Supernormal Stimuli
By Deirdre Barrett
Table of Contents
1) Supernormal Stimuli—What Are They?
2) Making the Ordinary Seem Strange
3) Sex for Dummies
4) Too Cute
5) Foraging in the Food Courts
6) Defending Home, Hearth, and Hedgefund
7) From Shakespeare to Survivor: Entertainment as Vicarious
Socializing
8) Intellectual Pursuits as Supernormal Stimuli
Introduction
Put a mirror on the side of a beta fighting fish’s aquarium and a male will beat
itself against the glass attacking the perceived intruder. A hen lays eggs day after
day as a farmer removes them for human breakfasts—30,000 in a lifetime
without one chick hatching but she never gives up trying.
The healthiest, largest male chickadees have the highest crests on their
heads and they are sought after as mates. When researchers outfit runt males
with little pointed caps—much like the human dunce cap--females line up to mate
with them, forsaking the naturally fitter, hatless males.
These animal behaviors look funny to us . . . or sad. The reflexive instincts of
dumb animals. But then there’s a jolt of recognition: just how different are our
endless wars, our modern health woes, our melodramatic romantic and sexual
lives?
Human instincts were designed for hunting and gathering on the savannahs of
Africa 10,000 years ago. Our present world is incompatible with these instincts
because of radical increases in population densities, technological inventions,
and pollution. Evolution’s inability to keep pace with such rapid change plays a
role in most of our modern problems.
This book will borrow a concept from animal ethology which is especially
useful in understanding the disconect between instinct and environment—that of
the supernormal stimulus. Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen coined this term after
his animal research revealed that experimenters could create objects which
appealed to instincts more than the original object for which they’d evolved. He
studied birds that lay small, pale blue eggs speckled with grey and found they
preferred to sit on giant, bright blue eggs with black polka-dots. The essence of
the supernormal stimulus is that the imitation can exert a stronger pull than the
real thing. I’m appropriating the term to explain a broad array of human folly.
Animals encounter supernormal stimuli mostly when experimenters build them.
We humans can produce our own: candy, pornography, huge-eyed stuffed
animals, diatribes about menacing enemies. Instincts arose to call our attention
to rare necessities but now we use them to produce ubiquitous attention-
grabbers. My last book, Waistland, explored how supernormal food stimuli have
produced our obesity crisis. The present book will use the concept to explore
problems in areas such as sex, health, international relations, and media. It will
offer solutions to modern predicaments by drawing on the fields of animal
ethology and human evolutionary psychology. Humans have one momentous
advantage over other animals--a giant brain capable of overriding simpler
instincts when they lead us astray. But we must recognize and understand our
follies before we will make this crucial switch in strategy.
Most of the book is organized by problem areas: what’s gone the first chapter I
want to present biographical of Niko Tinbergen and how he arrived at
supernormal stimuli. Unusual personality and times (WWII) contributed to view.
