Our minds evolved to survive, not to see the truth.

I’ve been puzzling for several years now to explain why 74 million Americans voted for Trump in 2024. This, after having eight years to observe him daily, both as President in his first term and as a candidate. One does not have to be a psychiatrist or any other professional to know that he is a person one should immediately avoid, at the very least, perhaps shun, or push out of the village, were one to encounter him in day-to-day life. I will only point out that during his first term, the Washington Post tracked his flagrant lying and ended with a list of 30,573 lies.¹

One can say that a rational person should easily identify Trump as a bully, liar, cheat, fraudster, racist, misogynist, ignorant of most history and much of contemporary life, and completely self-centered. These behaviors have been publicly displayed and widely reported on for decades. We do not need to employ any specialized language of the expert classes to know that he is a threat, a person to be avoided in every social context. I always imagine myself sitting at the bar nursing a beer when he comes in and sits next to me…… how long would it be before I identified him as a person to be avoided?

The problem is that we did not evolve as rational creatures. As pointed out by Sam Goldstein, Ph.D., “Our minds evolved to survive, not to see the truth.”²  Our minds evolved with all sorts of filters (cognitive biases, more about this below) to provide us with tools to identify immediate opportunities or threats, evaluate them, and act quickly. Our minds evolved in social settings where we lived in small groups, bands of 35 – 50 people, within a larger tribal structure of 150 to 300 people. Within this framework, we had to cooperate and learn from each other.

So, our minds evolved an array of what psychologists call cognitive biases. I prefer the term “cognitive filters” because the word “bias” carries a negative connotation. Evolution created these sensing and interpreting functions to improve our survival rates; they are filters, not biases. Some of the most common social-group filters include the in-group, halo effect, self-serving bias, and fundamental attribution filters.

A fundamental fact of evolution is that features that gave us a survival edge in one environment can become a negative factor when our environment changes. This is most often referred to as evolutionary maladaptation. An example is obvious in the global outbreak of obesity. Our industrial food industry has taken advantage of our desire for salt, sugar, and fats to produce foods that are packed with these. So, open a bag of potato chips, and voilà, we are very likely to consume the entire bag and crave the next one.

Another example of probable maladaptation is our recent shift to mass societies. I believe we are seeing personal and social filters developed during the 290,000 years of our life in small groups becoming maladaptive in a relatively short span of our 10,000-year history in mass societies. There is Dunbar’s number of about 150 people, which is the cognitive limit on stable human relationships. Our phase of mass societies clearly exceeds this limit.

An additional fact is that much of our success as a species has nothing to do with biological evolution, but is embedded in our culture. Our species spread to almost every environment on the globe with very few physical adaptations. Unlike ants, who are our co-inhabitants in these environments, we didn’t have to evolve more than 10,000 types to succeed. Our cultural learning enabled us to live everywhere through innovations shared and passed along through our culture.

It remains a mystery to me how to put all of this together to explain Trump. I’m working on it.