Cognitive Dissonance and the Bias Against Sharks
Something strange in society that is never mentioned is how the reality we face as adults does not correspond in important ways to the one we learned about growing up. Since this discrepancy remains unacknowledged, each of us discovers and must investigate its length and breadth alone.
The irrational nature of the bias held against sharks in Western society became evident to me during discussions on the Internet discussion list, Shark-L from 2002 to 2008. Being familiar with the behaviour of several species of wild sharks, I found that the members seemed to be talking about a different animal. While a large proportion of those posting on the list were apparently in thrall to the great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias), a variety of shark scientists and shark fishermen from many countries were also members; membership at that time was between 450 to 500 people. The subject of shark attacks commonly generated avid discussion, and during the year that Discovery Channel presented its Shark Week feature, Ocean of Fear (Discovery 2007) it was energetically discussed for much of that week.
Ocean of Fear: The Worst Shark Attack Ever presents the story of the crew of the American war ship, the USS Indianapolis. About 900 crew members were left floating after the ship was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine on July 30, 1945, in the Philippine Sea. Though surviving crew members stated during an interview that most of the survivors died of exhaustion, exposure, or drinking ocean water, the show presents sharks as being man-eating monsters responsible for unimaginable horror and mayhem. The passionate discussion of the show that followed on Shark-L reflected this stance. No one, including the shark scientists who participated in reviewing the morbid details, questioned its presentation. However, stepping back to take a wider look, one wonders what the men were doing, bleeding in the ocean. It was because their ship had been bombed. And what were they doing in the middle of the Philippine Sea? They had just delivered vital parts for the atomic bomb that would soon be dropped on Hiroshima, arguably the most murderous act ever perpetrated by homo sapiens.
The contrast between what the men in the USS Indianapolis did—mass murder—and what the sharks did—eat—was not once mentioned by a member of Shark-L. Though as the scientists in the discussion were doubtless aware, while fighting among men is common, no incident of sharks fighting had ever been reported.
Shark Aggression
The lack of intra-specific aggression in sharks is an attribute that has been systematically mentioned by shark ethologists since Allee and Dickinson (1954) placed 16 sharks in small containers and were unable to illicit conflict among them in spite of overcrowding and starvation (Allee and Dickinson 1954). The subject was covered in detail by shark ethologists Myrberg and Gruber (1974) in their study of bonnethead sharks. When asked whether they had ever seen sharks fighting, Professor Arthur A. Myrberg replied:
“During my many observations over about 25 years or so in the field, I’ve never seen a shark acting aggressively toward another shark other than males pushing or biting females during what appeared as reproductive tactics. I’ve observed lemons, tigers, bonnetheads, silkies, oceanic whitetips, and blacknoses for reasonably long periods and nurses and blacktips for very short periods of time.”
Professor Samuel H. Gruber wrote:
“After years and years of observing sharks in competitive feeding situations I have become impressed by how little aggression is shown by these animals. I often read in books when I was young that sharks can go into a frenzy and will attack and kill one another. I find this to be exactly opposite of what occurs. What I see is that when competitively feeding, sharks are almost gentle and balletic. If two sharks rush at a piece of bait and one clamps on the other’s head they will carefully unclamp, back up and move off. They do not bite or hurt one another.”
Chris Fallows, who studies the great white shark in South Africa, wrote in a personal communication (2022) that in more than thirty years he has never seen them fight. Neither has he seen them bite each other while feeding together on a whale carcass. Nor have they reacted by biting when they have been lured to baits at cage diving boats and have mistakenly collided when swimming from one side of the boat to the other when they could not see each other.
Klimley et al. (1996) described how the great white shark ritualizes conflict when a seal that one of them has killed comes under dispute. Each slaps the water at an angle with its tail, and the shark who raises the most water, and blasts it farthest, wins the prey. Klimley confirmed this by taking video sequences of many such encounters. Thus he was able to accurately measure the sharks involved, and the distances that they propelled the water (Klimley et al. 1996). For this ritual to be effective, each shark must understand it, and the loser must acknowledge the winner to avoid a physical battle for the seal, which would badly damage both sharks. Would human fighters be so cooperative? Personal experience with violent men suggests to this author that such is unlikely.
Even among great white sharks, it appears that conflictual biting and fighting, so common among vertebrates of our own phylogenetic line (the osteichthyan line), is not seen. Yet, this fact remains generally unacknowledged.
Human Aggression
Not counting animals that kill indirectly by spreading disease, homo sapiens is the species most dangerous to its conspecifics. In terms of its murderous behaviour, there is no counterpart in other vertebrates. A study by the United Nations (2019) determined that about 437,000 people annually are homicide victims, and 90% of the perpetrators are men; their victims are often conspecific females.
In contrast, only five people were killed by sharks in 2022 (International Shark Attack File 2022).
Though war kills fewer people than homicide, human history is an account of successive wars (Keeley 1996). Evidence shows that tribal warfare was on average 20 times more deadly than modern warfare, calculated as either a percentage of total deaths from war, or as average war deaths each year as a percentage of the population (Keeley 1996). These numbers are echoed by deaths in modern tribal societies in which death rates from war are between four and six times the highest death rates in 20th century Germany or Russia (Keeley 1996). These findings suggest that war is instinctive in homo sapiens, and not cultural (Lorenz 1963). The popularity of war and violence in media entertainment supports this. Further, instead of arguing against this irrational and instinctive danger, science works to serve it (e.g. see Pearce and Denkenberger 2018). Currently, not only destructive weapons are used to kill others, but chemical and bio-weapons have been intensively studied for eventual use. There is evidence that the COVID 19 pandemic was created in a lab (Bruttel et al. 2022); whether it was spread intentionally to wreak havoc globally or not, is not officially known as of this writing.
Homo sapiens is one of the two species in the biosphere that kills not to eat but for fun (Ghiglieri 1999); chimpanzees share the warring instinct (Aureli et al. 2006; de Waal and de Waal 2007). Humans excitedly seek fights, target conspecifics with the intention to kill, and enjoy doing so (Torres 2018). They will deliberately inflict pain, torture, and subjugation on conspecifics. One of homo sapiens’ distinctive traits is its capacity for innovation, and innovation 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 our species. He hypothesized that it is due to the lack of inhibitions that evolved to control intra-specific aggression in other social animals. Like sharks, animals that have evolved dangerous weapons will also have evolved behavioural strategies to keep them from mortally 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 no selection pressure to develop inhibitions against killing conspecifics. Animals of such species can kill another slowly and cruelly in situations in which the victim cannot get away. The weapons crafted by human societies are, in almost every case, their greatest achievement, and homo sapiens lacks the ability to refrain from using them against his fellow man. Though no dog will bite another who makes the gesture of submission, gunmen do not hesitate to shoot people who are begging for mercy. And only in human wars is the mass killing of conspecifics perpetrated.
Bob Altemeyer, formerly of the University of Manitoba, described an experiment that he carried out with a friend at the University of Moscow during the cold war. The two researchers found that students in the United States and Russia shared the same view of the opposing super power, each viewing the other country as having identical evil characteristics (Altemyer 2006). He also found, through decades of experimentation with human subjects, that your enemy would only have to ask three or four people before finding someone who would be willing to hold you down and electrocute you to death on the request of the most minor authority (Altemyer 2006). This and other studies have revealed the ready willingness of people in general to blindly follow authority.
Through reflection, Lorenz (1963) presented the possibility that the Christian story about Jesus Christ’s admonition to “turn the other cheek” did not mean that one should submit more to violence, but that one should present the other cheek so that the aggressor could not strike again. He cited this admonition, along with the ritual of the ‘peace pipe’ (in which a pipe is communally smoked before peace talks), as possibly being two efforts by modern humans to control the instinct for violence.
Human Bias
An aspect of human cognitive behaviour is the tendency to defend beliefs against the facts (Kahan et al. 2017). This pattern is seen in scientists as well as the general public (Kahan et al. 2017), and is likely behind much of the divisiveness among many of the religious dogmas, as well as between religion and science. Beliefs are held and any facts that contradict them are explained away—they don’t matter. For example, many people today continue to believe that the earth is flat in spite of photographic and other evidence that it is a globe. Similarly, others believe that the earth is just 10,000 years old, dismissing the fossil record and the biological evidence of evolution. Both these beliefs spring from ancient texts—the Koran and the Bible.
Another robust finding in social psychology is that there is a deep human tendency to regard those in a perceived ‘out-group’ as being inferior to the ‘home group’ based on arbitrary criteria, including beliefs (Hamilton 1964, Byrne 1969). This tendency has also been identified as being instinctive (Lorenz 1963); it presents as an aspect of the territorial instinct. The classification of ‘others,’ in which one group looks down on or fears another, results in prejudices and stereotypes, which throughout history has regularly led to cruelty, violence, war, slavery, and genocide. This tendency has also been found to be an aspect of the human attitude to animals (Plous 2003, Bastain et al. 2011, Hodson and Costello 2012). Humans consider themselves exceptional so that any and all human projects are 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).
A commonly used excuse for treating animals cruelly is to claim that though the animals act as if they are in pain, that does not mean that they really are (Rose 2002), which is the common argument used by fishermen to defend their ‘sporting’ practices. Though this argument requires that the alleged automaton imitate consciousness on cue, the “facts don’t matter tendency” has allowed fishermen to continue to argue that fish don’t feel pain in spite of a vast and rapidly accumulating store of scientific findings that they do (Sneddon et al. 2018). Indeed, some shark scientists continue to promote the shark fin trade as if elasmobranchs lack intrinsic ecological value (e.g. Shiffman and Hueter 2018), and claim that sharks should be treated as a commercial resource rather than as wildlife with the right to protection (Shiffman et al. 2021). Many scientific papers associated with fisheries refer to elasmobranchs (as well as teleosts) in anthropocentric terms.
There is also the phenomenon of psychological projection, in which in-groups project their own qualities on out-groups (Newman et al. 1997, Robbins and Krueger 2005). A similar phenomenon is anthropomorphism in which the perceived traits of other life forms are considered in terms of the knowledge of the way conspecifics behave. Given their dentition, if sharks behaved as aggressively as humans, human swimmers would indeed be in danger. This type of human tendency may help explain why such a violent species might be in denial of the peaceful nature of another species, especially one that they already want to kill.
Sharks have been used to portray the monsters of the human imagination ever since the blockbuster movie JAWS launched hate killings of sharks all along American coasts (Drumm 1996). The initiative was taken up by Discovery with Shark Week which claims to be portraying non-fiction—JAWS, on the other hand, was fictional. Shark Week has traditionally highlighted and showcased shark attacks, and refers to the animals with terms such as “man-eating monsters”—the demons of the human imagination. These and other such productions have exerted enormous influence on public attitudes 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, Jeff Hasler, and others, in 2010, my colleagues were told: “People watch because sharks are scary and dangerous.” Shark Week’s producers called this shark pornography, and since a scary and dangerous Shark Week had made a fortune amounting to billions of American dollars for the Network, the trend continued. At the same time, conservation was considered to be unpopular, so it was scarcely mentioned (pers. comm Gasek and Hasler 2010). As a result, many members of the generation who grew up watching Shark Week will tell you that they are afraid to even put a foot in the sea, or any deep water including mountain lakes. The fact that divers swim with sharks each day in many places around the planet, and are almost never bitten, is ignored. In contrast, there are about 4.5 million dog bites yearly (World Animal Foundation 2021), with 30,000 fatalities (Statista 2022) yet society holds a positive attitude to dogs.
This phenomenon has launched a barrier to shark conservation that has likely delayed effective action being taken to protect them and now, elasmobranchs are in worse shape than any other vertebrate line (Porcher and Darvell 2022).
Conclusions
Due to the long evolutionary history of sharks and their relatives, (Coates et al. 2018, Andreev et al. 2020, Kriwet and Benton 2004, Kriwet et al. 2009 their influence is felt throughout the intricate aquatic ecosystems around the planet. The way humanity has specifically targeted them and swept them from the seas is not something that could have happened naturally and the ecological results of doing so are unknown. Sharks, rays, and chimaeras were once common and are estimated now to be less than 6% of their former numbers at most. They no longer fulfil their former ecological roles, which is a recognized pre-cursor of extinction (for an in-depths analysis see Porcher and Darvell 2022).
Given that very little is known about elasmobranchs, it is counter-intuitive that shark scientists would find their mass slaughter in all oceans to be acceptable, and the situation presents as an example of the way modern civilization devalues life. But given current knowledge of the size and nature of the universe, the mysteries concerning the presence of life and of consciousness, and the failure to locate any other lifeforms within hundreds of thousands of light years around us, there is every reason to consider life to be precious, and that its appearance on our planet in this solar system is remarkable. The claim of human exceptionalism, made to excuse any and all human projects, no matter how destructive, does not stand, because it ignores the fact that humans are only one species among the trillions that have evolved in harmony to support life, in a vast network covering the planet.
There is evidence that the acknowledgement of how little humans know about the lives and subjective states of other life forms can result in them questioning the basis of their speciesism and treating other life forms with more wisdom (Voelkel et al. 2018). Humans pride themselves as acting through reasoning, and the only reasonable response to reality is to consider and try to understand it. Indeed, we may be the only animal that has evolved enough intelligence to understand the difference between reasoned thought and instinct. Only through putting that knowledge to good use across the scale of human actions, will we begin to solve the problems facing humanity as of this writing.
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