Cognitive Dissonance and the Bias Against Sharks
Somethingstrange in society that is never mentioned is how the reality we faceas adults does not correspond in important ways to the one we learnedabout growing up. Since this discrepancy remains unacknowledged, eachof us discovers and must investigate its length and breadth alone.
Theirrational nature of the bias held against sharks in Western societybecame evident to me during discussions on theInternet discussion list, Shark-L from 2002 to 2008. Beingfamiliar with the behaviour of several species of wild sharks,I found that the members seemed to be talking about a differentanimal. While a large proportion of those posting on the list wereapparently in thrall to the great white shark (Carcharodoncarcharias),a variety of shark scientists and shark fishermen from many countrieswere also members; membership at that time was between 450 to 500people. The subject of shark attacks commonly generated aviddiscussion, and during the year that Discovery Channel presented itsShark Week feature, Oceanof Fear(Discovery2007) itwas energetically discussed for much of that week.
Oceanof Fear: The Worst Shark Attack Ever presentsthe story of the crew of the American war ship, the USSIndianapolis. About 900 crewmembers were left floating after the ship was torpedoed by a Japanesesubmarine on July 30, 1945, in the Philippine Sea. Thoughsurviving crew members stated during an interview that most of thesurvivors died of exhaustion, exposure, or drinking ocean water, theshow presents sharks as being man-eating monsters responsible forunimaginable horror and mayhem. The passionate discussion of the showthat followed on Shark-L reflected this stance. No one, including theshark scientists who participated in reviewing the morbid details,questioned its presentation. However, stepping back to take a widerlook, one wonders what the men were doing, bleeding in the ocean. Itwas because their ship had been bombed. And what werethey doing in the middle of the Philippine Sea? They had justdelivered vital parts for the atomic bomb that would soon be droppedon Hiroshima, arguably the most murderous act ever perpetrated byhomo sapiens.
Thecontrast between what the men in the USS Indianapolis did—massmurder—and what the sharks did—eat—was not once mentioned by amember of Shark-L. Though as the scientists in the discussion weredoubtless aware, while fighting among men is common, no incidentof sharks fighting had ever been reported.
SharkAggression
Thelack of intra-specific aggression in sharks is an attribute that hasbeen systematically mentioned by shark ethologists since Allee andDickinson (1954) placed 16 sharks in small containers and were unableto illicit conflict among them in spite of overcrowding andstarvation (Allee and Dickinson 1954). The subject was coveredin detail by shark ethologists Myrberg and Gruber (1974) in theirstudy of bonnethead sharks. When asked whether theyhad ever seen sharks fighting, Professor Arthur A. Myrberg replied:
“Duringmy many observations over about 25 years or so in the field, I’venever seen a shark acting aggressively toward another shark otherthan males pushing or biting females during what appeared asreproductive tactics. I’ve observed lemons, tigers, bonnetheads,silkies, oceanic whitetips, and blacknoses for reasonably longperiods and nurses and blacktips for very short periods of time.”
ProfessorSamuel H. Gruber wrote:
“Afteryears and years of observing sharks in competitive feeding situationsI have become impressed by how little aggression is shown by theseanimals. I often read in books when I was young that sharks can gointo a frenzy and will attack and kill one another. I find this to beexactly opposite of what occurs. What I see is that whencompetitively feeding, sharks are almost gentle and balletic. If twosharks rush at a piece of bait and one clamps on the other’s headthey will carefully unclamp, back up and move off. They do not biteor hurt one another.”
ChrisFallows, who studies the great white shark in South Africa, wrote ina personal communication (2022) that in more than thirty years he hasnever seen them fight. Neither has he seen them bite each other whilefeeding together on a whale carcass. Nor have they reacted by bitingwhen they have been lured to baits at cage diving boats and havemistakenly collided when swimming from one side of the boat to theother when they could not see each other.
Klimleyet al. (1996) described how the great white shark ritualizes conflictwhen a seal that one of them has killed comes under dispute. Eachslaps the water at an angle with its tail, and the shark who raisesthe most water, and blasts it farthest, wins the prey. Klimleyconfirmed this by taking video sequences of many such encounters.Thus he was able to accurately measure the sharks involved, and thedistances that they propelled the water (Klimley et al. 1996). Forthis ritual to be effective, each shark must understand it, and theloser must acknowledge the winner to avoid a physical battle for theseal, which would badly damage both sharks. Would human fighters beso cooperative? Personal experience with violent men suggests to thisauthor that such is unlikely.
Evenamong great white sharks, it appears that conflictual biting andfighting, so common among vertebrates of our own phylogenetic line(the osteichthyanline), is not seen. Yet, this fact remains generally unacknowledged.
HumanAggressionNotcounting animals that kill indirectly by spreading disease, homosapiens is the species most dangerous to its conspecifics. Interms of its murderous behaviour, there is no counterpart in othervertebrates. A study by the United Nations (2019) determined thatabout 437,000 people annually are homicide victims, and 90% of theperpetrators are men; their victims are often conspecific females.
Incontrast, only five people were killed by sharks in 2022(International Shark Attack File 2022).
Thoughwar kills fewer people than homicide, human history is an account ofsuccessive wars (Keeley 1996). Evidence shows that tribal warfare wason average 20 times more deadly than modern warfare, calculated aseither a percentage of total deaths from war, or as average wardeaths each year as a percentage of the population (Keeley 1996).These numbers are echoed by deaths in modern tribal societies inwhich death rates from war are between four and six times the highestdeath rates in 20th century Germany or Russia (Keeley1996). These findings suggest that war is instinctive in homosapiens, and not cultural (Lorenz 1963). The popularity of warand violence in media entertainment supports this. Further, insteadof arguing against this irrational and instinctive danger, scienceworks to serve it (e.g. see Pearce andDenkenberger 2018). Currently, not only destructive weapons are usedto kill others, but chemical and bio-weapons have been intensivelystudied for eventual use. There is evidence that the COVID 19pandemic was created in a lab (Bruttel et al. 2022); whether it wasspread intentionally to wreak havoc globally or not, is notofficially known as of this writing.
Homosapiens is one of the two species in the biosphere that kills notto eat but for fun (Ghiglieri 1999); chimpanzees share the warringinstinct (Aureli et al. 2006; de Waal and de Waal 2007). Humansexcitedly seek fights, target conspecifics with the intention tokill, and enjoy doing so (Torres 2018). They will deliberatelyinflict pain, torture, and subjugation on conspecifics. One of homosapiens’ distinctive traits is its capacity for innovation, andinnovation is used to devise new techniques and new forms of killing(Baron-Cohen 2011).
Lorenz(1963) provided a possible explanation for the extreme cruelty of ourspecies. He hypothesized that it is due to the lack of inhibitionsthat evolved to control intra-specific aggression in other socialanimals. Like sharks, animals that have evolved dangerous weaponswill also have evolved behavioural strategies to keep them frommortally injuring conspecifics (Lorenz 1963, Klimley et al 1996).But, when the animal has not evolved big teeth and jaws, a sharp,strong beak, or a powerful, clawed stroke, there has been noselection pressure to develop inhibitions against killingconspecifics. Animals of such species can kill another slowly andcruelly in situations in which the victim cannot get away. Theweapons crafted by human societies are, in almost every case, theirgreatest achievement, and homosapiens lacks theability to refrain from using them against his fellow man. Though nodog will bite another who makes the gesture of submission, gunmen donot hesitate to shoot people who are begging for mercy. And only inhuman wars is the mass killing of conspecifics perpetrated.
BobAltemeyer, formerly of the University of Manitoba, described anexperiment that he carried out with a friend at the University ofMoscow during the cold war. The two researchers found that studentsin the United States and Russia shared the same view of the opposingsuper power, each viewing the other country as having identical evilcharacteristics (Altemyer 2006). He also found, through decades ofexperimentation with human subjects, that your enemy would only haveto ask three or four people before finding someone who would bewilling to hold you down and electrocute you to death on the requestof the most minor authority (Altemyer 2006). This and other studieshave revealed the ready willingness of people in general to blindlyfollow authority.
Throughreflection, Lorenz (1963) presented the possibility that theChristian story about Jesus Christ’s admonition to “turnthe other cheek”did not mean that one should submit more to violence, but that oneshould present the other cheek so that the aggressor could notstrikeagain. He cited this admonition, along with the ritual of the ‘peacepipe’(in which a pipe is communally smoked before peace talks), aspossibly being two efforts by modern humans to control the instinctfor violence.
HumanBiasAnaspect of human cognitive behaviour is the tendency to defend beliefsagainst the facts (Kahan et al. 2017). This pattern is seen inscientists as well as the general public (Kahan et al. 2017), and islikely behind much of the divisiveness among many of the religiousdogmas, as well as between religion and science. Beliefs are held andany facts that contradict them are explained away—they don’tmatter. For example, many people today continue to believe that theearth is flat in spite of photographic and other evidence that it isa globe. Similarly, others believe that the earth is just 10,000years old, dismissing the fossil record and the biological evidenceof evolution. Both these beliefs spring from ancient texts—theKoran and the Bible.
Anotherrobust finding in social psychology is that there is a deep humantendency to regard those in aperceived ‘out-group’ as being inferior to the ‘home group’based on arbitrary criteria, including beliefs (Hamilton 1964, Byrne1969). This tendency has also been identified as being instinctive(Lorenz 1963); it presents as an aspectof the territorial instinct. The classification of ‘others,’ inwhich one group looks down on or fears another, results in prejudicesand stereotypes, which throughout history has regularly led tocruelty, violence, war, slavery, and genocide. This tendency has alsobeen found to be an aspect of the human attitude to animals(Plous 2003, Bastain et al. 2011, Hodson and Costello 2012). Humansconsider themselves exceptional so that any and all human projectsare good, no matter how destructive they may be to other species.Recreational shark fishing and the shark fin trade are good examples(Shiffman and Hammerschlagg 2014, Gehan 2019, Porcher and Darvell,2022).
Acommonly used excuse for treating animals cruelly is to claim thatthough the animals act as if they are in pain, that does not meanthat they really are (Rose 2002), which is the common argument usedby fishermen to defend their ‘sporting’ practices. Though thisargument requires that the alleged automaton imitate consciousness oncue, the “facts don’t matter tendency” has allowed fishermen tocontinue to argue that fish don’t feel pain in spite of a vast andrapidly accumulating store of scientific findings that they do(Sneddon et al. 2018). Indeed, some shark scientists continue topromote the shark fin trade as if elasmobranchs lack intrinsicecological value (e.g. Shiffman and Hueter 2018), and claim thatsharks should be treated as a commercial resource rather than aswildlife with the right to protection (Shiffman et al. 2021). Manyscientific papers associated with fisheries refer to elasmobranchs(as well as teleosts) in anthropocentric terms.
Thereis also the phenomenon of psychological projection, in whichin-groups project their own qualities on out-groups(Newmanet al. 1997, Robbins and Krueger 2005). A similar phenomenon isanthropomorphism in which the perceived traits of other life formsare considered in terms of the knowledge of the way conspecificsbehave. Given their dentition, if sharks behaved as aggressively ashumans, human swimmers would indeed be in danger. This type of humantendency may help explain why such a violent species might be indenial of the peaceful nature of another species, especially one thatthey already want to kill.
Sharkshave been used to portray the monsters of the human imagination eversince the blockbuster movie JAWS launched hate killings of sharks allalong American coasts (Drumm 1996). The initiative was taken up byDiscovery with Shark Week which claims to be portrayingnon-fiction—JAWS, on the other hand, was fictional. Shark Week hastraditionally highlighted and showcased shark attacks, and refers tothe animals with terms such as “man-eatingmonsters”—thedemons of the human imagination. These and othersuch productions have exerted enormous influence on publicattitudes to sharks (Muter 2013; Neff 2015; Le Busque &Litchfield 2021, Pellot 2023) and continue to do so.During a meeting with Shark Week’s producers, Paul Gasek, JeffHasler, and others, in 2010, my colleagues were told: “People watchbecause sharks are scary and dangerous.” Shark Week’s producerscalled this sharkpornography,and since a scary and dangerous Shark Week had made a fortuneamounting to billions of American dollars for the Network, the trendcontinued. At the same time, conservation was considered to beunpopular, so it was scarcely mentioned (pers. comm Gasek and Hasler2010). As a result, many members of the generation who grew upwatching Shark Week will tell you that they are afraid to even put a foot in the sea, orany deep water including mountain lakes. The fact that divers swimwith sharks each day in many places around the planet, and are almostnever bitten, is ignored. In contrast, there are about 4.5 milliondog bites yearly (World Animal Foundation 2021), with 30,000fatalities (Statista 2022) yet society holds a positive attitude todogs.
Thisphenomenon has launched a barrier to shark conservation that haslikely delayed effective action being taken to protect them and now,elasmobranchs are in worse shape than any other vertebrate line(Porcher and Darvell 2022).
ConclusionsDue to the long evolutionary history of sharks and their relatives, (Coates et al. 2018, Andreev et al. 2020, Kriwetand Benton 2004, Kriwet et al. 2009 their influenceis felt throughout the intricate aquatic ecosystemsaround the planet. The wayhumanity has specifically targeted them and swept them from the seasis not something that could have happened naturally and theecological results of doing so are unknown. Sharks, rays, andchimaeras were once common and are estimated now to be less than 6%of their former numbers at most. They no longer fulfil their formerecological roles, which is a recognized pre-cursor of extinction (foran in-depths analysis see Porcher and Darvell 2022).Giventhat very little is known about elasmobranchs, it iscounter-intuitive that shark scientists would find their massslaughter in all oceans to be acceptable, and the situation presentsas an example of the way modern civilization devalues life. But givencurrent knowledge of the size and nature of the universe, themysteries concerning the presence of life and of consciousness, andthe failure to locate any other lifeforms within hundreds ofthousands of light years around us, there is every reason to considerlife to be precious, andthat its appearance on our planet in this solar system is remarkable.The claim of human exceptionalism, made to excuse any and all humanprojects, no matter how destructive,doesnot stand, because it ignores the fact that humans are only onespecies among the trillions that have evolved in harmony to supportlife, in a vast network covering the planet.
Thereis evidence that the acknowledgement of how little humans know aboutthe lives and subjective states of other life forms can result inthem questioning the basis of their speciesism and treating otherlife forms with more wisdom (Voelkel et al. 2018). Humans pridethemselves as acting through reasoning, and the only reasonableresponse to reality is to consider and try to understand it. Indeed,we may be the only animal that has evolved enough intelligence tounderstand the difference between reasoned thought and instinct. Onlythrough putting that knowledge to good use across the scale of humanactions, will we begin to solve the problems facing humanity as ofthis writing.
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