Deirdre Barrett

Deirdre Barrett is an evolutionary psychologist at Harvard Medical School whose work sits at the intersection of ethology, neuroscience, and the clinical study of addictive behavior. Her 2010 book Supernormal Stimuli: How Primal Urges Overran Their Evolutionary Purpose extended Niko Tinbergen's 1950s experiments with exaggerated animal signals into a comprehensive theory of modern maladaptation: the processed-food industry, the pornography industry, and the social media industry have, through iterative optimization, produced stimuli that exaggerate the features evolved reward systems track, triggering responses more intense than any natural stimulus could elicit and overwhelming the regulatory mechanisms that evolved to keep appetite within survivable bounds. Barrett's framework removes moral judgment from the diagnosis—the organism that cannot stop is not weak-willed but is encountering a stimulus that exceeds its regulatory architecture's design parameters—and redirects intervention from the individual to the environment. Her analysis, written before large language models existed in their current form, structurally predicted what the Orange Pill documents