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If Humans Are Social Creatures, Why Did Social Anxiety Evolve?
Fear of social situations existed long before the COVID-19 pandemic. Evolutionary models may
explain why we developed this trait in the first place.
By Allison Whitten | Apr 10, 2021 10:00 PM
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Amidst a year of Zoom fatigue and social interactions that feel like plastic replicas of the
real thing, the COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear just how important sociality is to
our well-being. So it might seem counterintuitive that for many in the U.S., the potential
for summer to bring the return of a more “normal” post-pandemic world is also bringing
something else: a serious dose of social anxiety.
Erin Tone, a clinical psychologist at Georgia State University, characterizes social anxiety
as a set of varied experiences arising from the possibility of a social threat in the
environment. She describes a pattern of responses that run the gamut from
physiological (heart pounding, sweating), to cognitive and emotional (thoughts about
negative outcomes in a social situation, rising distress), to behavioral (avoidance of the
threat). Tone says most of us experience social anxiety in tiny doses — and in fact, it’s
considered unusual to never experience it at all during your life. And for a subset of
people, these anxious responses seep into everyday social scenarios and can prevent
some people from doing the things they want to, or cause them extreme distress. At
that point, psychologists consider it social anxiety disorder.
Regardless of where you fall on the social anxiety spectrum, it’s likely that the
pandemic has led you to fear some social situations to protect your health. But these
anxious responses existed in humans long before the pandemic and will remain
afterwards. Tone says if we can find the evolutionary reasons — especially for things
like social anxiety that may have become problematic in modern day, but were not a
problem in the environments they evolved in — it could possibly help us to change the
context and better treat individuals.
Competition vs. Exclusion
Evolutionary theories point to the experience of social anxiety as an evolved adaptation,
meaning it arose to increase an individual’s chances of surviving and reproducing in their
environment. Over the past several decades, two main theories developed to explain
how social anxiety might have offered an advantage. The first is a model based on
social competition, which says that social anxiety evolved while our ancestors were
living in social structures with clear dominance hierarchies between members. To
survive in this kind of competitive environment, socially anxious individuals would have
been able to better detect threats of violence or actions that may cost them to lose their
own status in the hierarchy. And individuals with “lower ranks” might have especially
benefited from social anxiety as a way to maintain their status, since they were most at
risk of being kicked out of the group.
A second theory is based on a model of social exclusion, where social anxiety would
have served as a warning signal to the individual that they’re at risk of rejection or
exclusion, regardless of whether the group existed in a dominance hierarchy. The focus
here is on protecting all interpersonal relationships, regulated by a personal
“sociometer” as a gauge for how valued you are in your relationships.
But just because social anxiety could have evolved as an adaptive trait to help us
survive doesn’t mean it functions the same way in our modern world. Tone explains that
the stakes for survival have now changed, but the experience of social anxiety has not
— so we’re likely over-responding these days. Back in Neanderthal times, Tone warns,
being ostracized from your group meant it was pretty likely you’d die. Today, that’s not
the case (for most people). “But we still react as if the stakes are that high,” says Tone.
“Physiologically, I don't think we respond much differently to ostracism if it means we'll
be left out on the frozen plain alone, or we'll be left out of the group going out to
Starbucks in a few minutes.”
Even thousands of years later, research suggests socially anxious behaviors may match
up with predictions from evolutionary theories. In 2019, Tone and her colleagues tested
the social competition model in 122 college students playing a game called the
Prisoner’s Dilemma, which places students in a tightly controlled social interaction with
two choices: cooperate with others, or compete. Consistent with the social competition
model, they found that the players with the most self-reported social anxiety were
more likely to have competitive goals and feelings of nervousness in the game. But their
findings also suggest that behaviors in socially anxious individuals are not always
stereotypical, and have probably increased in complexity over the course of evolution.
The Missing Piece: Childhood
In 2020, a new evolutionary model of social anxiety emerged that adds a
developmental puzzle piece to the mix. Tara Karasewich, a Ph.D. student in psychology
at Queen’s University in Canada, came up with the framework after she noticed that the
role of an individual’s childhood was missing from the models. “All of our traits evolved
in the context of development, because all of our ancestors had to grow up and
survive,” she says.
The new model suggests social anxiety evolved to develop during childhood as a
conditional adaptation, a type of adaptation that prepares the individual for future
conditions. In the case of developing social anxiety, Karasewich explains that when your
childhood environment is full of social threat cues, it’s likely that your future
environment is also socially threatening. So, developing social anxiety during childhood
could make you more prepared to face those challenges as an adult, she says.
Tone agrees that introducing development into evolutionary theories of social anxiety is
an important addition. “It always troubles me when a theory acts as if people are
always adults,” she says. In future work, Tone also notes that theorists should study
how social anxiety evolved in stride with other traits, since no trait evolves in isolation.
The unfortunate thing about evolutionary theories of psychology and behavior is that
we can’t go back in time and verify them with our ancestors. A great cautioning example
comes from a recent study that called into question a long-standing belief that women
in prehistoric societies were only gatherers, never hunters. From our vantage point now,
Tone emphasizes that we need to be careful not to look for clean stories that map on to
how we understand things today — or take the theories as truth once we tell them.
anthropology behavior & society evolution intelligence psychology
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