Ch. 13 Toward A Unified Evolutionary Psychology

Front 1

What does evolutionary psychology add to the numerous fields of psychology.

Back 1

Adds "why" to these theories. -Why do humans possess the psychological mechanisms in the form they do?
-What specific adaptive function does each mechanism serve?

Front 2

Traditional assumptions of cognitive psychology:
functional agnosticism

Back 2

the view that information processing mechanisms can be studied without understanding the adaptive problems they were designed to solve.

Front 3

2 problems with assumption of general processing mechanisms

Back 3

1. Succesful adaptive solutions differ from domain to domain: we choose friends based on loyalty, fruits on nutritional content. They are not the same.
2. Combinatorial explosion: the nmber of possible behaviors generated by general mechanism approaches.

Front 4

Premises of Evolutionary Cognitive Psychology

Back 4

1. Human mind is a set of evolved information-processing mechanisms in the brain
2. Mechanisms are adaptations produced by natural and sexual selection
3. Mechanisms are functionally specialized to produce behavior that solves specific adaptive problems.
4. mechanisms must be structured in content specific ways.

Front 5

Ecological dominance/ sexual competition hypothesis

Back 5

humans have subdued traditional hostiel forces of nature and the brain has adapted towards complex social competition

Front 6

deadly innovations hypothesis

Back 6

Human innovations amplified risk of injury and premature death, creating selection for general intelligence.

Front 7

What should be at the core of social psychology but is not?

Back 7

Relationships: Friends, lovers, kin, coalitions, enemies, etc.

Front 8

Evolutionary Social Psychology has introduced these theories that provide new insights:

Back 8

- inclusive fitness
- sexual selection
- parental investment
- reciprocal altruism
- parent offspring conflict
- sexual conflict

Front 9

The Evolution of Moral Emotions

Back 9

-moral emotions produce quick automatic evaluations
- subsequently when we are forced to explain or rationalize our moral emotions it is very difficult to do.

Front 10

Possible functions of these:
- moral repulsion to incest
- moralistic anger
- shame
- guilt
- gratitude

Back 10

- avoid inbreeding
- revenge due to violators
- hiding when violations made public
- apology and reparation
- reward one's benefactors

Front 11

Conclusion about moral emotions:

Back 11

even our morality which we sometimes regard as a product of culture, reliious instruction, or parental socialization has a foundation in an evolved psychological mechanism.

Front 12

Developmental:
Life History Theory

Back 12

- time and energy are finite
- components of reproductive success are often in conflict: survival, growth, mating, and parenting.
- there are evolved decision rules to allocate effort to different component of fitness

Front 13

Evolutionary Personality psychology studies

Back 13

Human nature and individual differences.

Front 14

What does personality psychology tend to focus on:

Back 14

species and sex typical differences.

Front 15

Evolutionary approach to individual differences

Back 15

- alternative niche picking or strategic specializations
- adaptive assessment of heritable qualities
- frequency dependent alternative strategies

Front 16

frequency-dependent selection

Back 16

requires that the payoff of each strategy decreases as its frequency increases relative to other strategies in the population

Front 17

adaptive assessment of heritable qualities

Back 17

heritable individual differences provide input into decision rules producing stable individual differences

Front 18

alternative niche picking or strategic specializations

Back 18

as a particular niche, which may be the most cost effective niche is increasingly filling the individual may pick a lower cost-effective niche. However this niche becomes more cost effective than sharing the resources of another niche with others.

Front 19

Clinical:
dysfunction

Back 19

when a mechanism is not performing as it was designed to perform in the contexts in which it was designed to function.

Front 20

Sources of problems erroneously believed to represent disorders.

Back 20

- discrepancy between ancestral and modern environments ex: eating disorders
- mistaking the "on average" functioning of a mechanism
- subjective distress produced by the normal operation of functional mechanisms
ex: depression