Social Brain vs. Survival Brain

The social brain

Although it is a vast oversimplification, it's helpful to think of humans as having a social brain and a survival brain. Large portions of the human brain are involved in forming and managing connections with other human beings, everything from complex language to interpreting other people's emotions to feeling pain and pleasure in response to social situations. This gives human beings enormous capacity for prosocial behaviors such as helping others, comforting each other, and sharing resources, actions that emerge naturally even in very young children. Indeed, these behaviors are so routine in our everyday lives that we may not even notice we're doing them. Under the right conditions, humans quickly form social connections and develop positive feelings toward a wide variety of people. We feel pleasure when other people we are connected to do well and experience distress when they are harmed. 

These social rewards, along with the positive feelings that come simply from connecting with other human beings, are powerful motivators. While they are not a substitute for showing how policies like increasing the minimum wage or reducing climate change materially benefit an individual, they do "expand the pie," making people more willing to take risks and more tolerant of the losses that accompany change. They also improve a person's sense of being safe and belonging to a group, additional factors that increase willingness to take risks and to make change. Feeling safe, connected, and relaxed also allows human beings to access the parts of their brain responsible for learning, considering multiple perspectives, creativity, and complex problem solving. 

The survival brain

When human beings feel threatened, on the other hand, a different set of neurological structures activate. Foremost among these is the sympathetic nervous system, a network of nerves that reacts with lightning speed to any perception of danger to prepare your body for sudden, physical action. Known as the "fight or flight" response, this is characterized by a burst of adrenaline that raises your heart rate, improves your lung efficiency, diverts the body's resources away from non-essential functions, and increases your alertness. Critically, it also shuts down access to many of the areas of our brain responsible for social connection and complex decision-making. We lose our ability to be curious, to hold multiple perspectives, and to engage in creative problem solving. Our awareness of and concern for other people's wellbeing drops away until we are left with only the two most basic responses: fight whatever is in front of us, or run away.

Neither of these options are particularly effective ways to solve the complex problems facing humanity today. While an occasional fight response may turn people out for a march, the energy burst it provides burns out fairly quickly. The survival brain system was designed for situations of immediate physical peril that ends in a matter of minutes. Long term activation wears out the body and is unsustainable. Social connections motivate people more reliably and for a longer time.

What dropping someone into their survival brain does do is make them more willing to lash out. Often this builds on itself. One person or group lashes out, which triggers a threat response in the next person or group, which then lashes out in an ever widening and reinforcing pattern. This destructive cycle makes material conditions worse, creating more of the feelings of vulnerability and helplessness that drive people into their survival brain in the first place. At the same time, the decreased capacity for creative thought and perspective taking associated with the survival brain make it increasingly hard to find alternative solutions. Over time, people may cycle between lashing out (fight), avoiding thinking about the problem (flight), or other survival brain responses such as feeling paralyzed (freeze), or deciding everything's hopeless and giving up (collapse). None of these help solve today's complex problems.

Who benefits when people are in their survival brain?

What being in survival brain does do is make people much more receptive to authoritarian leaders. Authoritarian leaders gain power by telling a simple story: that people's problems are the fault of a group of enemies, and if they lash out and destroy those people, then their problems will be solved. This isn't true, and even a brief inquiry into how exactly lashing out is supposed to lead to better conditions makes it all fall apart. But that sort of simple story is what the survival brain wants to be true, and just as importantly, is what its reduced capacity is able to comprehend. 

Authoritarians take advantage of this by creating a sense of constant threat. This threat can be generated by resistance from opponents, by supporters' struggles to make ends meet, or it can be manufactured through stories. Supporters are encouraged to lash out and then, when that fails, to double down. In fight mode, encountering resistance triggers trying harder, becoming more focused on the enemy, losing peripheral awareness of what is getting damaged in the fight, and supporting giving the leader more and more power to wield against the enemy. As the leader accumulates power (and often wealth), supporters' worsening material conditions are blamed on as-yet-undefeated enemies, channeling attention away from the actual causes of social problems and away from competing policy solutions. The perpetual need to destroy the enemy justifies the leader's hold on power.

What do progressives need from the brain?

Authoritarians can use these features of the survival brain to their advantage because their focus is often on benefiting only a small group of people. Material conditions worsening for everyone else isn't inherently a problem for them. As progressives, however, we're trying to create a world where everyone thrives. Reducing climate change, ensuring everyone has access to basic necessities, responding compassionately to migrants, ending mass incarceration, etc. can't be solved by bashing something or running away. On the contrary, we need people to be willing to make longterm changes to their consumption habits, act compassionately in conflict, share resources, and work together. We need people to spend most of their time in their social brain.

In particular, we need to counteract the flight, freeze, and collapse responses. Ever been frustrated by a friend who just won't get involved? Sometimes that's due to not being aware of the danger, but often it's because they're too alarmed. Watch for people turning away or dropping eye contact when a topic comes up; this is a flight response. Similarly, the most aggressively apathetic or insistent that nothing matters may be in collapse. 

But what about the fight response? Isn't that useful? Yes and no. It is true that when there's a threat, an initial state of mild alarm is necessary to get people's attention and motivate them to work on a problem. People in this state of alarm are often energized, flexible, and ready to get to work. The negative effects come when the issue isn't immediately resolved. Because the survival brain isn't built for handling long term or complex problems (i.e. basically all modern problems), it often burns out fairly quickly. When it doesn't, it easily loses sight of the overarching goal and turns into tunnel vision. This leads to missing opportunities to get what we actually want, to build alliances, and to react to changing circumstances. People who are stuck in fight mode will pursue their enemy at the expense of getting what they actually want. In some situations, people can even get stuck in a habitual fight response that keeps looking for new targets even after the initial threat goes away.

Our goal is to get people back to the connection, curiosity, and creativity that characterizes the social brain and makes organizing effective, fun, and sustainable. This means finding ways to cushion their sense of vulnerability and decrease their sense of helplessness. In particular, we can do this by strengthening social connections (which the brain processes as a source of safety and belonging), having fun (which also signals safety), and finding small actions that are within people's circle of influence. If their sense of helplessness is coming from their life conditions, gathering social support and immediate material aid helps as well. People have to have hope, and actions speak louder than words. The more that we can find small wins, even if it's just experiencing a moment of joy, the more we prove to our nervous system that we have the power to move beyond bare survival.