COVID-19 Pandemic on Fire: Evolved Propensities for Nocturnal Activities as a Liability Against Epidemiological Control

Abstract

Humans have been using fire for hundreds of millennia, creating an ancestral expansion toward the nocturnal niche. The new adaptive challenges faced at night were recurrent enough to amplify existing psychological variation in our species. Night-time is dangerous and mysterious, so it selects for individuals with higher tendencies for paranoia, risk-taking, and sociability (because of security in numbers). During night-time, individuals are generally tired and show decreased self-control and increased impulsive behaviors. The lower visibility during night-time favors the partial concealment of identity and opens more opportunities for disinhibition of self-interested behaviors. Indeed, individuals with an evening-oriented chronotype are more paranoid, risk-taking, extraverted, impulsive, promiscuous, and have higher antisocial personality traits. However, under some circumstances, such as respiratory pandemics, the psychobehavioral traits favored by the nocturnal niche might be counter-productive, increasing contagion rates of a disease that can evade the behavioral immune system because its disease cues are often nonexistent or mild. The eveningness epidemiological liability hypothesis presented here suggests that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the evening-oriented psychobehavioral profile can have collectively harmful consequences: there is a clash of core tendencies between the nocturnal chronotype and the recent viral transmission-mitigating safety guidelines and rules. The pandemic safety protocols disrupt much normal social activity, particularly at night when making new social contacts is desired. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is contagious even in presymptomatic and asymptomatic individuals, which enables it to mostly evade our evolved contagious disease avoidance mechanisms. A growing body of research has indirectly shown that individual traits interfering with social distancing and anti-contagion measures are related to those of the nocturnal chronotype. Indeed, some of the social contexts that have been identified as superspreading events occur at night, such as in restaurants, bars, and nightclubs. Furthermore, nocturnal environmental conditions favor the survival of the SARS-CoV-2 virus much longer than daytime conditions. We compare the eveningness epidemiological liability hypothesis with other factors related to non-compliance with pandemic safety protocols, namely sex, age, and life history. Although there is not yet a direct link between the nocturnal chronotype and non-compliance with pandemic safety protocols, security measures and future empirical research should take this crucial evolutionary mismatch and adaptive metaproblem into account, and focus on how to avoid nocturnal individuals becoming superspreaders, offering secure alternatives for nocturnal social activities.

Unrealistic Optimism and Risk for COVID-19 Disease

“…This could be especially harmful for those with high risk of developing severe COVID-19 disease if infected. In the case of COVID-19, a disease with a high percentage of asymptomatic cases (Cheng et al, 2020;Huff and Singh, 2020), a long contagious period before showing symptoms (Tindale et al, 2020), it is possible that for some people it can be challenging to recognize the risk of becoming infected with the virus (Varella et al, 2021).…”

“…This may be because the benefits of mating success, which are on average higher for younger adults than older adults, overshadow the costs associated with STIs. Such conflicts between adaptive domains (in this case, mating success and disease avoidance) constitute an adaptive metaproblem (Al-Shawaf, 2016;Rantala et al, 2019;Varella et al, 2021).…”

“…For example, with COVID-19 risk, in the absence of any optimistic buffer, those with a higher risk for morbidity and mortality would be expected to experience a great deal of distress compared to those with a lower risk. In addition to bearing psychological costs, such distress may also prevent high-risk individuals from meeting key affiliative (and other fitness-relevant) goals that are especially salient under threat (Dezecache et al, 2020;Varella et al, 2021). This conflict between affiliative needs and disease avoidance can, again, be thought of as representing an adaptive metaproblem (Al-Shawaf, 2016;Rantala et al, 2019;Varella et al, 2021).…”

“…In addition to bearing psychological costs, such distress may also prevent high-risk individuals from meeting key affiliative (and other fitness-relevant) goals that are especially salient under threat (Dezecache et al, 2020;Varella et al, 2021). This conflict between affiliative needs and disease avoidance can, again, be thought of as representing an adaptive metaproblem (Al-Shawaf, 2016;Rantala et al, 2019;Varella et al, 2021). Furthermore, highrisk individuals may also be employing a "free-riding" strategy, enjoying the safety benefits of others' cautiousness while not adjusting their behavior commensurate with their high risk for morbidity and mortality (Yong and Choy, 2021).…”

Testing the Disgust-Based Mechanism of Homonegative Attitudes in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…Historically it has also been a rare phenomenon, due to multiple features of ancestral societies, such as relatively small-scale geographic mobility and limited routes of disease transmissions. For this reason, it is unlikely that defense mechanisms specific to 1 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-poland-lgbt-europe-trfn-idUSKBN2AA20S pandemics have evolved among humans (Ackerman et al, 2021; see also Varella et al, 2021).…”