Profs & Pints Online presents: “Meltdown on Aisle Twenty,” a look at panic-buying, hostility to outsiders, and other evolved responses to crises, with Stephanie D. Preston, professor of psychology at the University of Michigan.

When we first went into lockdown mode over Covid-19 people stockpiled goods, emptying grocery stores and creating a panic over dwindling supplies. Fights over seemingly scarce groceries broke out in the aisles, and some of those who checked out with teetering stacks of toilet paper in their carts ended up shamed on social media. Both in stores and beyond, Asian Americans suddenly found themselves experiencing heightened levels of discrimination, based on fears that they were somehow carriers of a virus from China.

How much of all of this was an irrational panic response? How much should we panic over how we respond to panic?

Come join Stephanie Preston, a behavioral neuroscientist who has extensively studied hoarding and shaming social behavior, for a fascinating discussion of the evolutionary roots of our panic-driven behavior and how much some of the best and worst of ourselves is hard-wired into our brain.

We’ll start by looking back through our evolutionary tree at other species, examining how hoarding food helps kangaroo rats survive desert droughts and squirrels survive hard winters. We use the same areas of our brains in stashing away food, water, and supplies to prepare for difficult times, and this response is exacerbated across species by stress, our brain’s signal that trouble is afoot.

The promotion of ties to one’s own social group has also generally been adaptive. Now, however,  it can make us act in troubling ways. It can prompt us to publicly shame those who flout the social contract, by, for example, buying more toilet paper than we think they’ll need. And it can lead us to exhibit prejudice toward people we see as outsiders, especially if we see them as possible carriers of disease to our own in-group.

Are we doomed to go at each other’s throats in a mad battle for survival whenever things get really bad? Or can we work together to get through whatever life throws at us? Professor Preston will discuss how natural empathy and altruism also are evolved responses from our social brains, because at times an urge to give and help has been crucial to our own survival. By leaning into these more generous impulses,we can find enough hope for ourselves and others to leave those boxes of things that we don’t truly need on the store shelf. (This talk will remain available in recorded form.)

Profs & Pints Online: Meltdown on Aisle Twenty