Psychology

Evolutionary psychology aims to understand and describe human behaviour in the light of past and continuing selection and adaptation. Still a young and developing discipline, the past couple of decades has seen enormous progress. As the science matures, its scope is inevitably beginning to broaden towards tackling contemporary issues in human society. To date, however, concerted effort to apply principle to practice has been patchy and limited in extent. This book aims to provide a foundation for an incipient focus on applications of evolutionary psychology. It draws together a collection of renowned academics from a very disparate set of fields, whose common interest lies in using evolutionary thinking to inform their research. It is the first book to overtly consider how basic evolutionary thinking is being applied to such a wide range of specific social, economic and technological problems.

Rather than viewing individual differences as merely the raw material upon which selection operates, this book provides theories and empirical evidence which suggest that personality and individual differences are central to evolved psychological mechanisms and behavioral functioning. The book draws theoretical inspiration from life history theory, evolutionary genetics, molecular genetics, developmental psychology, personality psychology, and evolutionary psychology, while utilizing the theories of the “best and the brightest” international scientists working on this cutting edge paradigm shift. The first three sections analyze personality and the adaptive landscape; here, the book offers a novel conceptual framework for examining “personality assessment adaptations.” Because individuals in a social environment have momentous consequences for creating and solving adaptive problems, humans have evolved “difference-detecting mechanisms” designed to make crucial social decisions such as mate selection, friend selection, kin investment, coalition formation, and hierarchy negotiation. The second section examines developmental and life-history theoretical perspectives to explore the origins and development of personality over the lifespan. The third section focuses on the relatively new field of evolutionary genetics and explores which of the major evolutionary forces—such as balancing selection, mutation, co-evolutionary arms races, and drift—are responsible for the origins of personality and individual differences.

The field of cognitive psychology is in a state of empirical abundance, and experts now know more about mammalian brain function than ever before. In contrast, psychological problems such as ADHD, autism, anxiety, and depression are on the rise, as are medical conditions such as diabetes, obesity, and autoimmune disorders. Why, in this era of unprecedented scientific self-knowledge, does there seem to be so much uncertainty about what humans need for optimal development? Evolution, Early Experience and Human Development asserts that human development is being misshaped by government policies, social practices, and public beliefs that fail to consider basic human needs. In this pioneering volume, scientists from a range of disciplines theorize that the rise of problems like depression and obesity is partially attributable to a disparity between the environments and conditions under which our mammalian brains currently develop and those in which the brains of our distant ancestors developed—and evolved to suit. These early environments and conditions have been named the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, or EEA. For example, healthy brain and emotional development depends to a significant extent on caregiver availability and quality of care, which is argued to be in decline by some experts; in addition, practices such as breastfeeding, cosleeping, and parental social support, which have waned in modern society, may be integral to healthy infant development. As the authors argue, without a more informed appreciation of the ideal conditions under which human brains develop and function, human beings will continue to struggle with maintaining mental and physical health, and psychological treatments will not be effective. Evolution, Early Experience and Human Development puts forth a logical, empirically based argument regarding human mammalian needs for optimal development, based on research from anthropology, neurobiology, animal science, and human development. The result is a unique exploration of evolutionary approaches to human behavior that will support the development of new policies, new attitudes toward health, and alterations in childcare practices that will better promote optimal human development.

The book examines the issue of whether there is any general theory in the biological and social sciences that has similar explanatory power to the general theories of physics. Specifically selection theory and niche construction are deemed to have wide explanatory scope within the transformation of species, certain forms of learning and knowledge gain, the operation of the vertebrate immune system, and the way science itself operates as a process. Cultural change in general is also assessed as a possible consequence of selection processes. It is concluded that in addition to the selection and construction processes themselves, the complexity of the multiple forms of co-evolving selection processes operating at different levels of selection must be considered as an essential part of any general theory.

From an early age, humans know a surprising amount about basic physical principles, such as gravity, force, mass, and shape. We can see this in the way that young children play and manipulate objects around them. The same behavior has long been observed in primates — chimpanzees have been shown to possess a remarkable ability to make and use simple tools. But what does this tell us about their inner mental state — do they therefore share the same understanding to that of a young child? Do they understand the simple, underlying physical principles involved? Though some people would say that they do, this book reports groundbreaking research that questions whether this really is the case. Challenging the assumptions so often made about apes, it offers us a rare glimpse into the workings of another mind, examining how apes perceive and understand the physical world — an understanding that appears to be both similar to, and yet profoundly different from our own.

‘IF’ is one of the most important and interesting words in the English language, being used to express hypothetical thought. The use of conditionals such as ‘if’ also distinguishes human intelligence from that of all other animals. This book presents a new theoretical approach to understanding hypothetical thought. It draws on studies from the psychology of judgement and decision making, as well as philosophical logic.

Sociologists and social and cultural anthropologists have largely missed a major intellectual revolution of our time: the application to our own species of the Darwinian framework that has been spectacularly successful in explaining the behaviors and societies of every other species in the natural world. This volume demonstrates the utility of the evolutionary approach for the social sciences, while discussing the confusions and unfounded fears that have in the past made this scientific perspective seem so controversial. Our evolved psychology is foundational for fields ranging from feminism to criminology, an insight obscured by the endemic speciesism that has led the social sciences to nearly miss the revolution.

This book updates Darwin’s early account of the evolution of morality in light of contemporary theory and research from a wide array of academic areas. The evidence supports two main propositions. First, a capacity for morality evolved in the human species because it helped early humans survive, reproduce, and propagate their genes. Second, traditional psychological accounts of morality can be improved by recognizing that processes such as those that regulate social learning, moral reasoning, empathy, perspective-taking, and conscience, are products of evolution. To account for the sources of morality featured in psychological theories, we must understand the functions that they evolved to serve. Dispositions to exert self-control, to defer to authority, to obey rules that uphold the social order, to punish transgressors, and to behave in altruistic and cooperative ways evolved because they helped early humans advance their biological interests and reap the benefits of group living. Old brain mechanisms that humans share with other primates engender primitive aspects of a sense of morality, such as feelings of moral obligation, sympathy, gratitude, guilt, forgiveness, and righteous indignation. Although new brain mechanisms endow humans with higher-order cognitive abilities that enable them to override primitive impulses, people are only provisionally rational, and often use mental shortcuts that are susceptible to a variety of cognitive biases to make moral decisions in their everyday lives. People are naturally-disposed to be as moral as they have to be to advance their interests, and a little bit more.

This edited volume bridges the epistemological gap between primate ethologists and primate neurobiologists. Experts in several fields review work ranging from primate foraging behavior, to the neurophysiology of motor control; from vocal communication, to the functions of the auditory cortex. This synthesis of the cognitive, ethological, and neurobiological approaches to primate behavior yields an understanding of our primate cousins to date, and sheds light on the evolutionary development of human behavior and cognition. The book contains chapters by primatologists, comparative psychologists, and neuroscientists, who have developed new ideas and experimental approaches, and who have applied these to a variety of issues dealing with primate behavior and neurobiology. The volume collects in a single book both basic and cutting-edge information on primate behavior and cognition, neurobiology, and the emerging discipline of neuroethology.

What cognitive abilities underpin the use of tools, and how are tools and their properties represented or understood by tool-users? Does the study of tool use provide us with a unique or distinctive source of information about the causal cognition of tool-users? Tool use is a topic of major interest to all those interested in animal cognition, because it implies that the animal has knowledge of the relationship between objects and their effects. There are countless examples of animals developing tools to achieve some goal — chimps sharpening sticks to use as spears, bonobos using sticks to fish for termites, and New Caledonian crows developing complex tools to extracts insects from logs. Studies of tool use have been used to examine an exceptionally wide range of aspects of cognition, such as planning, problem-solving and insight, naive physics, and social relationship between action and perception. A key debate in recent research on animal cognition concerns the level of cognitive sophistication that is implied by animal tool use, and developmental psychologists have been addressing related questions regarding the processes through which children acquire the ability to use tools. In neuropsychology, patterns of impairments in tool use due to brain damage, and studies of neural changes associated with tool use, have also led to debates about the different types of cognitive abilities that might underpin tool use, and about how tool use may change the way space or the body is represented.