Because animals face predatory risks that can’t be fully eliminated, it’s essential that they learn to live with fear, and develop strategies to respond correctly. Overcompensate, you miss out on resources and may starve. Undercompensate, a predator abruptly ends your life. For instance, the animals I study—marmots—flee to the safety of their burrows when a coyote is around. But how long should they remain hidden away, unable to find food? Life is about managing tradeoffs. So when does, and how should, fear motivate change?

In humans, fear motivates change best when the threat is simple to understand, actions have a direct impact on the outcome, and the potential outcome is viscerally repulsive; disgust is a powerful motivator. Consider public health officials’ campaigns against methamphetamine abuse in the early 2000s. Because meth is so highly addictive, informational campaigns had limited success. Enter Tom Siebel, a software millionaire on a mission with a brilliant idea: Instead of peppering users with statistics, show them pictures of “meth-mouth,” the severe dental decay associated with meth abuse. Starting in 2005, Siebel paid for highway billboards in Montana that showed close-ups of a woman’s face with rotten teeth with text that read: “YOU’LL NEVER WORRY ABOUT LIPSTICK ON YOUR TEETH AGAIN.” He continued his fear- and disgust-driven campaign with a series of short television and internet commercials that showed unsuspecting users their horrible futures. The campaign worked. High school meth use went down 45 percent in two years, compared to an average of just 7.8 percent annually previously.

Fear most successfully leads to immediate responses. It doesn’t work as an agent of change over longer periods, because animals habituate—they stop responding to non-threatening stimuli over time. Indeed, designing habituation-proof stimuli to scare away “problem animals” and reduce human-wildlife conflict is a compelling challenge. The plastic owl above the outdoor urban park dining area works at deterring pigeon traffic for a just few days before the birds realize it’s harmless and start appreciating its utility as an object that helps protect them from the wind. People tend to tune out, too. In the aftermath of 9/11, the Department of Homeland Security began estimating terrorism threat levels and communicating them to the American public. The color-coded system reported elevated red or orange levels of risk over an extended period of months. An analysis I did showed that the unchanging high threat levels produced the opposite of the desired response—people stopped seeking out information on how to prepare for terrorist threats. Americans habituated to the government’s warnings. We’re experiencing habituation to warnings about coronavirus threats now.

There are other costs to maintaining a fearful state for too long. For snowshoe hares, the mere exposure to predators, or predatory cues, can increase production of stress hormones and shift individuals into “survival” mode, directing energy away from growth and reproduction and toward defense. Snowshoe hare populations increase and decrease over time, driven by the population of their main predator, the lynx. As lynx populations increase, hare populations decrease until there are not enough hares to feed the lynx, resulting in a dramatic crash of the lynx population and a rebound for the hares. Researchers have found that hares have higher stress hormone levels at the peak of the lynx population cycle. In another study, the mere proximity of a dog walking by an enclosure containing pregnant female hares resulted in higher stress hormone levels in the dams and their offspring. Importantly, stressed dams produced fewer offspring. In a follow-up study, researchers found that the effects of stress hormones on reproductive success persisted through generations: The offspring of stressed mothers themselves were relatively more stressed and had fewer babies.

Complex problems are, in part, so defined because causality isn’t obvious. Solving complex problems requires something more than the simple, direct, fear-based motivators we see in the animal world. This is certainly true of the pandemic. As we learn more about it, we may think we are better able to manage the risks we’re exposed to. To some extent we are. The risk of transmission and infection is reduced by wearing masks, physically distancing, and minimizing time spent in closed spaces with others. However, none of these actions totally eliminates the risk of getting infected—which makes giving up on any one of them very tempting.

When passive restraint systems like airbags in cars were first introduced, some people stopped putting on their seat belts because they assumed that they would be safe. In reality, it takes both tools together to increase your odds of surviving a bad accident by keeping you in the car, where you typically are safer. Studies of taxi drivers showed that they drove faster on wet surfaces when antilock brakes were first introduced because they could do so and still arrive reasonably safely, shaving precious driving minutes off each ride. However, driving faster on wet streets, even with anti-lock brake technology, is never a great idea: There was no net reduction in car accidents.

Marmots vary in how fast they can run away from threats. It turns out that marmots who are slower than average spend relatively less time looking around when they are foraging. By doing so they reduce the time they are away from the safety of their burrows, thus compensating for risk. But another way to view this variation is that animals who are better able to escape spend more time looking around while foraging and thus increase their exposure to risk. Perhaps marmots, like taxi drivers, accept a certain level of risk when the possibility of reward beckons.

At a very immediate level, our sadness at losing the chance to scare one another this Halloween could reflect our belief that we are in control of our risk of infection. And this has important insights for our response to a global pandemic. Responding to the pandemic is a marathon, not a sprint. It will require constant vigilance and behavioral changes for more than the foreseeable future. As new drugs and vaccines are introduced, we should be extra vigilant of our perceived safety. Risks are cumulative, and the more you accept, the greater the likelihood that they will eventually catch up to you. Tragically, this was a message illustrated by the recent outbreak in the White House, and at a macro level, by the recent spikes we are seeing worldwide. Protective measures that increase our perceptions of safety (in the White House’s case, rapid testing and everywhere else, the success of social distancing in the summer months) encourage us to take more risks and are thus, counterintuitively, risky.

Some people view the warnings about coronavirus as the boy who cried wolf. After all, they themselves have not gotten sick, and most people who get COVID-19 don’t die. But this is the wrong way to interpret what we see around us. We all have different risks based on what we do, various pre-existing conditions, and our age. According to the CDC, if infected, I am at least four times more likely to be hospitalized and 30 times more likely to die than most of the undergraduates I teach. We know many people experience longer-lasting negative health effects from the virus. I also know that it’s not just my health at stake but also the health of others who may have even higher mortality risks. Taken together, this leads me to think that all of us—my students and myself included—are morally obligated to continue to take the coronavirus threat seriously.

Halloween illustrates the joy associated with celebrating our fears by allowing us to express one of our most primordial emotions. When we do so, we should embrace our fears and remember that we are descended from a long line of successful ancestors, dating back millions of years, who got their risk assessments right. They neither over-reacted, nor under-reacted to environmental threats; they figured out how to successfully live with them. I suggest that this Halloween we commit to making multimedia costumes that can scare, via Zoom, from afar. Meanwhile, let’s look forward to a time, hopefully not too far in the future, where we are surrounded, in person, with scary costumes, boos, and screams of both fear and joy.

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It is no surprise that 90 percent of the world’s data has been generated in the last two years: Things that used to be anonymous, private, and unnoticed are now in plain sight. Alexa eavesdrops in our homes, Google remembers our most revealing searches, and even churches are using facial recognition to find out who is sitting in the pews. We are starting to see a bigger picture of limitless monitoring: a world where the watchers never reach the point of “enough” information and instead require an ever-expanding data set about our movements, buying patterns, online activity, and workplace productivity.

But even as surveillance becomes a dominant force organizing our world, most Americans haven’t had an informed conversation about how it is changing the way we live, work, play, and even wage war. We do not yet know who benefits from all this monitoring, classifying, and archiving of our behavior. Nor have we figured out whether surveillance will really make us safer, happier, or healthier. Such questions are sometimes difficult to answer because the technology is moving so much faster than our ability to make sense of it.

In fact, Americans have complex, ambivalent feelings about surveillance. We might be excited to hear that a digital pill can tell our doctor via Bluetooth that our meds have been ingested on time, but worry what will happen once the insurance companies know the contents of our stomach. We might want a smart refrigerator to order milk when we run out, but might not want the Internet of Things to listen to everything in our “smart home,” especially when we have a family crisis unfolding, such as a teenager dealing with drug addiction or a pregnancy scare. We might like taking nature photos with our own small drone, but wince when laws don’t prevent a creepy neighbor from flying his drone over our teenager’s backyard pool party. We happily share our lives on Facebook, but are outraged when we read about their scheme to manipulate our emotions. “Now that the experiment is public,” Forbes reported, “people’s mood about the study itself would best be described as ‘disturbed.’”

Yet we often live in a kind of surveillance denial, assuming it’s not a problem if we’re not doing anything wrong, or that it’s only a concern in other countries. For instance, most Americans probably shudder when they hear about the rise of social credit scoring in China. An authoritarian government watching everything through sophisticated CCTV and online monitoring systems, then coming up with a score that could prevent someone from getting a job—it sounds like something out of a dystopian movie. But if Americans assume it can’t happen here, they’re not paying attention. Consider the potential abuses of workplace surveillance. For an increasing number of American workers, the boss can see almost everything, even if you are a freelancer working in sweatpants at the kitchen table. Productivity software can take a snapshot every 10 minutes and combine them with keystroke analysis to create a “focus score” or “intensity score” for each worker.

Yet surveillance is rarely a cost-free endeavor. We may not realize it, but surveillance changes us, sometimes subtly, more often profoundly as we try to manage the impression we make on social media or on security cameras. The ubiquitous eyes of these devices can shift the way we’re supposed to feel about a particular place (is it safe to use the retina scanner ATM?) or particular action (will they think I’m stealing?). Surveillance often adds another angle, another perspective that not everyone experiences as benign or even tolerable. Social psychologists looking at workplace surveillance have found ample evidence that even the threat of surveillance is enough to change behavior, making workers “follow rules more carefully and act more subservient,” as well as experiencing greater stress, a loss of personal control, and “a decreased sense of procedural justice.” It’s harder to work when you know a camera is perched over your shoulder and productivity software is analyzing your keystrokes for maximum efficiency. Employers might like such productivity metrics, but rarely consider the cost to workers who feel like they have no place to hide.

For many of us, surveillance forces an adjustment of our interior life, a stiffening of our feelings: Someone is watching. Better look productive. Better not arouse suspicion. In this sense, surveillance can add an emotional charge to an existing atmosphere: It may even channel our chaotic energies into officially approved channels with names like vigilance, dread, fear, relief, certainty, permanence, compliance, consumption, adding a layer of meaning to the social scene that we can feel in our gut or on the back of our neck. Especially when surveillance is focused on security, it can add the gnawing sense that “something bad happened here,” “something bad could happen here,” “someone is watching,” or even the fantasy that “someone will save me.” Privacy, on the other hand, grants us a reprieve from such anxieties and uncertainties; it gives us the gift of what one scholar calls “emotional liberty.”

If we value liberty and autonomy, we need to have a more critical conversation about surveillance technology, one that leads to smarter legal protections of our privacy and dignity both online and off. People need to be able to educate themselves and choose not only how these technologies exist in the world at large, but also how much access they have to our personal data and even our bodies.

Right now, the spread of surveillance systems has a lot of momentum, though, ironically, they have rarely faced real scrutiny. Coming on the heels of his involvement in the Edward Snowden affair, Alan Rusbridger, The Guardian’s former editor, wrote that “securicrats” in the United States and United Kingdom are working to “collect and store ‘all the signals all the time’—that means all digital life, including internet searches and all phone calls, texts, and emails we make and send each other.” This is the cultural logic of the present moment: making human life endlessly visible, recordable, sortable, accountable, with little regard for how this might feel to millions of people. Everything goes into the archive. No one can opt out. Nothing goes away.

Is this really what we want? As someone who has spent the last 10 years exploring this issue, I fear a fundamental human right is missing here: the right to be left alone. Too often we think of freedom in a narrow sense, that it is simply what the law allows us to do or say. But we also need freedom from the quietly oppressive forces in our world. In the case of surveillance, we need freedom from insidious kinds of supervision, coercion, expectation, and obligation, all of which are rife in a world of ubiquitous surveillance. Psychologically, emotionally, and maybe even spiritually, we need freedom from the conformist pressures of CCTV cameras, the psychological burdens of workplace monitoring, the anxiety of being scrutinized by credit card companies looking at our purchases, or simply strangers gawking at us on social media.

Must we be subjected to the constant threat of exposure and scrutiny in every part of our life? Must everything be seen, shared, and sorted? Must everything be visible on social media, CCTV, or TSA body scanner? I hope not.

And I hope we don’t shrug and simply grow accustomed to ever-increasing levels of invasiveness. Even if some aspects of surveillance culture are entertaining and even humane, from the benign side of social media to the well-intentioned camera connecting us to an elderly relative, too often we are faced with something much more controlling, if not outright manipulative. In its harsher forms, surveillance is nothing more than cold prodding to suss out our commercial prospects, to determine if we’re a potential asset or liability to some corporation, alternating with the even colder scrutiny of the state to see if we’re doing what we’re told. It’s not pleasant if you stop to consider what surveillance does to our bodies and souls, not to mention the healthy functioning of a democracy. All I’m suggesting is that we stop and think about it.

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Two robbers enter the Circle T Market in Riverbank. One carries a large assault rifle, an AK-47. Upon seeing them, the clerk behind the counter puts his hands up. Yet the elderly store owner finds the weapon absurdly big and casually walks up to the robbers, laughing. His shoulders are relaxed and he points the palms of his hands up as if asking them whether they are serious. Both perpetrators are startled upon seeing the elderly man laughing at them. One runs away, while the one with the AK-47 freezes, is tackled, and is later arrested by police. They had robbed numerous stores before.

Analyzing videos captured on CCTV, mobile phones, or body cameras and uploaded to YouTube now provides first-hand insight into a variety of similar situations. And there are a lot of videos to watch. In 2013, 31 percent of internet users online posted a video to a website. And on YouTube alone, more than 300 hours of video footage are uploaded every minute. Many of these videos capture our behavior at weddings and concerts, protests and revolutions, and tsunamis and earthquakes. Taboos become obsolete as more types of events are uploaded, from birth to live-streamed murder.

While some of these developments are contentious, their scientific potential to understand how social life happens can’t be ignored. This ever-expanding cache of recordings may have drastic implications for our understanding of human behavior.

Historically, researchers have had to rely heavily on interviews, laboratory experiments, and participant observation in order to study human behavior. Each of these approaches has its strengths, but they all face fundamental challenges when applied to studying real-life actions in detail. Eyewitness testimony can be deeply flawed. Even accurate memories fade. People tend to act differently under observation by a researcher than they do in real life. These discrepancies make 21st-century video a game-changer.

Videos can provide answers to important questions. What contributes to positive conversations, successful negotiations, or the charm of a public figure? Which situational dynamics allow teams to perform well together, whether in business, sport, law enforcement, or the arts? Video is especially powerful when it captures rare events that we didn’t see before. How does a panicking crowd move? How does a revolution unfold? What do people really do during a natural disaster?

Events on video can be studied numerous times, in slow motion or even frame by frame, examining every detail relevant to the situation: verbal and non-verbal communication, a person’s movements, fields of vision, uses of space, interactions, exchanges of glances and gestures, facial expressions, and body postures. And such videos can be accessed widely through websites such as YouTube or LiveLeak that employ user-generated content, or live-streaming sites like GeoCam.

What exactly do such videos allow us to observe that we could not see before? Take retail robbery as an example.

If a masked person enters a store and points a gun at the clerk, the situation is clear—this is a robbery. Even clerks who have never been in a robbery before know the deal when someone enters the store with a gun in hand. Most clerks do fear for their lives during a robbery, and many suffer from post-traumatic stress afterward. Yet studies conducted decades ago by criminologist David Luckenbill, as well as Charles Wellford and colleagues, showed that about one-third of clerks do not comply and numerous robberies fail. How is this possible?

Today, videos show the clue to the puzzle can be found in the situational dynamic of the robbery. CCTV recordings uploaded online show us that in those incidents where the robber is able to get the money, both actors act in accordance with a robbery ritual and their respective role—that of the confident, angry, and dangerous perpetrator and of the fearful, submissive clerk.
But if one of those involved does not show the behavior associated with their role, and breaks character, the ritual collapses. It can break down due to tiny actions by the perpetrator, even moves that seem barely noticeable, such as stumbling briefly. If perpetrators are perceived as acting out of character, videos show clerks stop “believing” in them as a dangerous robber.

Moreover, they try to make sense out of the unexpected situation and pick up on unusual behavior by the perpetrator. They adapt their actions to a new role that fits the behavior and drop out of character as well. When a perpetrator seems tentative, the clerk might take the dominant role, as in a robbery in California, where a female clerk makes the indecisive robber wait—basically putting the robbery on hold—saying in an annoyed tone that she is on the phone. In a store robbery in Florida uploaded by the New York Post, the armed perpetrator’s voice indicates sadness about committing the crime. He is hardly looking his victim in the eye. As a result, the clerk is no longer behaving as a fearful robbery victim, but starts cheering him up. They talk about Jesus and discuss possible solutions to the robber’s financial problems. At the end he leaves without the money.

Across such instances, we see clerks gain confidence, and resist. This happens even when perpetrators drop their role for a split second, regardless of the gender of the clerk, experience level of the perpetrator, or whether they look physically more or less fit than the clerk. Elderly clerks laugh and tackle armed perpetrators, as in the AK-47 robbery in the Riverbank minimart, or strong-looking armed male perpetrators stumble briefly and petite female clerks confidently attack and beat them until they run away. Once the illusion is broken, perpetrators seem to comply with their new role. They could shoot at the clerk, fire a warning shot, or scream and shout. Yet they tend to freeze, engage in conversations, or run away.

Such dynamics offer scientists insights into how social routines break down. Studying social behavior caught on video that is now accessible online, we can determine how routines work in the first place, what rules they abide by, and how stable or fragile they are. These videos show that people not only rely on routines in robberies and expect robbers to behave a certain way; they also expect friends, parents, coworkers, pilots, or store clerks to play their respective roles.

Sociologists like Harold Garfinkel and Randall Collins have shown that when routines fail and people behave out of character (be it a perpetrator behaving like a child, or a parent behaving like a coworker), we tend to perceive situations as strange and interactions as disconcerting and unsatisfying. We tend to like people less with whom we cannot make a routine work—even if it is just a mundane conversation.

The use of 21st-century videos to explore these kinds of social behaviors and situational patterns is still evolving. The advancement of software programs, data mining, and automated coding of videos might soon enable social scientists to study and compare even more events.

At the same time, technological improvements also allow videos to be easily altered or fabricated. Video uploads therefore need to be checked thoroughly for credibility and authenticity. Fortunately, software for checking authenticity is also evolving rapidly.

Moreover, ethical issues and privacy concerns arise when studying videos caught on CCTV or mobile phone and uploaded online. Scholars might not be able to reach people caught on video to get their consent as research subjects. This can be problematic, especially if private, potentially incriminating, or embarrassing behavior is filmed. Does that mean we should not tap into this vast pool of newly available data? How can we develop policies that permit such research while protecting the people in the videos?

As we answer these questions, 21st-century video is likely to revolutionize research on situational dynamics and our understanding of social life.

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Nearly 60 years later, this redefinition—of chimps, culture, and ourselves—continues. There are now seven chimpanzee field studies that span more than 25 years, as well as many shorter ones. These long-term studies have produced exciting new information on how chimps use simple tool technologies. The sum of all this work has given us a rich portrait of what a truly cultural species our closest relative is.

It’s one thing for an animal to use a simple tool. Sea otters place rocks on their chests and hammer shellfish on them as they float among the waves. Egyptian vultures use stones to crack open ostrich eggs.

In contrast, chimpanzees use tools in different ways from forest to forest across equatorial Africa. It’s clear that the differences—using sticks to fish for termites in one site and using stone tool hammers in another—vary as a result of local traditions, not differences in genetic programming.

Since the late 1990s, there has been a growing awareness of chimpanzee cultural behavior—and it’s not limited to tools. In the Mahale Mountains of Tanzania, two chimpanzees will clasp their right hands above their heads while their left hands groom their partners. Only 100 kilometers away at Goodall’s Gombe, the grooming partners grasp branches instead of hands. This sounds like a trivial difference, but primatologists believe the difference between the Gombe and the Mahale is analogous to the myriad little cultural differences in human societies. In Europe, moving your head side-to-side means no; in India, it can subtly signal agreement.

Only a highly intelligent species, to which learning is all-important, will show these sorts of variations. Now, when we find a new chimpanzee population in Africa, we’re not just finding a new gene pool. We’re also discovering a new culture.

As the number of long-term field studies of chimpanzees grew, so did our awareness of the scope of cultural diversity across Africa. Well into the fourth decade of chimpanzee field research, psychologist Andrew Whiten of St. Andrews University compiled the full complement of cultural variation across Africa, using information contributed by co-authors from each of the longest-term studies. They identified 39 behaviors across seven sites that appeared to be culturally and not environmentally induced. These included both foraging for food and more social traditions, like leaf-grooming.

Leaf-grooming is one of the few symbolic cultural traditions that varies from site to site and is practiced by many East African chimpanzee communities. The chimps pluck leaves and groom them as intently as they might pick through the hair of another chimp. Other chimps see the behavior and understand it as signaling the desire to groom or be groomed.

Another tradition that indicates symbolic communication is leaf-clipping. A male chimpanzee audibly clips the leaves from a plant stem using his fingers and teeth. This appears to signal a desire for sex with a particular female, and perhaps some sexual frustration.

How do such traditions begin and spread? Primatologists are still engaged in a search for the social mechanisms by which these new traditions emerge and become entrenched. We don’t know yet whether such traditions appear infrequently and are then readily adopted by others, or if they pop up often but are rarely adopted. It’s even possible that the pattern of traditions we now see across Africa may actually reflect the fact that many local traditions have selectively gone extinct. Culture may emerge and spread within a community readily, but it’s possible that it disappears just as often.

Calling chimpanzee behavioral variation “culture” is controversial for some anthropologists. My colleagues in the human-oriented fields of anthropology and psychology don’t accept that many chimpanzee behaviors come about through social learning, even though they span activities from hunting to food-sharing, showing great geographic variation between communities with distinct behaviors. This reluctance to embrace chimpanzees as cultural animals may be healthy scientific skepticism. Or it may reflect the opposite: a certain obtuseness about chimpanzee uniqueness.

Cultural anthropologists tend to adopt an exclusive rather than inclusive definition and allow culture as a concept only among human societies. Culture is a human universal, so almost anything that we do that is not genetically hardwired could be called cultural behavior. Even when we’re talking about humans, culture is not easy to define.

But it’s possible to apply criteria used in studies of human culture to chimpanzees, which could help further the debate. In 1962, famed ethnographer Alfred Kroeber published a time-tested checklist for human culture. Recently, primatologist William McGrew of St. Andrews University applied Kroeber’s checklist to many chimpanzee studies and found that the same traditions applied—albeit with a simpler overall pattern. Chimpanzees use tools, but a simpler toolset is found; they show cross-populational differences in traditions, though on a simpler scale than seen among human cultures.

Cultural anthropologists claim symbolic behavior is at the heart of culture. That is, humans do things—and create things we call cultural artifacts—that have no concrete connection to the thing itself. We invent symbolic sounds called words that have no connection to the word’s meaning itself. For example, nothing in the word red tells you what something red looks like. And the anthropologists are right—language is a central aspect of human culture that goes far beyond anything that chimpanzees do in the wild or can be taught to do in captivity.

Yet new cultural differences in chimpanzee behavior across Africa are being uncovered every year. Some are subtle differences in the details of tool use or body language which appear patently cultural. Others involve behavior where the line between learned behavior and response to local habitat isn’t clear. Why do chimpanzees who live in Forest A prefer to catch baby monkeys rather than adults, but those in Forest B prefer to catch adult monkeys? Does the particular structure of each forest lend itself to one practice or the other? Or does each group perpetuate techniques that have been practiced by male hunters simply because older males had always hunted that way?

We are still a long way from understanding exactly why some traditions become entrenched for generations while others wink out of existence quickly, or fail to take hold in the first place. But in 2018, we can say that chimpanzees are defined by their cultural traditions in a way that is unmatched by any other animal on Earth, save their closest relatives—ourselves.

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