An Integrated Psychological Science: Toward a Unified Evolutionary Psychology Jennifer Johnson

An Integrated Psychological An Integrated Psychological Science:Science:

Toward a Unified Toward a Unified Evolutionary PsychologyEvolutionary Psychology

Jennifer JohnsonJennifer Johnson

Summary of Previous ChaptersSummary of Previous Chapters

• Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology– Evolution Before Darwin: Lamarck/Cuvier– Darwin’s Theory of Natural Selection– Genes and Particulate Inheritance– The Ethology Movement– Inclusive Fitness Revolution– Trivers’s Seminal Theories

• Reciprocal altruism/parental investment/parent-offspring conflict

– Sociobiology: synthesize – controversy– Psychology:

• Freud/Psychology of Instincts/Rise of Behaviorism/Cultural Variability/Decline of Behaviorism/Cognitive Revolution


• The New Science of Evolutionary Psychology– Creationism/Seeding Theory/Evolution– Products of Evolution

• Adaptation, byproducts, random effects– Levels of Evolutionary Analysis– Evolved Psychological Mechanism: Information

Processing Devices that exist in the form they do b/c they have solved specific problems of survival or reproduction recurrently over the long course of human evolutionary history

• Nonarbitrary criteria• Problem Specific• Numerous and functional in nature

– Research Methods


• Lindsey: Problems of Survival– What survival is - – food acquisition and selection– food adaptations, – why humans drink alcohol– why morning sickness is thought to occur– fears and phobias– hunter-gather hypothesis


• Laura: Women’s Long Term Mating Strategies– Evolved mate preferences for:

• 1- Economic resources• 2- Financial prospects• 3- High social status• 4- Older men• Sustained Acquisition of Resources

– Preferences depend on:• Personal Resources• Temporal Context• Menstrual Cycle• Women’s Mate Value• Geographical Location


• Claire: Men’s long-term mating strategies– reproductive value and fertility – Men prefer women with low waist-to-hip ratios

and other physical cues so they know who is reproductively healthy

– Standards of beauty– Paternity uncertainty


• Kristin: Short term sexual strategies– Men: Use strategies to pursue a LARGE NUMBER of

sexual partners, more REPRODUCTIVE ADVANTAGES for short term sexual encounters

– Women: more RISK involved in short term sexual strategies – most likely pursue them in exchange for PROTECTION OR GOOD GENES for their offspring

– No one engages exclusively in STS, main thing is to pursue them only when you can MAXIMIZE BENEFITS, MINIMIZE COSTS


• Aubrey: Problems of Parenting– Offspring? – Parental Care for all species? No– Paternity Uncertainty Hypothesis– Child Abuse/Homicide/Infanticide– Ability to convert Parental Care into Reproductive

Success– Parental Effort vs. Mating Effort– Maternal care based on health of child– Care for sons vs. daughters– Oedipus Complex


• Emily: Problems of Kinship– 1. The evolution of families is based on a cost-benefit model

where the benefits of staying with the family are greater than the reproductive costs.

– 2. Kinship Altruism - we are more likely to help those who share a greater percent of our genes and have the highest reproductive value.

– 3. Siblings can be our closest friends and our greatest competitors for resources and parental affection and attention.

– 4. Maternal grandparents will invest the most time and energy as they have a greater certainty of a genetic link to their grandchildren than paternal grandparents.

• It basically comes down to the theory of inclusive fitness - we will act in ways that ensure the survival of not only ourselves, but those who share our genes.


• Jordan: Cooperative Alliances– Reciprocal altruism is beneficial overall to a

group because the benefit another person receives usually outweighs the cost of another person, creating an overall net gain in benefits.

– Friendship and how it is mostly beneficial but can be costly if the a friend is after the same things as you are


• Lecia: Aggression and Warfare– Men Consistently more aggressive than women– Men consistently instigator of war– Benefits to war: more copulations due to increase in

status, more resources– Women demean sexual competitors– Men diminish threats to own access of women– Men aggressive towards women b/c dissuade

cheating– Discussed War


• Jessica: Conflict Between the Sexes– both sexes have strategies they use to

achieve certain goals. – Seeing as the different sexes have different

goals and strategies they come into conflict with one another and interfere with each others strategies.

– Some on these conflicts are handled by force, sexual harassment, or properly communicating with one another


• Nicole: Status, Prestige, and Social dominance– How status and dominance play out in social

constructs. – Explain why dominance hierarchies and

status-striving persist today through evolutionary theories.

– Non-human examples were used to show how status and dominance are prevalent in the animal kingdom as well.

The Scientific ProcessThe Scientific Process

“Many sciences develop for a time as exercises in description and empirical generalization. Only later do they acquire reasoned connections within themselves and with other branches of knowledge. Many things were scientifically known of human anatomy and the motions of the planets before they were scientifically explained”

-George Williams, 1966

Main Point: DEVELOPMENTWill this hold true for EP?

The MartianThe Martian

• Spying on psychologists: Arbitrary Division?– Cognitive– Social– Developmental– Personality– Cultural – Clinical– Forensic

Meta-theoryMeta-theory

• EP is the only viable meta-theory powerful enough to integrate all these sub disciplines– Unified understanding of the mechanisms of

the mind

• Chapter 13– How EP can inform each discipline– Argument to dissolve disciplinary boundaries

How EP can inform How EP can inform Cognitive PsychologyCognitive Psychology

• Problem with Cognitive:– Assume general processing mechanism

• What constitutes a successful adaptive solution differs from domain to domain

• Number of possible unconstrained general behavior mechanisms approaches infinity, so organism has no way to determine the successful adaptive solutions

– Content Free Mechanisms– Functional Agnosticism

• View that info-processing mechanisms can be studied in ignorance of adaptive problems designed to solve

How EP can inform Cognitive How EP can inform Cognitive Psychology Psychology

• Evolutionary Assumptions– 1) The human mind consists of a set of evolved

information-processing mechanisms embedded in the human nervous systems

– 2) These mechanisms are produced by natural selection

– 3) Many are functionally specialized to produce behavior which solves particular adaptive problems

– To be functionally specialized, must be richly structured in content-specific ways

How EP can inform Cognitive How EP can inform Cognitive PsychologyPsychology

• Marr and Tooby– Computational theories specify function of

informational processing device• 1) Information processing devices are designed to

solve problems• 2) They solve problems by virtue of their structure• 3) Hence to explain structure of a device need to

know:– What problem it was designed to solve– Why it was designed to solve

• Don’t provide how, only constrain search


• Problem Solving: Heuristics & Biases– Base Rate Fallacy– The Conjunction Fallacy

• Tooby & Cosmides: Rather, study ecological rationalities– Utilize Statistic regularities to solve real adaptive

problems– Goal being sought/materials at hand/context

• Won’t assume cognitive mechanism riddled with problems


• Cosmides & Tooby: Frequentist Hypothesis– Some human reasoning mechanisms are

designed to take as input frequency info and produce as output frequency info

– Advantages• Preserve number of events• Update database• Construct new Reference Classes

– Study that counters Base Rate Fallacy

How EP can inform How EP can inform Cognitive PsychologyCognitive Psychology

• Male and Female Comparisons– Spatial Ability: Related to hunting

• Women outperform men on spatial tasks involving location memory and object memory with certain objects

• Counter?

– Changes: • Several distinct abilities included within spatial• Studies of sex differences should examine nature

of adaptive problem• Cognitive system is multimodular

How EP can inform How EP can inform Social PsychologySocial Psychology

• Because Adaptive problems social, human mind should have psychological mechanisms dedicated to social solutions, especially relationships

• Problem with Social: Phenomenon oriented– Correspondence bias– Social loafing effect– Self-handicapping– Self-serving bias– Confirmation bias– CAN’T EXPLAIN ORIGINS OF PHENOMENON


• Capitalizing on Evolutionary Theories about Social Phenomena– Inclusive Fitness theory– Sexual selection– Parental Investment– Theory of reciprocal altruism– Parent-offspring conflict


• Heuristic Value - Relationships– Events surrounding reproductive activity

• Mating• Status, prestige, reputation• Kinship and family relations (inclusive fitness)• Friends/coalitional allies

– Powerful Meta Theory• Why humans love Shakespeare, soap operas

– Mating, divorce, pregnancy, deceit, manipulations, affairs– Social events that effect fate of our allies

– Return of Group Selection

How EP can informHow EP can informDevelopmental Psychology Developmental Psychology

• Developmental theory is temporal– B/C few mechanisms arise at birth,

development essential to understand psychological mechanisms

• Missing insight: – humans face predictably different adaptive

problems at various points in their lives

How EP can informHow EP can informDevelopmental PsychologyDevelopmental Psychology

• Theory of Mind Modules– Theory of mind: inferences about beliefs and

desires of other individuals in child’s world– Helps solve adaptive problems– Add: Content Saturated Theories


• Attachment and Life History Strategies– Species-Typical Menu: one selected on

environmental experiences– Evolutionary Theory of Socialization

• Fathers’ Presence or Absence• All theories of environmental influence rest on a foundation of

evolved psychological mechanisms, whether or not acknowledged

• Individual Difference– Reproductive physiology, psychological models of social world,

overt behavior– Results from early experiential calibration are adaptively

patterned


• Attachment and Life-History Theory

• Chrisholm & Belsky – integrate the two– Effort Allocation

• Natural selection fashioned decision rules for changing allocation of effort to difference components

• Trade-offs between current and future reproduction• Thus parents effect children: secure, avoidant,

anxious/ambivalent– Attachment styles heritable or represent environment?

How EP can informHow EP can informPersonality PsychologyPersonality Psychology

• Hypothesized psychological features of human nature have provided much of the “core” around which these grand theories of personality have been constructed

• But – So much variability– Typically assume individual variability is not

heritable– Then, why are they linked to activities close to

reproduction?


• Individual Differences can emerge from a variety of heritable and non-heritable sources– Alternative Niche Picking or Strategic Specialization

• Selection favors mechanisms which cause individuals to seek niches with less competition (heritable)

– Sulloway: Birth order• Individual differences are adaptively patterned, but they are

not based on heritable individual differences (non-heritable)


• Adaptive Assessment of Heritable Qualities– Reactive Heritability:

• Heritable individual differences provide input into the decision rule, thereby producing stable individual differences: assessment mechanisms

– Body build: Meso-, ecto-, endomorphic• Aggression and cooperativeness

– Mating Strategies: facial features– Adaptive individual differences based on assessment

of heritable information


• Frequency-Dependent Adaptive Strategies– FD selection requires that payoff of each strategy

decreases as its frequency increases, relative to other strategies in the population

– Bluegill sunfish– Heritable Individual Differences can persist in

population indefinitely through frequency-dependent selection, unlike directional selection

– Mealey’s (1995) theory of psychopathy – survive in cooperative society

• Heritable/exploit short-term sexual strategies

How EP can informHow EP can informClinical PsychologyClinical Psychology

• Present: implicitly appeal to intuitions (good and bad)– Fix: EP provide more rigorous set of explicit

principles for identifying the presence of disorder

• Dysfunction occurs when the mechanism is not performing as it was designed to perform in the contexts in which it was designed to function


• Why dysfunction?– Mechanism fails to activate– Mechanism becomes activated in contexts in which

not designed to become activated– Mechanism fails to coordinate as it was designed to

coordinate

• How dysfunction?– Chance genetic variation– Mutation– Developmental insults


• 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

How EP can informHow EP can informCultural PsychologyCultural Psychology

• Problem: Dichotomy bx culture and biology– Fix: Culture rests on foundation of evolved

psychological mechanism

• Problem: Begin with Culture accounts for variability– Fix: Explain – don’t use “culture”– Evoked Culture– Transmitted Culture


• Evolution of Art, Fiction, Movies, Music

• Display Hypothesis– Culture is an emergent phenomenon arising

form sexual competition among vast numbers of individuals pursuing different mating strategies in different mating arenas

• Men create and display art and music as strategy for broadcasting courtship.


• Display hypothesis– Accounts for:

• Men more, b/c women narrowcasting• Age distribution of cultural displays• Why art, music, literature linked to social status

– Can’t explain:• Content• Solitary enjoyment


• Pinker’s hypothesis:– Evolved mechanisms of the mind for other

purposes that let people take pleasure in shapes and colors and sounds and jokes and stories and myths

• Similar hypothesis:– Activate pleasurable sensations by triggering

a host of evolved mechanisms

Toward a Unified PsychologyToward a Unified Psychology

• Cognitive, social, developmental, personality, clinical, cultural + organizational, industrial, environmental– Dissolve borders b/c human can’t be neatly

partitioned into discrete elements????• Or, b/c Recipe Knowledge????

• Critical task: Identify key adaptive problems– It is not unreasonable to expect that the first scientists

to explore these uncharted territories will come away with a great bounty

TuesdayTuesday

• Java Jay!!! 9:30 am

• We will discuss:– Survey results– Critiques of EP– Other disciplines using EP – Philosophy– Possibilities for a future in EP– Personal Opinions on:

Creationism/Evolution/ID

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An Integrated Psychological Science: Toward a Unified Evolutionary Psychology Jennifer Johnson