Authored By Leonid Donovan
Since the ancient times, spanning all the way back to 500-300 million years ago, evolution has always prioritized social harmony over independent thinking. The act of fear mongering has developed an irrational cognitive bias called the negativity bias, which is the evolutionary tendency to focus on threats, negative experiences and emotions rather than positive ones.
We can observe how these changes affect modern society, from avoiding predators and tribe ostracism to the influence of media propaganda across multiple generations as the neurological brain triggers social punishment mechanisms such as shame and anxiety to discourage straying from group identity. [^1]: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/articles/10.3389/fnhum.2013.00050/full
Conforming into an in-group is not merely a psychological choice, it physically triggers the brain's reward centers that make the group alignment naturally satisfying, while disagreeing often activates regions associated with error detection and social punishment. This allows individuals to be prone to persuasion without active introspection due to fear or simply the lack of awareness, risking progression, rational efficiency, the nature of fluidity and true autonomy.
While compliance is the brain's default baseline, human beings possess cortical plasticity, the ability to actively train our prefrontal cortex as it is highly malleable to flag emotional overreactions and choose critical analysis over immediate conformity, especially during adolescence around 14 years of age.
However, the human brain takes an exceptionally long time to mature, keeping us adaptive and open to learning late until adulthood. We have a unique cognitive ability to think about our own thinking; this capacity for metacognition enables us to actively interrogate biases and default survival instincts.
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