Moridinamael is right about self-confidence, it is really important in fast reacting, even more than practice.
When I joined the military as a private in Russian army my performance during certain stressfull tasks was significantly lower during approximately first six months. As time passed, sertain situations became less stressfull, and I became to outperform lots of my peers as I gained more self-confidence and was finally able to think clear and fast.
(Practice is most essential in ability to react fast and cooperatively. To effectively cooperatively react you need to make one decision of most importance whether you are taking charge of things or you are going to follow someone else's initiative in the next minutes. I think this is the essence of effective cooperative reaction is small groups. But thats another topic.)
Couple of time has passed, army days are long gone and now I know that I had some serious troubles with my self-confidence during some stressfull situations in my life, even the ones that had repeated again and again. Final change came when my wife had left me, I loved her so much that most of my world evolved around her. And now I have virtually nothing to lose, this event severely increased my performance in tasks which require self-confidence.
P.S. I think you might be interested in reading something about OODA loop.
Read Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, Stanislav Lem, Robert Sheckley, that's just the first names that came to my mind.
As for a parent post, society is more dependent on it's economical system more than on anything else. And technology advancements, as history teaches us, don't always define social structure. Ancient Greece and Roma are the great examples of enormous scientific and technological advancements living side by site with an underdeveloped dead-end social structure. Yep, there is a good Sci-Fi novel about this, read "Hard to Be a God".