Chapter 8 - Evolutionary Perspectives on Personality

Question 0

According to modern evolutionary biologists, evolution operates by the process of differential gene reproduction. What is this?

Answer 0

Differential gene reproduction is the reproductive success relative to others. The genes of organisms that reproduce more than others get passed down to future generations at a greater frequency than od the genes of those that reproduce less.

Question 1

Two types of sexual selection and the difference between them:

Answer 1

Intrasexual competition:
- The characteristics that lead to success in costests oft hsi kind evolve because the victors are able to mate more often and, hence, pass on more genes.

Intersexual selection:
- members of one sex choose a mate based on their preferences for particular qualities in a mate.

Question 2

Since the differential gene production is a broader term than simply its evolutionary precedents, a new theory of fitness has been developed. What is inclusive fitness theory?

Answer 2

Inclusive fitness theory (Hamilton, 1964) is a modern evolutionary theory based on differential gene production. The “inclusive” part is the fact that the characteristics that facilitate reproduction need not affect the personal production of offspring. They can afffect the survival and reproduction of genetic relatives as well.

Question 3

X + X = inclusive fitness.

Answer 3

Personal reproductive success + the effects you have on the reproduction of your genetic relatives weighted by the degree of genetic relatedness = Inclusive fitness.

Question 4

What does the Inclusive Fitness Theory explain, that previous theories failed to?

Answer 4

Human traits such as altruism. It also provides a theoretical hypothesis of why homosexuality is selected despite small chances of personal reproductive success.

Question 5

Define “an adaptation”.

Answer 5

An adaptation can be defined as:

“A reliably developing structure in the organism, which, because it meshess with the recurrent structure of the world, causes the solution to an adaptive problem. “ (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992, p. 104)

Question 6

What then, is an adaptive problem?

Answer 6

Anything that impedes with survival or reproduction.

Question 7

Did we evolve noses to carry our glasses on?

Answer 7

Naturally, no. The human nose is clearly an adaptation designed for smelling, but the fact that we can use them to hold up our eyeglasses is an “evolutionary byproduct”.

Question 8

What is evolutionary noise?

Answer 8

Random variations that at neutral with respect to selection.

Question 9

How can evolutionary noise exist?

Answer 9

If a trait is neutral to the evolutionary process, it doesn’t hinder it either - meaning it will be selected randomly because of other things.

Question 10

Evolutionary psychology involves three key premises:

Answer 10

• Domain specificity
• Numerousness
• Functionality

Question 11

One of the three key premises to evolutionary psychology is Domain Specificity. What is this?

Answer 11

Adaptations are presumed to be domain-specific in the sense that they are designed by the evolutionary process to solve a particular adaptive problem. This is because general mechanisms, are generally unsuccessful compared to specific ones because there are so many maladaptive solutions.

Question 12

One of the three key premises of evolutionary psychology is Numerousness. What is it?

Answer 12

Evolutionary psychologists expect there to be a large number of domain-specific psychological mechanisms to correspond to the large number of distinct adaptive problems humans have recurrently confronted.

Question 13

One of the three key premises to evolutionary psychology is Functionality. What is it?

Answer 13

The notion that our psychological mechanisms are designed to accomplish particular adaptive goals. Evolutionary psychologists suggest that understanding adaptive function is also critical to inisight into our evolved psychological mechanisms. The same way a medical researched studying the liver wouldn’t get very far if he didn’t know what the liver’s function in the body is.

Question 14

What is the difference between deductive and inductive reasoning?

Answer 14

Deductive is “Top down”, Inductive is “bottom-up”.

• You have no theory (top), but you go looking in the nature(bottom) and find a phenomenon you record and create a theory(up).
• Someone wants to test your theory (top), and goes looking for the same phenomenon - finds it and records it (down).

Question 15

What are the major research topics that evolutionary psychologists have been interested in?

Answer 15

• Need to belong (Hogan, Baumester ….)
• Helping and Altruism (Burnstein, Crandall & Kitayama …)
• Universal Emotions (Ekman, Ketelaar …)
• Sex Differences (Buss …)
• Individual Differences (Belsky, Tooby & Cosmides, Gangestad & Simpson …)
• The Big Five and Evolution (Penke, Ellis …)

Question 16

Hogan (1983) argues that the most basic human motivators are status and acceptance by the group. How can he say that?

Answer 16

According to Hogan, the most important social problems early humans had to solve in order to survive and reproduce involved establishing cooperative relations with other members of the group. Achieving status and popularity likely conferred a host of reproductively relevant resources.

Question 17

Baumeister and Tice (1990) explain social anxiety by means of evolutionary principles. What theory do they build their reasoning on?

Answer 17

Hogan’s theory of “need to belong”. According to Hogan’s theory, being ostracized from a group would have been extremely damaging to our ancestors. Therefore, it can be predicted that humans have evolved psychological mechanisms to prevent being excluded. One of these, could be social anxiety according to Baumeister and Tice (1990)

Question 18

Baumeister and Leary (1995) mapped out the resources that the group can offer to the individual, which are all important for survival and reproduction. Which four?

Answer 18

1. Groups share food, information, and other resources.
2. Groups offer protection from external threat.
3. Groups contain concentration of mates, needed for reproduction.
4. Groups contain kin, which provide opportunities to receive altruism and to invest in genetic relatives.

Question 19

Is there supporting research of Baumester and Leary’s group resource mapping from 1995?

Answer 19

Stein (1976) concluded that external threats had been shown repeatedly to increase group cohesion. Also Elder and Clipp (1998) saw that WW2 veterans had the strongest social ties with the war comrades who had seen combat with them - and as a function closer in the units where other comrades had died.

In Rabbie & Horwitz’ 1969 study, groups were given a prize depending on the flip of a coin - this increased in-group preference compared to the control group no matter if they won or not.

Question 20

Denissen et al, performed a cross-cultural study on the effects of social interactions on self-esteem. What did he find?

Answer 20

Denissen found that day-to-day fluctuations in self-esteem were linked with qualitiy and quantity of social interactions. This suggests that self-esteem, at least in part, functions as an internal tracking device that monitors social inclusion.

Question 21

Burnstein and colleagues hypotehsized that helping others is a direct function of the recipient’s ability to enhance the inclusive fitness of the helpers. How did they study this, and what were the findings?

Answer 21

The study had people from the United States and Japan imagine different individuals sleep in different rooms of a rapidly burning building. Who they chose to help seemed to be a direct function of the degree of genetic relatedness.

Question 22

Burnstein et al (1994) predicted that people should help their kin relative to the likely productiveness of that person. What was the design and result?

Answer 22

Participants were to think of life-or-death situations where they could save ONE.

1-year-olds were helped more than 10-year-olds, who in turn were helped more than 45-year-olds, least helped were 75-year-olds.

When the situation was set to a famine condition, the relationship was curvilear 10-year olds being helped more than the other groups.

Question 23

Evolutionary psychologists have taken three distinct perspective on the study of emotions. Which?

Answer 23

1. Examine whether facial expressions of emotion are interpreted the same ways across cultures.
2. Emotions are adaptive psychological mecahnisms that signal various “fitness affordances” in the social environment. Emotions guide the person towards goals that would have conferred fitness in ancestral environments.
3. Manipulation hypothesis: emotions are designed to exploit the psychological mechanisms of other people.

Question 24

Evolutionary psychology predicts that males and females will be the same or similar in domains…

Answer 24

in which the sexes have faced the same or similar adaptive problems.

Question 25

Why, theoretically in an evolutionary perspecitve, is it that men are so much more violent than women?

Answer 25

Males can have many more offspring than females can, the ceiling on reproduction is much higher for males. As a general rule, the greater the variance in reproduction, the more ferocious the ocmpetition within the sex that shows higher variance. This is also known as effective polygyny.

Question 26

What is sexual dimorphism?

Answer 26

Species that show high variance in reproduction within one sex tend to be highly sexually dimorphic, highly different in size and structure.

Question 27

On average, how sexually dimorphic are humans?

Answer 27

Humans are mildly dimorphic, with males roughly 12 percent larger than females.

Question 28

What is effective polygyny?

Answer 28

Effective polygyny is when the reproductive variance within a sex is high.

Question 29

How do we explain Buss et al (1992)s results where it seemed like there was a disparancy between how men and women saw emotional or sexual infidelity?

Answer 29

Over human evolutionary history, men have riske investing in children who were not their own. A reproductively damaging act, would be if his mate had pregnancy with another man, cause it would jeapardize his certainty of passing on his genes.

A woman, however, would be more at risk if her mate’s resources, time, commitment and investment was lost to another woman.

Question 30

What are the sex differences in mate preferences?

Answer 30

Because women bear the burdens of the heavy obligatory parental investment, they are predicted to place more value on a potential mate’s financial resources and the qualities that lead to such resources. Men, in contrast, are predicted to place greater value on a woman’s physical appearance, which provides cues to her fertility.

Question 31

Evolutionary framework identifies several sources of individual differences, which?

Answer 31

1. Those that arise from individuals posessing universal adaptations whose expression is contingent on the environment.
2. those that arise from contingencies with other traits
3. Those due to variation over time and space in the optimum value of a trait.
4. Those due to frequency-dependent selection.

Question 32

One of the sources of individual differences identified by our evolutionary framework is: Environmental Triggers of Individual Differences. Give an example of a theory that uses this type of evolutionary explanation.

Answer 32

Belsky, Steinberg & Draper (1991) hypothesized that the critical event of early father presence versus father absence triggered speicific sexual strategies in individuals. The empirical evidence for this was correlational.

Question 33

A source of individual differences identified by our evolutionary framework is Heritable Individual Differences Contingent on Other Traits. Give an example of a theory, and research that uses this type of analysis.

Answer 33

The tendency toward aggression is not directly heritable. Rather it is reactively heritable: it is a secondary consequence of heritable body build (Tooby & Cosmides, 1990). There is some evidence to support this idea that body build enters into a man’s decision of whether to pursue an aggressive strategy (Ishikawa et al., 2001).

Question 34

One type of individual difference identified by our evolutionary framework is Frequency-Dependent Strategic Individual Differences. Give an example of an obvious frequency depedant individual difference, and a more complicated one as per the research of Gangestad and Simpson.

Answer 34

The most obvious one is biological sex.

Gangestad and Simpson argue that human individual differences in women’s mating strategies have been caused by frequency-dependent selection. According to Gangestadn and Simpson, women’s mating strategies should center on two key qualities of potential mates: the parental investment and the quality of his genes.

There is a trade-off. Men who are highly attractive may not wish to commit to one woman.

This gave rise to two strategies: restricted sexual strategy and unrestricted mating strategy.