Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological structure from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations – that is, the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection in human evolution. Adaptationist thinking about physiological mechanisms, such as the heart, lungs, and immune system, is common in evolutionary biology. Some evolutionary psychologists apply the same thinking to psychology, arguing that the modularity of mind is similar to that of the body and with different modular adaptations serving different functions. These evolutionary psychologists argue that much of human behavior is the output of psychological adaptations that evolved to solve recurrent problems in human ancestral environments.
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 colored patch on the other side. The visible faces of the cards show 3, 8, red and brown. Which card(s) must you turn over in order to test the truth of the proposition that if a card shows an even number on one face, then its opposite face is red?
The Human Behavior and Evolution Society, or 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.
In science and philosophy, a just-so story is an untestable narrative explanation for a cultural practice, a biological trait, or behavior of humans or other animals. The pejorative nature of the expression is an implicit criticism that reminds the listener of the essentially fictional and unprovable nature of such an explanation. Such tales are common in folklore and mythology.
Leda Cosmides is an American psychologist, who, together with anthropologist husband John Tooby, helped develop the field of evolutionary psychology.
John Tooby is an American anthropologist, who, together with psychologist wife Leda Cosmides, helped pioneer the field of evolutionary psychology.
Jerome H. Barkow is a Canadian anthropologist at Dalhousie University who has made important contributions to the field of evolutionary psychology. He received a BA in Psychology from Brooklyn College in 1964 and a PhD in Human Development from the University of Chicago in 1970. He is Professor of Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University and a Distinguished International Fellow at the Institute of Cognition and Culture, Queen's University Belfast. He also serves on the Board of Directors of METI.
Evolutionary developmental psychology (EDP) is a research paradigm that applies the basic principles of evolution by natural selection, to understand the development of human behavior and cognition. It involves the study of both the genetic and environmental mechanisms that underlie the development of social and cognitive competencies, as well as the epigenetic processes that adapt these competencies to local conditions.
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.
The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) is an interdisciplinary research lab at Stanford University that offers a residential postdoctoral fellowship program for scientists and scholars studying "the five core social and behavioral disciplines of anthropology, economics, political science, psychology, and sociology".
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 a freelance writer and former psychology professor specializing in evolutionary psychology.
A cognitive module 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.
Cognitive description is a term used in psychology to describe the cognitive workings of the human mind.
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.
Prejudice can be considered from an evolutionary perspective. Evolutionary psychologists posit that our psychology, e.g. emotion and cognition, has not been uniquely isolated from the forces of evolution. Although there is psychological variation among individuals, the majority of our psychological mechanisms should be adaptations designed specifically to solve recurrent problems, many of which were social in nature, in our evolutionary history. To balance the costs and benefits of sociality we must be able to recognize and functionally respond to threats and opportunities, and our errors in judgment should be biased toward minimizing costs to reproductive fitness. Our implicit responses to others result from the activation of functionally specific adaptations to motivate action, either to take advantage of opportunities, avoid or confront threats. The valence—positive or negative—of those responses can be measured using implicit association tests. Unconscious, negative reactions are often referred to as prejudice, but these prejudices are much more contextually rich than simple, positive or negative affect, and often involve discrete emotions, which likely represent unique adaptations to motivate functionally distinct actions. Our evolved biases toward minimizing fitness costs may have implications for the function and/or malfunction of stigma, prejudice, and discriminatory behavior in post-industrial societies. Some common biases are discussed.
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.".
