by Gord Hotchkiss, Featured Contributor, April 11, 2017

Humans are defined by scarcity. All our evolutionary adaptations tend to be built to ensure survival in harsh environments. This can sometimes backfire on us in times of abundance.

For example, humans are great at foraging. We have built-in algorithms that tell us which patches are most promising and when we should give up on the patch we’re in and move to another patch.

We’re also good at borrowing strategies that evolution designed for one purpose and applying them for another purpose. This is called exaptation. For example, we’ve exapted our food foraging strategies and applied them to searching for information in an online environment. We use these skills when we look at a Web site, conduct an online search or scan our email inbox. But as we forage for information — or food — we have to remember, this same strategy assumes scarcity, not abundance.

Take food, for example. Nutritionally we have been hardwired by evolution to prefer high-fat, high-calorie foods. That’s because this wiring took place in an environment of scarcity, where you didn’t know where your next meal was coming from. High-fat, high-calorie and high-salt foods were all “jackpots” if food was scarce. Eating these foods could mean the difference between life and death. So our brains evolved to send us a reward signal when we ate these foods. Subsequently, we naturally started to forage for these things.

This was all good when our home was the African savannah. Not so good when it’s Redondo Beach, there’s a fast-food joint on every corner, and the local Wal-Mart’s shelves are filled to overflowing with highly processed, premade meals. We have “refined” food production to continually push our evolutionary buttons, gorging ourselves to the point of obesity.

Foraging isn’t a problem here. Limiting ourselves is.

So, evolution has made humans good at foraging when things are scarce, but not so good at filtering in an environment of abundance. I suspect the same thing that happened with food is happening today with information.

Just as we’re predisposed to look for food high in fats, salt and calories, we are drawn to information that:

All those things make sense in an evolutionary environment where there’s not enough to go around. But, in a society of abundance, they can cause big problems.

Just like food, for most of our history information was in short supply. We had to make decisions based on too little information, rather than too much. So most of our cognitive biases were developed to allow us to function in a setting where knowledge was in short supply and decisions had to be made quickly. In such an environment, these heuristic short cuts would usually end up working in our favor, giving us a higher probability of survival.

These evolutionary biases become dangerous as our information environment becomes more abundant. We weren’t built to rationally seek out and judiciously evaluate information. We were built to make decisions based on little or no knowledge. There is an override switch we can use if we wish, but it’s important to know that, just like we’re inherently drawn to crappy food, we’re also subconsciously drawn to crappy information.

Whether or not you agree with mainstream news sources, there was a thoughtful editorial process operating there. Entire teams of people were employed to spend their days rationally thinking about gathering, presenting and validating the information that would be passed along to the public. In Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman’s terminology, they were “thinking slow” about it. And because the transactional costs of getting that information to us was so high, there was a relatively strong signal-to-noise ratio.

That’s no longer the case. Transactional costs have dropped, to the point that it costs almost nothing to get information to us. This allows information providers to completely bypass any editorial loop before sending it out.

Foraging for that information is not the problem. Filtering it is. As we forage through potential information “patches” — whether they be on Google, Facebook or Twitter ––we tend to “think fast,” clicking on the links that are most tantalizing.

I would never have dreamed that having too much information could be a bad thing. But the problems I mention in most of the cautionary columns I’ve written in the last few years all seem to have the same root cause: We’re becoming intellectually “obese.” We’ve developed an insatiable appetite for fast, fried, sugar-frosted information.

MediaPost.com: Search Marketing Daily

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