This story was originally published in our November/December 2021 issue. Click here to subscribe to read more stories like this one.
Amidst a year and a half of Zoom fatigue and 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 return of aspects of a more “normal” life 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. Tone says most of us experience social anxiety in tiny doses — 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 them from doing the things they want, or cause 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 long afterwards.
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 have developed to explain how social anxiety might have offered early humans an advantage. The first is based on 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 environment, socially anxious individuals would have been able to better detect threats of violence or actions that may cost them their own status in the hierarchy.
(Credit: Chris Montgomery/Unsplash)
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 changed, but the experience of social anxiety has not — so we’re likely over-responding these days. Back in Neanderthal times, Tone says, being ostracized from your group meant it was pretty likely you’d die. Today, that’s usually not the case. “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.”
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 earlier 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 childhoodas 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.
Sadly, we can’t go back in time and verify our evolutionary theories of psychology and behavior with our ancestors. A cautionary example comes from a recent study that called into question a long-standing belief that women in prehistoric societies were only gatherers, never hunters. Given our modern vantage point, says Tone, we need to be careful not to take these theories as truth once we tell them.
