The prospect of social interaction, whether it actually happens or not, can trigger it. Any time I start a project (including assignments at university), go back to edit something, and it doesn’t meet my standards, I get quite severe self-deprecating feelings.
For the second one I managed to mitigate it by changing my working process to something more iterative and focused on meeting the minimum requirements before optimizing. I still have not found a remotely serviceable solution for the social interaction problems, and the feedback loops there are more destructive too. At least with the perfectionism problem I can move to another project to help restore some of my self-esteem.
Don’t traits have to be heritable for evolution to count? I’m not an expert or anything, but I thought I’d know if stars’ descendants had similar properties to their parent stars.