An Integrated Psychological Science: Toward a Unified Evolutionary Psychology

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An Integrated Psychological ScienceToward a
Unified Evolutionary Psychology

• Jennifer Johnson

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Summary of Previous Chapters

• Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology
• Evolution Before Darwin Lamarck/Cuvier
• Darwins Theory of Natural Selection
• Genes and Particulate Inheritance
• The Ethology Movement
• Inclusive Fitness Revolution
• Triverss Seminal Theories
• Reciprocal altruism/parental investment/parent-off
  spring conflict
• Sociobiology synthesize controversy
• Psychology
• Freud/Psychology of Instincts/Rise of
  Behaviorism/Cultural Variability/Decline of
  Behaviorism/Cognitive Revolution

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Summary of Previous Chapters

• 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

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Summary of Previous Chapters

• 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

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Summary of Previous Chapters

• Laura Womens 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
• Womens Mate Value
• Geographical Location

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Summary of Previous Chapters

• Claire Mens 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

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Summary of Previous Chapters

• 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

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Summary of Previous Chapters

• 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

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Summary of Previous Chapters

• 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.

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Summary of Previous Chapters

• 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

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Summary of Previous Chapters

• 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

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Summary of Previous Chapters

• 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

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Summary of Previous Chapters

• 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.

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The 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 DEVELOPMENT
• Will this hold true for EP?

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The Martian

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

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Meta-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

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How EP can inform Cognitive 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

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How EP can inform Cognitive 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

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How EP can inform Cognitive Psychology

• 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
• Dont provide how, only constrain search

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How EP can inform Cognitive Psychology

• 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
• Wont assume cognitive mechanism riddled with
  problems

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How EP can inform Cognitive Psychology

• 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

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How EP can inform Cognitive 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

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How EP can inform Social 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
• CANT EXPLAIN ORIGINS OF PHENOMENON

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How EP can inform Social Psychology

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

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How EP can inform Social Psychology

• 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

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How EP can informDevelopmental 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

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How EP can informDevelopmental Psychology

• Theory of Mind Modules
• Theory of mind inferences about beliefs and
  desires of other individuals in childs world
• Helps solve adaptive problems
• Add Content Saturated Theories

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How EP can informDevelopmental Psychology

• 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

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How EP can informDevelopmental Psychology

• 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?

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How EP can informPersonality 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?

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How EP can informPersonality Psychology

• 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)

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How EP can informPersonality Psychology

• 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

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How EP can informPersonality Psychology

• 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
• Mealeys (1995) theory of psychopathy survive
  in cooperative society
• Heritable/exploit short-term sexual strategies

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How EP can informClinical 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

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How EP can informClinical Psychology

• 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

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How EP can informClinical 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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How EP can informCultural 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 dont use culture
• Evoked Culture
• Transmitted Culture

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How EP can informCultural Psychology

• 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.

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How EP can informCultural Psychology

• Display hypothesis
• Accounts for
• Men more, b/c women narrowcasting
• Age distribution of cultural displays
• Why art, music, literature linked to social
  status
• Cant explain
• Content
• Solitary enjoyment

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How EP can informCultural Psychology

• Pinkers 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

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Toward a Unified Psychology

• Cognitive, social, developmental, personality,
  clinical, cultural organizational, industrial,
  environmental
• Dissolve borders b/c human cant 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

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Tuesday

• Java Jay!!! 930 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