Paleopsychology Revisited

Usually, when we think of the Paleo lifestyle, we think of eating foods consistent with what our ancestors would have eaten under ancestral conditions.¹ Or maybe we think of the modern CrossFit movement, focusing on how we should exercise in ways consistent with ancestral forms of physical activities.² As someone who works regularly to integrate evolutionary principles into my own life, I can say that the Paleo approaches to diet and exercise have a lot to offer.

Source: Glenn Geher

The Basic Paleo Reasoning

The basic Paleo reasoning is found in the concept of evolutionary mismatch.³ In short, the idea is that humans, like any organisms, evolved under specific kinds of environmental conditions. Specifically, for the lion's share of human evolutionary history, our nomadic ancestors had to exercise intensively on a regular basis simply to survive. And the only food offerings they had were natural foods. So exercising and eating in ways consistent with the regimens that would have been typical for ancestral nomads should lead to physical health benefits today. And, generally, they do.⁴

However, as my co-author Nicole Wedberg and I present in our book Positive Evolutionary Psychology,⁵ the mismatch idea extends well beyond our physical lives. We argue, in fact, that all the reasoning of the Paleo movement applies strongly to our social and psychological worlds as well.

Recently, I was interviewed by podcaster Chris Williamson for the Modern Wisdom podcast. During the interview, which largely focused on the concept of positive evolutionary psychology, Chris introduced me to the term paleopsychology⁶ and suggested that work in this area, applying evolutionary principles to our psychological lives on a regular basis, seems to be lagging relative to the Paleo lifestyle applied to issues of physical health.

During the conversation, we extensively discussed how this approach to understanding the human mind and behavior has important lifestyle implications. Further, we discussed how, when examined carefully, these ideas kind of force us to question nearly all major societal institutions. It was an interesting conversation to be part of.

Applying the Paleo Lifestyle to our Inner Worlds

The basic idea of positive evolutionary psychology, which really is spot-on with the concept of paleopsychology, is to think about what ancestral social and psychological environments were like and to try to structure one's life in a way that is as consistent with these conditions as possible. Thinking about things this way, it is noteworthy that under ancestral conditions (prior to the advent of agriculture, which emerged only about 10,000 years ago—a blink of an eye in evolutionary time), the following conditions were regularly present:

• Humans lived in small, stable groups where they rarely encountered strangers.
• Humans were surrounded by kin, including extended kin.
• Communication was only of the face-to-face variety.
• Formal education and formal government were not part of the picture.

While there are other important features of ancestral conditions that relate to modern living, the abovementioned list captures many of the important elements of ancestral human conditions. A Paleo approach to our psychological worlds, then, would be to try to integrate this reasoning into our daily lives. This might include, for instance, making a bigger point to stay closely connected with extended family or to try to create relatively small, stable subgroups in work contexts to try to match ancestral social ecosystems.

Throughout the interview, Chris and I found ourselves questioning many important societal institutions from this evolution-based framework. During the conversation, I used the metaphor of being a fish in a fishbowl. The basic idea of this metaphor is this: Imagine that you are a goldfish and that you have spent your entire life in a single fishbowl that sits on a dresser in a little kid's room. You don't know anything about what is outside the fishbowl. Food comes in with some regularity. You swim around each day in your safe little space. And that is about it. You don't know what the rest of the house looks like. You don't even know that you are in a house. You don't know anything about the broader geography of where you are. In sum, you don't really know much because your experiences across your entire life have led you to only know what you have personally encountered. And that simply means that you only know what is in the fishbowl. Nothing else.

Well, think about this metaphor applied to human living. How many things in our lives exist that we simply never question? We don't question things like the origins or value of nuclear families, public education, or the nature of our capitalistic economy. In an important way, that stuff just is. But you know, maybe, in an important sense, we really are like a fish in a fishbowl.

The evolutionary perspective allows us to step back and see that, in fact, in many ways, we are akin to a fish in a fishbowl. But it also, kind of amazingly, allows us to see ourselves outside of the fishbowl. And this is why the evolutionary perspective on the human experience is so deeply important.

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5 Societal Institutions to Question From a Paleo Perspective

Relevant to this reasoning related to positive evolutionary psychology, below I present a list of five major societal institutions that we might be best to question in at least some capacity.

1. Education: Public education was created based on a factory model. Under ancestral conditions, nothing like formal education existed.⁷ Kids were not segregated by age and made to sit at desks for 30 hours a week being fed intellectual information from a novel adult who is, essentially, a stranger. When we see kids having a hard time concentrating and learning in a modern classroom, maybe instead of questioning what is wrong with the kid, we should be asking what is wrong with the institution of public education.
2. Social media: By this point, we are pretty much all addicted to smartphones and social media. Nowadays, many employers fully expect each employee to have a functioning smartphone on at any and all times. It turns out that social media seems to be strongly responsible for increases in bullying among adolescents along with increases in mental health issues in this same demographic.⁸ Our ancestors evolved to only encounter social interactions of the face-to-face variety. Maybe cell phones are causing more damage than we can imagine. However, to see it this way, we need to appeal to an evolutionary approach and step out of the fishbowl.
3. Government: Wherever you are on the political spectrum, you have to admit that the political world is a mess. Based on research findings from my lab on the evolutionary psychology of how we think about politics,⁹ this problem is likely partly rooted in the fact that our minds did not evolve to deal with large-scale politics. Rather, our minds evolved to deal with small-scale, local kinds of politics. So we're not great at thinking about politics at state, national, or international levels. Armed with this fact, maybe we need to question political processes and large-scale government more than we might have realized.
4. Going away to college: In many modern societies, there is an expectation that kids should go away to college after finishing high school. In 1988, when I left New Jersey for college in exotic Connecticut, I followed this path myself. I am not saying that there are only downsides to this idea. But if you step outside the fishbowl and think about it for a minute, you can see that it seems rather strange from an evolutionary perspective. Under ancestral conditions, humans lived in small, stable groups and were constantly surrounded by others they've known their whole lives along with family members. This idea that at the age of 18 someone should suddenly leave everything and everyone they know for some novel place full of strangers is nothing short of odd from an evolutionary perspective. And this thinking helps make sense of why the first year of college is often considered a year of major life transition.
5. City living: We like to think of urban living as a sort of advanced, civilized kind of human achievement. And, in some ways, I suppose it is. But once we step outside the fishbowl of the human experience and start thinking about city living, the idea of mismatch quickly emerges into the picture. It turns out that rates of mental health problems and loneliness are higher in cities than they are in smaller-scale living contexts.¹⁰ From the perspective of positive evolutionary psychology (or paleopsychology), these findings are not surprising in the slightest. Under urban conditions, evolutionary mismatches exist in spades.

Bottom Line

The Paleo lifestyle has been famously applied to issues of physical health. Based on the ideas of positive evolutionary psychology, and its sister paleopsychology, perhaps it's time to start applying the Paleo lifestyle to our inner worlds as well. When we start to think about how evolutionary reasoning relates to our emotional, social, and psychological lives, it turns out that there is quite a bit there.

Want to live a richer life today—mind, body, and soul? Maybe step out of the fishbowl of the human experience and think about your life from a deep evolutionary perspective.