Why did the chicken cross the road?

But, why did the chicken cross the road?

There are a lot of answers to this question, but why? Well, because it depends on who you ask. People are raised and taught in certain cultures, and this can influence their perception of almost everything around them, many times without them knowing that for others, some things might be different.

We tend to form models and categories that we think are universal, but are they?

If you care to take a trip to another country and you venture on a shopping spree, for example, you might find yourself not being understood when it comes to some shades of colors. The boundary of where the color starts and where it ends varies a lot depending on the culture, this being a very mundane example of how experience reflects in one’s everyday life.

If you ever argued with someone or maybe had a small debate, there is a chance that you asked yourself 'Why does this person think like this?' or if you ever brainstormed with someone who came up with an idea that never crossed your mind, you might’ve thought 'How can this person see things from this perspective?'. 

Maybe you don’t always think about such details, but you’ve definitely watched at least once on National Geographic animals behaving in a certain way and wondered 'Why did that animal act like that?'.

You can find answers to these questions, but ironically, for every single issue, you can find a variety of answers. Let’s go back to the problem of the chicken crossing the street and dive together through different perspectives regarding this question.

Different perspectives

From an evolutionary standpoint, the chicken might have seen an appealing male on the other side of the road and crossed the street to reproduce. The reason for this could be that, in time, chickens that did not cross the street to mate left fewer copies of their genes, and due to evolution, this chicken crossed the street in order to breed, as it is prone to crossing the street whenever it sees an opportunity to mate as an inherited trait from its parents.

Another point of view could come from a molecular geneticist who could tell you that maybe the chicken’s parents did not give it a gene to cross the street after all. Still, the chicken could have had a mutation in one of its genes that made it move to the other side of the road when it got dehydrated, for example, thus forming an if-then clause type of behavior: if the chicken is dehydrated, it will cross the street.

A different perspective could come from a behavioral geneticist who could argue that maybe when the chicken was a baby chic, it used to cross the street very often together with its mother so that when it grew older it crossed the road by itself.

Maybe the chicken is used to receiving food after it crosses the street and so because it wanted the food, it went to the other side of the road. In the eyes of a cognitive ethologist, this could be the best explanation of the phenomenon.

A neuroscientist might join the discussion and say that maybe the chicken got scared and its fight or flight instinct triggered, and it chose to run to the other side of the road, thus crossing the street while doing so.

We think in categories. Explaining something from only one point of view is not enough. We can easily miss the bigger picture. 

Understanding behavior only through genes, neurotransmitters, childhood trauma, environment, or any other factor, while taking into account only one of these will make us not see the others. Essential aspects of a problem might slip right past.

This categorical thinking is not present just in biology, or shopping, but in every part of our lives. In order to not have our minds stuck in one category or on a particular model that we’re used to, we need to overcome that barrier by seeing things from different perspectives.

There were plenty of people throughout history who saw things from only one point of view and while they taught humanity a great lesson, their practices did not have a positive outcome. One of those people was Antonio Egas Moniz, who invented frontal lobotomy. He thought that faulty synapses are the only cause for mental disorders, and if you remove them, the missing systems will be redirected through the remaining channels. He considered that this treatment had no failures.

If you want to take a closer look at the outcomes of this technique, you can find information here, but if you don’t, all you need to consider is that there is a reason why when people suffer from disorders like depression, doctors don’t go around trying to disconnect the frontal lobe from the rest of their brains by drilling holes into their heads.

After all that has been said here, it is essential to accept that different perspectives exist, BUT it is also not wrong to choose to focus on a single category or a couple of them at first.

It is tough to take into account so many possibilities as there are always scenarios that we don’t even think about. Choosing what we think is most influential when forming an opinion, while being aware that there are also other factors is the best compromise that we can make.

People are able, in time, to extend the number of categories that they focus on when solving a problem, so not taking into account as many categories as they’d like at first is not an issue.

Every day we make choices, whether it is treating a patient, programming an app, or just doing our groceries. If we try to be aware of as many things as possible, there will be a day in which we could find and take into account all factors that influence any type of decisions, and the number of what-ifs in our lives could be reduced immensely.

We are the ones who can make this future happen, so by each and every one of us doing our small part of getting out of our comfort zones and trying to see things from as many different perspectives as we can, we bring ourselves closer to that future.

The inspiration for this article is one of the best professors whom we have seen in action so far, prof Robert Sapolsky from Stanford University. We did not have the chance to attend his lectures in person. Still, due to the generosity of Stanford, all his lectures from the Human Behavioural Biology course, the course that guides you through the categories mentioned above, and some others, are available on Youtube. We also recommend all of Mr. Sapolky’s books, but especially Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers.