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Jun 22, 2022

The Smoke Detector Principle (Why We Overreact)

Smoke by William Warby warby 11774542195 EDIT

My clients occupy demanding professional roles that often involve navigating high-stakes situations under conditions of uncertainty, so it's no surprise that a theme in my practice is how to cope with the resulting stress. And the risks are real, with large amounts of money, career prospects, and entire companies on the line--and yet it's almost never the case that actual lives are on the line. My clients are business leaders, not trauma surgeons, so when we talk about an "existential threat," it's a metaphor.

That said, it's not uncommon for a client to say, "I know it's not life-or-death, but it feels like it. I know I'll survive no matter what happens, but I feel a sense of doom or panic." These feelings rarely lead my clients to take steps they deeply regret--although it happens on occasion--but they may act in haste or make suboptimal decisions in an effort to diminish the intensity of such strong emotions, and no matter the outcome the experience is profoundly unpleasant while it lasts.

This mismatch between our cognitive understanding of a situation--what we know--and our emotional response--how we feel--is a hallmark of human psychology. And like so many other confounding aspects of how our minds work, it benefits the species while impairing our individual experience. It's a feature that acts like a bug.

Physician and evolutionary psychiatrist Randolph Nesse calls this dynamic the "Smoke Detector Principle," [1] referring to the fact that most alarms result from minor kitchen mishaps, and very, very few actually alert us to a dangerous fire:

Most of the responses that cause human suffering are unnecessary in the individual instance but still perfectly normal because they have low costs but protect against huge possible losses. They are like false alarms from smoke detectors. The occasional wail when you burn the toast is worth it to ensure that you are warned early about every real fire...

Systems that regulate protective responses...turn the response on whenever the benefits are greater than the costs, even if that means false alarms. The costs of such responses tend to be low compared to the benefits of avoiding danger. So when danger may or may not be present, the small cost of a response ensures protection against a much larger harm. That is why we put up with false alarms from smoke detectors. [2]

Nesse points out that our "protective response systems" originated eons ago in an environment radically different from the world that we inhabit today, and he puts us in the shoes of one of our distant ancestors to illustrate how these systems work:

You are thirsty on the ancient African savanna and a watering hole is just ahead, but you hear a noise in the grass. It could be a lion, or it might just be a monkey. Should you flee? It depends on the costs. Assume that fleeing in panic costs 100 calories. Not fleeing costs nothing if it is only a monkey, but if the noise was made by a lion, the cost is 100,000 calories--about how much energy a lion would get from having you for lunch!

Louder sounds are more likely to be caused by a lion. How loud does the sound need to be before you flee? Do the math. The cost of not fleeing if the lion is present is 1,000 times greater than the cost of a panic attack, so the optimal strategy is to run like hell whenever the sound is loud enough to indicate a lion is present with a probability greater than 1/1,000. This means that 999 times out of 1,000 you will flee unnecessarily. However, 1 time out of 1,000, fleeing will save your life. [3]

Multiply this over 200,000 years and some 10,000 human generations, and we can easily see why we're prone to overreact. Evolution, as always, has solved not for any individual's peace of mind, but for the collective survival of the species. The early humans who were more likely to flee in panic lived on to pass down their (highly-sensitive) protective response systems. Their more laid-back peers did not.

In light of these ideas, it's easy to leap to the conclusion that emotions should be suppressed in order to make better judgments--but not only is this impossible, it's simply wrong. As I've written before,

Suppression is essentially an act of make-believe--we pretend we're not feeling what we're feeling and hope to distract ourselves until the feeling passes. We can do this for short periods, but not for an extended length of time--and some research suggests that the effort may be counter-productive. [4]

Even if we could suppress emotions on a sustained basis, it would be the equivalent of removing the batteries from our smoke detectors to ensure that we're never interrupted--and we know how that would end, as the late psychologist Daniel Wegner warned:

It is clear that emotion should not be very susceptible to willful control. If we could turn off all our emotions, feel no pain, never laugh, not be gripped by fear or despair, stop being excited, and so on, we could easily end up dead... The priority of emotions over will is important for our survival because it allows our plans to be interrupted by the immediate pressures of reality. [5]

And in contrast to the conventional belief that emotion and reason act in opposition to each other, work by neuroscientist Antonio Damasio, among others, has made it clear that emotion and reason act in concert, with feelings serving as essential inputs to the reasoning process. [6] As Damasio has written,

I will not deny that uncontrolled or misdirected emotion can be a major source of irrational behavior. Nor will I deny that seemingly normal reason can be disturbed by subtle biases rooted in emotion... Nonetheless, what the traditional account leaves out is [this]... Reduction in emotion may constitute an equally important source of irrational behavior. [7, emphasis original]

So if we can't (and wouldn't want to) suppress our feelings, and if emotions are necessary in order to reason effectively, what can we do when we overreact? How should we respond to that shrieking smoke detector? There's no simple solution, of course, but there are many steps we can take that will help:

Cultivate our capacity for emotion regulation. We can't control our feelings, but we can influence them.

Get MESSy. Commit to a mindfulness practice, regular exercise, sufficient sleep, and stress management.

Slow down. Counteract our reflexive responses by making time to reflect on, write about, and discuss our experience with people we trust.

 

Footnotes

[1] For Nesse's original work on the "smoke detector principle," see the following:

[2] Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry, pages 40-41 and 73-74 (Randolph Nesse, 2020)

[3] Ibid, page 74.

[4] The Tyranny of Feelings. For more on the impact of suppressing emotions:

[5] White Bears and Other Unwanted Thoughts: Suppression, Obsession, and the Psychology of Mental Control, page 123 (Daniel Wegner, 2nd edition, 1994)

[6] Antonio Damasio on Emotion and Reason

[7] Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain , pages 52-53 (Antonio Damasio, 2005)

 

Photo by William Warby.