Following our reading and review of “The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk Taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust” by John Coates (How our decision-making is everything but rational), let us have a thought experiment for a while.
Let us imagine that the office where we are working in is full not of neat humans, but of monkeys. Big, large monkeys that obviously react with much less thought and rationality than what we’d expect from humans.
Monkeys that would snare when they’d feel threatened. Monkeys that would display all sorts of body language to assert themselves, show their superiority or their social rank. Monkeys that would react unwillingly to opposite sex presence – and high-ranking monkeys trying to get additional partners to show their superiority. Monkeys that would react by fear or show threat when cornered. Monkeys that would live in close bands per hierarchical level and defend their territory. Monkeys that would conspire to overturn the current hierarchical order to get more peanuts.
Well I must say that sometimes I really feel like we’re not too far from observing our jungle origin even in the coziest offices of the largest towns created by civilization. No mistake – we’re still very much governed by our biology. How can we make the best of it?
