Lectur 21q - Evolution & Happiness Flashcards
Therefore, what is the purpose of happiness?
Happiness is an emotional reward or incentive for behaviours that improve reproductive success. For example eating, drinking, sex and social status.
Why Is happiness okay temporary ?
Because if you achieved permanent happiness you wouldn’t keep striving for more, so this way you keep losing happiness and working harder to achieve it again
In the modern day, is happiness still the same as in hunter gatherer society?
Not really, happiness nowadays has an approximate relationship to following instincts, but it doesn’t always lead to happiness. So in hunter gatherer times eating would always lead to happiness, but in the modern day we have so much food it can lead to sadness because you get fat etc. So there is a difference between short term and long term happiness which wasn’t really a thing in HG society
If there was a continuum of happiness over the course of history who would lie at the happiest end, unhappiest end and in between?
Happiest end - HG
In between - modern post industrial revolution humans
Unhappiest - agricultural peasants
Describe features of hunter gatherer society that mean they are the happiest ?
Hunter gatherers had to work very few hours and don’t have to plan for the future very much
They’re strong and tall
Comfortable and eat enough, spending most of their time in social groups
Gentle and indulgent of their children who had very little responsibility
Tended to die of disease, predation or violence
Describe features of peasant society which explains why it is the unhappiest?
Peasants, never wash, constantly semi-starving and diseased
Very little time in social environments due to work hours
Die younger and all stunted
Children are forced to work from a young age
What might be considered the one comfort to peasant societies?
Religion was a bigger deal which might have provided a reason and higher power for the hardship they endured.
In modern day societies there is a disconnection between reproductive success and 3 domains of living. Name the 3 domains
Survival - the longest survivors in the planet have the lowest reproductive success
Health - the healthiest people have the lowest reproductive success
Happiness - the happiest self reported groups have in general a lower reproductive success
In the modern world what is reproductive success increased by? What kind of people are having the most children?
Those with lower “g”
Higher impulsivity
Criminality and psychopathy
High fertility, because mortality is so low.
What does this swing in who is reproductively successful mean for the genetic pool and for happiness ?
You’re combining poor genetic quality with poor genetic quality, which means that some genetic damage are temporarily increasing reproductive success, and the genetic pool is not very good.
However, happiness is also decreasing on average because happiness is based on physical health so the more genetic damage we have the less physically healthy we all are.
What is the main role of evolutionary psychology ?
Give an example
The main role is to ask the right questions.
Asking questions like why is someone miserable is wrong, you should ask why are some people happy, under the right situations and factors.
What are humans optimally designed for? And therefore not designed for ?
Humans are designed to optimally reproduce successfully, not to be happy.
