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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.
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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.
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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.".
Jeffrey Sherman is a Social Psychologist and Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis. He is known for his research on social cognition, stereotyping, and implicit bias.
References
- ↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on 2010-05-16. Retrieved 2010-01-12.
{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) - ↑ Schaller, M., Asp, C. H., Rosell, M. C., & Heim, S. J. (1996). Training in statistical reasoning inhibits the formation of erroneous group stereotypes. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22, 829-844.
- ↑ Schaller, M., & Conway, L. G., III (1999). Influence of impression-management goals on the emerging contents of group stereotypes: Support for a social-evolutionary process. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 25, 819-833.
- ↑ Schaller, M., Conway, L. G., III, & Tanchuk, T. L. (2002). Selective pressures on the once and future contents of ethnic stereotypes: Effects of the communicability of traits. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 861-877.
- ↑ Schaller, M., Park, J. H., & Faulkner, J. (2003). Prehistoric dangers and contemporary prejudices. European Review of Social Psychology, 14, 105-137.
- ↑ Schaller, M. (2006). Parasites, behavioral defenses, and the social psychological mechanisms through which cultures are evoked. Psychological Inquiry, 17, 96-101.
- ↑ Schaller, M., & Duncan, L. A. (2007). The behavioral immune system: Its evolution and social psychological implications. In J. P. Forgas, M. G. Haselton, & W. von Hippel (Eds.), Evolution and the social mind: Evolutionary psychology and social cognition (pp. 293-307). New York: Psychology Press.
- ↑ Oaten, M., Stevenson, R. J., & Case, T. I. (2009). Disgust as a disease-avoidance mechanism. Psychological Bulletin, 135, 303-321.
- ↑ Faulkner, J., Schaller, M., Park, J. H., & Duncan, L. A. (2004). Evolved disease-avoidance mechanisms and contemporary xenophobic attitudes. Group Processes and Intergroup Behavior, 7, 333–353.
- ↑ Navarrete, C. D., Fessler, D. M. T., & Eng, S. J. (2007). Elevated ethnocentrism in the first trimester of pregnancy. Evolution and Human Behavior, 28, 60–65.
- ↑ Mortensen, C. R., Becker, D. V., Ackerman, J. M., Neuberg, S. L., & Kenrick, D. T. (2010). Infection breeds reticence: The effects of disease salience on self-perceptions of personality and behavioral tendencies. Psychological Science, 21, 440-447.
- ↑ Schaller, M., & Murray, D. R. (2010). Infectious diseases and the evolution of cross-cultural differences. In M. Schaller, A. Norenzayan, S. J. Heine, T. Yamagishi, & T. Kameda (Eds.), Evolution, culture, and the human mind (pp. 243-256). New York: Psychology Press.
- ↑ Schaller, M., Miller, G. E., Gervais, W. M., Yager, S., & Chen, E. (2010). Mere visual perception of other people's' disease symptoms facilitates a more aggressive immune response. Psychological Science, 21, 649-652.
- ↑ "Social Cognition Lab".
