10. toward unified evolutionary psychology Flashcards
mainstream cognitive psychology
-> general-purpose and content free
-> functional agnosticism
information-processing devices responsible for food selection are assumed to be the same as for a mate and habitat selection
functional agnoticism
- view that information processing mechanisms can be
studied without understanding the adaptive problems
they were designed to solve
adaptive problems shape …
attention
memory systems
- women -> cues to emotional infidelity
- men -> cues to sexual infidelity
evolutionary cognitive psychology
-> information-processing mechanisms
functional specialization
adaptively biased
loss aversion
- mind consists of INFORMATION-PROCESSING MECHANISMS
in NS
adaptions produced by natural selection over time in ancestral
environments - mechanisms are FUNCTIONALLY SPECIALIZED to produce
behaviour that solves adaptive problems - ADAPTIVELY BIASED
error management theory -> bias towards inferring danger - LOSS AVERSION
endowment effect -> mug is more worthwhile when you own it
evolutionary social psychology
most human interactions within enduring relationships
- kin: inclusive fitness
- mating: sexual selection theory
- parenting: parental investment theory / parent-offspring conflict
- friendships: banker’s paradox
little attention to these topics
five moral emotions tracking cooperative relationship
- anger
to punish those violating social contracts - guilt
to show harmed party you know you caused harm
motivates confession / motivation to repair harm - shame
reduce social presence / desire to hide and withdraw - sympathy
moving people to help others who are suffering - gratitude
motivate people to be pro-social to one’s benefactors
bias in research WEIRD-sampling
W estern
E ducated
I ndustrialised
R ich
D emocratic
partner selection dilemma
choose spouse based on standardized test?
- people scoring high on marital compatibility score high on marital
satisfaction
three evolutionary theories of language
= adaption -> Pinker
- social gossip hypothesis
info sharing useful to figure out who to collaborate with - social contract hypothesis
to verbalise social / marriage contract - scheherazade hypothesis
to seduce opposite sex -> PEACOCK’s TAIL
-> does NOT explain why we developed language so early
two evolutionary developmental psychology
attachment theory
- adaption to childhood environment
is my parent able and willing to invest?
life-history theory
- trade-off somatic (slow strategy) effort + reproductive (fast) effort
e.g. father’s absence and early menstruation
- slow life history and low fertility issue
fertility declines after 18(+), want to be economically secure
evolutionary personality psychology
different personalities reflect different SOCIAL NICHES or SPECIALIZATIONS
- e.g. extraversion - beneficial in large societies
possibly maintained by FREQUENCY-DEPENDENT natural selection
- e.g. big-five
where does personality variation come from and how did it evolve?
dark triad personality
special case of frequency-dependent selection
not selected against if they are rare in a population
- machiavellianism
- psycho
- narcissistic
evolutionary organisational psychology
study of evolved psychological mechanisms that shape decision-making in work organisations
- selection and recruitment
- leadership
- managerial biases
evolutionary clinical psychology
-> adaptive or maladaptive
-> mismatch
some functional disorders / adaptive repsonses to loss of a valued person or loss of resources
- e.g. depression after divorce
adaptive in certain contexts
- e.g. paranoia among dictators
mismatch between modern and ancestral environment
- e.g. postnatal depression
evolutionary clinical psychology
-> mental health problems emerge when the evolved mechanism …
… fails to become activated
when the relevant adaptive problem is confronted
- e.g. not eating when hungry -> anorexia
… becomes activated
in a context that it was not designed for
- e.g. fear of flying
… fails to coordinate
with other mechanisms
- e.g. self-assessments of mate value fail to guide a person to the
right people
evolutionary cultural psychology
culture
- system of shared knowledge, norms, and values, that members
in the same group hold
transmitted culture
- social learning mechanisms e.g. prestige bias
evoked culture
- culture as adaptive response to a particular envrm. problem
e.g. natural disaster, war, weak institution
pathogens and beauty culture
prevalence of parasites in the local ecology strongly predicts the importance people in the culture place on physical attractiveness in a long-term mate
individualism / collectivism as cultural adaption to disease
strong negative relationship between
individualism and historical pathogen prevalence
evolutionary psychology of religion
-> adaptive explanations
- fitness benefits for individuals believers
e.g. health benefits of prayer and other rituals - joining a religion as a costly signal of commitment
- religious primes do not increase prosociality significantly more
evolutionary psychology of religion
-> three by-product theories
- hyperactive agency detection
leads us to infer that unseen forces - quakes - are human-like
agents - theory of mind adaptions
we infer unseen beliefs, desires, and intentions in other
people
‘god has a plan’ - religion as parasitic meme
intended to manipulate - young - people’s minds
