Online Behavior and Evolutionary Cyberpsychology Flashcards
What is the theory of online behavior and evolutionary cyberpsychology?
Online content is triggering domains that evolved a long time ago
Evolutionary Psychology
an integration of cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology
Piazza and Bering Theory
evolutionary psychology can explain why we feel certain emotions in certain online situations
*Similarities of cyberspace and real life (3)
- Online relationships are often just as deep and stable as relationships formed offline
- Computer mediated tech (such as email and instant messaging) help people maintain their current relationships as well as help people maintain larger overall social networks
- There’s no simple relationship between internet use and health outcomes although controversies still remain
Differences of cyberspace and real life
- Greater degree of visual anonymity, so people may engage in riskier or aggressive behavior
- Geographic distance is largely immaterial online
- There are fewer time constraints when communicating online (e.g. texting at any time of day)
What does “domain” refer to?
a specific area of psychological function
e.g. facial recognition, perception, cognition, or social behavior
domain specific meaning
a psychological mechanism evolved to process input from specific domains that were invariant across human evolution and generate functional responses to that input
e.g. responding to hearing your name, sensing infidelity in a relationship
A domain is the product of…
selection pressures of a reproductive problem
selective pressure
something about the environment determines what trait or quality survives
Domain is a response to selection pressure because the ones who engage in the behavior survive
Input Criteria
the rules of what is needed to wake up a domain
when the input conditions are similar enough to the input criteria, our domain is woken up
e.g. two dots and a line wake up te facial recogntion domain
domain specificity
certain psychological processes or abilities that are specific to a particular domain
Proper domain
What a device is designed to process
Actual domain
what the device will actually process
Domain specificty and input conditions example
Silicon Valley device to recognize a hot dog used in social media to detect explicit content
Evolutionary Mismatch Theory
the idea that physiological and psychological adaptations operate environments that differ meaningfully from the environments in which they originally evolved
E.g. storing fat due to stress is evolutionary an evolved response of storing fact for stress caused by winter coming
Themes for Evolutionary Cyberpscyhology: Sexual Strategies Theory
Men and women confront different adaptive problems in short term as opposed to long term mating contexts
mainly due to differences in parental investment between men and women
-women have greater investment so are more selective
