Professor Robert Sapolsky wrote a fascinating and ominous piece published March 13 on CNN. The article, "Our brains on coronavirus," examines the effects of stress on human decision-making and general behavior.
With a rise in baseline stress, Sapolsky reported, we can expect people to react in ways differing from their norm. General stress generates hormones that dampen critical thinking and patience by affecting the pre-frontal cortex, while the same hormones amp up basic emotional responses from evolutionarily older parts of the brain. Rational thinking is reduced and impulsivity is increased. In addition, humans revert to habitual past responses instead of applying new information to create different behavioral strategies. We revert to routine because our normal routines have been interrupted.
The feedback loops here are insidious. Emotional impulsivity can obviously lead to emotional and impulsive reactions from others. Loss of our routine has us tightening our behavioral responses into more rigid routines. These behavioral effects are themselves almost viral in nature as they self-replicate.
Stress Speculation
Back in the 70's and 80's, when personality theorists such as H.J. Eysenck explored stress effects, researchers examined stress/performance curves. People varied greatly as to what degree of stress generated optimal performance on various tasks. Some did best under low-stress conditions; others did better on some tasks when stressors were relatively high. Well, now we are approaching situations where we are all going to be operating under high stress conditions, and we'd best start leaning on those who can process and handle high stress best.
American culture as a whole came into the COVID-19 event nursing a deep seated political dichotomy. Hundreds of dissertations will be written on the Trump years in the decades ahead, and I am not qualified to make any complex observations. Superficially, one could make the point that a robust economy and low unemployment heading into the pandemic have helped keep general American stress low. Conversely, one could argue the other side, namely that racism and class division have created increased stress for most of the general population.
Stepping away from both of those views, one could also argue that political divisiveness has never been worse, and that this has created a high base stress level for most who are engaged in the "culture wars." On the other side of that argument is the idea that insularity and tribalism have created social groups that interact only with the like-minded, thereby reducing the contact and stress of dealing with "the other."
Whatever the reality and demography of American stress levels, we are entering a war-time level of general population stress. Unlike all wars of this and the preceding century, this is a war fought squarely on American soil. Americans' ability to deal with stress is going to be challenged in a way that existing generations simply have not experienced.
Gambler's View
The most frightening aspect of all of this, from my point of view, is what Sapolsky emphasized in "Our brains on coronavirus." I'm concerned that American responses will be increasingly emotion-driven and reliant on routinized behavior. I worry because emotion-driven means not math-driven.
The United States is not terribly math conscious to start, and has isolated itself as perhaps the least science-driven of the Western democracies when it comes to policy. If the decisions made in the weeks ahead are not placed in the hands of scientists, we face a worse outcome than the current situation in Italy. It is time for demagogues to step aside and allow science to take hold of both the reins and the checkbook. Quite frankly, if we do not, the United States faces ruination ironically reminiscent of what befell the Martians in H.G.Wells' The War of the Worlds. Our technology, the greatest in the history of mankind, is only as good as our ability to make science-based policy decisions.
March 15, 2020
Bob Dietz
