While researching cooperation in human societies, including how people deal with challenges and risks, cooperation theorist Athena Aktipis started thinking about the apocalypse. In her book “A Field Guide to the Apocalypse: A Mostly Serious Guide to Surviving Our Wild Times,” she asserts that “we’re all kinds of fucked” – but we’re equipped to deal with it, because humans have been dealing with apocalypses for as long as humanity has existed. Aktipis, an associate professor in the department of psychology at Arizona State University, directs The Cooperation Lab and co-directs The Cooperation Science Network and The Human Generosity Project, the first large-scale research project on the impact of biological and cultural influences on human generosity.
In the book, which came out in April, she draws on evolutionary psychology, history, brain science, game theory and more to give readers commonsense advice on understanding, surviving and thriving in an apocalyptic state. It plays with plenty of doomsday scenarios; a Washington Post Book Club writer called it “a weird, weirdly encouraging book from a scholar who understands the risks of volcanoes, killer robots, militarized pathogens, space aliens, nuclear weapons, wildfires and the greenhouse effect.”
As the book’s first anniversary approaches, Aktipis speaks Thursday at the Harvard Science Center. We interviewed her Friday; her words have been edited for length and clarity.
With such a serious subject, what made you opt to use a nonserious tone throughout?
Catastrophe can just be inherently scary in a way that makes people withdraw, and that has a lot of consequences. It makes it harder for people to engage with others and therefore harder to learn or share information that might be important. I wanted to create an accessible and playful tone that would invite people to approach the challenges we’re facing without a sense of dread or helplessness. I’m encouraging people to lean into morbid curiosity. My colleague Coltan Scrivner has done a lot of work on how we are very curious about things that are scary or dangerous, and that makes good evolutionary sense, because we want to be prepared. People will voluntarily go to haunted houses or horror movies just to scare themselves, and that’s fun for them. Not that my book is a horror book, but it’s an invitation to have a more playful and exploratory attitude about the challenges that we may be facing in the future. I talk a lot about the zombie apocalypse, because I see that as a good tool for considering how to be prepared for disasters; it doesn’t feel as overwhelming as thinking about an earthquake or a tornado. By asking the questions through a zombie apocalypse lens, you still get the real answers.
How did this book come about?
I was seeing a lot of general anxiety, especially among younger people, about what is happening in the world and what’s going to happen. Those people feel like everything is horrible, and that becomes very overwhelming and can be almost paralyzing. On the other hand, there are people who are in denial, being like “Let’s pretend that everything is fine and great, we don’t have to worry.” I saw a third way that I thought was a lot better: to embrace that a lot of things are messed up, and to embrace the fact that we’re actually pretty good at dealing with issues and solving problems and doing so in a collective way. For over a decade my Human Generosity Project has been looking at how people cooperate in small-scale societies and in particular how they help each other in times of need. We’ve seen that people are very generous, especially when needs arise due to unpredictable and uncontrollable challenges, and they often help each other without expecting anything in return.
How else does the book tie in with your research?
There has been a historical focus in the study of cooperation, at least in evolutionary biology, on all the ways that cooperation can be compromised – and for a lot of my career, I’ve looked at the opposite. Right now, we have a large National Science Foundation grant looking at how collectives manage risk across species. We’re studying everything from the small-scale society work to how ant colonies manage risk, how multispecies systems like the bacteria and yeast in kombucha work to manage risk. Part of what we’re trying to do is leverage insights from across biology to understand better how we can scale up our capacities for managing risk collectively in modern Western society.
What’s the evidence that humans have been good at managing challenges. How does it relate to our current day?
My colleague Michael Gurven, who’s at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has done some really interesting mathematical modeling on human populations. He’s been able to estimate that our ancestors would have lost something like 20 percent of the people in our groups over our lifetimes due to unexpected, hazardous events. That’s like losing one of five people you know to war or famine or natural disaster. Dealing with fundamentally apocalyptic regional and local events was almost certainly a part of our evolutionary history, and we’ve shown to be really adaptable as a result. We have capacities for communication that may also have been important in helping us manage risk in a dynamic and changing landscape. We had a lot of need to deal with environmental variability too, which is relevant today today.
What do you hope people take from the book?
We need cooperation, community, a sense of adventure, a curiosity about the world and openness to others. We have this toolkit built into our evolved psychology that helps us deal with challenges. I believe we really just need to leverage that; we need to build cooperative networks and we need to make sure we’re sharing information. We need to also be more comfortable with adapting and changing, and being ready to to shift how we’re approaching things as the situations around us change. It’s equally important to have some fun along the way, and realize there are a lot of things available to us to achieve that, whether it’s having an adventuresome attitude or even engaging with music or comedy. That can contribute to the work of building networks of cooperation and trust that I believe will be increasingly important.
Athena Aktipis reads from “A Field Guide to the Apocalypse” at 6 p.m.Thursday at Harvard Science Center Hall A, 1 Oxford St., Harvard Square, Cambridge. Free.
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