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Humans ‘Tend to Be Focused on Short Term Because Long Term is Too Unpredictable’, Academic Says

© AFP 2023 / PEDRO PARDOAn employee wears protective gear while working at the Azcapotzalco crematorium in Mexico City, on August 6, 2020, amid the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic
An employee wears protective gear while working at the Azcapotzalco crematorium  in Mexico City, on August 6, 2020, amid the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic - Sputnik International
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The Covid-19 pandemic has plunged the world into economic crisis, with the World Bank projecting a 5.2% decline in global GDP – marking the deepest recession since World War Two, and nearly three times as bad as the one caused by the global financial crisis of 2008-2009.

Robin Dunbar, Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Oxford, is looking at whether humanity has the ability to plan and overcome major adversities.

Sputnik: On the back of challenges brought on by COVID-19; is humanity, in fact, able to successfully plan for the long-term future?

Robin Dunbar: The answer is, yes, we can always plan but the real problem is that this everyday behaviour of humans, like almost any other animal, tends to be focused on the short term because the long term is far too unpredictable. As a species, we have the advantage that we can see far enough ahead and make predictions but most animals don't, and by and large, we tend not to return to grab at the immediate slice of cake on the plate rather than wait for a better opportunity in the future. You can argue this good economic and psychological grounds for doing that simply because the future is unpredictable. If you don't make it through till tomorrow, you don't have any chances at all, but if you make it through till tomorrow, there's every possibility something new may turn up.

Sputnik: What effect does politics and government have on our in-built ability to shake adversity and develop going forwards?

Robin Dunbar: I think the bottom line is there are two ways of doing this. One is the kind of military model where you have top-down discipline imposed on the rebellious troops, which is clearly the kind of authoritarian motive of politics; and the other is sort of consensual version, which is the sort of bottom-up version. So, it's a matter of persuading people. Now, we can do that but we're actually not very good at it, and we're not very good at it the bigger the size of the population really. It's extremely hard for very large numbers of people to converge on an agreed democratic position because there are just too many different opinions floating around and opinions tend to polarise. We are caught between the devil and the deep blue sea on this one in a very politically, I think, very serious way.

© REUTERS / Simon DawsonA shopper wears a face mask in Old Bond Street
Humans ‘Tend to Be Focused on Short Term Because Long Term is Too Unpredictable’, Academic Says - Sputnik International
A shopper wears a face mask in Old Bond Street

Sputnik: What can individuals do on a short term and long-term basis to maximise their success amid challenges like those that have been presented during the pandemic?

Robin Dunbar: I think the bottom line really is that all primates live in what are essentially implicit social contracts. So that's the nature of their societies, the nature of their evolutionally innovation if you like. It's what's made the primates so successful as a group. By definition being one of those, a member of that family, at the end of the day our societies our social contracts. We succeed when we all agree to pursuing a particular line of behaviour and behaving in certain ways, and not behaving in other ways. But again, it's a problem of scale because our psychology is designed to handle very small communities where you've only got a couple of hundred people maybe in the community. At that level, we're quite good at sort of agreeing what to do, it's just that it doesn't scale up awfully well. The essence of the problem is trying to persuade people that doing things in certain ways is in everybody's best interest and even if you have to give some kind of sacrifice, to enable that to happen in the long run, everybody benefits including yourself. So, I think, one can be optimistic, I'm sure we will survive and get on but maybe there are some prices to pay. There are lots of clear examples where urban centres and empires have outstripped their food supply and come crashing down in flames basically and faced major famine and disaster, which has some very nice ruins to look at now, but the population clearly suffered immense mortality. So, there are risks and it may be that some parts of the planet suffer much more heavily than other parts of the planet. But the one thing we're blessed with is a big brain and an inventive brain and we can find solutions - if and when we put our minds to it.

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