Theology and Evolutionary Psychology, A Weekend Musing: Technology, the Human Brain, and Emoticons

In my last post (the end of which contains, IMHO, one of the most important implications for spiritual formation I've ever posted) I reflected on how cultural evolution, due to its speed, has overrun the much slower (and blind) processes of natural selection working on the human mind. That is, cultural evolution often situates our brain in very UNNATURAL situations. In my last post examples were:

1. A brain that craves fats and sugars is surround by Krispy Kreams.

2. A brain that is skittish about snakes and spiders is ho-hum about cars and guns.

3. A brain that defines friend/family vary narrowly is now living in a global world full (to the brain at least) of strangers which fills us with wariness, fear, and paranoia.

Well, for a Saturday, I want to focus on a much more serious example: Emoticons.

Emoticons are those little smiley faces we add to e-mails to convey emotional tone and content:

:-) Happy

:-( Sad

;-) Wink

>:-I Anger

You get the point. The range of expression is amazing. See this chart from Yahoo.

As a psychologist I find this phenomenon interesting. As we all know, verbal communication involves both language (the semantic content of our speech) along with paralanguage (the non-verbals such as facial expressions, tone, body language). Often, as we know, language can send one message while paralanguage can send the exact opposite message. This is the case in sarcasm.

Most people are just unaware of how much our communication is paralinguistic. That is until the e-mail came around. E-mails are rife with misunderstandings. As are blog comments. Why? When speech is stripped of its paralinguistic content it is hard to judge if the writing is being funny or serious. Are they angry? Or just kidding?

Enter the Emoticon, the paralinguistic innovation of the e-mail. In the vacuum of non-verbals, the ubiquitous :-) allows us to joke and kid and use sarcasm on the internet and in e-mails. It's a way to signal emotional tone.

When I first started blogging and commenting on blogs I swore I would never fall to the level of using Emoticons. But I've given in. As paralinguistic devices they really are helpful.

What does this have to do with evolutionary psychology? Well, like Krispy Kream, the e-mail, as a cultural innovation, is very unnatural for the human brain. The brain is just ill-equipped to effectively communicate via this mechanism. Thus, e-mail communications and blog comments are full of hurt feelings and misunderstandings. It's an emotionally glitchy way to communicate.

In short, the Emoticon is a little piece of human nature manifesting itself in the world the e-communications. Particularly communications between strangers. Phrased another way, the Emoticon is a little time capsule of evolutionary history, pointing to a time when language evolved to communicate with people face to face.

Have a great weekend! :-)