Chapter 8: The Evolutionary Approach Flashcards
What is evolutionary psychology?
Psychological approach concerned with how the human mind came into existence.
What is evolutionary computing?
It is a collection of computational methods that have been modelled on the principles of biological evolution.
What is a theory of Neural Darwinism?
It is a theory which applies the idea of evolutionary processes to neural learning.
What is the Environment of Evolutionary Adaptation (EEA)?
The period of time during which many human psychological mechanisms evolved. (approx. 2 million years ago in Pleistocene era)
What is theory of natural selection?
It’s a theory proposed by Charles Darwin that describes the processes by which animal species change over time. It involves species variability, inheritance of traits through reproduction, and selection due to environmental change.
What does “variation” mean in context of evolution?
It is the fact that animals differ in their physical traits.
What is inheritance?
It’s a process of passing on some of parents’ gene-based characteristics to their offspring.
Selection
A change in the environmental conditions that results in differential inheritance of traits.
What is sexual selection?
A differential inheritance of traits based on mate selection and competition instead of a change in the environment.
What is a general-purpose processor?
The view that the mind can solve any type of the problem equally well. It is based on the notion that a problem is solved by context-independent symbol representation and computation.
Evolved Psychological Mechanism
A cognitive process that has evolved to solve a specific adaptive problem.
What are the 6 properties of evolved psychological mechanisms (EPM)?
- EPM exists because it contributed to the solution of a specific problem of survival or reproduction.
- EPM are designed to take in only narrow band of information (input).
- The input of an EPM communicates to an organism the particular adaptive problem it’s facing.
- The input of an EPM is transformed by decision rules (“if-then” statements) into output (If I see a spider then I run).
- The output of an EPM can be physiological activity, information that will serve as input for other psychological mechanisms, or a behavior.
- The output of an EPM is directed toward the solution to a specific adaptive problem
What is the Typicality effect?
The phenomenon that human participants are faster to judge stereotypical members as belonging to a category.
What is the purpose of typicality-based categories?
It allows us to generalize our judgements from what we know to what we don’t know (e.g. eating a plant with purple spots that made you sick will probably prevent you from eating a plant with reddish-purple spots in the future).
What is the Wason Selection Task?
It is a task designed to measure a person’s logical thinking ability. It involves applying abstract rules of logic to a specific example.
What is cheater-detection?
The ability to detect who has undeservedly received a benefit.
What is reciprocal altruism?
It is a behaviour whereby an organism acts in a manner that temporarily reduces its fitness while increasing another organism’s fitness, with the expectation that the other organism will act in a similar manner at a later time.
What is a heuristic?
A mental “rule of thumb” or strategy that acts as a fast and easy way of problem solving. Heuristics are right most (but not all) of the time.
What is a Fallacy?
A fundamental misunderstanding of a statistical rule that can result from applying a heuristic.
Representativeness heuristic
The tendency to judge an item based on its perceived similarity to a category label.
Base-rate fallacy
A neglect of the probability that the item belongs to a certain group.
Conjunction fallacy
A neglect of the conjunction rule which states that simultanously being a member of two categories is always less probable than the probability of being a member of one of either category alone.
The gambler’s fallacy
The belief that probability outcomes are not independent, that the probability of the event can be influenced by how often it occurred in the past.
Robin Dunbar (1996) theory of language evolution
Language replaced grooming as a form of social bonding as it became ineffective when the groups became larger. It may have driven the formation of larger groups in early proto-human societies.
