Cooperation Is the Key to Surviving the Apocalypse
According to Athena Aktipis, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Arizona State University, the folks most likely to survive and thrive in the wake of catastrophe would do a lot less hiding—and maybe a lot more goofing around.
So get in, loser! We’re getting ready for the apocalypse.
For Science Quickly, I’m Rachel Feltman.
Feltman: Athena, thanks for coming on. I’m really excited to talk to you about your latest book.
Athena Aktipis: Yeah, so my book is called A Field Guide to the Apocalypse: A Mostly Serious Guide to Surviving Our Wild Times. And it is, in a nutshell, a fun book about how to survive the apocalypse.
Feltman: Listeners might be surprised to learn that a funny book about the apocalypse is like a pretty natural progression of your research on cooperation, which you’ve managed to apply to everything from cells to zombie outbreaks. How did you get into such interdisciplinary and zombified work?
Aktipis: Well, okay, to be perfectly honest, all of this started when I was an extremely nerdy teenager because I would go and hang out in my local bookstore and just like read all the books, and I was like, “I want to understand how everything works.” And then also I was like, “Things in the world don’t seem quite right.” So I was kind of coming of age in the 1990s, in the late 1990s, and I was like, “Maybe this isn’t sustainable. Maybe we can’t keep doing things the way we have been forever.” And I very much became an environmentalist as a teen. But I was also just fascinated by human nature and trying to, like, just really understand how it is that we are the way we are and especially using evolutionary biology as a tool to understand human nature.
And actually, I know this sounds kind of crazy, but, like, I made a conscious decision when I went into college that I would go all academic to learn as much as I could about all the things that are relevant to human nature for dealing with the problems in the world. And then I was like, “And then at some point in my life, I’ll turn to pulling it all together to try to, like, do something about all of this.”
And lo and behold, here I am now, two decades later, and I have this book that probably my 17-year-old self would be really, really happy that I wrote.
Feltman: Awesome—well, and you mentioned this is, like, a pretty lighthearted book about the apocalypse. What informed your approach? Because this is definitely unique in the world of apocalyptic nonfiction.
Aktipis: Well, it’s a weird book in that, on one hand, it’s, like, lighthearted and funny; I had somebody call it a beach read the other day.
But it’s also just chock-full of information about how our brains work, about how we process information when we’re under stress, about how humans deal with strategic situations when there’s conflict and how we solve, like, collective-action dilemmas.
There just isn’t another book like that. Like, most books that are about existential risk are boring and terrifying at the same time. And so I didn’t want to write a book like that—definitely not.
Feltman: Yeah, I don’t think anyone could accuse you of being boring—I mean, you literally run a conference about zombies. So why do you think it is that playfulness can help us prepare for hard times?
Aktipis: I think one of the big challenges now for a lot of people is that there are a lot of things that are scary, not fun, that we know we have to deal with.
But it can be really hard to engage with them when we have all these other things going on.
And so these sort of, like, cycles of anxiety and fear and doom-scrolling and—you know, you’re just, like, getting all this information, and then you’re just like, “Oh, my brain’s gonna explode, and I need a nap.”
But the thing is, we have a lot of other emotions that we can leverage for dealing with crises. And this is something that humans do around the world when there are crises: there are all of these positive sides of human nature and positive aspects of human experience that come out.
So, you know, cooperation—for one thing, like, during times of need people help each other. It’s actually a huge focus of the book. But also using storytelling, using humor, creating sort of shared attention around the threats, but in a way that invites imagination, creativity, playfulness—that puts us in a mindset where we deal more effectively with problems because our brains are more open; we’re not, like, shut down in fear mode.
And so a lot of what I’ve tried to do with the book is not just make the book itself fun but also describe how we do need to leverage these positive sides of human nature and how we experience the world to engage with the things in, you know, our future and our present that are most scary. And people like to do it—I mean, people, like, for fun, watch horror movies. It’s part of our nature to be morbidly curious...[full transcript]
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