Biological Preparedness

Biological preparedness is the concept that organisms are evolutionarily predisposed to learn certain associations, especially fear associations, far more readily than others. The psychologist Martin Seligman proposed that organisms whose ancestors developed faster fear responses to genuinely dangerous stimuli gained a survival advantage, so that an innate tendency to fear evolutionarily significant threats became built into the species over time. This explains why phobias of snakes, spiders and heights are far more common, and far easier to produce experimentally, than fears of comparably or more dangerous modern hazards such as electrical outlets or hammers, since the older threats mattered far more across evolutionary history even though the newer ones cause more injuries today. Preparedness is also used to explain conditioned taste aversion, in which an association between a novel taste and later illness can form after a single pairing even when hours separate the two events, a speed of learning that challenged the earlier behaviorist assumption that all stimuli and responses are equally easy to associate with one another.