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Asked by to Anna, Elaine, Fiona, Kevin, Darren on 16 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
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Zhiming Darren Tan answered on 16 Jun 2014:
Most scary things won’t have a reasonable debate with you.
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Elaine Cloutman-Green answered on 16 Jun 2014:
It’s an important survival trait, although it can go the wrong way sometimes and we fight things we should have run from 🙂
Reactions are faster when you don’t have to go through thinking about them and making a decision and so these traits are still strongly embedded as they’re the ones that meant our ancestors got to breed rather than the ones that didn’t make it that far as they tried to fight the saber tooth tiger.
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Kevin O'Dell answered on 16 Jun 2014:
To survive.
Most of the behaviours humans have are a consequence of our evolution over millions of years. Place yourself in a very scary situation, in a modern setting being threatened late at night whilst walking down the street. You have evolved to judge that situation quickly and do whatever is necessary to survive. In a sense you have two options (a) to run away as quickly as possible, which is the flight response, or (b) to hit your attacker and run away as quickly as possible, which is the fight response.
Key to this is adrenaline and its biochemical chums. In a scary situation you get an adrenaline rush which allows you to run faster, think quicker and punch harder than you could ever normally do. But you survive, which is a pretty important outcome! From an evolutionary perspective the better your fight or flight response (the better your judgement when threatened) the more likely you are to pass on these survivor genes.
The question then becomes, if an adrenaline rush is such a good evolutionary adaptation, why don’t you stay like that all the time? The answer is that (i) it costs a lot of energy and is therefore unsustainable, and (ii) most of the time a calm and rational approach is far better for your survival.
Interesting there are a small number of people who have a genetic condition meaning they kind of live in a permanent adrenaline rush. They can’t make a chemical called monoamine oxidase which acts like a giant sponge to get rid of excess adrenaline. In you or I, once the scary event is over monoamine oxidase helps us calm down. Individuals that have monoamine oxidase deficiency stay in an agitated/excited state for hours or days after the rest of us have calmed down.
You might want to think about how the legal system should deal with these people. If they are violent, is it really their fault???
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