Evolutionary Psychology - Lecture 3: What can evolution teach us about human culture? Flashcards
Dictator Game
It captures a decision by a single player: to send money to another or not and how much they want to give to the other.
The way people behave across cultures varies
In the dictator game, depending on one’s background/origin/culture, it was found people would be willing to give different amounts of money to another person
Muller-Lyer illusion
The Muller-Lyer illusion is a well-known optical illusion in which two lines of the same length appear to be of different lengths (due to position of arrows at the ends)
-> Results of experiment show that basic cognition varies across cultures
Psychology’s dirty secret
“A 2008 survey of the top psychology journals found that 96% of subjects were from Western industrialized countries —which house just 12% of the world’s population.” ⎼ Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010) Nature
What are most psych subjects?
WEIRD Western Educated Industrialised - come from these societies Rich Democratic
The pitfalls of WEIRD psychology
Psychologists often implicitly ignore cultural variation, or assume that the population sampled is representative of all humanity.
•“Weperceive…”
•“People are biased in their reasoning about…”
•Who is we? Which people?
What is transmitted culture?
Cultural differences that arise due to information transmitted via social learning
-> Humans are culturally diverse - languages, environments
Foraging Aka pygmies in Central African Republic
50 life-skills: hunting, gathering, food preparation, infant care, house and tool maintenance, sex and family, sharing, rituals, dancing, singing
Foraging Aka pygmies in Central African Republic - Asked: WHO did you learn these skills from and WHEN?
80% of skills learned from parents
Sex differences in timing
Sex differences in teaching
Important survival traits inherited vertically - parent to offspring
-> Lots of vital info about living and how to prosper in forest environment is being passed on vertically - inherit vital, cultural capital in this way
Burke and Wills - culture is adaptive
Of 19 ppl who set out on voyage -> died, starved - only 1 person made it back to Melbourne -> Both Burke and Wills died -> didn’t have culturally inherited knowledge -> couldn’t survive in aboriginal enviro
-> Culture is both passed on/inherited/transmitted and passes on vital info
2 types of human adaptations to social learning
Strategies for identifying the most reliable social information
•Conformist bias - copy the majority
•Prestige bias - copy the successful
What are the two biases?
2 cognitive mechanisms which ensure fidelity and utility of cultural information
Overimitation
Copying a behaviour, even when that behaviour appears irrelevant -> thinking it could be useful in passing on cultural info with high fidelity
World Map
Word for two is very similar in areas in close proximity to NZ and going further out also show forms that are quite similar
-> must have been due to process of descent with modification
Language family trees
Track spread and timing of specific migration -> cultures evolve
Descent with modification
Language family tree tracks expansion pulses and pauses in Pacific settlement
3 requirements for evolution via natural selection
Variation, heritability, differential fitness
Variation
Different individuals in a population have different morphologies, physiologies, and behaviors
Heritability
There is a correlation between parents and offspring in the contribution of each to future generations
Differential Fitness
If resources are limiting different phenotypes have different rates of survival and reproduction in different environments .
Natural selection variations evolve in…
culture and biology
3 requirements for natural selection acts on both cultural variance and genetic variance
Example of cultural variance
Clothing - fashionable at different times/periods
-> Variation, inheritance, certain things designed in better ways - different properties of cultural variance
Memes
“tunes, ideas, clothes, fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperm or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain by a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation.” - Richard Dawkins 1976
Memes useful for biological fitness?
May or may not be -> cultural fitness not necessarily the same as biological fitness
-> Interests of meme and its replication may not = fitness of its host e.g. smoking is not good biologically but is good culturally
Selfish meme
- Compete for limited space
- Cultural selection for best replicators
- Memes can enhance or reduce our chances of survival
- Cultural fitness ≠ genetic fitness
- Consider smoking or vows of celibacy
- An entirely new evolving system
Religion as a selfish meme - Richard Dawkins
Inhabits minds and are pathological in society
-> mechanisms to make sure copied with high fidelity - blend in with views
–Copying fidelity •Sacred texts
•Prohibitions against questioning the
tenets of the religion
•Proscriptions against tolerance
towards other worldviews
-> outcompete other kinds of views e.g. heaven and hell
–Replication •mission/conversion system
•Exhortations to be fruitful and multiply
•You will go to heaven if you believe
•You will go to hell if you do not
Is religion a cultural adaption for group survival?
Belief in a powerful deity who will punish immoral behaviour helps individuals trust others in their group, promoting cooperation
-> Religion primes ppl to act in a pro-social way
Religious priming as pro-social example
Religious priming increases sharing in a dictator game
A cultural adaptation for group survival in harsh and unpredictable conditions?
Belief in moralising deities more likely in arid conditions
Life is harder -> resources dry, unpredictable -> more belief in God than well-off areas
-> Need Gods to enforce social norms and encourage pro-sociality
-> Helps these ppl/cultures exist and prosper in harsh enviros
What is religion a product of?
Cultural evolution that helps human groups to cooperate and therefore prosper in different ecologies across the globe
What has led to cultural diversity?
Humans all around the world undergoing cultural evolution
Should Psych be WEIRD?
No - to really succeed and understand all mysteries of human mind, it needs to thoroughly embrace that kind of diversity, rather than just study 12% of WEIRD ppl - need to understand true diversity of psychologies across the planet
