Sleeping In Safe Places Essay

In Spörrle and Stich’s (2010) article, “Sleeping in Safe Places,” the researchers investigated people’s sleeping place preferences from the point-of-view of evolutionary psychology. Since there is little research about the topic, they focused on exploring numerous ‘testable’ predictions that originate from their fundamental hypothesis that posits people’s choices for places where they can sleep safely have changed to [sleeping] places where they think they are protected from possible aggressors and ‘predators’ at night. In particular, the researchers assumed that people opted sleeping places where they can see the entrances to the rooms where they sleep from a certain distance (i.e. from windows and doors) while noting they must not be seen from the entrances.
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Further research on the same topic (or something similar) is encouraged due to the lack of research on the subject. They argue that the presence of evolved psychological processes for sleeping is similar to evolutionary mechanisms because both are crucial to human survival. To prove their hypotheses, the study examined the effect of the door and window positions on bed positioning, which has not been researched much. Additionally, the article featured a theoretical framework for examining people’s sleeping place preferences, as a topic that is experiment-based and permits concrete assumptions that can be applied in real life (has practical use). Thus, the research uses evolutionary psychology as a concrete example by using it in the field of architectural psychology. In addition, the current study contributed to evolutionary psychology to an extent where it is applied to the area of sleeping behavior in humans. Nonetheless, the researchers’ hypotheses that a set of evolved psychological processes motivated the choices of sleeping places in humans based on empirical