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Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify human psychological adaptations with regards to the ancestral problems they evolved to solve. In this framework, psychological traits and mechanisms are either functional products of natural and sexual selection or non-adaptive by-products of other adaptive traits.
Irven DeVore was an anthropologist and evolutionary biologist, and Curator of Primatology at Harvard University's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. He headed Harvard's Department of Anthropology from 1987 to 1992. He taught generations of students at Harvard both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He mentored many young scientists who went on to prominence in anthropology and behavioral biology, including Richard Lee, Robert Trivers, Sarah Hrdy, Peter Ellison, Barbara Smuts, Henry Harpending, Marjorie Shostak, Robert Bailey, Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Richard Wrangham and Terrence Deacon.
The Wason selection task is a logic puzzle devised by Peter Cathcart Wason in 1966. It is one of the most famous tasks in the study of deductive reasoning. An example of the puzzle is:
You are shown a set of four cards placed on a table, each of which has a number on one side and a color on the other. The visible faces of the cards show 3, 8, blue and red. Which card(s) must you turn over in order to test that if a card shows an even number on one face, then its opposite face is blue?
Barbara Herrnstein Smith is an American literary critic and theorist, best known for her work Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. She is currently the Braxton Craven Professor of Comparative Literature and English and director of the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory at Duke University, and also Distinguished Professor of English at Brown University.
The Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) is an interdisciplinary, international society of researchers, primarily from the social and biological sciences, who use modern evolutionary theory to help to discover human nature — including evolved emotional, cognitive and sexual adaptations. It was founded on October 29, 1988 at the University of Michigan.
A psychological adaptation is a functional, cognitive or behavioral trait that benefits an organism in its environment. Psychological adaptations fall under the scope of evolved psychological mechanisms (EPMs), however, EPMs refer to a less restricted set. Psychological adaptations include only the functional traits that increase the fitness of an organism, while EPMs refer to any psychological mechanism that developed through the processes of evolution. These additional EPMs are the by-product traits of a species’ evolutionary development, as well as the vestigial traits that no longer benefit the species’ fitness. It can be difficult to tell whether a trait is vestigial or not, so some literature is more lenient and refers to vestigial traits as adaptations, even though they may no longer have adaptive functionality. For example, xenophobic attitudes and behaviors, some have claimed, appear to have certain EPM influences relating to disease aversion, however, in many environments these behaviors will have a detrimental effect on a person's fitness. The principles of psychological adaptation rely on Darwin's theory of evolution and are important to the fields of evolutionary psychology, biology, and cognitive science.
The term standard social science model (SSSM) was first introduced by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides in the 1992 edited volume The Adapted Mind. They used SSSM as a reference to social science philosophies related to the blank slate, relativism, social constructionism, and cultural determinism. They argue that those philosophies, capsulized within SSSM, formed the dominant theoretical paradigm in the development of the social sciences during the 20th century. According to their proposed SSSM paradigm, the mind is a general-purpose cognitive device shaped almost entirely by culture.
Leda Cosmides is an American psychologist, who, together with anthropologist husband John Tooby, pioneered the field of evolutionary psychology.
John Tooby was an American anthropologist, who helped pioneer the field of evolutionary psychology with his psychologist wife Leda Cosmides.
The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture is a 1992 book edited by the anthropologists Jerome H. Barkow and John Tooby and the psychologist Leda Cosmides. First published by Oxford University Press, it is widely considered the foundational text of evolutionary psychology (EP), and outlines Cosmides and Tooby's integration of concepts from evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology, as well as many other concepts that would become important in adaptationist research.
Jennifer A. Richeson is an American social psychologist who studies racial identity and interracial interactions. She is currently the Philip R. Allen Professor of Psychology at Yale University where she heads the Social Perception and Communication Lab. Prior to her appointment to the Yale faculty, Richeson was Professor of Psychology and African-American studies at Northwestern University. In 2015, she was elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences. Richeson was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 2022. Since 2021, she has been a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST).
Evolutionary psychology seeks to identify and understand human psychological traits that have evolved in much the same way as biological traits, through adaptation to environmental cues. Furthermore, it tends toward viewing the vast majority of psychological traits, certainly the most important ones, as the result of past adaptions, which has generated significant controversy and criticism from competing fields. These criticisms include disputes about the testability of evolutionary hypotheses, cognitive assumptions such as massive modularity, vagueness stemming from assumptions about the environment that leads to evolutionary adaptation, the importance of non-genetic and non-adaptive explanations, as well as political and ethical issues in the field itself.
Robert Kurzban is an American freelance writer and former psychology professor specializing in evolutionary psychology.
A cognitive module in cognitive psychology is a specialized tool or sub-unit that can be used by other parts to resolve cognitive tasks. It is used in theories of the modularity of mind and the closely related society of mind theory and was developed by Jerry Fodor. It became better known throughout cognitive psychology by means of his book, The Modularity of Mind (1983). The nine aspects he lists that make up a mental module are domain specificity, mandatory operation, limited central accessibility, fast processing, informational encapsulation, "shallow" outputs, fixed neural architecture, characteristic and specific breakdown patterns, and characteristic ontogenetic pace and sequencing. Not all of these are necessary for the unit to be considered a module, but they serve as general parameters.
The history of evolutionary psychology began with Charles Darwin, who said that humans have social instincts that evolved by natural selection. Darwin's work inspired later psychologists such as William James and Sigmund Freud but for most of the 20th century psychologists focused more on behaviorism and proximate explanations for human behavior. E. O. Wilson's landmark 1975 book, Sociobiology, synthesized recent theoretical advances in evolutionary theory to explain social behavior in animals, including humans. Jerome Barkow, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby popularized the term "evolutionary psychology" in their 1992 book The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and The Generation of Culture. Like sociobiology before it, evolutionary psychology has been embroiled in controversy, but evolutionary psychologists see their field as gaining increased acceptance overall.
Ruth Chang is an American legal scholar who serves as the Professor and Chair of Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford, a Professorial Fellow of University College, Oxford, and an American professor of philosophy. She was previously a professor at Rutgers University from 1998 to 2019. She is known for her research on the incommensurability of values and on practical reason and normativity. She is also widely known for her work on decision-making and is lecturer or consultant on choice at institutions ranging from video-gaming to pharmaceuticals, the U.S. Navy, World Bank, and CIA.
Evolutionary psychology has traditionally focused on individual-level behaviors, determined by species-typical psychological adaptations. Considerable work, though, has been done on how these adaptations shape and, ultimately govern, culture. Tooby and Cosmides (1989) argued that the mind consists of many domain-specific psychological adaptations, some of which may constrain what cultural material is learned or taught. As opposed to a domain-general cultural acquisition program, where an individual passively receives culturally-transmitted material from the group, Tooby and Cosmides (1989), among others, argue that: "the psyche evolved to generate adaptive rather than repetitive behavior, and hence critically analyzes the behavior of those surrounding it in highly structured and patterned ways, to be used as a rich source of information out of which to construct a 'private culture' or individually tailored adaptive system; in consequence, this system may or may not mirror the behavior of others in any given respect.".
Batja Mesquita is a Dutch social psychologist, a cultural psychologist and an affective scientist. She is a professor of psychology at the University of Leuven, Belgium, where she studies the role of culture in emotions, and of emotions in culture and society. She is director of the Center for Social and Cultural Psychology in Leuven.
Sarah A. Soule is an American sociologist who is the Morgridge Professor of Organizational Behavior and director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She is known for her work on organizational behavior, social movements, political sociology, and policy change and diffusion.
References
- ↑ "History". Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Archived from the original on August 8, 2014. Retrieved June 21, 2014.
- ↑ Debora Hammond (2003). The science of synthesis: exploring the social implications of general systems theory. University Press of Colorado, 2003. p.168.
- 1 2 "Facilities". CASBS. Archived from the original on August 10, 2014. Retrieved June 21, 2014.
- ↑ Sciences, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral (February 1, 2023). "Organizational Behavior Scholar Sarah Soule Named Next CASBS Director". Social Science Space. Retrieved March 8, 2023.
- ↑ "The Early Years and Mission". Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Archived from the original on August 11, 2014. Retrieved June 21, 2014.
- ↑ Alasdair A. MacDonald, A. H. Huussen (2004). Scholarly environments: centres of learning and institutional contexts, 1560-1960. Peeters Publishers, p.173
- ↑ "Leadership History | Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences". casbs.stanford.edu. Retrieved October 8, 2023.
- ↑ "Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences Seeks fellowship applications". Stanford Report. April 9, 2008.
- ↑ "Centers, Laboratories, and Institutes - Stanford University". exploredegrees.stanford.edu.
- ↑ Stanford University News Service (415) 723-2558, Ralph Tyler, one of century's foremost educators, dies at 91 Archived February 6, 2007, at the Wayback Machine
- ↑ LEDA COSMIDES (PDF), Center for Evolutionary Psychology , retrieved June 24, 2017
- ↑ Shmuel Noah Eisenstadt (1963). The political systems of empires. p. LXX
- ↑ Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss (1963). Durkheim/Mauss: Primitive Classification. p. XLVIII
- ↑ Spectrum Policy: Property or Commons?, Stanford Center for Internet and Society, retrieved August 28, 2012
- ↑ Edmund Janes James, Roland Post Falkner, Henry Rogers Seager (1964). Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science: Volumes 351-356. p.195
- ↑ JOHN TOOBY (PDF), Center for Evolutionary Psychology , retrieved June 24, 2017
- ↑ "Past Fellows, Research Affiliates, and Visiting Scholars (Class of 1961-62)". casbs.stanford.edu. Stanford University. Archived from the original on June 11, 2018. Retrieved July 11, 2016.
