that through natural selection every parasite will, to the extent achievable, develop mechanisms to exert control over both the body and the activity of its host.
There are some wonderful advantages to being a parasite. It’s easier to ride in a boat than it is to row it. So parasites arrange for their hosts to do a good bit of the rowing for them. They stow away aboard their host organisms, treating themselves to an easy trip down the river of life. Parasitism is a popular lifestyle. It is so popular, in fact, that the majority of all species are parasites, from viruses to bacteria to much more complex lifeforms. They’re literally everywhere. As science writer Carl Zimmer put it, “the study of life is, for the most part, parasitology.” [4]
To be clear, when we speak of zombified host animals we are not talking about the scary, mythical “walking dead” of motion pictures. The zombified hosts are neither mythical nor dead. They are real and very much alive. It’s just that their parasites have co-opted their behavior, changing it in ways that benefit the parasite. Whether the changes are harmful depends on what the parasite needs. Some changes actually benefit their hosts. Whether harmful or helpful, though, a parasite always changes host behavior in ways that help the parasite complete its own life cycle, whatever that may be.
Psychology’s copycat error
Overlooking parasitic zombification was a big mistake for biology. It introduced a flaw that slowed progress for decades. Only recently has that science begun its recovery from this misstep. But this book is about psychology. So why are we talking about parasites? Does parasitism have something to do with psychology?
Yes, it does. We humans are host animals too, so our parasites change our behavior and our perception as well. Opening our eyes to this reality can demystify some of our strangely destructive activities. Unfortunately, though, psychology has followed in biology’s footsteps, duplicating its error rather precisely. It has overlooked the influence of parasitic forms upon normal and abnormal behavior. And unlike biology, it has not yet realized its mistake, much less corrected it.
This book details the unforeseen consequences of psychology’s copycat blunder and outlines a way to make things right. Fixing this fundamental error will provoke a change that should have happened a long, long time ago. Applying the fix will extend the light of evolution from biology to behavioral science. The result will be a more useful psychology. This constructive change hinges on our willingness to adopt a handful of well-validated biological principles in order to clarify normal and abnormal habits. Among the useful concepts available are parasitism, immunity, and parasitic zombification.
As we apply these ideas, we’ll see that addictions and similarly destructive, out-of-control behaviors are best understood as zombification. Already we know that certain biological parasites can change human behavior. Understanding that biological parasites can influence our acts helps us grasp how biological thinking can shed light on the quirks of our own behavior.
Jumping the fence
Recognizing that parasites influence our behavior is a valuable insight. But as long as we restrict our attention to the influence of biological parasites only, we’re sitting on the fence between biology and psychology. We can amplify that insight a hundredfold by jumping completely over the fence into the domain of psychology proper. Within this realm, the zombifying parasitic forms of greatest concern are not biological organisms at all. Rather, they are abnormally persistent patterns in an animal’s behavior, patterns of activity that maintain themselves at the animal’s expense—“behavioral parasites.”
A behavioral parasite is a habit that has escaped its normal controls to become self-reproducing. If this idea sounds strange, it is only because of psychology’s error, the decision to ignore the influence of parasitic forms. That omission makes the idea of diseased behavior sound strange at first. But in truth, it isn’t any stranger than the idea of diseased bodies. When we more accurately understand learning, we see that the learning process itself regularly and unavoidably engenders parasitic habits.
The normal assembly of habits occasionally produces self-repeating, malignant habits. This is an inescapable side effect of the learning process itself. It routinely creates unproductive behaviors that can spin out of control unless unceasingly suppressed. Addictions and other stereotypical, destructive, persistent behaviors arise when suppression fails. Once we apply the principle of natural selection to psychological phenomena, it’s impossible to avoid this conclusion.
Natural selection
If we want to know why natural selection is so important for psychology, we must understand what it is, and what it is not. It is certainly not something invented by Darwin and Wallace. Those thinkers were simply the first to write clearly about what was going on.
Natural selection is a process that has been guiding the development of life for billions of years. What those able thinkers invented was a way to understand that process. They discovered how living things adapt to their environments. Then they wrote about their discovery clearly enough that the world understood. That brilliant articulation opened our eyes to a cycle that has been shaping living things since the dawn of time.
Natural selection is the mechanism behind evolutionary change. The way it works isn’t all that hard to understand, but people seem to get confused anyway. Perhaps we can sidestep some confusion by introducing it with a parable, one I call “The Sculptor’s Secret.”
Once there was a sculptor who became famous for his magnificent marble horses. His works were so very lifelike—stallions and mares, fully grown animals and foals, some carved as if at rest and others as if in motion. His horses evoked such feeling in the beholder that he was the envy of all the other sculptors in the land. Was it indeed artistry, they wondered, or had this savant somehow acquired a gift from the gods? One of his rivals begged him to reveal his secret. “There’s really not much to it,” the sculptor modestly replied. “I buy a big block of marble. Then I take up my tools, and I chip away everything that isn’t a horse.”
The sculptor’s secret sounds kind of stupid. It may seem odd, then, that he has voiced the most profound principle of evolution. Natural selection does in fact create “what is” by chipping away “what isn’t.”
Here’s how it works. Suppose there’s a large group of mice living in a field. There are minor differences among the mice. For example, some individuals can run faster than others. Hungry hawks fly above the field looking for a meal. Naturally, the hawks eat the mice that are easiest to catch—the slower ones.
With those sluggish mice removed from the breeding population, only the faster ones remain. These mate to begin the next generation. Their genes are mixed, and the mixing creates more variation among them. Then the entire cycle starts again. Some individuals of the new generation are faster than the others. Once again, the slower mice are more likely to get caught and eaten. Over and over, the faster ones are “naturally selected” to begin each succeeding generation.
This cycle repeats indefinitely. In this way, with the features of the slower mice “chipped away” over the generations, the population becomes faster and faster on average, harder for the hawks to catch. Chipping away “what isn’t” creates “what is.”
We know this is how natural selection shapes animal species. But it shapes lots of other things, too. Once the concept was clear enough, people started seeing see it working everywhere. They came to recognize it in all kinds of systems—many of which have nothing to do with living things. Inventive people even started dreaming up ways of using it to grow solutions to difficult problems.
For example, stock market analysts harness it to develop effective trading strategies. How? They create a bunch of strategies at random. Then they use real market data to try the strategies out, to see which of them yield the best profits. They remove the worst-performing strategies from the pool. Those that remain are the “naturally selected” winners. The analysts add some variation to these, and they become the starting point for the next generation. The market analysts repeat this cycle of variation and selection hundreds of times. Profits get better and better. The result is a viable trading strategy. The strategy seems for all the world like an intelligent design. But it isn’t. It’s the mindless product of natural selection.
In much the same way, aircraft engineers apply natural selection to develop innovative designs for planes. And programmers tap the process to evolve better voice recognition systems. Given the wide applicability of this venerable “chip away the losers” principle, it shouldn’t surprise us to learn that nature has been using it all along to guide the development of habits. As the coming chapters emphasize, it is the very backbone of individual learning.
Though introduced to explain changes in the bodies of animal species, we can put natural selection to work in hundreds of other ways. What I am calling “a better psychology” recognizes that it is at work in learning—the evolution of individual habits. As with animal species, aircraft, and trading strategies, individual habits become more and more efficient as we remove the less satisfactory variants through a repeating cycle of variation and selection. Recognizing that process in individual learning yields huge practical benefits.
Of course, the way natural selection shapes learning is not quite the same as the way it shapes biological forms. To begin with, there is a vast difference in the timescale needed for the evolution of a species and the evolution of an individual habit. Animal bodies evolve over a time spanning multiple generations. That could be hundreds, or thousands, or millions of years. Individual habits evolve within a much shorter time span—the lifetime of a single animal. That could be months, days, or even minutes.
Notwithstanding this difference, natural selection has always been the engine powering habit formation. So far, we haven’t recognized it. We can acknowledge that engine now, or we can continue to ignore it. But it is better to see it for what it is, because awareness of its role in learning helps us understand psychology’s most perplexing failures.
What have psychological theorists missed by neglecting this principle? They have failed to recognize the parasitic nature of many maladaptive behaviors. I have noted that parasitic forms and parasitic zombification are common in biology. These things appear frequently in the realm of psychology too, a realm where bad habits sometimes seem to take on a life of their own.
Mindless resistance
An instructive example of a parasitic habit is alcoholism. Let’s see how its most puzzling features—the mind-boggling denial and incredible persistence of this malignant habit—make sense in terms of parasitic zombification. These troublesome characteristics arise predictably in the progression of a drinking problem, simply because natural selection promotes the growth of resistance.
Biologists know that because of natural selection, anything we do to eliminate a disease organism automatically fosters resistance. For instance, disease-causing bacteria always develop resistance to the antibiotics used to kill them. They can’t help it. The antibiotic wipes out the susceptible variants of the disease organisms, sparing only those having some natural resistance to it. The surviving bacteria reproduce to become the next generation.
The cycle of variation and selection continues over many generations. And in this way, the bacterial strain becomes ever more resistant. Eventually, the antibiotic no longer harms the bacteria at all. “What is,” a population of resistant bacteria, has been created by gradually chipping away “what isn’t,” the less resistant bacteria. This evolution of resistance is mindless and automatic.
The same thing happens when pathogens respond to bodily immune defenses. Whenever any form of life struggles with a pathogen, natural selection progressively shapes the pathogen to become more resistant to control. Harmful bacteria and viruses inevitably become resistant to immunity’s efforts to eliminate them. Just as with the hawks and the slower mice, an animal’s immune functions decimate the susceptible varieties of the pathogen, leaving only those with some natural resistance. The cycle repeats. Over generations the pathogens change, evolving to better combat the immune defenses. Immunity itself must adapt in order to meet the challenge. The result is a never-ending arms race between host immunity and the parasitic bacteria.
Now here’s a detail we shouldn’t overlook. If a disease organism comes to live only in or on one particular species of animal, then what shapes the disease’s ever-growing resistance is its success in overcoming the immune system of that specific species. In that case, the pathogen becomes a specialized parasite of that one species, making it the preferred host. This exclusive focus means that over time the parasite will refine its form and function—sometimes to the degree that it completely stymies its host’s immunity. Then it becomes endemic. Natural selection guarantees that the parasite will continue to refine its capacity to zombify its host.
Is there any reason to assume that the automatic growth of resistance, the emergence of parasitic forms, and the consequent zombification would apply only to biological pathogens? No. It isn’t hard to see that the same principle would also foster resistance in pathological behaviors. We can predict that unless controlled, any malignant behavioral pattern would over time become progressively more resistant, eventually gaining “parasitic” features. And that brings us back to the growing resistance typical of addictions like alcoholism.
Clinicians know flowering addictions are “progressive.” Over time, they become more and more destructive, even as they become more resistant to control. The conventional wisdom concerning addiction doesn’t really account for this. But the progression makes perfect sense when we interpret it as the automatic growth of resistance. Part of clinicians’ confusion arises simply because they aren’t thinking in evolutionary terms.
A better psychology would accept that natural selection shapes behavioral disorders just as it does biological pathogens, ultimately creating parasitic forms. Then psychologists could explain why resistance inevitably arises as we struggle with addictions, yet does not come about in normal, controlled habits.
Having introduced the idea of automatic resistance, we can dive more deeply into our example—the notoriously resistant, out-of-control behavior typical of alcoholism. Most professionals who deal with alcoholism are aware of its patently disease-like features. Does it make sense to understand it as a habit turned parasitic? Yes, it does.
Here’s the argument. Nature blesses drinkers, like the rest of us, with natural, powerful means of controlling bad habits. It lies in their awareness of the consequences of their actions. The awareness-based controls work like immune defenses, eliminating pathological trends in our behavior as they appear.
A drinker doesn’t do exactly the same thing each time he drinks. There is variability in the expression of his habit. Some of those variants are more likely to come to his focal awareness than are others, so he is more likely to remove them from the growing habit.
To illustrate, a man may enter an episode of heavy drinking on a weeknight, so his hangover hampers his job performance the next day. That alarming consequence may bring a looming problem to his awareness, so he may cut heavy weekday drinking out of the pattern. But other drinking episodes might take place on a Friday or Saturday evening. Then the hangover will be less of a problem. On those days, the threat is more likely to slip by under the radar. So he may continue to indulge heavily, but only on the weekends.
In one instance, a woman might rationalize her excessive drinking by telling herself she’s had a rough week and deserves a break. In another, her binge might spark memories of family members whose alcoholism ruined their lives. Both the details of the drinker’s developing habit and the way he or she interprets it fluctuate from occasion to occasion. This is the variation part of the variation/selection process.
Now consider the selection part of this repeating cycle. Some variant forms of the habit, for example getting drunk on a weeknight, are more vulnerable to the drinker’s awareness-based controls. These relatively susceptible habit varieties are like the slow mice the hawks can easily catch. The drinker eliminates those weak variants from the growing habit.
An alcoholic’s drinking becomes a sequence of repetitions. As the episodes continue, one after another, the less resistant varieties of the habit are progressively “chipped away.” This process of selective elimination leaves just the varieties with some resistance, the ones able to slip past the drinker’s awareness, and so to bypass his controls. These resistant varieties, the “faster mice” of our metaphor, accumulate within the pattern. Once again, progressively eliminating “what isn’t”—varieties more likely to spark awareness of the problem, creates “what is”—in this case an awareness-resistant pattern of malignant behavior.
Unless halted, the drinker’s pattern of cyclical indulgence inevitably and automatically develops resistance to control. Each repetition further shapes the dysfunctional habit toward forms that sidestep the light of the alcoholic’s awareness, and so his awareness-based controls.
As the pattern progressively undermines awareness, it becomes more impervious, more firmly entrenched—and ever more deserving of the label “parasitic.” The zombified drinker gradually loses his ability to put a finger on the source of his difficulties. It becomes harder for him to entertain the idea that alcohol is causing his problems.
Looking at alcoholism through the lens of natural selection shows us that the diminished awareness and illogical thinking clinicians call “denial” is simply part of the pattern of resistance growing within the drinker’s habitual behavior. Denial is one aspect of alcoholic zombification, the predictable result of natural selection in action upon the evolution of a parasitic habit.
Although the logic here isn’t all that complicated, many find it confusing—because the natural selection explanation differs from the conventional wisdom about addictions. Our current psychology provides no way to distinguish normal habits from those which have become parasitic. The required concepts, though readily available within the mother science of biology, are curiously missing from psychology. We will address their mysterious absence in a moment.
There is a logical, easily understandable reason malignant habits develop resistance over time, while normal habits do not. That crucial difference is a topic of tremendous clinical importance. We will thoroughly explore that topic in the pages to come. Briefly stated, though, the difference between normal and malignant habits parallels the difference, on a biological level, between normal cells and cancerous cells. Normal cells are part of a team, and evolve under the body’s control, as part of that team. Cancer cells have escaped those controls and evolve in their own interest. We will see that when normal habits turn malignant, it happens in much the same way, and for much the same reason, that bodily cells become malignant.
Threatening a disease
We can voice a general principle about pathogens, one that applies as certainly to behavioral disorders as it does to biological disorders. We could phrase the principle this way. “When we threaten a disease, it invariably responds with resistance.” In applying this principle, we must remember that there’s no awareness of threat here.
Antibiotics aren’t aware, and neither are germs. The antibiotics do not, of course, threaten as a human might threaten—by shaking their fists at the bacterial pathogens and yelling that they’re going to kill them. And the bacteria don’t get scared and put up their dukes in self-defense. Neither does insight threaten an alcoholic’s drinking pattern by whispering in its ear that its days are numbered. So as used here, the word “threaten” has a special, more objective meaning that has nothing to do with awareness. It means only that natural selection invariably eliminates the more susceptible varieties of an illness, leaving the resistant versions to proliferate.
Natural selection is the engine driving adaptive change at all levels of life. As a universal principle, this applies to parasites, and to parasitic zombification. Automatically and inevitably, pathogens adapt to threats by evolving resistance. When an antibiotic threatens bacteria, they mindlessly improve their resistance to that antibiotic. When the immune system threatens pathogens, they develop resistance to host immunity. And when an insight threatens an alcoholic pattern, the pattern automatically and mindlessly develops resistance to that insight.
Ideas gone missing
The example of alcoholic denial shows that it isn’t hard to apply the concept of natural selection to behavior. Both changes in species and changes in behavior reflect animals’ adaptation to their environments. Given that they share a concern with adaptation, it would have been natural for psychology to share biology’s romance with natural selection. We might have expected psychology to use—or at least try to use—the concept to help explain the behavior and misbehavior of individuals. But that hasn’t happened.
It hasn’t happened? Some readers might disagree, saying, “Psychologists study animal learning. Their careful animal research is a meaningful connection to biology.” There’s a problem with this argument. Even while they study biological creatures, psychologists make no use of biology’s conceptual tools to explain their findings. Despite the many thousands of animal experiments performed over the years, the researchers seem blind to the fact that those tools can help them better understand the behavior they are witnessing.
A curious void
All of the sciences relate to each other—except for psychology. Over a hundred years ago, it set itself apart as an area of study that was unique and self-sufficient. But it isn’t unique. There’s an obvious connection to biology. It’s strange that psychology has neglected natural selection and other basic biological concepts for so many years, and has neglected them so profoundly. The omission is so odd, in fact, that it stretches credibility to think it could be accidental. What could explain it?
Could it be that these ideas are too complicated, or that they have no benefit? No. Using them to make sense of alcoholic denial, as we just did, demonstrates that there’s really no logical reason to omit evolutionary reasoning from behavior theory. So what’s the problem? Why is that blank spot there? The answer that best fits the facts is disturbing because it has nothing to do with science or logic. Disease put the blank spot there. Perhaps the clearest way to explain this is through an analogy, one for which we have already laid the groundwork. Psychology’s failure of insight is like the blindness of the alcoholic. Here’s what I mean.
The alcoholic’s friends and family look at his behavior from outside his disorder. They can easily see that his drinking is the source of his many troubles. But the alcoholic is looking at things from inside the malignant pattern. He has trouble perceiving what is so obvious to those on the outside. The disease of alcoholism has created within him a bizarre dysfunction of his attention. This is what psychologists call an “inattentional blindness.”
It’s not that the drinker’s eyes are defective, or that he has brain damage. Rather, his disorder is interfering with his ability to focus his attention on his drinking and its consequences. His induced perceptual disability has impoverished his view of the world. “Denial,” the uncanny failure to grasp the reality of his condition, is an evolved inattentional blindness. His expanding cluelessness is an element of his zombification, one that stands out.
The alcoholic’s inability to recognize his all-too-obvious disorder works to perpetuate it. This barrier to insight allows him to keep drinking despite the chaos booze creates in his life. If he could drop the denial, he might end the chaos. But as treatment professionals know, the disease of alcoholism creates and actively maintains this bizarre void in his insight.
An evolved inattentional blindness is likewise crippling our psychology. Mysteriously inept at wielding the most basic and most important of biology’s conceptual tools, theorists have remained oblivious to the parasitic nature of many of our most destructive behavioral infirmities. Lacking the insight those tools would bring, today’s psychology has little power to stop us from doing absurdly unproductive things over and over.
Psychology’s inability to apply biological concepts is a barrier blocking its path forward. Where did this barrier come from? Remember that pathological patterns automatically and mindlessly evolve resistance. Just as with biological pathogens and just as with alcoholism, parasitic patterns in our collective behavior have developed resistance to a fully competent psychology, one that applies biological insights sensibly and effectively. The disturbing truth is that, like the alcoholic, psychology is looking at the world from inside a disorder. Let me explain.
Disabling insight
It is ideas—concepts—that give shape and structure to our awareness. The way we perceive and think about events depends on the specific concepts available to use in interpretation. I began this introduction by stressing that the concept of natural selection restructured biologists’ awareness of life in a sweeping and positive way as it spread through the scientific community.
Few have trouble believing that new concepts can engender new insights, as did the idea of natural selection. But it takes courage to accept that things can go the other way—that existing concepts can be removed, corrupted, or discounted, disabling our capacity for insight. And yet, as the example of alcoholism shows so clearly, a malignant process in our behavior can indeed degrade our ability to assess what is happening to us. An insight that would have been easy before becomes almost impossible to achieve. When that happens, the void in our thinking leaves us unaware, clueless, in a perceptual and conceptual fog, and so powerless to interrupt the malignancy that produced it.
Natural selection can strengthen a malignant habit by creating an inattentional blindness like the denial that is so common in alcoholism. The threat of insight fosters the growth of awareness-resistant forms of the destructive habit, a development that includes both behavioral and conceptual elements.
To be sure, the progressive disease of alcoholism changes the addict’s pattern of alcohol use. But another part of the change is an alteration in his interpretation of his behavior and its consequences. In line with the principle of natural selection, his behavioral malignancy taints his view of the world, distorting it so much that in the end, he has little ability to interrupt it.
Social blindness
It’s unsettling to think that pathological patterns of behavior could actually degrade our awareness. People steeped in the conventional wisdom of our time consider this a strange idea—some would even think it “bizarre.” But given that we regularly witness such distortions happening right before our very eyes, as with addiction, the truly bizarre thing is that we somehow cling to the belief that it just isn’t possible. Though the idea is both frightening and distasteful, we can’t doubt that it happens—unless we engage in frank denial ourselves. And when it happens, we should remember that it isn’t because someone is trying to trick or mislead us. Disabling threatening ideas requires no more conscious intent than bacteria’s growing resistance to antibiotics. It’s simply natural selection in action.
This train of thought can explain the weakness in our current psychology. It invites some important questions. Could this kind of attentional blindness come about in groups of people? Could the resistance fostered by pathological patterns in a social system likewise disable insight throughout the system? Could it even deplete the pool of ideas available to our scientific psychology?
If it can happen with individuals, there’s no reason to think it couldn’t happen with groups. In this book we will evaluate evidence that parasitic patterns in our cultural milieu have fostered resistance to a more effective psychology, specifically degrading those ideas that most threaten them. It is not at all coincidental that the gravest threats to rampant societal ills are basic biological concepts—the very ones that are missing from our current psychology. I believe that, as with the alcoholic’s tainted perspective, psychology’s view of behavioral disorders has over the years been gradually and systematically emasculated.
At present, it is hard for us to see that there’s anything wrong with psychology, or to understand what might have happened to it, because the ideas that have gone missing are the very ones required to spark that insight. Natural selection has chipped away at the pool of useful ideas to leave a collection harmless to malignant patterns—patterns threatened by the insight better psychology would bring.
The plan
In this introduction, I have drawn attention to a strange deficiency in our current psychology, and I have outlined an explanation. The coming chapters fill in the picture by exploring examples of dysfunctional behavior our current psychology does not adequately explain. Among the examples I have chosen are alcoholism, the eating disorder anorexia nervosa, and the morass of corporate malfeasance we affectionately call “Big Tobacco.” A close examination should make it clear that we have the power to create a more informed psychology—one we can use to meet the individual and societal challenges of our time.
Chapter summaries
- Sick Habits – Clarifies why it’s worthwhile to avoid moral judgments when trying to account for destructive human behaviors.
- Alcoholism – Interprets alcoholism, the best known of all substance addictions, as an out-of-control, parasitic behavioral pattern – a rogue habit.
- Anorexia Nervosa – Recasts the eating disorder anorexia nervosa as a rogue habit.
- Viral Schemes – Presents a point-by-point comparison of biological viruses with virus-like behavioral patterns.
- Viral Origins – Addresses this surprisingly relevant question: where do viruses come from?
- The Drive/Habit System – Explains the birth of rogue habits in terms of a quirk in the evolutionarily designed system governing all learning.
- Runaway Habits – Documents the conditions under which habits are most likely to escape their normal controls.
- The Great Escape – Compares rogue habits’ escape from control to cancerous cells’ escape from immunity.
- Viral Incubation – Discusses the refinement of parasitic habits through the process of incubation, a form of evolution by natural selection.
- The Transfer of Control – A theoretical interpretation of speciation as “behavioral resonance,” extending the idea to rogue habits.
- Behavioral Immunity – Dwells upon the striking parallel between biological immune functions and the way we normally control our habits.
- The Attentional Fog – Calls attention to a problematic feature of all behavioral parasites – the means by which they incapacitate our behavioral immunity.
- Sociocultural Viruses – Describes a kind of behavioral parasite that operates not within one individual, but within entire social systems.
- Resisting Behavioral Disease – Suggests practical ways of dealing with virally induced behavior.
- Meme versus Virus – Distinguishes the viewpoint detailed in this book from “meme theory.”
- The Zeitgeist – Investigates an alarming reality: the viral removal of important concepts from the cultural zeitgeist.
- Dumbing Down a Culture – Details an example illustrating the way a sociocultural parasite cripples awareness on a large scale.
- A Psychology Without Awareness – Provides an explanation for the bizarre intrusion of behaviorism into psychology over a century ago.
- An Age of Unreason – Now that the information age is upon us, the destructive impact of sociocultural viruses is greater than ever. *
Appendix A provides explanations of some of the important terms used in the present volume. A more extensive chapter-by-chapter summary is contained in Appendix C.
The series
This book is part of a series entitled “Puppet Dreams and Viral Schemes.” It can stand on its own as an illuminating introduction to a more adequate psychology. But as with the other volumes in this series, it can also be enjoyed as an element of the whole.
Appendix B is a synopsis of the entire series, clarifying parasitic behavioral viruses, their origins, and our natural means of dealing with them. An even more detailed outline is contained in the first book of the series, Behavioral Viruses. [5]
I sincerely hope you find A Better Psychology a worthwhile investment of your time and attention.
– Tom Whitehead
[1] Seilacher A, Reif W, and Wenk P. The parasite connection in ecosystems and macroevolution. Naturwissenschaften 2007, 94, 155-169.
[2] The term “zombification,” arguably more colorful than it needs to be, is used by some reputable scientists to describe the ability of parasites to influence the behavior of their hosts in a way that helps the parasite move through its life cycle. See for example https://www.nationalgeographic.co.uk/animals/2018/10/meet-5-zombie-parasites-mind-control-their-hosts
[3] Heteroxenous parasites move between two or more hosts as part of their lifecycle. A fairly well-known example is toxoplasma gondii, which commonly infects humans. See [Flegr J. Influence of latent Toxoplasma infection on human personality, physiology and morphology: Pros and cons of the toxoplasma-human model in studying the manipulation hypothesis. The Journal of Experimental Biology, 2013, 216, 127-133.]
[4] Zimmer C. Parasite Rex: Inside the bizarre world of nature’s most dangerous creatures. Touchstone Books, 2000. Page xxi.
[5] Whitehead T. Behavioral Viruses: A novel way of understanding repetitive, maladaptive behavioral patterns. 2016(a), A Kindle Book. Available from Amazon.
