How Instinctive Drift and Evolution Influence the Biased Brain

The Biased Brain Podcast with Owen Hawthorne

Explore the intriguing world of cognitive biases and human cognition in this engaging podcast. Discover how bias in decision making shapes our perceptions and influences our choices. Join us as we delve into the science behind critical thinking and biases, providing practical insights to enhance your understanding and control over your thought processes. Whether you're a psychology student or curious observer, this podcast offers valuable tools to help you unveil the hidden biases in your mind.

How Instinctive Drift and Evolution Shape Our Behavior (And What That Means for Our Minds)

Hey, have you ever noticed how sometimes animals — and even people — just fall back on old habits, even when they’re trying to learn something new? There’s this really interesting phenomenon called instinctive drift where an animal’s natural instincts start to take over, messing with the learned behaviors that trainers or researchers have tried to teach them. It’s like the animal’s brain says, “Nah, this deep-down thing feels more natural, so I’m doing that instead.”

Now, why is instinctive drift so fascinating? Because it gives us a peek into how evolution shaped not just animals, but also our own human cognition. Over millions of years, natural selection favored behaviors and instincts that helped creatures survive and reproduce. That means even when a behavior is “learned” through new experiences or training, it can clash with these older, deeply wired instincts that evolution stamped into the species’ brain wiring.

Take for example some classic experiments with raccoons trying to learn how to drop coins into a container to get food rewards. They can learn the task initially, but after a while, they start dipping and rubbing the coins with their paws — a natural food-washing behavior — instead of just dropping them in. That’s instinctive drift in action. Their ingrained evolutionary habits pull them back, trumping the newly learned behavior.

Isn’t that wild? It kind of shows that our brains – and animals' brains too – are a mixture of new learning and old instincts. This tension between what evolution has wired into us and what we learn is part of what makes understanding human behavior so tricky and fascinating.

And speaking of brains, this ties closely to the idea of cognitive biases and a biased brain. You might be wondering what instinctive drift has to do with things like bias in decision making or critical thinking and biases? Well, just like animals can’t fully escape their instincts, humans can’t completely override certain cognitive biases that are hardwired through our evolutionary past.

For example, we all have this tendency to rely on mental shortcuts — which psychologists call heuristics — to make decisions quickly. They’re helpful most of the time, but they can also lead to systematic errors or biases, like favoring information that confirms our beliefs or overestimating risks based on past experiences. These aren’t just random mistakes; they’re deeply connected to our evolutionary survival strategies.

Evolution kind of shaped our human cognition to favor certain biases because, in the ancient environments where our brains developed, these biases helped our ancestors make fast, “good enough” decisions when it mattered most — like avoiding predators or finding food. But in today’s complex world, those same shortcuts can sometimes trip us up, especially when we need careful, analytical thinking.

This is where critical thinking and awareness about biases become essential. If we can recognize these instinctual pulls and cognitive biases, we gain power over them instead of being controlled by them. The more we understand how our biased brain works, the better we can refine how we think and make decisions.

There’s this excellent resource called the book, "The Biased Brain" by Bo Bennett, PhD. It does an amazing job explaining why our minds work the way they do, especially around biases and cognitive shortcuts, grounding it all in science but keeping it super readable and relatable. If you’re curious about how evolution and instinct shape what we think and how we decide, this book will really give you insight and tools to spot those biases in your own mind.

So, next time you find yourself stuck on an old habit or snapping to conclusions quickly, remember it’s not just poor willpower or bad judgment — it’s instincts and biases that have been around long before you were born, built into your brain by evolution itself. Learning about instinctive drift and understanding cognitive biases can help you appreciate just how complex and amazing human cognition really is.

Explore the book and unravel the secrets of your mind today! Check out The Biased Brain to get a fresh perspective on how your past shapes your present thinking and how you can become a sharper, more self-aware thinker.

Mitigate the Effects of Cognitive Biases and Become More Reasonable Register for the Online Course and Engage in Passive "Micro-learning" link Enroll Today