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TH EDITION
EVOLUTIONARY
PSYCHOLOGY,
5
Chapter x
David Buss
Chapter 13
Toward a Unified Evolutionary
Psychology
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Mainstream Cognitive Psychology
• Assumes that cognitive architecture is
general purpose and content free
– The information-processing devices that are
responsible for food selection are assumed to
be the same as those for mate and habitat
selection
– These general-purpose mechanisms include
the abilities to reason, learn, imitate, calculate
means–ends relationships, compute similarity,
form concepts, and remember things
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Mainstream Cognitive Psychology
• Evolutionary psychologists make precisely
the opposite assumption:
– The mind is likely to consist of a large number
of specialized mechanisms, each tailored to
solving a different adaptive problem
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Mainstream Cognitive Psychology
• Two major problems with the assumption
of general processing mechanisms:
– What constitutes a successful adaptive
solution differs from domain to domain—the
qualities needed for successful food selection,
for example, differ from those needed for
successful mate selection
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Mainstream Cognitive Psychology
– The number of possible behaviors generated
by unconstrained general mechanisms
approaches infinity, so the organism would
have no way of distinguishing successful
adaptive solutions from the blizzard of
unsuccessful ones (the problem of
combinatorial explosion discussed in Chapter
2)
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Mainstream Cognitive Psychology
• Functional agnosticism
– The view that information-processing
mechanisms can be studied without
understanding the adaptive problems they
were designed to solve
• Evolutionary psychology, in contrast,
infuses the study of human cognition with
functional analysis
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Evolutionary Cognitive Psychology
• The human mind consists of a set of
evolved information-processing
mechanisms embedded in the human
nervous system
• These mechanisms and the
developmental programs that produce
them are adaptations produced by natural
selection over evolutionary time in
ancestral environments
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Evolutionary Cognitive Psychology
• Many of these mechanisms are
functionally specialized to produce
behavior that solves particular adaptive
problems, such as mate selection,
language acquisition, and cooperation
• To be functionally specialized, many of
these mechanisms must be richly
structured in content-specific ways
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Attention and Memory
• Women more than men remembered cues
to emotional infidelity
• Men more than women remembered cues
to sexual infidelity
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Attention and Memory
• Using eye-tracking technology, one study
found that women showed an attentional
bias toward viewing infants more strongly
than men
• Nulliparous women—those without
children—showed this attentional bias
especially strongly
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Attention and Memory
• These results are consistent with the
hypothesis that women played a more
central role in caring for infants, resulting
in sex differences even at the level of the
sorts of information that humans attend to
for cognitive processing
• Evolutionary relevance influences
attention
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© 2015 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
© 2015 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Problem-Solving
• Human adaptive problem solving—which
our ancestors must have done reasonably
well or else they would have failed to
become our ancestors—always depends
on three ingredients:
– the specific goal being sought (the problem
that must be solved)
– the materials at hand
– the context in which the problem is embedded
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Problem-Solving
– The criterion by which the “correctness” of
solutions is evaluated is evolutionary:
• The decisions made by the cognitive mechanism
led, on average, to better survival and enhanced
reproduction in ancestral environments relative to
alternative designs that were present at the time
• What matters in the eyes of selection is not truth,
validity, or logical consistency, but simply what
works in the currency of reproductive success
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Frequency Representations and
Judgment under Uncertainty
• Frequency representations can provide
crucial input into problem-solving and
decision-making mechanisms
• The frequentist hypothesis
– the proposition that some human reasoning
mechanisms are designed to take as input
frequency information and produce as output
frequency information
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© 2015 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
The Evolution of Language
• Is language an adaptation?
• What adaptive problems, if any, did
language evolve to solve?
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What Adaptive Problems Did Language
Evolve to Solve?
• The dominant theory of the function of
language is that it evolved to facilitate
communication—the exchange of
information between individuals (Pinker,
1994)
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What Adaptive Problems Did Language
Evolve to Solve?
• Information exchange could help with an
almost limitless variety of tasks: warning
friends and family of danger; informing
allies about the location of ripe berries;
coordinating a coalition for hunting or
warfare; providing instruction for the
construction of shelters, tools, or weapons;
and many others
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The Evolution of Extraordinary Human
Intelligence
• The brain is a metabolically expensive
organ to operate
• Although the human brain makes up only
2 to 3 percent of the average human’s
body weight, it consumes roughly 20 to 25
percent of the body’s calories (Leonard &
Robertson, 1994)
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The Evolution of Extraordinary Human
Intelligence
• Why did humans evolve these cognitive
capacities?
– Ecological dominance/social competition
(EDSC) hypothesis (Alexander,1989; Flinn,
Geary, & Ward, 2005)
• Proposes that human ancestors were able to
subdue many of the traditional “hostile forces of
nature” that previously impeded survival
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Evolutionary Social Psychology
• Most human social interaction has taken
place within the context of enduring
relationships
– Questions about the psychology of
relationships should form the core of the field
of social psychology
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The Evolution of Moral Emotions
• Historical approaches to morality have
been dominated by “rationalist” theories,
whereby people arrive at a moral judgment
through moral reasoning (Haidt, 2001)
• By logic and rationality, we are presumed
to weigh the issues of right and wrong,
harm and misdeed, justice and fairness,
and arrive at the morally correct answer
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The Evolution of Moral Emotions
• Repulsion of incest
– evolved to prevent inbreeding and is invoked
in reaction to sex between Julie and Mark
(Lieberman, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2003)
• Anger
– evolved to punish those who violate social
contracts
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The Evolution of Moral Emotions
• Embarrassment
– evolved to promote appeasement and
submission
• Shame
– motivate the desire to hide and withdraw,
reducing one’s social presence
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The Evolution of Moral Emotions
• Guilt
– evolved to signal to the harmed party that you
know that you have inflicted a harm: It
motivates confession and apologies. It also
signals that you are motivated to repair the
harm
– by promoting reparation after harming a
communal ally, thereby making up for the
transgression, guilt functions to prevent the
dissolution of valued relationships
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The Evolution of Moral Emotions
• Contempt (evoked with moral violations of
disrespect, duty, or hierarchy)
• Sympathy (moving people to help others
who are suffering)
• Gratitude (motivating people to act more
pro socially to one’s benefactors)
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Evolutionary Personality Psychology
• Evolutionary psychology is now grappling
with ways to incorporate individual
differences and species-typical
psychological mechanisms within a unified
conceptual framework (e.g.,Bailey, 1998;
Buss & Greiling, 1999; Gangestad &
Simpson, 1990; MacDonald, 1995; Nettle
& Penke, in press; Wilson, 1994)
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Evolutionary Clinical Psychology
• Psychopaths pursue a deceptive or
“cheating” strategy in their social
interactions, especially with interaction
partners who are less attractive and those
who they don’t expect to interact with in
the future
• Psychopaths pursue a social strategy
characterized by exploiting the reciprocity
mechanisms of others
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Evolutionary Clinical Psychology
• Once an evolved psychological
mechanism is described and its proper
function is identified, a clear criterion
exists for determining dysfunction
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Evolutionary Clinical Psychology
• Evolutionary Insights into Problems
Erroneously Thought to Be Dysfunctions
– Discrepancy between ancestral and modern
environments
– Normal mistakes accompanying the “on
average” functioning of a mechanism
– Subjective distress produced by the normal
operation of functional mechanisms
– Socially undesirable behavior produced by the
normal operation of functional mechanisms
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Evolutionary Cultural Psychology
• Evoked Culture
– phenomena that are triggered in some groups
more than in others because of differing
environmental conditions
• Transmitted Culture
– representations or ideas that originally exist in
at least one mind and are transferred to other
minds through observation or interaction
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© 2015 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
Evolutionary Cultural Psychology
• The Evolution of Art, Fiction, Movies, and
Music
• Display hypothesis
– Proposes culture is “an emergent
phenomenon arising from sexual competition
among vast numbers of individuals pursuing
different mating strategies in different mating
arenas” (Miller, 1998, p. 118)
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The Evolutionary Psychology of
Religion
• Religious beliefs are prototypical examples
of transmitted culture—representations in
some minds that are transmitted to other
minds
• Hyperactive agency detection device
– Leads us to infer that unseen forces are
human agents
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The Evolutionary Psychology of
Religion
• Theory of mind adaptations
– We infer unseen beliefs, desires, and
intentions in other people
• Attachment system
– Originally evolved in the context of mother–
child bonds for protection and nurturance
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The Evolutionary Psychology of
Religion
• Kin psychology
– In Catholicism, for example, nuns are “sisters”
and priests are “fathers,” even though they
are not our real genetic relatives
• Mating psychology
– Whether in the form of prohibiting adultery,
exhorting men not to covet their neighbor’s
wives
© 2015 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.
© 2015 Pearson Education, Inc. All rights reserved.