EvPsych & Behavioral Economics

Homo economicus vs. Homo actualis

"Actual man" as opposed to Homo economicus, or "Economic Man." Homo economicus is described by Nobel laureate Daniel McFadden as "sovereign in tastes, steely-eyed and point on in perception of risk, and relentless in maximization of happiness." McFadden calls such a person a rare species. Homo actualis is more to the norm and is described by Baggini (2016) as "often uncertain or ambiguous in preferences, blurry-eyed, poor at risk assessment and inconsistent in the maximisation of happiness." References Julian Baggini (2016), The Edge of Reason: A Rational Skeptic in an Irrational World Daniel McFadden (2006), Presidential speech to the American Economic Association

Consequences . . . (Dalio, 2017)

"Failing to consider second- and third-order consequences is the cause of a lot of painfully bad decisions, and it is especially deadly when the first inferior option confirms your own biases. Never seize on the first available option, no matter how good it seems, before you've asked questions and explored." Ray Dalio, Principles: Life and Work (2017)

Imitation . . . (Baldwin)

"My sense of self grows by imitation of you . . . an imitative creation." James Mark Baldwin

Thought . . . (Bakunin, 1873)

"Natural and social life always precedes thought (which is merely one of its functions) but is never its result. . . . Abstract reflections [are] always produced by life but never producing it." Mikhail Bakunin (1873), Statism and Anarchy

Psychotropy

"Psychotropy is one of the fundamental conditions of modernity . . ." David Lord Smail On Deep History and the Brain

"The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme" (1979), Stephen Jay Gould & Richard Lewontin

"The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme," also known as the "Spandrels paper," is a paper by evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin, originally published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences in 1979. The paper criticizes the adaptationist school of thought that was prevalent in evolutionary biology at the time using two metaphors: that of the spandrels in St Mark's Basilica, a cathedral in Venice, Italy, and that of the fictional character "Pangloss" in Voltaire's novellaCandide. The paper was the first to use the architectural term "spandrel" in a biological context.

"solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short"

"Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time or war where every man is enemy to every man, the same is consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain, and consequently no culture of the earth, no navigation nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea, no commodious building, no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force, no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time, no arts, no letters, no society, and, which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death, and the life of man solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, "Ch. 13, Of the Natural Condition of Mankind as Concerning Their Felicity and Misery"

social privilege

"an advantage that only one person or group of people has". These groups can be advantaged based on age, education level, disability, ethnic or racial category, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, and social class. It is generally considered to be a theoretical concept used in a variety of subjects and often linked to social inequality. Privilege is also linked to social and cultural forms of power. The term has become more widely used in contemporary language to discuss this phenomenon, proved by its presence in a multitude of New York Times articles. It began as an academic concept, but has since been invoked more widely, outside of academia. This evolution has led to growing awareness and acceptance of this idea in popular culture. This subject is highly nuanced and based on the interactions of different forms of privilege within certain situations. Furthermore, it must be understood as the inverse of social inequality, in that it focuses on how power structures in society aid societally privileged people, as opposed to how those structures oppress others.

"unique human properties" (Damasio, 1994)

"systems in the human brain . . . with unique human properties, among them the ability to anticipate the future and plan accordingly within a complex social environment; the sense of responsibility toward the self and other; and the ability to orchestrate one's survival deliberately, at the command of one's free will." Antonio Damasio (1994), Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

Evolutionary Routes to Individual Dispositional Strategies

(1) heritable alternative strategies, (2) heritable calibration of psychological mechanisms, (3) situationally contingent alternative strategies, and (4) developmental calibration of psychological mechanisms.

On Human Nature (1978), E.O. Wilson

(second edition 2004) is a book by Harvard biologist E. O. Wilson, in which the author attempts to explain human nature and society through sociobiology. Wilson argues that evolution has left its traces on characteristics such as generosity, self-sacrifice, worship and the use of sex for pleasure, and proposes a sociobiological explanation of homosexuality. He attempts to complete the Darwinian revolution by bringing biological thought into social sciences and humanities. Wilson describes On Human Nature as a sequel to his earlier books The Insect Societies (1971) and Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975).

The Adapted Mind

-natural and sexual selection operate not on behavior, but on the psychological mechanisms that cause the behavior

EvPsych Theoretical Tenets (Cosmides & Tooby, 2005)

1) brain is a computer that extracts information from the environment, 2)

Peter Carruthers' Arguments for Massive Modularity

1) functional decomposition (biological) 2) computational argument 3) poverty of the stimulus

cultural drift

1) the spread of culture traits throughout an area 2) the tendency of a culture or its institutions to manifest cumulative variation in certain directions.

A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (Thornhill & Palmer, 2000)

A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion is a 2000 book by the biologist Randy Thornhill and the anthropologist Craig T. Palmer, in which the authors argue that evolutionary psychology can account for rape among human beings, maintain that rape is either a behavioral adaptation or a byproduct of adaptive traits such as sexual desire and aggressiveness, and make proposals for preventing rape. They also criticize the assumption that there is a connection between what is naturally selected and what is morally right or wrong, which they refer to as the "naturalistic fallacy", and the idea, popularized by the feminist author Susan Brownmiller in Against Our Will (1975), that rape is an expression of male domination and is not sexually motivated.

social grooming hypothesis

A model of language evolution proposing that gossip for humans serves the same purpose of social network building as does grooming for chimpanzees.

positive externality

A positive externality imposes an unexpected benefit on a third party. The producer doesn't agree to this, nor do they receive compensation for it. Scientific research often leads to positive externalities. Research findings can have applications beyond their initial scope. The resulting information becomes part of our collective knowledge base. However, the researcher who makes a discovery cannot receive the full benefits. Nor do they necessarily feel entitled to them.

natural selection

A process in which individuals that have certain inherited traits tend to survive and reproduce at higher rates than other individuals because of those traits.

culture and sexuality (Baumeister)

A series of studies of human sexuality has addressed questions such as how nature and culture influence people's sex drive, rape and sexual coercion, the cultural suppression of female sexuality, and how couples negotiate their sexual patterns. In his research, Baumeister reached four major conclusions: The relative influence of culture and nature on sexuality varies by gender. Female sexuality is more cultural/nurture, and male sexuality is more in-born/nature (see erotic plasticity).There is a gender difference with sex drive. Men, on average, want more sex than women.The present widespread cultural suppression of female sexuality exists in large part at the behest of women.Sexual interactions can be analyzed in terms of cost-benefit analysis and market dynamics with "sexual economics."

Evolutionary Theory

A theory presented by the naturalist Charles Darwin; it views the history of a species in terms of the inherited, adaptive value of physical characteristics, of mental activity, and of behavior.

Veblen effect

Abnormal market behavior where consumers purchase the higher-priced goods whereas similar low-priced (but not identical) substitutes are available. It is caused either by the belief that higher price means higher quality, or by the desire for conspicuous consumption (to be seen as buying an expensive, prestige item). Named after its discoverer, the US social-critic Thorstein Bunde Veblen (1857-1929).

Eusociality

Altruism in social groups that have sterile individuals.

EEB

An acronym describing the early integration of evolution, ecology, and behavior as an explanatory framework for organisms.

evolutionary social psychology

An extension of evolutionary psychology that views complex social behaviour as adaptive, helping the individual, kin and the species as a whole to survive. Takes an evolutionary perspective to social psychology as testable, not reductionist, not a theory about rigid genetic determinism, not a justification for the status quo, and not incompatible with sociocultural or cognitive analyses. Instead, is a set of ideas that have proved quite useful in generating novel hypotheses, and parsimoniously connecting findings from very different domains ranging from mate choice and family relationships to aggression and intergroup relations. Adopting an evolutionary perspective can help us appreciate not only the common threads that bind the people in our culture to those in other cultures, but also, beyond that, to the other species with which we share the earth. Taking this broad perspective, however, also makes us aware of the vast reaches of our own ignorance. As yet, we know very little about how evolved psychological mechanisnis inside individuals develop, or how they influence, and are influenced by, the complex cultures that humans construct. Bringing light to these questions will require a fuller integration of all the different theoretical perspectives on human social behavior.

Hierarchy in the Forest (1999), Christopher Boehm

Are humans by nature hierarchical or egalitarian? Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (1999) addresses this question by examining the evolutionary origins of social and political behavior. Christopher Boehm, an anthropologist whose fieldwork has focused on the political arrangements of human and nonhuman primate groups, postulates that egalitarianism is in effect a hierarchy in which the weak combine forces to dominate the strong. The political flexibility of our species is formidable: we can be quite egalitarian, we can be quite despotic. Hierarchy in the Forest traces the roots of these contradictory traits in chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla, and early human societies. Boehm looks at the loose group structures of hunter-gatherers, then at tribal segmentation, and finally at present-day governments to see how these conflicting tendencies are reflected. Hierarchy in the Forest claims new territory for biological anthropology and evolutionary biology by extending the domain of these sciences into a crucial aspect of human political and social behavior. This book will be a key document in the study of the evolutionary basis of genuine altruism.

fundamental situational error

As defined by David M. Buss, the fundamental situational error is the assumption that because situational variance can account for behavioral variance, a coherent explanatory account need not invoke stable psychological mechanisms residing within the organism. Without internal mechanisms there can be no behavior.

sociobiological fallacy

As proposed by David M. Buss, the sociobiological fallacy maintains that many sociobiologists have skipped or neglected the 'psychological level' of analysis. Simply, they have concentrated too much on the end product of behavior, and have failed to question why humans developed the behaviors in the first place.

Cultural Evolution Theory

As time moves forward, we evolve FROM superstitious and savage (uncivilized non-western world) TO enlightened and civilized (western world). Idea of skin color adding to this concept.

Attitude polarization (belief polarization, polarization effect)

Attitude polarization, also known as belief polarization and polarization effect, is a phenomenon in which a disagreement becomes more extreme as the different parties consider evidence on the issue. It is one of the effects of confirmation bias: the tendency of people to search for and interpret evidence selectively, to reinforce their current beliefs or attitudes. When people encounter ambiguous evidence, this bias can potentially result in each of them interpreting it as in support of their existing attitudes, widening rather than narrowing the disagreement between them. The effect is observed with issues that activate emotions, such as political "hot button" issues. For most issues, new evidence does not produce a polarization effect. For those issues where polarization is found, mere thinking about the issue, without contemplating new evidence, produces the effect. Social comparison processes have also been invoked as an explanation for the effect, which is increased by settings in which people repeat and validate each other's statements. This apparent tendency is of interest not only to psychologists, but also to sociologists and philosophers.

August Weismann (1834-1914)

August Friedrich Leopold Weismann FRS (For) HFRSE LLD (17 January 1834 - 5 November 1914) was a German evolutionary biologist. Ernst Mayr ranked him as the second most notable evolutionary theorist of the 19th century, after Charles Darwin. Weismann became the Director of the Zoological Institute and the first Professor of Zoology at Freiburg. His main contribution involved germ plasm theory, at one time also known as Weismannism, according to which inheritance (in a multicellular organism) only takes place by means of the germ cells—the gametessuch as egg cells and sperm cells. Other cells of the body—somatic cells—do not function as agents of heredity. The effect is one-way: germ cells produce somatic cells and are not affected by anything the somatic cells learn or therefore any ability an individual acquires during its life. Genetic information cannot pass from soma to germ plasm and on to the next generation. Biologists refer to this concept as the Weismann barrier. This idea, if true, rules out the inheritance of acquired characteristics as proposed by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. However, a careful reading of Weismann's work over the span of his entire career shows that he had more nuanced views, insisting, like Darwin, that a variable environment was necessary to cause variation in the hereditary material. The idea of the Weismann barrier is central to the modern synthesis.

Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)

Avram Noam Chomsky (born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, historian,social critic, and political activist. Sometimes called "the father of modern linguistics", Chomsky is also a major figure in analytic philosophy and one of the founders of the field of cognitive science. He holds a joint appointment as Institute Professor Emeritus at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and laureate professor at the University of Arizona, and is the author of more than 100 books on topics such as linguistics, war, politics, and mass media. Ideologically, he aligns with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism.

Axel Honneth (b. 1949)

Axel Honneth (born 1949) is a German philosopher. Honneth's work focuses on social-political and moral philosophy, especially relations of power, recognition, and respect. One of his core arguments is for the priority of intersubjective relationships of recognition in understanding social relations. This includes non- and mis-recognition as a basis of social and interpersonal conflict. For instance, grievances regarding the distribution of goods in society are ultimately struggles for recognition.

free will (Baumeister)

Baumeister approaches the topic of free will from the view-point of evolutionary psychology. He has listed the major aspects that make up free will as self-control, rational, intelligent choice, planful behavior, and autonomous initiative. Baumeister proposes that "the defining thrust of human psychological evolution was selection in favor of cultural capability" and that these four psychological capabilities evolved to help humans function in the context of culture. In his view, free will is an advanced form of action control that allows humans to act in pro-social ways towards their enlightened self-interest when acting in these ways would otherwise be in conflict with the fulfillment of evolutionarily older drives or instincts. Research by Baumeister and colleagues (principally Kathleen Vohs) has shown that disbelief in free will can lead people to act in ways that are harmful to themselves and society, such as cheating on a test, increased aggression, decreased helpfulness, lower achievement levels in the workplace, and possible barriers to beating addiction.

erotic plasticity (Baumeister)

Baumeister coined the term "erotic plasticity", which is the extent to which one's sex drive can be shaped by cultural, social and situational factors. He argues that women have high plasticity, meaning that their sex drive can more easily change in response to external pressures. On the other hand, men have low plasticity, and therefore have sex drives that are relatively inflexible.

E.O. Wilson

Biologist who co-coined, with Robert MacArthur, the theory of island biogeography, which identifies factors that regulate species richness on islands. Wilson has been called "the father of sociobiology" and "the father of biodiversity" for his environmental advocacy, and his secular-humanistand deist ideas pertaining to religious and ethical matters. Among his greatest contributions to ecological theory is the theory of island biogeography, which he developed in collaboration with the mathematical ecologist Robert MacArthur. This theory served as the foundation of the field of conservation area design, as well as the unified neutral theory of biodiversity of Stephen Hubbell.

"The Ancient Strategy" (Buss, 1989)

Buss' (1989) postulate that, although human makes generally adopt a monogamous mating strategy, they usually do not forgo casual mating opportunities, similar to male chimpanzees. David Buss (1989), "Sex Differences in Human Mate Preferences: Evolutionary Hypotheses Tested in 37 Cultures"

Anne Campbell

Campbell's research was largely concerned with differences between men and women in their aggressive behaviour. In the 1980s she studied female violence through ethnographic work with female gang members in New York. She subsequently investigated social representations of aggression: the different explanations that men and women offer for their own aggression. Campbell found that men are more likely than women to report that their aggression was a means to an end, while women are more likely to view it as a loss of control. Campbell's 1999 'Staying Alive' paper proposed an evolutionary explanation for sex differences in aggression. She argued that, while competition is important for women as well as men, women's competition takes less direct and risky forms than men's because mothers are more critical to the survival of their offspring than fathers are. She went on to explore possible ways in which evolution might have shaped men's and women's psychology differently, in particular with regard to impulsivity[9][10][11] and fear.

Christopher Boehm (b. 1931)

Christopher Boehm (born 1931) is an Americancultural anthropologist with a subspecialty in primatology, who researches conflict resolution, altruism, moral origins, and feuding and warfare. He is also the Director of the Jane Goodall Research Center at University of Southern California, a multi-media interactive database focusing on the social and moral behavior of world hunter gatherers.

reverse dominance hierarchy

Christopher Boehm focuses on whether humans are hierarchical or egalitarian by nature. His thesis "is that egalitarianism does not result from the mere absence of hierarchy, as is commonly assumed. Rather egalitarianism involves a very special type of hierarchy, a curious type that is based on antihierarchical feelings." This "Reverse Dominance Hierarchy," as Boehm calls it, depends on the rank and file banding together "to deliberately dominate their potential master if they wish to remain equal." Boehm extends his analysis to argue that the processes of group selection originally advanced by David Sloan Wilson can account for the evolution of altruistic behavior in humans.

major evolutionary transition

Complexity of life forms on Earth has increased tremendously, primarily driven by subsequent evolutionary transitions in individuality, a mechanism in which units formerly being capable of independent replication combine to form higher-level evolutionary units. Although this process has been likened to the recursive combination of pre-adapted subsolutions in the framework of learning theory, no general mathematical formalization of this analogy has been provided yet. Here we show, building on former results connecting replicator dynamics and Bayesian update, that (i) evolution of a hierarchical population under multilevel selection is equivalent to Bayesian inference in hierarchical Bayesian models, and (ii) evolutionary transitions in individuality, driven by synergistic fitness interactions, is equivalent to learning the structure of hierarchical models via Bayesian model comparison. These correspondences support a learning theory oriented narrative of evolutionary complexification: the complexity and depth of the hierarchical structure of individuality mirrors the amount and complexity of data that has been integrated about the environment through the course of evolutionary history.

parent-offspring conflict

Conflict that arises between parents and their offspring over how much the parents will invest in the offspring. These conflicts stem from the opposing genetic interests of parents and offspring. Parent-offspring conflict (POC) is an expression coined in 1974 by Robert Trivers. It is used to describe the evolutionary conflict arising from differences in optimal parental investment (PI) in an offspring from the standpoint of the parent and the offspring. PI is any investment by the parent in an individual offspring that decreases the parent's ability to invest in other offspring, while the selected offspring's chance of surviving increases.

conscious evolution

Conscious evolution refers to the ability of the human species to choose what the species Homo sapiens will become in the future, based on recent advancements in science, medicine, technology, psychology, sociology, and spirituality. Most leading thinkers in this area have focused on the conscious evolution of how we think, live, organize ourselves, work together, and address issues, rather than on biological evolution. The idea of conscious evolution is not a specific theory, but it has loose connections to integral theory, Spiral Dynamics, and noosphere thought.[1] It is also sometimes connected to the theory of the global brain or collective consciousness.[1] Some have suggested "conscious cultural-evolution"[2] as a more accurate term, to reduce association with standard biological evolution, though this is not widely applied. Conscious evolution suggests that now that humanity is conscious of its history and of how things evolve (evolutionary consciousness), and given the rapid pace of change in society and culture, humanity can (and should) choose advancement through co-operation, co-creation and sustainable practices over self-destruction through separateness, competition, and ecological devastation.

cheater detection module

Cosmides and Tooby have proposed the existence of a cheater detection module to explain why we are so good at detecting cheaters. This module is an adaptive algorithm in the brain that once activated causes individuals to automatically look for cheaters in social exchange. According to Cosmides and Tooby's view of the mind, modules operate without conscious effort and are distinct from general cognitive resources. In the present study we tested this effortless, automatic nature of the cheater detection module.

cultural selection

Cultural practices evolve as they contribute to the success of the practicing group. B. F. Skinner is best known for the development of operant conditioning — the process by which the consequences of our behavior affect the future probability of its recurrence given particular antecedent conditions. What you might not know is that he conceptualized operant conditioning as a type of selection, analogous to Darwin's biological selection. In other words, Skinner thought of those behaviors which are reinforced and recur more often in the future to be "selected" by those consequences. Much like Darwin thought that biological traits are selected based on their survival value, Skinner thought of reinforcement as a type of "survival" in the sense that the behavior of which reinforcement is contingent is more likely to continue into the future. Those behaviors that do not contact operant consequences undergo "extinction" and fade away — just like the dinosaurs. However, Skinner also talked of a third type of selection — cultural selection. This type of selection differs from operant selection in two ways. First, cultural selection pertains to the spread of innovative technologies or ways of doing things within populations of people. For example, long ago there was MySpace — one of the most popular social media sites up until that time. A few years later, however, Facebook came along. Today you hardly hear of MySpace and it seems that everyone across all age groups is on Facebook. Skinner's cultural selection could help explain why Facebook is more reinforcing than MySpace and how the practice of using Facebook spread and overcame the practice of using MySpace. Secondly, cultural selection is based on group consequences, rather than consequences for the individual. Skinner (1981)makes this point abundantly clear. However, exactly what he meant by "group" consequences that are different than individual consequences was never precisely articulated. If you look through his writings, though, a clearer picture begins to emerge.

virtuous coevolutionary spiral

D.S. Wilson's phrase from his book, This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution (2019), that emphasizes that selection by consequences need not be a race to the bottom." By directing social and cultural evolution, humans can use evolutionary processes for positive gains.

behavioral coevolutionary arms race

D.S. Wilson's term for power struggles that occur between individuals or groups as negotiated through behavioral maneuvers.

identity by descent

DNA replication without mutation (refers to alleles and associated phenotypes).

David Whiten

David Andrew Whiten, known as Andrew Whiten is a British zoologist and psychologist, Professor of Evolutionary and Developmental Psychology, and Professor Wardlaw Emeritus at University of St Andrews in Scotland. He is known for his research in social cognition, specifically on social learning, tradition and the evolution of culture, social Machiavellian intelligence, autism and imitation, as well as the behavioral ecology of sociality. In 1996, Whiten and his colleagues invented an artificial fruit that allowed to study learning in apes and humans.

David C. Geary

David Cyril Geary is a United States cognitive developmental and evolutionary psychologist with interests in mathematical learning and sex differences.

David F. Bjorklund

David Fredrick Bjorklund is an American professor of psychology at Florida Atlantic University. His areas of research interest include cognitive development and evolutionary developmental psychology. His works include authoring several books and over 130 scientific papers. He is editor of the peer-reviewed Journal of Experimental Child Psychology.

rigid flexibility

David Sloan Wilson's (2019) term describing an adaptation that works effectively in one context but ineffectively in others.

domain-general learning (mechanisms)

Domain-general learning theories of developmentsuggest that humans are born with mechanisms in the brain that exist to support and guide learning on a broad level, regardless of the type of information being learned. Domain-general learning theories also recognize that although learning different types of new information may be processed in the same way and in the same areas of the brain, different domains also function interdependently. Because these generalized domains work together, skills developed from one learned activity may translate into benefits with skills not yet learned. Another facet of domain-general learning theories is that knowledge within domains is cumulative, and builds under these domains over time to contribute to our greater knowledge structure. Domain-general learning theories are in direct opposition to domain-specific learning theories, also sometimes called theories of Modularity. Domain-specific learning theories posit that humans learn different types of information differently, and have distinctions within the brain for many of these domains. Domain-specific learning theorists also assert that these neural domains are independent, purposed solely for the acquisition of one skill (i.e. facial recognition or mathematics), and may not provide direct benefits in the learning of other, unrelated skills.

Donald Symons

Donald Symons is an Americananthropologist best known as one of the founders of evolutionary psychology, and for pioneering the study of human sexuality from an evolutionary perspective. He is one of the most cited researchers in contemporary sex research. His work is referenced by scientists investigating an extremely diverse range of sexual phenomena. Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker describes Symons' The Evolution of Human Sexuality (1979) as a "groundbreaking book" and "a landmark in its synthesis of evolutionary biology, anthropology, physiology, psychology, fiction, and cultural analysis, written with a combination of rigor and wit. It was a model for all subsequent books that apply evolution to human affairs, particularly mine.

Four Drives Motivating Human Choice (Lawrence & Nohria, 2002)

Drive to acquire objects and experiences that improve our status relative to others (D1). Drive to bond with others in long-term relationships of mutual care and commitment (D2). Drive to learn and make sense of the world and ourselves (D3). Drive to defend ourselves, our loved ones, and our resources from harm (D4). Paul R. Lawrence & Nitin Nohria Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices (2002)

Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices (2002), Paul R. Lawrence and Nitin Nohria

Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices (2002), Paul R. Lawrence and Nitin Nohria postulate that human beings have four fundamental, biological drives: acquiring, bonding, learning, defending.

Four Laws of Ecology

Ecology is the study of relationships and processes linking living things to the physical and chemical environment. 1) The First Law of Ecology: Everything Is Connected to Everything Else 2) The Second Law of Ecology: Everything Must go Somewhere 3) The Third Law of Ecology: Nature Knows Best 4) The Fourth Law of Ecology: There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

economic determinism

Economic determinism is a socioeconomic theory that economic relationships (such as being an owner or capitalist, or being a worker or proletarian) are the foundation upon which all other societal and political arrangements in society are based. The theory stresses that societies are divided into competing economic classes whose relative political power is determined by the nature of the economic system. In the version associated with Karl Marx, the emphasis is on the proletariat who are considered to be locked in a class struggle with the capitalist class, which will eventually end with the revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system and the gradual development of socialism. Marxist thinkers have dismissed plain and unilateral economic determinism as a form of "vulgar Marxism", or "economism", nowhere included in Marx's works. In the writing of American history the term is associated with historian Charles A. Beard (1874-1948), who was not a Marxist but who emphasized the long-term political contest between bankers and business interest on the one hand, and agrarian interests on the other.

Edvard Westermarck (1862-1939)

Edvard Alexander Westermarck (20 November 1862 - 3 September 1939) was a Finnish philosopher and sociologist. Among other subjects, he studied exogamy and the incest taboo. The phenomenon of reverse sexual imprinting is when two people live in close domestic proximity during the first few years in the life of either one, and both become desensitised to sexual attraction, now known as the Westermarck effect, was first formally described by him in his book The History of Human Marriage (1891). He has been described as "first Darwiniansociologist" or "the first sociobiologist."

enlightened self-interest

Enlightened self-interest is a philosophy in ethics which states that persons who act to further the interests of others (or the interests of the group or groups to which they belong), ultimately serve their own self-interest. It has often been simply expressed by the belief that an individual, group, or even a commercial entity will "do well by doing good".

evolutionary developmental psychology (EDP)

Evolutionary developmental psychology (EDP) is a research paradigm that applies the basic principles of Darwinian evolution, particularly natural selection, to understand the development of human behavior and cognition. It involves the study of both the genetic and environmental mechanisms that underlie the development of social and cognitivecompetencies, as well as the epigenetic (gene-environment interactions) processes that adapt these competencies to local conditions. EDP considers both the reliably developing, species-typical features of ontogeny (developmental adaptations), as well as individual differences in behavior, from an evolutionary perspective. While evolutionary views tend to regard most individual differences as the result of either random genetic noise (evolutionary byproducts) and/or idiosyncrasies (for example, peer groups, education, neighborhoods, and chance encounters) rather than products of natural selection, EDP asserts that natural selection can favor the emergence of individual differences via "adaptive developmental plasticity." From this perspective, human development follows alternative life-history strategies in response to environmental variability, rather than following one species-typical pattern of development. EDP is closely linked to the theoretical framework of evolutionary psychology (EP), but is also distinct from EP in several domains, including research emphasis (EDP focuses on adaptations of ontogeny, as opposed to adaptations of adulthood) and consideration of proximate ontogenetic and environmental factors (i.e., how development happens) in addition to more ultimate factors (i.e., why development happens), which are the focus of mainstream evolutionary psychology.

Evolutionary ethics

Evolutionary ethics is a field of inquiry that explores how evolutionary theory might bear on our understanding of ethics or morality.[1] The range of issues investigated by evolutionary ethics is quite broad. Supporters of evolutionary ethics have claimed that it has important implications in the fields of descriptive ethics, normative ethics, and metaethics. Descriptive evolutionary ethics consists of biological approaches to morality based on the alleged role of evolution in shaping human psychology and behavior. Such approaches may be based in scientific fields such as evolutionary psychology, sociobiology, or ethology, and seek to explain certain human moral behaviors, capacities, and tendencies in evolutionary terms. For example, the nearly universal belief that incest is morally wrong might be explained as an evolutionary adaptation that furthered human survival. Normative (or prescriptive) evolutionary ethics, by contrast, seeks not to explain moral behavior, but to justify or debunk certain normative ethical theories or claims. For instance, some proponents of normative evolutionary ethics have argued that evolutionary theory undermines certain widely held views of humans' moral superiority over other animals. Evolutionary metaethics asks how evolutionary theory bears on theories of ethical discourse, the question of whether objective moral values exist, and the possibility of objective moral knowledge. For example, some evolutionary ethicists have appealed to evolutionary theory to defend various forms of moral anti-realism (the claim, roughly, that objective moral facts do not exist) and moral skepticism.

evolutionary psychology (Cosmides & Tooby)

Evolutionary psychology is based on the recognition that the human brain consists of a large collection of functionally specialized computational devices that evolved to solve the adaptive problems regularly encountered by our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Because humans share a universal evolved architecture, all ordinary individuals reliably develop a distinctively human set of preferences, motives, shared conceptual frameworks, emotion programs, content-specific reasoning procedures, and specialized interpretation systems--programs that operate beneath the surface of expressed cultural variability, and whose designs constitute a precise definition of human nature. Leda Cosmides and John Tooby

Haidt's Four Exhibits Defense of Group Selection (2012)

Exhibit 1: major transitions produce superorganisms. Exhibit 2: shared intentionality generates moral matrices. Exhibit 3: genes and cultures coevolve. Exhibit 4: evolution can be fast. Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion

externality

Externalities are everywhere. It's easy to ignore the impact of our decisions—to recline an airplane seat, to stay late at the office, or drop litter. Eventually though, someone always ends up paying. Like the villagers in Hardin's Tragedy of the Commons, who end up with no grass for their animals, we run the risk of ruining a good thing if we don't take care of it. Keeping the three types of externalities in mind is a useful way to make decisions that won't come back to bite you. Whenever we interact with a system, we should remember to ask Hardin's question: and then what?An externality affects someone without them agreeing to it. As with unintended consequences, externalities can be positive or negative. Understanding the types of externalities and the impact they have in our lives can help us improve our decision making, and how we interact with the world. Externalities provide useful mental models for understanding complex systems. They show us that systems don't exist in isolation from other systems. Externalities may affect uninvolved third parties which make them a form of market failure —an inefficient allocation of resources.

Homo religiosus

Famous sociologist Mircea Eliade coined the term homo religiosusto describe a kind of person who shares particular attitudes with all people of faith.

Friedrich Hayek (1899-1992)

Friedrich August von Hayek CH FBA (8 May 1899 - 23 March 1992), often referred to by his initials F. A. Hayek, was an Anglo-Austrian economist and philosopher best known for his defence of classical liberalism. Hayek shared the 1974 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Gunnar Myrdal for his "pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and [...] penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena". Hayek was also a major social theorist and political philosopher of the 20th century and his account of how changing prices communicate information that helps individuals co-ordinate their plans is widely regarded as an important achievement in economics, leading to his Nobel Prize.

Gad Saad

Gad Saad is a Lebanese-Canadian evolutionary behavioural scientist who is known for applying evolutionary psychology to marketing and consumer behaviour. He has a blog at Psychology Today titled Homo Consumericus.

Geoffrey Miller

Geoffrey F. Miller is an American evolutionary psychologist who has researched sexual selection in human evolution.

George Lowenstein (b. 1955)

George Freud Loewenstein (born August 9, 1955) is an American educator and economist. He is the Herbert A. Simon Professor of Economics and Psychology in the Social and Decision Sciences Department at Carnegie Mellon University and director of the Center for Behavioral Decision Research. He is a leader in the fields of behavioral economics (which he is also credited with co-founding) and neuroeconomics. He is the alleged great-grandson of Sigmund Freud.Loewenstein is especially known for his work regarding intertemporal choice and affective forecasting. Hot-cold empathy gaps are one of Loewenstein's major contributions to behavioral economics. The crux of this idea is that human understanding is "state dependent," that is, when one is angry it is difficult to understand what it is like for one to be happy, and vice versa. The implications of this were explored in the realm of sexual decision-making, where young men in an unaroused "cold state" fail to predict that when they are in an aroused "hot state" they will be more likely to make risky sexual decisions, such as not using a condom. Along with co-authors Christopher Hsee, Sally Blount and Max Bazerman, Loewenstein pioneered research on evaluability and joint-separate preference reversals. This theory states that attributes of an option that are well known, such as GPA for college candidates, are given greater weight than attributes one knows little about, such as number of programs written in an obscure language, when one is evaluating options in isolation (separate evaluation). However, when two candidates are considered together, the less evaluable option is given increased weight because it is possible to make a simple comparison between the two options on that attribute (i.e., more or fewer programs written in an obscure language).

A Herd of Fast Deer (Williams, 1966)

George Williams (1966) example of why those seeking to understand adaptation and natural selection should restrict their explanations to the individual level of selection rather than the group level when the individual level adequately examine the trait. His observation was made in response to rampant invocation of group selection at the time. For example, he said that there is no need to bring in group selection to explain a fast herd of deer when individual selection explains quite well that a fast herd of deer is simply a herd of fast deer. George Williams (1966), Adaptation and Natural Selection

grand (master) narrative

Grand narrative or "master narrative" is a term introduced by Jean-François Lyotard in his classic 1979 work The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, in which Lyotard summed up a range of views which were being developed at the time, as a critique of the institutional and ideologicalforms of knowledge. Narrative knowledge is knowledge in the form of story-telling. In the tribal times, myths and legends formed knowledge of this type; that such-and-such a mountain was just where it was because some mythic animal put it there, and so on. The narrative not only explained, but legitimated knowledge, and when applied to the social relations of their own society, the myths functioned as a legitimation of the existing power relations, customs and so on.

Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (1996)

Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language is a 1996 book by Robin Dunbar, in which the author argues that language evolved from social grooming. He further suggests that a stage of this evolution was the telling of gossip, an argument supported by the observation that language is adapted for storytelling.

Haidt's Moral Foundations (Haidt, 2012)

Haidt (2012) has postulated a number of moral foundations that are innate, or "organized in advance of experience," shared by all humans and their cultures though each may be elaborated in different ways or to different degrees of significance. Care/Harm Foundation: evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of caring for vulnerable children who take longer to nature than other species due to enhanced brain capacity requiring longer maturation. Fairness/Cheating Foundation: evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of reaping the rewards of cooperation without being exploited, i.e. reciprocal altruism (Trivers, 1971). Loyalty/Betrayal Foundation: evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forming and maintaining coalitions. Authority/Subversion Foundation: evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of forging relationships that will benefit humans within social hierarchies. Sanctity/Degradation Foundation: evolved in response to the adaptive challenge of the Omnivore's Dilemma, or deciding what is edible and what isn't, and then to the broader challenge of living in a world of pathogens and parasites. This foundation makes it possible for people to engage in essentialism, or endowing objects with irrational and extreme values--positive and negative--which are important for binding groups together. Liberty/Oppression Foundation: makes people notice and resent perceived signs of attempted domination. Triggers an urge to band together in respective tribes to resist. References Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion Gary Marcus (2004), The Birth of the Brain Trivers, R. L. (1971). "The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism"

Immediate Judgments

Harvard Business School professor Amy Cuddy is an expert in first impressions, having researched that split-second interaction with fellow psychologists Susan Fiske and Peter Glick for more than 15 years. In her best-selling book "Presence: Bringing Your Boldest Self to Your Biggest Challenges," Cuddy spells out two questions you'll immediately ask yourself — and answer — upon meeting someone new: - Can I trust this person - Can I respect this person? In psychologist speak, asking yourself those questions is a way to gauge a person's warmth and competence, respectively. The goal is for someone to answer two resounding yeses to those inquiries. But, according to Cuddy, people usually think competence is the more important factor, especially in a workplace setting. Not so fast — it's better to nail the warmth before business acumen. "From an evolutionary perspective," Cuddy writes, "it is more crucial to our survival to know whether a person deserves our trust."

Homo ludens (Huizinga)

Homo Ludens is a book originally published in Dutch in 1938 by Dutch historian and cultural theorist Johan Huizinga. It discusses the importance of the play element of culture and society. Huizinga suggests that play is primary to and a necessary (though not sufficient) condition of the generation of culture. The Latin word ludens is the present active participle of the verb ludere, which itself is cognate with the noun ludus. Ludus has no direct equivalent in English, as it simultaneously refers to sport, play, school, and practice.

Homo reciprocans

Homo reciprocans, or reciprocating human, is the concept in some economic theories of humans as cooperative actors who are motivated by improving their environment through positive reciprocity (rewarding other individuals) or negative reciprocity (punishing other individuals), even when without foreseeable benefit for themselves. This concept stands in contrast to the idea of homo economicus, which states the opposite theory that human beings are exclusively motivated by self-interest. However, the two ideas can be reconciled if we assume that utility functions of the homo economicus can have parameters that are dependent to the perceived utility of other agents (such as one's wife or children).

evolutionary history

How organisms have evolved over time.

Human Universals (1991), Donald Brown

Human Universals is a book by Donald Brown, an American professor of anthropology (emeritus) who worked at the University of California, Santa Barbara. It was published by McGraw Hill in 1991. Brown says human universals, "comprise those features of culture, society, language, behavior, and psyche for which there are no known exception." According to Brown, there are many universals common to all human societies. Steven Pinker lists all Brown's universals in the appendix of his book The Blank Slate. The list includes several hundred universals, and notes Brown's later article on human universals in The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. Brown's universals are not all unique to humans, and many are realized differently in different societies. The list is seen by Brown (and Pinker) to be evidence of mental adaptations to communal life in our species' evolutionary history.[3]p53 The issues raised by Brown's list are essentially darwinian. They occur in Darwin's Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), and in Huxley's Evidence as to Man's Place in Nature (1863). The list gives little emphasis to the issues of aggression, physical conflict and warfare, which have an extensive literature in ethology. Brown's list does have conflict and its mediation as items. He also makes note of the fact that human males are more prone to violence and aggression than females.

social constructionism

Human actors actively construct their "reality", rather than discovering a reality that has inherent validity, through their social interactions. The beliefs and shared understandings of individuals create social realities. In the context of illness, there is a gap b/t the biological reality of a medical condition and the societally created meaning of the condition. (ex. changing conceptualizations of mental illness results in changes to the DSM). It is a dynamic, ongoing process.

"Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)" (1970), Louis Althusser

Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)" is an essay by the French Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser. First published in 1970, it advances Althusser's theory of ideology. Where Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels posited a thinly-sketched theory of ideology as false consciousness, Althusser draws upon the works of later theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacanto proffer a more elaborate redefinition of the theory. Althusser's theory of ideology has remained influential since it was written.

Jerome Barkow

In 1992, together with John Tooby and Leda Cosmides edited The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. She and Tooby also co-founded and co-direct the Center for Evolutionary Psychology.

Leda Cosmides

In 1992, together with Tooby and Jerome Barkow, Cosmides edited The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. She and Tooby also co-founded and co-direct the Center for Evolutionary Psychology.

"Glaucon was right" (Haidt, 2012)

In assessing human nature, psychologist Jonathan Haidt (2012) refers to Plato's classic the Republic to assess human morality specifically the debate between Socrates and Glaucon about justice and the nature of virtue. Socrates avers that the common good requires people to be virtuous per se, while Glaucon maintains that such an expectation is quixotic and unattainable. In awarding the debate to Glaucon, Haidt makes the following points: 1) what people ought to do depends on assumptions about human nature and psychology made invariably by people 2) reason is not fit to rule; it evolved to provide justification, not truth 3) people care more about appearance and reputation than reality 4) the most important principle in designing an ethical society is to make sure that everyone's reputation is on the line all the time, so that bad behavior will always bring bad consequences. Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion

unenlightened self-interest

In contrast to enlightened self-interest is simple greed, or the concept of "unenlightened self-interest", in which it is argued that when most or all persons act according to their own myopic selfishness, the group suffers loss as a result of conflict, decreased efficiency and productivity because of lack of cooperation, and the increased expense each individual pays for the protection of their own interests. If a typical individual in such a group is selected at random, it is not likely that this person will profit from such a group ethic. Some individuals might profit, in a material sense, from a philosophy of greed, but it is believed by proponents of enlightened self-interest that these individuals constitute a small minority and that the large majority of persons can expect to experience a net personal loss from a philosophy of simple unenlightened selfishness. Unenlightened self-interest can result in the tragedy of the commons.

common-pool resource group

In economics, groups that depend upon a common-pool resource (CPR) that is a type of good consisting of a natural or human-made resource system (e.g. an irrigation system or fishing grounds), whose size or characteristics makes it costly, but not impossible, to exclude potential beneficiaries from obtaining benefits from its use. Unlike pure public goods, common pool resources face problems of congestion or overuse, because they are subtractable. A common-pool resource typically consists of a core resource (e.g. water or fish), which defines the stock variable, while providing a limited quantity of extractable fringe units, which defines the flow variable. While the core resource is to be protected or nurtured in order to allow for its continuous exploitation, the fringe units can be harvested or consumed.

Dutch disease

In economics, the Dutch disease is the apparent causal relationship between the increase in the economic development of a specific sector (for example natural resources) and a decline in other sectors (like the manufacturing sector or agriculture). The putative mechanism is that as revenues increase in the growing sector (or inflows of foreign aid), the given nation's currency becomes stronger (appreciates) compared to currencies of other nations (manifest in an exchange rate). This results in the nation's other exports becoming more expensive for other countries to buy, and imports becoming cheaper, making those sectors less competitive. While it most often refers to natural resource discovery, it can also refer to "any development that results in a large inflow of foreign currency, including a sharp surge in natural resource prices, foreign assistance, and foreign direct investment".

Theory of Reciprocal Altruism (Trivers, 1971)

In evolutionary biology, reciprocal altruism is a behaviour whereby an organism acts in a manner that temporarily reduces its fitness while increasing another organism's fitness, with the expectation that the other organism will act in a similar manner at a later time. The concept was initially developed by Robert Trivers (1971) to explain the evolution of cooperation as instances of mutually altruistic acts. The concept is close to the strategy of "tit for tat" used in game theory. The concept of "reciprocal altruism", as introduced by Trivers, suggests that altruism, defined as an act of helping another individual while incurring some cost for this act, could have evolved since it might be beneficial to incur this cost if there is a chance of being in a reverse situation where the individual who was helped before may perform an altruistic act towards the individual who helped them initially. This concept finds its roots in the work of W.D. Hamilton, who developed mathematical models for predicting the likelihood of an altruistic act to be performed on behalf of one's kin. Trivers, R.L. (1971). "The evolution of reciprocal altruism". Quarterly Review of Biology. 46: 35-57. doi:10.1086/406755.

Baldwin effect

In evolutionary biology, the Baldwin effect describes the effect of learned behavior on evolution. In brief, James Mark Baldwin and others suggested during the eclipse of Darwinism in the late 19th century that an organism's ability to learn new behaviors (e.g. to acclimatise to a new stressor) will affect its reproductive success and will therefore have an effect on the genetic makeup of its species through natural selection. Though this process appears similar to Lamarckian evolution, Lamarck proposed that living things inherited their parents' acquired characteristics. The Baldwin effect has been independently proposed several times, and today it is generally recognized as part of the modern synthesis.

vocal grooming

In his book, Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language, Dunbar claims that we are hard-wired for such gossip. He states that language evolved to enable our male ancestors to do things like co-ordinate hunts more effectively and goes so far as to say that "language evolved to allow us to gossip." Our nearest relatives, the monkeys and apes, spend a fifth of their time grooming one another; this allows them to form bonds and partnerships. It is Dunbar's theory that, as a species, we have evolved to replace this physical grooming with "vocal grooming," which is another word for gossiping. Just as with non-human primates, gossiping for us constitutes a social bonding mechanism which helps us form alliances with one another.

Machiavellian intelligence (socially strategic reasoning)

In primatology and evolutionary psychology, Machiavellian intelligence is the capacity of an organism to be in a successful political engagement with social groups. The first introduction of this concept came from Frans de Waal's book Chimpanzee Politics (1982), which described social maneuvering while explicitly quoting Machiavelli. This hypothesis posits that large brains and distinctive cognitive abilities of humans have evolved via intense social competition in which social competitors developed increasingly sophisticated "Machiavellian" strategies as a means to achieve higher social and reproductive success.

scientific knowledge (Lyotard)

In scientific knowledge the question of legitimation always arises. Lyotard says that one of the most striking features of scientific knowledge is that it includes only denotative statements, to the exclusion of all other kinds (narrative knowledge includes other kinds of statements, such as prescriptives). According to the "narrative" of science, however, only knowledge which is legitimated is legitimate - i.e. is knowledge at all. Scientific knowledge is legitimated by certain scientific criteria - the repeatability of experiments, etc. If the entire project of science needs a metalegitimation, however (and the criteria for scientific knowledge would itself seem to demand that it does) then science has no recourse but to narrative knowledge (which according to scientific criteria is no knowledge at all). This narrative has usually taken the form of a heroic epic of some kind, with the scientist as a "hero of knowledge" who discovers scientific truths. The distinction between narrative and scientific knowledge is a crucial point in Lyotard's theory of postmodernism, and one of the defining features of postmodernity, on his account, is the dominance of scientific knowledge over narrative knowledge. The pragmatics of scientific knowledge do not allow the recognition of narrative knowledge as legitimate, since it is not restricted to denotative statements). Lyotard sees a danger in this dominance, since it follows from his view that reality cannot be captured within one genre of discourse or representation of events that science will miss aspects of events which narrative knowledge will capture. In other words, Lyotard does not believe that science has any justification in claiming to be a more legitimate form of knowledge than narrative. Part of his work in The Postmodern Condition can be read as a defence of narrative knowledge from the increasing dominance of scientific knowledge. Furthermore, Lyotard sees a danger to the future of academic research which stems from the way scientific knowledge has come to be legitimated in postmodernity (as opposed to the way it was legitimated in modernity).

collective (shared) intentionality

In the philosophy of mind, collective intentionality characterizes the intentionality that occurs when two or more individuals undertake a task together. This phenomenon is approached from psychological and normative perspectives, among others. Prominent philosophers working in the psychological manner are Raimo Tuomela, Kaarlo Miller, John R. Searle, and Michael E. Bratman. Margaret Gilbert takes a normative approach dealing specifically with group formation. David Velleman is also concerned with how groups are formed, but his account lacks the normative element present in Gilbert. The notion that collectives are capable of forming intentions can be found, whether implicitly or explicitly, in literature going back thousands of years. For example, ancient texts such as Plato's Republic discuss the cooperative determination of laws and social order by the group composed of society as a whole. This theme was later expanded into social contract theory by Enlightenment-era philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. In the 20th century, the likes of Wilfrid Sellars and Anthony Quinton noted the existence of "We-Intentions" amid broader discussion of the concept of intentionality, and thus laid the groundwork for the focused philosophical analysis of collective intentionality that began in the late 1980s. Jonathan Haidt wrote in the Righteous Mind (2012) that he considers the development of shared intentionality to be humans "moral Rubicon" when the first moral matrix was developed.

instrumental rationality

Instrumental" and "value rationality" are terms scholars use to identify two ways human reason when correlating group behaviour to maintain social life. Instrumental rationality recognizes means that "work" efficiently to achieve ends. Value rationality recognizes ends that are "right," legitimate in themselves. These two ways of reasoning seem to operate separately. Efficient means are recognized inductively in heads or brains or minds. Legitimate ends are felt deductively in hearts or guts or souls. Instrumental rationality provides intellectual tools—scientific and technological facts and theories—that appear to be impersonal, value-free means. Value rationality provides legitimate rules—moral valuations—that appear to be emotionally satisfying, fact-free ends. Every society maintains itself by correlating instrumental means with value rational ends. Together they make humans rational.

cultural hegemony & structuralism

Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramscideveloped the concept of cultural hegemony, the process within Capitalist economies the ruling classes to create social norms, value systems, and social stigmas to create a culture by which their continued dominance is considered beneficial. Gramsci expands the concept of false consciousness to be understood along cultural and sociological perspective. During the late 1960s and 1970s, the philosophical and anthropological school of structuralism began to gain popularity among academics and public intellectuals, focusing on interpreting human culture in terms of underlying structures such as symbolic, linguistic, and ideological perspectives. French Communist Party member and public intellectual Louis Althusser popularized his structuralist influenced interpretation of false consciousness, The Ideological State Apparatus. Structuralism influenced Althusser's interpretation of false consciousness, which focuses on the institutions of the capitalist state⁠—particularly those of public education⁠—which enforce an ideological system favoring obedience, conformity and submissiveness.

Pan sapiens

Jared Diamond in The Third Chimpanzee (1991), and Morris Goodman (2003) argued that Homo is not sufficiently removed from Pan to warrant the definition of a separate genus. Based on the Principle of Priority, this would result in chimpanzees being reclassified as members of the genus Homo, e.g. Homo paniscus, Homo sylvestris, or Homo arboreus. An alternative philosophy suggests that the term Homo sapiens is the misnomer and that humans should be reclassified as Pan sapiens. In either case, a name change of the genus would have implications on the taxonomy of extinct species closely related to humans, including Australopithecus. A taxonomic name given to the species of the last common ancestors of humans and chimpanzees is Pan prior.

Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998)

Jean-François Lyotard (10 August 1924 - 21 April 1998) was a French philosopher, sociologist, and literary theorist. His interdisciplinary discourse spans such topics as epistemology and communication, the human body, modern art and postmodern art, literature and critical theory, music, film, time and memory, space, the city and landscape, the sublime, and the relation between aesthetics and politics. He is best known for his articulation of postmodernism after the late 1970s and the analysis of the impact of postmodernity on the human condition.

Jerry Fodor (1935-2017)

Jerry Alan Fodor (April 22, 1935 - November 29, 2017) was an American philosopherand cognitive scientist. He held the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Rutgers University and was the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thought hypotheses, among other ideas. He was known for his provocative and sometimes polemicalstyle of argumentation and as "one of the principal philosophers of mind of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. In addition to having exerted an enormous influence on virtually every portion of the philosophy of mind literature since 1960, Fodor's work has had a significant impact on the development of the cognitive sciences."

Jerry Fodor (1935-2017)

Jerry Alan Fodor (April 22, 1935 - November 29, 2017) was an American philosopherand cognitive scientist. He held the position of State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Emeritus, at Rutgers University and was the author of many works in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive science, in which he laid the groundwork for the modularity of mind and the language of thoughthypotheses, among other ideas. He was known for his provocative and sometimes polemical style of argumentation and as "one of the principal philosophers of mind of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. In addition to having exerted an enormous influence on virtually every portion of the philosophy of mind literature since 1960, Fodor's work has had a significant impact on the development of the cognitive sciences."

John Bargh (b. 1955)

John A. Bargh (born 1955) is a social psychologist currently working at Yale University, where he has formed the Automaticity in Cognition, Motivation, and Evaluation (ACME) Laboratory. Bargh's work focuses on automaticity and unconscious processing as a method to better understand social behavior, as well as philosophical topics such as free will. Much of Bargh's work investigates whether behaviors thought to be under volitional control may result from automatic interpretations of and reactions to external stimuli, such as words.

John Tooby

John Tooby is an American anthropologist, who together with his wife Leda Cosmides and Jerome Barkow, helped pioneer the field of evolutionary psychology. In 1992, together with Tooby and Jerome Barkow, Cosmides edited The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. She and Tooby also co-founded and co-direct the Center for Evolutionary Psychology.

"moral Rubicon" (Haidt, 2012)

Jonathan Haidt (2012) believes, based partly on the work of Michael Tomasello, that the development of shared intentionality was the defining occurrence in humans moral development when out first moral matrix formed; consequently, he calls that unidentified point in time and evolution as humanity's "moral Rubicon." Haidt places the occurrence at somewhere between 600,000-700,000 years ago and speculates that the most likely hominin was Homo heidelbergensis. Haidt, J. (2012). The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion

Joseph Henrich

Joseph Henrich is an anthropologist. Henrich is interested in the question of how humans evolved from "being a relatively unremarkable primate a few million years ago to the most successful species on the globe", and how culture affected our genetic development. His research areas include: cultural learning, the evolution of cooperation, social stratification, prestige and the evolution of economic decision-making and religious beliefs. He indicates that polygamy is harmful for society; monogamy reduces male-male competition. Henrich's research shows that in psychological testing people with a Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic background - the WEIRD people - are a subgroup, not representative of humans at large, and outliers in many test situations.

Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929)

Jürgen Habermas (born 18 June 1929) is a German philosopher and sociologist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. His work addresses communicative rationality and the public sphere.

Robert Kurzban

Kurzban's research focuses on evolutionary approaches to understanding human social behavior. Robert Kurzban was trained by two pioneers in the field of evolutionary psychology, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, and his research focuses on evolutionary approaches to understanding human social behavior. He takes an adaptationist view of human psychology, studying the adaptive function, or, survival value, in the adoption of traits by humans. His work is aimed at understanding the functions of psychological mechanisms occurring in human social life. He uses methods drawn from social psychology, cognitive psychology, and especially experimental economics.

Rules for Institutions (Becker, 1998)

Lawrence C. Becker (1998) described certain rules that govern the behavior of institutions, in his formulation including roles, social conventions, and actual societal institutions. They included . . . Participation Rules: who is included and their level of involvement. Teleological Factors: institution's reason for being and goals. Deontological Rules: allowable or required conduct, including entitlements and responsibilities. Valuational Commitments: aims, interests, acts, products, traits, achievements, and abilities valued by the institution given its telos. Generative and Transformative Rules: institution's legislative processes. Administrative Rules: institution's executive and police powers and adjudicative processes. Regulative Policies, Practices, and Rules: institution's modus operandi in implementing its rules. Legitimation Assumptions: grounds for recognizing a given commitment, policy, practice, rule, or assumption as one of the institution's own. Connectedness: extent and nature of relations between members. Closure: extent to which participants are related only to each other and not to individuals outside the group. Mutuality Levels: extent to which individuals recognize themselves and each other as participants, make and recognize reciprocal contributions to each others' lives, have a common understanding of the nature of the group, and have univalent responses to it and each other. Reference: Becker, L.C. (1998). A New Stoicism

Steven Pinker

Linguist that believed that we learn language from the environment. Steven Arthur Pinker is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, linguist, and popular science author. He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

Althusser's Two Theses of Ideology

Louis Althusser advances two theses on ideology: "Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence" and "Ideology has a material existence". The first thesis tenders the familiar Marxist contention that ideologies have the function of masking the exploitative arrangements on which class societies are based. The second thesis posits that ideology does not exist in the form of "ideas" or conscious "representations" in the "minds" of individuals. Rather, ideology consists of the actions and behaviours of bodies governed by their disposition within material apparatuses. Central to the view of individuals as responsible subjects is the notion of an explanatory link between belief and action, that every 'subject' endowed with a 'consciousness' and believing in the 'ideas' that his 'consciousness' inspires in him and freely accepts, must act according to his ideas, must therefore inscribe his own ideas as a free subject in the actions of his material practice.

Mark Schaller

Mark Schaller is a psychological scientist who has made many contributions to the study of human psychology, particularly in areas of social cognition, stereotyping, evolutionary psychology, and cultural psychology.

Mark van Vught

Mark van Vught is an evolutionary psychologist worked on research into environmental sustainability and transportation as social dilemmaand tragedy of the commons problems.

Marshall Sahlins (b. 1930)

Marshall David Sahlins (born December 27, 1930) is an American anthropologistbest known for his ethnographic work in the Pacific and for his contributions to anthropological theory. Sahlins is known for theorizing the interaction of structure and agency, his critiques of reductive theories of human nature (economic and biological, in particular), and his demonstrations of the power that culture has to shape people's perceptions and actions.

Martin Daly

Martin Daly is a Professor of Psychology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada and author of many influential papers on evolutionary psychology. His current research topics include an evolutionary perspective on risk-taking and interpersonal violence, especially male-male conflict and family violence. He and his wife, the late Margo Wilson, were the former editors-in-chief of the journal Evolution and Human Behavior and former presidents of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society.

negative externality

Negative externalities can occur during the production or consumption of a service or good. Pollution is a useful example. Calling something a negative externality can be a convenient way of abdicating responsibility.

The Mindful Brain (1978), Herald Edelman

Neural Darwinism, a large scale theory of brain function by Gerald Edelman, was initially published in 1978, in a book called The Mindful Brain (MIT Press). It was extended and published in the 1987 book Neural Darwinism - The Theory of Neuronal Group Selection.

reverse dominance hierarchy (Boehm, 1999)

Occurs when subordinates in a hierarchical human or other primate society band together to overthrow an alpha male. Conceptualized by Christopher Boehm in his work Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior (1999).

progressive evolution (orthogenesis)

Orthogenesis, also known as orthogenetic evolution, progressive evolution, evolutionary progress, or progressionism, is the biological hypothesis that organisms have an innate tendency to evolve in a definite direction towards some goal (teleology) due to some internal mechanism or "driving force". According to the theory, the largest-scale trends in evolution have an absolute goal such as increasing biological complexity. Prominent historical figures who have championed some form of evolutionary progress include Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and Henri Bergson. The term orthogenesis was introduced by Wilhelm Haacke in 1893 and popularized by Theodor Eimerfive years later. Proponents of orthogenesis had rejected the theory of natural selection as the organizing mechanism in evolution for a rectilinear model of directed evolution. With the emergence of the modern synthesis, in which genetics was integrated with evolution, orthogenesis and other alternatives to Darwinism were largely abandoned by biologists, but the notion that evolution represents progress is still widely shared. The evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr made the term effectively taboo in the journal Nature in 1948, by stating that it implied "some supernatural force". The American paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson (1953) attacked orthogenesis, linking it with vitalism by describing it as "the mysterious inner force". Modern supporters include E. O. Wilson and Simon Conway Morris, while museum displays and textbook illustrations continue to give the impression of progress in evolution. The philosopher of biology Michael Ruse notes that in popular culture evolution and progress are synonyms, while the unintentionally misleading image of the March of Progress, from apes to modern humans, has been widely imitated.

Parkinson's Law

Parkinson's Law states that tasks expand to fit the time allocated to them.

punctuated equilibrium

Pattern of evolution in which long stable periods are interrupted by brief periods of more rapid change.

Paulo Freire (1921-1997)

Paulo Reglus Neves Freire (September 19, 1921 - May 2, 1997) was a Brazilian educator and philosopher who was a leading advocate of critical pedagogy. He is best known for his influential work, Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which is generally considered one of the foundational texts of the critical pedagogy movement.

positional externality

Positional externalities are a form of second-order effects. They occur when our decisions alter the context of future perception or value.

Poverty of the Stimulus (POS)

Poverty of the stimulus (POS) is the argument from linguistics that children are not exposed to rich enough data within their linguistic environments to acquire every feature of their language. This is considered evidence contrary to the empiricist idea that language is learned solely through experience. The claim is that the sentences children hear while learning a language do not contain the information needed to home in on the grammar of the language. The POS is often used as evidence for universal grammar. This is the idea that all languages conform to the same structural principles, which define the space of possible languages. Both poverty of the stimulus and universal grammar are terms that can be credited to Noam Chomsky. Chomsky coined the term "poverty of the stimulus" in 1980, however he had argued for the idea since his 1959 review of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior. The POS is also related to Nelson Goodman's new riddle of induction.

convergent evolution

Process by which unrelated organisms independently evolve similarities when adapting to similar environments.

survival of the fittest

Process where organisms 'after adaptations' survive and reproduce most successfully. Coined by Herbert Spencer.

rational selfishness

Rational selfishness is a more individualistic form of enlightened self-interest. It is a term generally related to Ayn Rand's Objectivist philosophy, which refers to a person's efforts to look after their own well-being, to cultivate the self, and achieve goals for the good of the self. The focus in rational selfishness might be considered to be more self-directed (where the benefit to the group or society is a possible by-product) than the focus of enlightened self-interest which is more group-directed (and the benefit to oneself might be more of the by-product). Some authors say that this concept elevates egoism to the level of a moral principle.

Robert Trivers

Robert Ludlow "Bob" Trivers is an American evolutionary biologist and sociobiologist. Trivers proposed the theories of reciprocal altruism (1971), parental investment(1972), facultative sex ratio determination (1973), and parent-offspring conflict (1974). He has also contributed by explaining self-deception as an adaptive evolutionary strategy (first described in 1976) and discussing intragenomic conflict.

Plutchik's Psychoevolutionary Theory of Basic Emotions

Robert Plutchik proposed a psychoevolutionary classification approach for general emotional responses. He considered there to be eight primary emotions—anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, anticipation, trust, and joy. Plutchik argues for the primacy of these emotions by showing each to be the trigger of behaviour with high survival value, such as the way fear inspires the fight-or-flight response. Plutchik's psychoevolutionary theory of basic emotions has ten postulates. - The concept of emotion is applicable to all evolutionary levels and applies to all animals including humans. - Emotions have an evolutionary history and have evolved various forms of expression in different species. - Emotions served an adaptive role in helping organisms deal with key survival issues posed by the environment. - Despite different forms of expression of emotions in different species, there are certain common elements, or prototype patterns, that can be identified. - There is a small number of basic, primary, or prototype emotions. - All other emotions are mixed or derivative states; that is, they occur as combinations, mixtures, or compounds of the primary emotions. - Primary emotions are hypothetical constructs or idealized states whose properties and characteristics can only be inferred from various kinds of evidence. - Primary emotions can be conceptualized in terms of pairs of polar opposites. - All emotions vary in their degree of similarity to one another. - Each emotion can exist in varying degrees of intensity or levels of arousal.

Robert Wright

Robert Wright is an American journalist who writes about science, history and religion, and evolutionary psychology topics, including The Evolution of God, Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, The Moral Animal, Why Buddhism is True, and Three Scientists and Their Gods: Looking for Meaning in an Age of Information.

Robin Dunbar

Robin Ian MacDonald Dunbar (born 28 June 1947)[10][11] is a British anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist and a specialist in primatebehaviour. He is currently head of the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience Research Group in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. He is best known for formulating Dunbar's number, a measurement of the "cognitive limit to the number of individuals with whom any one person can maintain stable relationships."

evolutionary science

Science of how the natural selection of traits promote the survival of genes.

human self-domestication

Self-domestication theories describe how humans developed and evolved. "Contemporary reproductive technologies such as selective abortion and genetic screening are typical examples where our self-domestication is most directly apparent", writes philosopher Masahiro Morioka, who also says that "Through domesticating ourselves like cattle, people began civilization." Gregory Stock, director of the UCLA School of Medicine's Program of Medicine, Technology and Society, describes self-domestication as a process which "... mirrors our domestication [of animals] ... we have transformed ourselves through a similar process of self-selection ... our transformation has been primarily cultural, but it has almost certainly had a biological component." Clark & Henneberg argue that during the earliest stages of human evolution a more paedomorphic skull arose through self-domestication. This assertion is based upon a comparison of the skull of Ardipithecus and chimpanzees of various ages. It was found that Ardipithecus clustered with the infant and juvenile species. The consequent lack of a pubertal growth spurt in males of the species and the consequent growth of aggressive canine armoury was taken as evidence that Ardipithecus evolved its paedomorphic skull through self domestication. As the authors state, comparing the species with Bonobos: Of course A.ramidus differs significantly from bonobos, bonobos having retained a functional canine honing complex. However,the fact that A.ramidus shares with bonobos reduced sexual dimorphism, and a more paedomorphic form relative to chimpanzees, suggests that the developmental and social adaptations evident in bonobos may be of assistance in future reconstructions of early hominin social and sexual psychology. In fact the trend towards increased maternal care, female mate selection and self-domestication may have been stronger and more refined in A.ramidus than what we see in bonobos. Further research has confirmed that Ardipithecus possessed paedomorphic cranial base angulation, position of the foramen magnum as well as vocal tract dimensions. This was interpreted as not only evidence of a change in social behavior but also a potentially early emergence of hominin vocal capability. If this thesis is correct then not only human social behavior but also language ability originally evolved through paedomorphic skull morphogenesis via the process of self-domestication. The most comprehensive case for human self-domestication has been proposed for the changes that account for the much later transition from robust humans such as Neanderthals or Denisovans to anatomically modern humans. Occurring between 40,000 and 25,000 years ago, this rapid neotenization has been explained as the result of cultural selection of mating partners on the basis of variables lacking evolutionary benefits, such as perceived attractiveness, facial symmetry, youth, specific body ratios, skin tone or hair, none of which play any role in any other animal species. This unintentional auto-domestication, coinciding with the introduction of imagery of female sexuality, occurred simultaneously in four continents then occupied by hominins. It led to rapid changes typical for domestication, such as in cranial morphology, skeletal architecture, reduction in brain volume, to playful and exploratory behavior, and the establishment of thousands of deleterious conditions, syndromes, disorders and illnesses presumed absent in robust humans. This hypothesis effectively replaces the Replacement Hypothesis (known as "African Eve theory") and explains the relatively rapid transition as a culturally induced domestication process still continuing today. It also explains the rise of exograms and their role in selecting for competence in the use of external memory traces. The idea of self-domestication was used by early Social Darwinism which, according to psychiatrist Martin Brüne in an article "On human self-domestication", developed from the idea that humans could perfect themselves biologically.

environmental signals (cues)

Signals that originate outside the body.

social learning theory

Social learning theory is a theory of learning process and social behavior which proposes that new behaviors can be acquired by observing and imitating others. It states that learning is a cognitive processthat takes place in a social context and can occur purely through observation or direct instruction, even in the absence of motor reproduction or direct reinforcement. In addition to the observation of behavior, learning also occurs through the observation of rewards and punishments, a process known as vicarious reinforcement. When a particular behavior is rewarded regularly, it will most likely persist; conversely, if a particular behavior is constantly punished, it will most likely desist. The theory expands on traditional behavioral theories, in which behavior is governed solely by reinforcements, by placing emphasis on the important roles of various internal processes in the learning individual.

Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975), E.O. Wilson

Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975; 25th anniversary edition 2000) is a book by the biologist E. O. Wilson. It helped start the sociobiology debate, one of the great scientific controversies in biology of the 20th century and part of the wider debate about evolutionary psychology and the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology. Wilson popularized the term "sociobiology" as an attempt to explain the evolutionary mechanics behind social behaviour such as altruism, aggression, and the nurturing of the young. It formed a position within the long-running nature versus nurture debate. The fundamental principle guiding sociobiology is that an organism's evolutionary success is measured by the extent to which its genes are represented in the next generation.

Steven Mithen

Steven Mithen is a Professor of Archaeology at the University of Reading. He has written a number of books, including The Singing Neanderthals and The Prehistory of the Mind: The Cognitive Origins of Art, Religion and Science. Cognitive fluidity is a term first popularly applied by Mithen in his book The Prehistory of the Mind, a search for the origins of Art, Religion and Science. The term cognitive fluidity describes how a modularprimate mind has evolved into the modern human mind by combining different ways of processing knowledge and using tools to create a modern civilization. By arriving at original thoughts, which are often highly creative and rely on metaphor and analogy modern humans differ from archaic humans. As such, cognitive fluidity is a key element of the human attentive consciousness. The term has been principally used to contrast the mind of modern humans, especially those after 50,000 B.P. (before present), with those of archaic humans such as Neanderthals and Homo erectus. The latter appear to have had a mentality that was originally domain-specific in structure; a series of largely isolated cognitive domains for operating in the social, material, and natural worlds. These are termed "Swiss penknife minds" with a set of special modules of intelligence for specific domains such as the Social, Natural history, Technical and Linguistic. With the advent of modern humans the barriers between these domains appear to have been largely removed in the attentive mode and hence cognition has become less compartmentalised and more fluid. Consciousness is of course attentive and self-reflective, and the role of the modular intelligences in neurological "Default mode" is a topic for current research in self-reflective human consciousness. Mithen uses an appropriately interdisciplinary approach, combining observations from cognitive science, archaeology, and other fields, in an attempt to offer a plausible description of prehistoric intellectual evolution.

ecological niche

Sum total of a species' use of the biotic and abiotic resources.

tend-and-befriend response (Taylor, 2000)

Tend-and-befriend is a behavior exhibited by some animals, including humans, in response to threat. It refers to protection of offspring (tending) and seeking out the social group for mutual defense (befriending). In evolutionary psychology, tend-and-befriend is theorized as having evolved as the typical female response to stress, just as the primary male response was fight-or-flight. The tend-and-befriend theoretical model was originally developed by Dr. Shelley E. Taylor and her research team at the University of California, Los Angeles and first described in a Psychological Review article published in the year 2000.

The Adapted Mind, Barkow, Tooby, & Cosmides (1992)

The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture is a 1992 book edited by the anthropologists Jerome H. Barkow and John Toobyand the psychologist Leda Cosmides. First published by Oxford University Press, it is widely considered the foundational text of evolutionary psychology (EP), and outlines Cosmides and Tooby's integration of concepts from evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology, as well as many other concepts that would become important in adaptationistresearch.

The Adapted Mind

The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture is a 1992 book edited by the anthropologists Jerome H. Barkow and John Toobyand the psychologist Leda Cosmides.[1] First published by Oxford University Press, it is widely considered the foundational text of evolutionary psychology (EP), and outlines Cosmides and Tooby's integration of concepts from evolutionary biology and cognitive psychology, as well as many other concepts that would become important in adaptationistresearch.

The Blank Slate (2002), Steven Pinker

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature is a best-selling 2002 book by Steven Pinker, in which the author makes a case against tabula rasa models in the social sciences, arguing that human behavior is substantially shaped by evolutionary psychological adaptations. Pinker argues that modern science has challenged three "linked dogmas" that constitute the dominant view of human nature in intellectual life: - the blank slate (the mind has no innate traits) - empiricism - the noble savage (people are born good and corrupted by society) romanticism - the ghost in the machine (each of us has a soul that makes choices free from biology) Much of the book is dedicated to examining fears of the social and political consequences of his view of human nature: -the fear of inequality - the fear of imperfectibility - the fear of determinism - the fear of nihilism Pinker claims these fears are non sequiturs, and that the blank slate view of human nature would actually be a greater threat if it were true. For example, he argues that political equality does not require sameness, but policies that treat people as individuals with rights; that moral progress doesn't require the human mind to be naturally free of selfish motives, only that it has other motives to counteract them; that responsibility doesn't require behavior to be uncaused, only that it respond to praise and blame; and that meaning in life doesn't require that the process that shaped the brain must have a purpose, only that the brain itself must have purposes. He also argues that grounding moral values in claims about a blank slate opens them to the possibility of being overturned by future empirical discoveries. He further argues that a blank slate is in fact inconsistent with opposition to many social evils since a blank slate could be conditioned to enjoy servitude and degradation. Evolutionary and genetic inequality arguments do not necessarily support right-wing policies. Pinker writes that if everyone is equal regarding abilities it can be argued that it is only necessary to give everyone equal opportunity. On the other hand, if some people have less innate ability, then redistribution policies should favor those with less innate ability. Further, laissez-faire economics is built upon an assumption of a rational actor, while evolutionary psychology suggests that people have many different goals and behaviors that do not fit the rational actor theory. "A rising tide lifts all boats" is often used as an argument that inequality need not be reduced as long as there is growth. Evolutionary psychology suggests that low status itself, apart from material considerations, is highly psychologically stressful and may cause dangerous and desperate behaviors, which suggests that inequalities should be reduced. Finally, evolutionary explanations may also help the left create policies with greater public support, suggesting that people's sense of fairness (caused by mechanisms such as reciprocal altruism) rather than greed is a primary cause of opposition to welfare, if there is not a distinction in the proposals between what is perceived as the deserving and the undeserving poor. Pinker also gives several examples of harm done by the belief in a blank slate of human nature: Totalitarian social engineering. If the human mind is a blank slate completely formed by the environment, then ruthlessly and totally controlling every aspect of the environment will create perfect minds.Inappropriate or excessive blame of parents since if their children do not turn out well this is assumed to be entirely environmentally caused and especially due to the behavior of the parents.Release of dangerous psychopaths who quickly commit new crimes.Construction of massive and dreary tenement complexes since housing and environmental preferences are assumed to be culturally caused and superficial.Persecution and even mass murder of the successful who are assumed to have gained unfairly. This includes not only individuals but entire successful groups who are assumed to have become successful unfairly and by exploitation of other groups. Examples include Jews in Nazi Germany during the Holocaust; kulaks in the Soviet Union; teachers and "rich" peasants in the Cultural Revolution; city dwellers and intellectuals under the Khmer Rouge.

The Fable of The Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714), Bernard Mandeville

The Fable of The Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits is a book by Bernard Mandeville, consisting of the poem The Grumbling Hive: or, Knaves turn'd Honest, along with prose discussion of the poem. The poem was published in 1705, and the book first appeared in 1714. The poem suggests many key principles of economic thought, including division of labor and the "invisible hand", seventy years before these concepts were more thoroughly elucidated by Adam Smith. Two centuries later, the noted economist John Maynard Keynes cited Mandeville to show that it was "no new thing ... to ascribe the evils of unemployment to ... the insufficiency of the propensity to consume",a condition also known as the paradox of thrift, which was central to his own theory of effective demand. At the time, however, it was considered scandalous. Keynes noted that it was "convicted as a nuisance by the grand jury of Middlesex in 1723, which stands out in the history of the moral sciences for its scandalous reputation. Only one man is recorded as having spoken a good word for it, namely Dr. Johnson, who declared that it did not puzzle him, but 'opened his eyes into real life very much'."

Mickey Mouse problem

The Mickey Mouse problem refers to the difficulty in predicting which supernatural agents are capable of eliciting belief and religious devotion. We approached the problem directly by asking participants to invent a "religious" or a "fictional" agent with five supernatural abilities. Compared to fictional agents, religious agents were ascribed a higher proportion of abilities that violated folk psychology or that were ambiguous-violating nonspecific or multiple domains of folk knowledge-and fewer abilities that violated folk physics and biology. Similarly, participants rated folk psychology violations provided by the experimenter as more characteristic of religious agents than were violations of folk physics or folk biology, while fictional agents showed no clear pattern. Religious agents were also judged as more potentially beneficial, and more ambivalent (i.e., similar ratings of benefit and harm), than fictional agents, regardless of whether the agents were invented or well-known to participants. Together, the results support a motivational account of religious belief formation that is facilitated by these biases.

Overton Window

The Overton window is the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse, also known as the window of discourse. The term is named after Joseph P. Overton, who stated that an idea's political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this range, rather than on politicians' individual preferences. According to Overton, the window contains the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office in the current climate of public opinion.

Pleiotropy

The ability of a single gene to have multiple effects.

cultural evolution

The adaptive changes of cultures in response to environmental changes over time.

Social Darwinism

The application of ideas about evolution and "survival of the fittest" to human societies - particularly as a justification for their imperialist expansion.

social context

The combination of people, the activities and interactions among people, the setting in which behavior occurs, and the expectations and social norms governing behavior in that setting.

ultrasociality (Turchin, 2016)

The concept of "ultrasociality" is becoming increasing popular as a tool to understand the characteristics and the evolution of human society. It is a concept taken from evolutionary biology that describes how some species attain evolutionary success by means of collaboration among individuals. The extreme implementation of this idea is found with social insects, ants and bees, whose behavior is usually termed "eusociality" ("the good sociality"). Humans don't arrive to the degree of hyperspecialization of some insect societies, but they are more socially specialized than most mammals, hence the term "ultrasociality." Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth (2016), Peter Turchin

individual vs. group selection

The concept of a group as comparable to a single organism has had a long and turbulent history. Currently, methodological individualism dominates in many areas of psychology and evolution, but natural selection is now known to operate at multiple levels of the biological hierarchy. When between-group selection dominates within-group selection, a major evolutionary transition occurs and the group becomes a new, higher-level organism. It is likely that human evolution represents a major transition, and this has wide-ranging implications for the psychological study of group behavior, cognition, and culture.

Love Drives: Libido, Attachment, Partner Preference

The conventional view in biology is that there are three major drives in love: libido, attachment, and partner preference. The primary neurochemicals (neurotransmitters, sex hormones, and neuropeptides) that govern these drives are testosterone, estrogen, dopamine, oxytocin, and vasopressin. Central dopamine pathways mediate partner preference behavior, while vasopressin in the ventral pallidum and oxytocin in the nucleus accumbens and paraventricular hypothalamic nucleus mediate partner preference and attachment behaviors. Sex drive is modulated primarily by activity in the mesolimbic dopamine pathway (ventral tegmental area and nucleus accumbens). Trace amines (e.g., phenethylamine and tyramine) play a critical role in regulating neuronal activity in the dopaminergic pathways of the central nervous system. Testosterone and estrogen contribute to these drives by modulating activity within dopamine pathways. Adequate brain levels of testosterone seem important for both human male and female sexual behavior. Norepinephrine and serotonin have a less significant, contributing role through their neuromodulatory effects upon dopamine and oxytocin release in certain pathways. The chemicals triggered that are responsible for passionate love and long-term attachment love seem to be more particular to the activities in which both persons participate rather than to the nature of the specific people involved. Individuals who have recently fallen in love show higher levels of cortisol.

evolutionary legacy hypothesis

The evolutionary legacy hypothesis ( evolutionary mismatch, savanna principle) posits that the human brain evolved in ancestral conditions that differed radically from those in modern environments, leading to evolutionary mismatch where traits adapted for humans ancestral past are no longer effective and, sometimes, actually are harmful.

Darwinian Evolution

The general theory of evolution (see also "macro-evolution") named after Charles Darwin, the British naturalist who expounded this theory in 1859 in his Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life.

Evolution

The gradual change in a species over time. An historical process that relies upon chance mutations.

Social Grooming (Allogrooming)

The grooming of another individual, usually by scratching or licking an area of skin, often to remove parasites.

Self-Elaboration Model of Belief (Jordan, 2019)

The hypothesis that due to the evolved, hegemonic propensity to reason causally, initial premises, whether taken on faith or developed logically, sometimes become self-elaborating in the sense that the initial premise is sufficient to initiate a chain of supportive beliefs with recursive and innovative properties. For example, religion need not be explained as an evolutionary by-product nor as a distinct module, but simply as a logical outcome of a fundamental erroneous belief in an important matter. A pinball machine makes an apt analogy. The initiating event is the pull of the lever that send the ball powerfully forward. Afterward, the ball's course is largely capricious and unpredictable. In fine, our propensity for belief is a by-product of our evolved tendency--perhaps compulsion--to identify causality. Frank G. Jordan Jr. (2019)

Systems 1 & 2

The intuitive (1) and rational (2) cognitive functioning, especially as described by D. Kahneman (cf. Thinking, Fast and Slow) that constitutes human celebration.

language of thought hypothesis (LOTH) aka thought ordered mental expression (TOME)

The language of thought hypothesis (LOTH), sometimes known as thought ordered mental expression (TOME), is a view in linguistics, philosophy of mind and cognitive science, forwarded by American philosopher Jerry Fodor. It describes the nature of thought as possessing "language-like" or compositional structure (sometimes known as mentalese). On this view, simple concepts combine in systematic ways (akin to the rules of grammar in language) to build thoughts. In its most basic form, the theory states that thought, like language, has syntax. Using empirical data drawn from linguistics and cognitive science to describe mental representationfrom a philosophical vantage-point, the hypothesis states that thinking takes place in a language of thought (LOT): cognition and cognitive processes are only 'remotely plausible' when expressed as a system of representations that is "tokened" by a linguistic or semantic structure and operated upon by means of a combinatorial syntax. Linguistic tokens used in mental language describe elementary concepts which are operated upon by logical rules establishing causal connections to allow for complex thought. Syntax as well as semantics have a causal effect on the properties of this system of mental representations.

massive modularity hypothesis

The position that the brain/mind operates with a considerable number of domain-specific mechanisms and systems. massive modularity. Other perspectives on modularity come from evolutionary psychology, particularly from the work of Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. This perspective suggests that modules are units of mental processing that evolved in response to selection pressures. On this view, much modern human psychological activity is rooted in adaptations that occurred earlier in human evolution, when natural selection was forming the modern human species. Evolutionary psychologists propose that the mind is made up of genetically influenced and domain-specific mental algorithms or computational modules, designed to solve specific evolutionary problems of the past. Cosmides and Tooby also state in a brief "primer" on their website, that "...the brain is a physical system. It functions like a computer," "...the brain's function is to process information," "different neural circuits are specialized for solving different adaptive problems," and "our modern skulls house a stone age mind." The definition of module has caused confusion and dispute. J. A. Fodor initially defined module as "functionally specialized cognitive systems" that have nine features but not necessarily all at the same time. In his views modules can be found in peripheral processing such as low-level visual processing but not in central processing. Later he narrowed the two essential features to domain-specificity and information encapsulation. Frankenhuis and Ploeger write that domain-specificity means that "a given cognitive mechanism accepts, or is specialized to operate on, only a specific class of information". Information encapsulation means that information processing in the module cannot be affected by information in the rest of the brain. One example is that being aware that a certain optical illusion, caused by low level processing, is false does not prevent the illusion from persisting. Evolutionary psychologists instead usually define modules as functionally specialized cognitive systems that are domain-specific and may also contain innate knowledge about the class of information processed. Modules can be found also for central processing. This theory is sometimes referred to as massive modularity. A 2010 review by evolutionary psychologists Confer et al. suggested that domain general theories, such as for "rationality," has several problems: 1. Evolutionary theories using the idea of numerous domain-specific adaptions have produced testable predictions that have been empirically confirmed; the theory of domain-general rational thought has produced no such predictions or confirmations. 2. The rapidity of responses such as jealousy due to infidelity indicates a domain-specific dedicated module rather than a general, deliberate, rational calculation of consequences. 3. Reactions may occur instinctively (consistent with innate knowledge) even if a person has not learned such knowledge. One example being that in the ancestral environment it is unlikely that males during development learn that infidelity (usually secret) may cause paternal uncertainty (from observing the phenotypes of children born many months later and making a statistical conclusion from the phenotype dissimilarity to the cuckolded fathers). With respect to general purpose problem solvers, Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby (1992) have suggested in The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and The Generation of Culture that a purely general problem solving mechanism is impossible to build due to the frame problem. Clune et al. (2013) have argued that computer simulations of the evolution of neural nets suggest that modularity evolves because, compared to non-modular networks, connection costs are lower. Several groups of critics, including psychologists working within evolutionary frameworks, argue that the massively modular theory of mind does little to explain adaptive psychological traits. Proponents of other models of the mind argue that the computational theory of mind is no better at explaining human behavior than a theory with mind entirely a product of the environment. Even within evolutionary psychology there is discussion about the degree of modularity, either as a few generalist modules or as many highly specific modules. Other critics suggest that there is little empirical support in favor of the domain-specific theory beyond performance on the Wason selection task, a task critics state is too limited in scope to test all relevant aspects of reasoning. Moreover, critics argue that Cosmides and Tooby's conclusions contain several inferential errors and that the authors use untested evolutionary assumptions to eliminate rival reasoning theories. Wallace (2010) observes that the evolutionary psychologists' definition of "mind" has been heavily influenced by cognitivism and/or information processing definitions of the mind. Critics point out that these assumptions underlying evolutionary psychologists' hypotheses are controversial and have been contested by some psychologists, philosophers, and neuroscientists. For example, Jaak Panksepp, an affective neuroscientist, point to the "remarkable degree of neocortical plasticity within the human brain, especially during development" and states that "the developmental interactions among ancient special-purpose circuits and more recent general-purpose brain mechanisms can generate many of the "modularized" human abilities that evolutionary psychology has entertained." Philosopher David Buller agrees with the general argument that the human mind has evolved over time but disagrees with the specific claims evolutionary psychologists make. He has argued that the contention that the mind consists of thousands of modules, including sexually dimorphic jealousy and parental investment modules, are unsupported by the available empirical evidence. He has suggested that the "modules" result from the brain's developmental plasticity and that they are adaptive responses to local conditions, not past evolutionary environments. However, Buller has also stated that even if massive modularity is false this does not necessarily have broad implications for evolutionary psychology. Evolution may create innate motives even without innate knowledge. In contrast to modular mental structure, some theories posit domain-general processing, in which mental activity is distributed across the brain and cannot be decomposed, even abstractly, into independent units. A staunch defender of this view is William Uttal, who argues in The New Phrenology(2003) that there are serious philosophical, theoretical, and methodological problems with the entire enterprise of trying to localise cognitive processes in the brain. Part of this argument is that a successful taxonomy of mental processes has yet to be developed. Merlin Donald argues that over evolutionary time the mind has gained adaptive advantage from being a general problem solver. The mind, as described by Donald, includes module-like "central" mechanisms, in addition to more recently evolved "domain-general" mechanism.

Hamilton's rule

The principle that for natural selection to favor an altruistic act, the benefit to the recipient, devalued by the coefficient of relatedness, must exceed the cost to the altruist.

Hamilton's rule

The principle that for natural selection to favor an altruistic act, the benefit to the recipient, devalued by the coefficient of relatedness, must exceed the cost to the altruist. Kin selection is the evolutionary strategy that favours the reproductive success of an organism's relatives, even at a cost to the organism's own survival and reproduction. Kin altruism can look like altruistic behaviour whose evolution is driven by kin selection. Kin selection is an instance of inclusive fitness, which combines the number of offspring produced with the number an individual can ensure the production of by supporting others, such as siblings. Charles Darwin discussed the concept of kin selection in his 1859 book, On the Origin of Species, where he reflected on the puzzle of sterile social insects, such as honey bees, which leave reproduction to their mothers, arguing that a selection benefit to related organisms (the same "stock") would allow the evolution of a trait that confers the benefit but destroys an individual at the same time. R.A. Fisher in 1930 and J.B.S. Haldane in 1932 set out the mathematics of kin selection, with Haldane famously joking that he would willingly die for two brothers or eight cousins. In 1964, W.D. Hamilton popularised the concept and the major advance in the mathematical treatment of the phenomenon by George R. Price which has become known as Hamilton's rule. In the same year, John Maynard Smith used the actual term kin selection for the first time. According to Hamilton's rule, kin selection causes genes to increase in frequency when the genetic relatedness of a recipient to an actor multiplied by the benefit to the recipient is greater than the reproductive cost to the actor. Hamilton proposed two mechanisms for kin selection. First, kin recognition allows individuals to be able to identify their relatives. Second, in viscous populations, populations in which the movement of organisms from their place of birth is relatively slow, local interactions tend to be among relatives by default. The viscous population mechanism makes kin selection and social cooperation possible in the absence of kin recognition. In this case, nurture kinship, the treatment of individuals as kin as a result of living together, is sufficient for kin selection, given reasonable assumptions about population dispersal rates. Note that kin selection is not the same thing as group selection, where natural selection is believed to act on the group as a whole. information: Biological rules Formally, genes should where r = the genetic relatedness of the recipient to the actor, often defined as the probability that a gene picked randomly from each at the same locus is identical by descent.B=the additional reproductive benefit gained by the recipient of the altruistic act,C=the reproductive cost to the individual performing the act. This inequality is known as Hamilton's rule after W. D. Hamilton who in 1964 published the first formal quantitative treatment of kin selection. The relatedness parameter (r) in Hamilton's rule was introduced in 1922 by Sewall Wright as a coefficient of relationship that gives the probability that at a random locus, the alleles there will be identical by descent. Subsequent authors, including Hamilton, sometimes reformulate this with a regression, which, unlike probabilities, can be negative. A regression analysis producing statistically significant negative relationships indicates that two individuals are less genetically alike than two random ones (Hamilton 1970, Nature & Grafen 1985 Oxford Surveys in Evolutionary Biology). This has been invoked to explain the evolution of spiteful behaviour consisting of acts that result in harm, or loss of fitness, to both the actor and the recipient.

repressive state apparatus (RSA)

The ruling class uses the repressive state apparatuses (RSA) to dominate the working class. The basic, social function of the RSA (government, courts, police and armed forces, etc.) is timely intervention to politics in favour of the interests of the ruling class, by repressing the subordinate social classes as required, either by violent or non-violent coercive means. The ruling class controls the RSA, because they also control the powers of the state (political, legislative, armed). Althusser has enhanced the Marxist theory of the state, by distinguishing the repressive apparatuses of the state from the ideological apparatuses of the state (ISA), which are an array of social institutions and multiple, political realities that propagate many ideologies—the religious ISA, the educational ISA, the family ISA, the legal ISA, the political ISA.

levels of selection

The several kinds of reproducing biological entities (e.g., genes, organisms, species) that can vary in fitness, resulting in potential selection among them. Selection levels may be individual, group, multi-level.

social environment

The social environment, social context, sociocultural context or milieu refers to the immediate physical and social setting in which people live or in which something happens or develops. It includes the culture that the individual was educated or lives in, and the people and institutions with whom they interact. The interaction may be in person or through communication media, even anonymous or one-way, and may not imply equality of social status. Therefore, the social environment is a broader concept than that of social class or social circle. The physical and social environment is a determining factor in active and healthy aging in place, being a central factor in the study of environmental gerontology.

behavioral ecology

The study of the evolution of and ecological basis for animal behavior..

Evolutionary Anthropology

The study of the origins of human physiology and innate behavior, as well as the study between these traits compared in hominids and non-hominid primates.

Homo economicus

The term homo economicus, or economic man, is the portrayal of humans as agents who are consistently rational, narrowly self-interested, and who pursue their subjectively-defined ends optimally. It is a word play on Homo sapiens, used in some economic theories and in pedagogy. In game theory, homo economicus is often modelled through the assumption of perfect rationality. It assumes that agents always act in a way that maximize utility as a consumer and profit as a producer,[2] and are capable of arbitrarily complex deductions towards that end. They will always be capable of thinking through all possible outcomes and choosing that course of action which will result in the best possible result. The rationality implied in homo economicus does not restrict what sort of preferences are admissible. Only naïve applications of the homo economicus model assume that agents know what is best for their long-term physical and mental health. For example, an agent's utility function could be linked to the perceived utility of other agents (such as one's wife or children), making homo economicus compatible with other models such as homo reciprocans, which emphasizes human cooperation. As a theory on human conduct, it contrasts to the concepts of behavioral economics, which examines cognitive biases and other irrationalities, and to bounded rationality, which assumes that practical elements such as cognitive and time limitations restrict the rationality of agents.

inclusive fitness

The total effect an individual has on proliferating its genes by producing its own offspring and by providing aid that enables other close relatives to increase the production of their offspring.

Darwinism (evolution)

Theory brought about by Charles Darwin that describes the processes by which organisms adapt to their environments.

Todd K. Shackelford

Todd Kennedy Shackelford (born 1971) is an American psychologist and professor at Oakland University. He is best known for his work in evolutionary psychology. He is the editor in chief of the academic journals Evolutionary Psychology and Evolutionary Psychological Science. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science.

Todd K. Shackelford

Todd Kennedy Shackelford is an American psychologist and professor at Oakland University. He is best known for his work in evolutionary psychology. He is the editor in chief of the academic journals Evolutionary Psychology and Evolutionary Psychological Science. He is a fellow of the American Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science.

Universal Darwinism

Universal Darwinism (also known as generalized Darwinism, universal selection theory, or Darwinian metaphysics) refers to a variety of approaches that extend the theory of Darwinism beyond its original domain of biological evolution on Earth. Universal Darwinism aims to formulate a generalized version of the mechanisms of variation, selection and heredity proposed by Charles Darwin, so that they can apply to explain evolution in a wide variety of other domains, including psychology, economics, culture, medicine, computer science and physics.

universal grammar

Universal grammar (UG) in linguistics, is the theory of the genetic component of the language faculty, usually credited to Noam Chomsky. The basic postulate of UG is that a certain set of structural rulesare innate to humans, independent of sensory experience. With more linguistic stimuli received in the course of psychological development, children then adopt specific syntactic rules that conform to UG. It is sometimes known as "mental grammar", and stands contrasted with other "grammars", e.g. prescriptive, descriptive and pedagogical. The advocates of this theory emphasize and partially rely on the poverty of the stimulus (POS) argument and the existence of some universal properties of natural human languages. However, the latter has not been firmly established, as some linguists have argued languages are so diverse that such universality is rare. It is a matter of empirical investigation to determine precisely what properties are universal and what linguistic capacities are innate.

psychotropic mechanism: random abuse

Used by dominant individuals or groups to subordinate and oppress inferior members of a group. Three conditions thaf allow its efficacy: 1) scare resources 2) asymmetrically distributed power 3) possibility of coalition formation is suppressed

Evolutionary Algorithm: V/S/R

Variety + Selection + Retention (V/S/R) = organic evolution by natural selection.

Veblen goods (examples)

Veblen effect is one of a family of theoretical anomalies in the general law of demand in microeconomics. Other related effects include: The snob effect: expressed preference for goods because they are different from those commonly preferred; in other words, for consumers who want to use exclusive products, price is quality. The common law of business balance: low price of a good indicates that the producer may have compromised quality, that is, "you get what you pay for".The hot-hand fallacy: stock buyers have fallen prey to the fallacy that previous price increases suggest future price increases. Other rationales for buying a high-priced stock are that previous buyers who bid up the price are proof of the issue's quality, or conversely, that an issue's low price may be evidence of viability problems. Sometimes, the value of a good increases as the number of buyers or users increases. This is called the bandwagon effect when it depends on the psychology of buying a product because it seems popular; or the network effect, when a large number of buyers or users itself increases the value of a good. For example, as the number of people with telephones or Facebook increased, the value of having a telephone or being on Facebook increased, since the user could reach more people. However, neither of these effects suggests that, at a given level of saturation, raising the price would boost demand. Some of these effects are discussed in a classic article by Harvey Leibenstein (1950). Counter-examples have been called the counter-Veblen effect. The effect on demand depends on the range of other goods available, their prices, and whether they serve as substitutes for the goods in question. The effects are anomalies within demand theory, because the theory normally assumes that preferences are independent of price or the number of units being sold. They are therefore collectively referred to as interaction effects. The interaction effects are a different kind of anomaly from that posed by Giffen goods. The Giffen goods theory is one for which observed quantity demanded rises as price rises, but the effect arises without any interaction between price and preference—it results from the interplay of the income effect and the substitution effect of a change in price. Studies have examined cases of goods which show interaction effects,[7][8] and in which people seem to receive more pleasure from more expensive goods.

social baseline model (theory)

We are hardwired to seek social contact, and therefore, these are baseline strategies for emotion regulation. Interpersonal factors, such as social proximity and interaction, can up- or down- regulate our current or potential emotion responses help us to regulate by: • Signaling social resources are available • Reducing perceptions of risk and harm • Alerting individual that less action is needed • Reducing costs - both metabolically and cognitively • Fostering efficient coping To survive and reproduce, organisms must take in more energy than they expend, a principle of behavioral ecology called economy of action. Social baseline theory (SBT), a framework based on this principle, organizes decades of observed links between social relationships, health, and well-being, in order to understand how humans utilize each other as resources to optimize individual energy expenditures. This general strategy helps us manage the costs of our very long period of ontogenetic development and, we argue, the many behavioral and psychological capabilities of our uniquely powerful and costly brain. Below, we review evidence that social relationships serve the energy-saving functions that we claim and describe the reasons SBT refers to social proximity as a "baseline" condition. For this chapter we place special emphasis on the role of social proximity in the regulation of emotion. In our view, the social regulation of emotion serves, in the aggregate' and on average, to decrease the cost of coping with many of life's difficulties-a function that involves the brain's ability to use both internal and external information to make "bets" about how to deploy its own resources in light of expected returns. This perspective (1) highlights the importance of emotion as a source of information about current and predicted resources, and (2) entails a view of psychological measurement that extends beyond the individual to systemic processes within dyads and groups.

Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity (1802), William Paley

William Paley, in his 1802 Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity published a prominent presentation of the design argument with his version of the watchmaker analogy and the first use of the phrase "argument from design."

David Sloan Wilson

Wilson is a prominent proponent of the concept of group selection (also known as multi-level selection) in evolution. He and Elliott Sober proposed a framework called multilevel selection theory, which incorporates the more orthodox approach of gene-level selection and individual selection, in their book Unto Others. This framework argues that while genes serve as the means by which organisms' designs are transmitted across generations, individuals and groups are vehicles for those genes and both are arenas for genes to act on. Indeed, genes themselves can be affected by selection, not just because of their effects on the design of their vehicle (the organism) but also because of their effect on the functioning of the DNA on which they reside. Hence the notion of multilevel selection. Wilson has also coined the concept of a trait-group, a group of organisms linked not permanently as a group but having a shared fate due to interactions that they have. Wilson has described himself as an "enthusiastic proponent" of the extended evolutionary synthesis.

Grooming, Gossip and the Evolution of Language (1996), Robin Dunbar

a 1996 book by Robin Dunbar, in which the author argues that language evolved from social grooming. He further suggests that a stage of this evolution was the telling of gossip, an argument supported by the observation that language is adapted for storytelling.

social grooming (allogrooming)

a behaviour in which social animals, including humans, clean or maintain one another's body or appearance. A related term, allogrooming, indicates social grooming between members of the same species. Grooming is a major social activity, and a means by which animals who live in close proximity may bond and reinforce social structures, family links, and build companionships. Social grooming is also used as a means of conflict resolution, maternal behaviour and reconciliation in some species. Mutual grooming typically describes the act of grooming between two individuals, often as a part of social grooming, pair bonding, or a precoital activity.

Surgency

a cluster of behaviors including approach behavior, high activity, and impulsivity. n. a personality trait marked by cheerfulness, responsiveness, spontaneity, and sociability but at a level below that of extraversion or mania. [defined by Raymond B. Cattell] —surgent adj.

Dunning-Kruger Effect

a cognitive bias in which unskilled people make poor decisions and reach erroneous conclusions, but their incompetence denies them the metacognitive ability to appreciate their mistakes. Accounts for why low-skilled individuals are prone to greater overconfidence than are higher-skilled persons (in a particular area). the field of psychology, the Dunning-Kruger effectis a cognitive bias in which people mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, people cannot objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence. As described by social psychologists David Dunningand Justin Kruger, the cognitive bias of illusory superiority results from an internal illusion in people of low ability and from an external misperception in people of high ability; that is, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others."

parasitic meme

a concept of Richard Dawkins' building on his concept of the meme, a unit of human cultural information passed from individual to individual and group to group like a gene. A parasitic meme is a harmful unit of cultural information that, like a biological parasite, can harm individuals, groups, and societies.

open-ended learning

a continuous attitude of knowledge and skill acquisition.

social signaling

a core component of the evolutionary advantage involved the development of complex social-signaling capabilities that allowed for a quick and safe means to evaluate/resolve conflict and manage potential collaborations. Indeed, our social signalling capacities are more powerful than most individuals realize as they viscerally impact not only the person we are interacting with but our own physiology as well—most often at the pre-conscious level. Slow-motion film analysis has robustly revealed that we react to changes in body movement, posture, and facial expressions of others during interactions without ever knowing it. Indeed, we are constantly social-signaling when around others (e.g., via micro-expressions, body movements)—even when deliberately trying not to. For example, 'silence' can be just as powerful as 'non-stop talking'. Plus, for our very early ancestors living in harsh environments the cost of not detecting a 'true' disapproval signal was too high to ignore—since tribal banishment was essentially a death sentence from starvation or predation (see Lonely Apes Die). As a consequence, we are constantly scanning the facial expressions and vocalizations of other people for signs of disapproval and are biologically predisposed to construe the intentions of others as disapproving—especially when social-signals are ambiguous. This means we are essentially a socially-anxious species.

diathesis-stress model

a diagnostic model that proposes that a disorder may develop when an underlying vulnerability is coupled with a precipitating event.

diathesis-stress model

a diagnostic model that proposes that a disorder may develop when an underlying vulnerability is coupled with a precipitating event. Diathesis-stress model is a psychological theorythat attempts to explain a disorder, or its trajectory, as the result of an interaction between a predispositional vulnerability and a stress caused by life experiences. Was applied to explaining schizophrenia in the 1960s by Paul Meehl. The term diathesis derives from the Greek term for a predisposition, or sensibility. A diathesis can take the form of genetic, psychological, biological, or situational factors. A large range of differences exists among individuals' vulnerabilities to the development of a disorder. The diathesis, or predisposition, interacts with the individual's subsequent stress response. Stress is a life event or series of events that disrupts a person's psychological equilibrium and may catalyze the development of a disorder. Thus the diathesis-stress model serves to explore how biological or genetic traits (diatheses) interact with environmental influences (stressors) to produce disorders such as depression, anxiety, or schizophrenia. The diathesis-stress model asserts that if the combination of the predisposition and the stress exceeds a threshold, the person will develop a disorder.

evolutionary worldview

a disposition to viewing the most important aspects of life through an evolutionary theoretical frame.

mind-reading module

a hypothesized cognitive mechanism that allows humans to predict what others are thinking or planning. Postulated by Cosmides and Tooby.

symbolic interactionism

a micro-level theory in which shared meanings, orientations, and assumptions form the basic motivations behind people's actions. Interactionism is a theoretical perspective that derives social processes (such as conflict, cooperation, identity formation) from human interaction. It is the study of how individuals shape society and are shaped by society through meaning that arises in interactions. Interactionist theory has grown in the latter half of the twentieth century and has become one of the dominant sociological perspectives in the world today. George Herbert Mead, as an advocate of pragmatism and the subjectivity of social reality, is considered a leader in the development of interactionism. Herbert Blumerexpanded on Mead's work and coined the term "symbolic interactionism."

social dominance orientation

a motivation to have one's group dominate other social groups.

Theory of Natural Selection

a process that results in the survival of the organisms that are best suited for their environment.

Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975)

a seminal, influential work in the field of evolutionary psychology by Edward O. Wilson. Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975; 25th anniversary edition 2000) is a book by the biologist E. O. Wilson. It helped start the sociobiology debate, one of the great scientific controversies in biology of the 20th century and part of the wider debate about evolutionary psychology and the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology. Wilson popularized the term "sociobiology" as an attempt to explain the evolutionary mechanics behind social behaviour such as altruism, aggression, and the nurturing of the young. It formed a position within the long-running nature versus nurture debate. The fundamental principle guiding sociobiology is that an organism's evolutionary success is measured by the extent to which its genes are represented in the next generation.

punctuated equilibrium model

a set of phases that temporary groups go through that involves transitions between inertia and activity.

social evolution

a subdiscipline of evolutionary biology that is concerned with social behaviors that have fitness consequences for individuals other than the actor. It is also a subdiscipline of sociology that studies evolution of social systems.

culturgen

a term coined in 1980 by two Americanscientists, the biomathematician Charles J. Lumsden and the sociobiologist E. O. Wilson, to denote a hypothetical 'unit' of culture, in their controversial attempt to analyse cultural evolution by using techniques borrowed from population genetics, and to infer a theory of evolution of the human mind. It effectively means much the same as the older term "cultural trait" used by anthropologists, and offers similar difficulties of identification and definition. The fullest exposition of their theory appeared in their book Genes, Mind, and Culture: the coevolutionary process (1981), which received many reviews in the scientific press, many of them highly negative; it was re-issued in 2005 with a review of subsequent developments. The term has declined in popularity, and the older term meme (coined by Richard Dawkinsin his book The Selfish Gene (1976)) is now used in its stead almost universally (even by Wilson in his later writings).

false consciousness

a term used primarily by Marxist sociologists to describe ways in which material, ideological, and institutional processes are said to mislead members of the proletariat and other class actors within capitalist societies, concealing the exploitation intrinsic to the social relations between classes. Friedrich Engels used the term "false consciousness" to address the scenario where the ideology of the ruling class is embodied willfully by a subordinate class. Engels dubs this consciousness "false" because the class is asserting itself towards goals that do not benefit it. "Consciousness", in this context, reflects a class's ability to politically identify and assert its will. The subordinate class is conscious: it plays a major role in society and can assert its will due to being sufficiently unified in ideas and action. Marshall I. Pomer has argued that members of the proletariat disregard the true nature of class relations because of their belief in the probability or possibility of upward mobility. Such a belief or something like it is said to be required in economics with its presumption of rational agency; otherwise wage laborers would not be the conscious supporters of social relations antithetical to their own interests, violating that presumption.

social dominance theory

a theory contending that societal groups can be organized in a power hierarchy in which the dominant groups enjoy a disproportionate share of the society's assets and the subordinate groups receive most of its liabilities.

Neural Darwinism

a theory of brain development laid out in 1987 by neurobiologist Gerald Edelman (b. 1929). According to this theory, selective forces, both of development and experience, operate on neuronal groups rather than on single neurons. Movement-sensation categories are continually re-categorized, producing maps that interact in ensemble, and establish the coherent temporal patterns of a unified notion of brain. This is an empirically viable neurobiological theory of individuality, about how a person's unique memories, perspectives, and autonomous mental life evolves. The role it may play in a wider theory of consciousness as a kind of "remembered present" is as yet unclear, despite its advantages over other connectionist or neural network models.

Moral Foundations Theory

a theory proposing that there are five evolved, universal moral domains in which specific emotions guide moral judgments. Moral foundations theory is a social psychologicaltheory intended to explain the origins of and variation in human moral reasoning on the basis of innate, modular foundations. It was first proposed by the psychologists Jonathan Haidt, Craig Joseph and Jesse Graham, building on the work of cultural anthropologist Richard Shweder; and subsequently developed by a diverse group of collaborators, and popularized in Haidt's book The Righteous Mind. The original theory proposed five foundations: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, and Sanctity/Degradation. It now includes a sixth parameter, Liberty/Oppression; while its authors did not proscribe the possibility of including more. Although the initial development of moral foundations theory focused on cultural differences, subsequent work with the theory has largely focused on political ideology. Various scholars have offered moral foundations theory as an explanation of differences among political progressives (liberals in the American sense), conservatives, and libertarians, and have suggested that it can explain variation in opinion on politically charged issues such as same sex marriage and abortion. The two main sources are The Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism and Mapping the Moral Domain. In the first Haidt and Graham describe their work as looking, as anthropologists, at the evolution of morality and finding the common ground between each variation. In the second they describe and defend their method, known as the Moral Foundations Questionnaire. Through various trials and a participation population that consisted of over 11 thousand people, from all ages and political beliefs, they were able to find results that supported their prediction.

dominance hierarchy

a type of social hierarchythat arises when members of a social group interact, to create a ranking system. In social living groups, members are likely to compete for access to limited resources and mating opportunities. Rather than fighting each time they meet, relative rank is established between members of the same sex. Based on repetitive interactions a social order is created that is subject to change each time a dominant animal is challenged by a subordinate one.

ideological state apparatus (ISA)

according to Althusser, use methods other than physical violence to achieve the same objectives as RSA. They may include educational institutions (e.g. schools), media outlets, churches, social/sports clubs and the family. These formations are ostensibly apolitical and part of civil society, rather than a formal part of the state (i.e. as is the case in RSA). In terms of psychology they could be described as psychosocial, because they aim to inculcate ways of seeing and evaluating things, events and class relations. Instead of expressing and imposing order, through violent repression, ISA disseminate ideologies that reinforce the control of a dominant class. People tend to be co-opted by fear of social rejection, e.g. ostracisation, ridicule and isolation. In Althusser's view, a social class cannot hold state power unless, and until, it simultaneously exercises hegemony (domination) over and through ISA. Educational ISA, in particular, assume a dominant role in a capitalist economy, and conceal and mask the ideology of the ruling class behind the "liberating qualities" of education, so that the hidden agendas of the ruling class are inconspicuous to most teachers, students, parents and other interested members of society. Althusser said that the school has supplanted the church as the crucial ISA for indoctrination, which augments the reproduction of the relations of production (i.e. the capitalist relations of exploitation) by training the students to become a source of labour power, who work for and under capitalists. However, because ISA cannot dominate as obviously or readily as RSA, ideological state apparatuses may themselves become a site of class struggle. That is, subordinate social classes are able to find the means and occasions to express class struggle politically and in so doing counter the dominant class, either by utilizing ideological contradictions inherent in ISA, or by campaigns to take control of positions within the ISA. This, nevertheless, will not in itself prevent the dominant class from retaining its position in control of RSA.

interpellation

according to Louis Althusser, the obviousness that people (you and I) are subjects is an effect of ideology. Althusser believes that there are two functions of interpellation. One function of ideology is "recognition" and the other function, its inverse, is "misrecognition". Below are a few concrete illustrations that Althusser provides to further explain the two functions: Althusser uses the term "interpellation" to describe the process by which ideology constitutes individual persons as subjects. The ideological social and political institutions—the family, the media, religious organisations, the education system and the discourses they propagate—'hail' the individual in social interactions, giving the individual his or her identity. Althusser compares ideology to a policeman shouting "hey you" to a person walking in the street. The person responds to the call and in doing so is transformed into a subject—a self-conscious, responsible agent whose actions can be explained by his or her thoughts. Althusser thus goes against the classical definition of the subject as cause and substance, emphasising instead how the situation always precedes the (individual or collective) subject. Concrete individual persons are the carriers of ideology—they are "always-already interpellated" as subjects. Individual subjects are presented principally as produced by social forces, rather than acting as powerful independent agents with self-produced identities. Althusser's argument here strongly draws from Jacques Lacan's concept of the mirror stage—we acquire our identities by seeing ourselves somehow mirrored in ideologies.

emotional intelligence gathering (EIG)

active observation to learn about an individual, group, culture, or social situation in order to effectively navigate it (F. Jordan, 2018).

environment-contingent adaptations

adaptations that are activated or modified based on environmental conditions.

environment-contingent species-typical strategy

adaptive attributes expressed based on environmental conditions that are unique to an organism.

developmental (situational) calibration of psychological mechanisms

adaptive psychological attributes are expressed contingent upon the environmental conditions encountered. Similar to the diathesis-stress model.

evolutionary contingency

adaptive traits are expressed dependent upon environmental conditions.

Allomothering

allomothering, "alloparental", "infant handling", or non-maternal infant care, is performed by any group member other than the mother or genetic father and thus is distinguished from parental care. It is a widespread phenomenon among mammals and birds. Allomothering comprises a wide variety of behaviours including: carrying, provisioning, grooming, touching, nursing (allonursing), and protecting infants from predators or conspecifics. Depending on age-sex composition of groups alloparents, helpers or "handlers" can be non-reproductive males in polyandrous systems, reproductive or non-reproductive adult females, young or older juveniles, or older brothers or sisters helping to raise their younger siblings.

Dual Inheritance Theory (DIT) aka gene-culture coevolution

also known as gene-culture coevolution or biocultural evolution, was developed in the 1960s through early 1980s to explain how human behavior is a product of two different and interacting evolutionary processes: genetic evolution and cultural evolution. Genes and culture continually interact in a feedback loop, changes in genes can lead to changes in culture which can then influence genetic selection, and vice versa. One of the theory's central claims is that culture evolves partly through a Darwinian selection process, which dual inheritance theorists often describe by analogy to genetic evolution. 'Culture', in this context is defined as 'socially learned behavior', and 'social learning' is defined as copying behaviors observed in others or acquiring behaviors through being taught by others. Most of the modelling done in the field relies on the first dynamic (copying) though it can be extended to teaching.

phylogenetic adaptation

an adaptation for survival that is expressed

conditional adaptation

an adaptation that is subject to inhibition, alteration, or modification based on environmental signals or cues.

ontogenetic adaptation

an adaptation that occurs during the life of an organism buy is not conveyed genetically.

genetically invariant psychological mechanism

an adaptive psychological attribute that will be expressed regardless of environment.

selection pressure

an agent of differential mortality or fertility that tends to make a population change genetically.

evolutionary utilitarianism

an emerging philosophical perspective that attempts to present utilitarianism using an evolutionary frame.

Theory

an explanation using an integrated set of principles that organizes observations and predicts behaviors or events.

evolution is relentlessly relative

an expression of D.S. Wilson's in his book This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution (2019) which emphasizes the lack of directionality, intentionality, and cognizance with regard to evolutionary processes.

behavioral adaptation

an inherited behavior that helps an organism survive.

evolutionary life task

an organism's goal-directed behaviors that facilitate survival and successful reproduction.

physical reasoning mode (Wilson, 2019)

assessing something based on its physical properties.

functional reasoning mode (Wilson, 2019)

assessing something based on presumed or identified functionality, purpose, or intention.

Extraparental kin investment

assistance raising offspring by genetically related or socially obligated others.

individual traits

attributes that describe the behaviors of an individual.

goal-directed behavior

behavior in which several schemes are combined and coordinated to generate a single act to solve a problem.

social signals

behaviors that establish and maintain social relationships.

selfish traits

behaviors that exhibit a benefit to the indvidual.

cooperative traits

behaviors that exhibit a concern for the group.

mate guarding

behaviours employed by both males and females with the aim of maintaining reproductive opportunities and sexual access to a mate. It involves discouraging the current mate from abandoning the relationship whilst also warding off intrasexual (same sex) rivals. It has been observed in many nonhuman animals (see sperm competition), as well as humans. Sexual jealousy is one of the main causes of mate guarding behaviour. Both males and females use different strategies to retain a mate and there is evidence that suggests resistance to mate guarding also exists.

sociosexual orientation

beliefs and behaviors that describe our feelings about sex.

Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942), Julian Huxley

book by Julian Huxley (grandson of T.H. Huxley), set out his vision of the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology of the early 20th century. It was enthusiastically reviewed in academic biology journals.

collective memory

collective memory refers to the shared pool of memories, knowledge and information of a social group that is significantly associated with the group's identity. The English phrase "collective memory" and the equivalent French phrase "la mémoire collective" appeared in the second half of the nineteenth century. The philosopher and sociologist Maurice Halbwachs analyzed and advanced the concept of the collective memory in the book La mémoire collective (1950). Collective memory can be constructed, shared, and passed on by large and small social groups. Examples of these groups can include nations, generations, communities among others. Collective memory has been a topic of interest and research across a number of disciplines, including psychology, sociology, history, philosophyand anthropology.

match quality

correspondence between interest, ability, and activity.

teletropy

creating mood changes in other people. A subtype of psychotropy.

conscientização (conscientization, critical consciousness)

critical consciousness, conscientization, or conscientização in Portuguese, is a popular education and social concept developed by Brazilian pedagogue and educational theorist Paulo Freire, grounded in post-Marxist critical theory. Critical consciousness focuses on achieving an in-depth understanding of the world, allowing for the perception and exposure of social and political contradictions. Critical consciousness also includes taking action against the oppressive elements in one's life that are illuminated by that understanding. Paulo Freire defines critical consciousness as the ability to "intervene in reality in order to change it." Critical consciousness proceeds through the identification of "generative themes", which Freire identifies as "iconic representations that have a powerful emotional impact in the daily lives of learners." In this way, individual consciousness helps end the "culture of silence" in which the socially dispossessed internalize the negative images of themselves created and propagated by the oppressor in situations of extreme poverty. Liberating learners from this mimicry of the powerful, and the fratricidal violence that results therefrom is a major goal of critical consciousness. Critical consciousness is a fundamental aspect of Freire's concept of popular education.

cultural evolution

cultural change over time; not to be confused with progress.

mate poaching

defined as behavior intended to attract someone who is already in a romantic relationship.

ecological dominance

degree to which a taxon is more abundant or makes up more biomass than its competitors in an ecological community.

cultural commodification

describes human societies that are driven by an acquisitive ethos.

Epigenesis

development resulting from ongoing, bidirectional exchanges between heredity and all levels of the environment.

heritable variation

differences that are passed on from parent to offspring.

dyadic reciprocal alliance formation

dyadic relationships characterized by cooperation and reciprocity.

Functionalism

early school of thought promoted by James and influenced by Darwin; explored how mental and behavioral processes function- how they enable the organism to adapt, survive, and flourish.

adaptationist (natural selection) thinking

enhanced fitness compared to alternative traits is the only source of design in nature (Wilson, 2019, This View of Life.)

stress-inducing environment

environmental conditions containing stressors that organisms respond to.

evolutionary species concept

every species has its own evolutionary history, which is partly documented in the fossil record.

evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS)

evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) is a strategy (or set of strategies) which, if adopted by a population in a given environment, is impenetrable, meaning that it cannot be invaded by any alternative strategy (or strategies) that are initially rare. It is relevant in game theory, behavioural ecology, and evolutionary psychology. An ESS is an equilibrium refinement of the Nash equilibrium. It is a Nash equilibrium that is "evolutionarily" stable: once it is fixed in a population, natural selection alone is sufficient to prevent alternative (mutant) strategies from invading successfully. The theory is not intended to deal with the possibility of gross external changes to the environment that bring new selective forces to bear.

evolutionary ethics

evolutionary ethics tries to bridge the gap between philosophy and the natural sciences by arguing that natural selection has instilled human beings with a moral sense, a disposition to be good. If this were true, morality could be understood as a phenomenon that arises automatically during the evolution of sociable, intelligent beings and not, as theologians or philosophers might argue, as the result of divine revelation or the application of our rational faculties. Morality would be interpreted as a useful adaptation that increases the fitness of its holders by providing a selective advantage. This is certainly the view of Edward O. Wilson, the "father" of sociobiology, who believes that "scientists and humanists should consider together the possibility that the time has come for ethics to be removed temporarily from the hands of the philosophers and biologicized" (Wilson, 1975: 27). The challenge for evolutionary biologists such as Wilson is to define goodness with reference to evolutionary theory and then explain why human beings ought to be good.

evolutionary landscape

evolutionary landscape is a metaphor, a construct used to think about and visualize the processes of evolution (e.g. natural selection and genetic drift) acting on a biological entity (e.g., a gene, protein, population, species). This entity can be viewed as searching or moving through a search space. For example, the search space of a gene would be all possible nucleotide sequences. The search space is only part of an evolutionary landscape. The final component is the "y-axis," which is usually fitness. Each value along the search space can result in a high or low fitness for the entity. If small movements through search space cause changes in fitness that are relatively small, then the landscape is considered smooth. Smooth landscapes happen when most fixed mutations have little to no effect on fitness, which is what one would expect with the neutral theory of molecular evolution. In contrast, if small movements result in large changes in fitness, then the landscape is said to be rugged.In either case, movement tends to be toward areas of higher fitness, though usually not the global optima.

personality (Jordan, 2019)

evolutionary perspective: the constellation of pervasive, enduring, and generally predictable genetically, environmentally, and experientially derived mental products, including thoughts, beliefs, attitudes, temperaments, dispositions, and traits, exclusive of disorder and caprice, ordinarily representative of an individual's psychological functioning as manifest in observable behaviors and intended to aid in survival and reproduction.

David Buss

evolutionary psychologist. The primary topics of his research include male mating strategies, conflict between the sexes, social status, social reputation, prestige, the emotion of jealousy, homicide, anti-homicide defenses, and—most recently—stalking. All of these are approached from an evolutionary perspective. Buss is the author of more than 200 scientific articles and has won many awards, including an APA Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology in 1988 and an APA G. Stanley Hall Lectureship in 1990. Buss is the author of a number of publications and books, including The Evolution of Desire, The Dangerous Passion, and The Murderer Next Door, which introduces a new theory of homicide from an evolutionary perspective. He is also the author of Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, whose fourth edition was released in 2011. In 2005, Buss edited a reference volume, The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology.[1] His latest book is Why Women Have Sex, which he coauthored with Cindy Meston.

Margo Wilson

evolutionary psychologist. Together with her fellow psychologist and husband, Martin Daly, whom she'd met in Toronto in 1974, where they were both working at the time, Margo Wilson started investigating homicide, and conducting "epidemiological analyses of patterns of risk for violence in different categories of relationships." She was a former editor-in-chief of the journal Evolution and Human Behavior along with Daly, and served as president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society.

social-contextual approach (learning)

examines the effects of environmental aspects of the learning process, particularly the role of parents and other caregivers.

correlates of fitness

features that tend to indicate an organism's relative evolutionary success.

Standard Social Science Model (SSSM), Tooby & Cosmides (1992)

first introduced by John Tooby and Leda Cosmides in the 1992 edited volume The Adapted Mind. They used SSSM as a reference to social sciencephilosophies related to the blank slate, relativism, social constructionism, and cultural determinism. They argue that those philosophies, capsulized within SSSM, formed the dominant theoretical paradigm in the development of the social sciences during the 20th century. According to their proposed SSSM paradigm, the mind is a general-purpose cognitive device shaped almost entirely by culture. After establishing SSSM, Tooby and Cosmides make a case for replacing SSSM with the integrated model (IM), also known as the integrated causal model (ICM), which melds cultural and biological theories for the development of the mind. Supporters of SSSM include those who feel the term was conceived as a point of argument in support of ICM specifically and evolutionary psychology (EP) in general.

ultrasocial

form societies and divide labour, cooperate for mutual benefit.

Randolph M. Nesse

founder of evolutionary medicine. His research on the evolution of aging led to a long collaboration with the evolutionary biologist George C. Williams. Their co-authored book, Why We Get Sick: The New Science of Darwinian Medicine, inspired fast growth of the field of evolutionary medicine. His subsequent research has focused on how natural selection shapes mechanisms that regulate pain, fever, anxiety low mood, and why emotional disorders are so common. He also has written extensively about the evolutionary origins of moral emotions, and strategies for establishing evolutionary biology as a basic science for medicine. Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry applies the principles of evolutionary medicine to mental disorders. He was the initial organizer and second president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, and is currently the president of the International Society for Evolution, Medicine & Public Health. He is a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Sciences, and an elected Fellow of the AAAS.

ecological succession

gradual change in living communities that follows a disturbance.

social memory

how social life affects the processes of memory and forgetting, whether on an individual psychological level or in terms of how groups think of their collective history. Social memory is a concept used by historians and others to explore the connection between social identity and historical memory. It asks how and why diverse peoples come to think of themselves as members of a group with a shared (though not necessarily agreed upon) past.

Identifiable Victim Effect

identifiable victim effect refers to the tendency of individuals to offer greater aid when a specific, identifiable person ("victim") is observed under hardship, as compared to a large, vaguely defined group with the same need. The effect is also observed when subjects administer punishment rather than reward. Research has shown that individuals can be more likely to mete out punishment, even at their own expense, when they are punishing specific, identifiable individuals ("perpetrators"). Concrete images and representations are often more powerful sources of persuasion than are abstract statistics. For example, Ryan White contracted HIV at age 13 and struggled with the disease until succumbing some six years later. Following his death, the US congress passed the Ryan White Care Act, which funded the largest set of services for people living with the AIDS in the country. The effect is epitomized by the phrase (commonly attributed to Joseph Stalin) "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." The conceptualization of the identifiable victim effect as it is known today is commonly attributed to American economist Thomas Schelling. He wrote that harm to a particular person invokes "anxiety and sentiment, guilt and awe, responsibility and religion, [but]...most of this awesomeness disappears when we deal with statistical death."

The Strength of Weak Ties (Granovetter, 1973)

in 1973 the sociologist Mark Granovetter published a paper titled "The Strength of Weak Ties" in which he talks about and explains the value of weak ties. Granovetter analogizes weak ties to being bridges which allow us to disseminate and get access to information that we might not otherwise have access to. In fact, Granovetter states, "all bridges are weak ties."

sedentism

in cultural anthropology, sedentism (sometimes called sedentariness; compare sedentarism) is the practice of living in one place for a long time. As of 2019, the majority of people belong to sedentary cultures. In evolutionary anthropology and archaeology, sedentism takes on a slightly different sub-meaning, often applying to the transition from nomadic society to a lifestyle that involves remaining in one place permanently. Essentially, sedentism means living in groups permanently in one place.

embeddedness

in economics and economic sociology, embeddedness refers to the degree to which economic activity is constrained by non-economic institutions. The term was created by economic historian Karl Polanyi as part of his substantivist approach. Polanyi argued that in non-market societies there are no pure economic institutions to which formal economic models can be applied. In these cases economic activities such as "provisioning" are "embedded" in non-economic kinship, religious and political institutions. In market societies, in contrast, economic activities have been rationalized, and economic action is "disembedded" from society and able to follow its own distinctive logic, captured in economic modeling. Polanyi's ideas were widely adopted and discussed in anthropology in what has been called the formalist-substantivist debate. Subsequently, the term "embeddedness" was further developed by economic sociologist Mark Granovetter, who argued that even in market societies, economic activity is not as disembedded from society as economic models would suggest.

effective demand (ED)

in economics, effective demand (ED) in a market is the demand for a product or service which occurs when purchasers are constrained in a different market. It contrasts with notional demand, which is the demand that occurs when purchasers are not constrained in any other market. In the aggregated market for goods in general, demand, notional or effective, is referred to as aggregate demand. The concept of effective supply parallels the concept of effective demand. The concept of effective demand or supply becomes relevant when markets do not continuously maintain equilibrium prices.

Baldwin effect

in evolutionary biology, the Baldwin effect describes the effect of learned behavior on evolution. In brief, James Mark Baldwin and others suggested during the eclipse of Darwinism in the late 19th century that an organism's ability to learn new behaviors (e.g. to acclimatise to a new stressor) will affect its reproductive success and will therefore have an effect on the genetic makeup of its species through natural selection. Though this process appears similar to Lamarckian evolution, Lamarck proposed that living things inherited their parents' acquired characteristics. The Baldwin effect has been independently proposed several times, and today it is generally recognized as part of the modern synthesis.

Machiavellian intelligence

in primatology and evolutionary psychology, Machiavellian intelligence is the capacity of an organism to be in a successful political engagement with social groups. The first introduction of this concept came from Frans de Waal's book Chimpanzee Politics (1982), which described social maneuvering while explicitly quoting Machiavelli. This hypothesis posits that large brains and distinctive cognitive abilities of humans have evolved via intense social competition in which social competitors developed increasingly sophisticated "Machiavellian" strategies as a means to achieve higher social and reproductive success. The term refers to the hypothesis that the techniques which lead to certain kinds of political success within large social groups are also applicable within smaller groups, including the family-unit. The term "everyday politics" was later introduced in reference to these various methods. These arguments are based on research by primatologists such as Nicholas Humphrey (1975).

group polarization

in social psychology, group polarization refers to the tendency for a group to make decisions that are more extreme than the initial inclination of its members. These more extreme decisions are towards greater risk if individuals' initial tendencies are to be risky and towards greater caution if individuals' initial tendencies are to be cautious. The phenomenon also holds that a group's attitude toward a situation may change in the sense that the individuals' initial attitudes have strengthened and intensified after group discussion, a phenomenon known as attitude polarization. Group polarization is an important phenomenon in social psychology and is observable in many social contexts. For example, a group of women who hold moderately feminist views tend to demonstrate heightened pro-feminist beliefs following group discussion. Similarly, studies have shown that after deliberating together, mock jury members often decided on punitive damage awards that were either larger or smaller than the amount any individual juror had favored prior to deliberation. The studies indicated that when the jurors favored a relatively low award, discussion would lead to an even more lenient result, while if the jury was inclined to impose a stiff penalty, discussion would make it even harsher. Moreover, in recent years, the Internet and online social media have also presented opportunities to observe group polarization and compile new research. Psychologists have found that social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter demonstrate that group polarization can occur even when a group is not physically together. As long as the group of individuals begins with the same fundamental opinion on the topic and a consistent dialogue is kept going, group polarization can occur. Research has suggested that well-established groups suffer less from polarization, as do groups discussing problems that are well known to them. However, in situations where groups are somewhat newly formed and tasks are new, group polarization can demonstrate a more profound influence on the decision-making.

interactionism

in sociology, interactionism is a theoretical perspective that derives social processes (such as conflict, cooperation, identity formation) from human interaction. It is the study of how individuals shape society and are shaped by society through meaning that arises in interactions. Interactionist theory has grown in the latter half of the twentieth century and has become one of the dominant sociological perspectives in the world today. George Herbert Mead, as an advocate of pragmatism and the subjectivity of social reality, is considered a leader in the development of interactionism. Herbert Blumerexpanded on Mead's work and coined the term "symbolic interactionism."

sociosexual orientation

individual differences in the tendency to prefer either unrestricted sex (without the necessity of love) or restricted sex (only in the context of a long-term, loving relationship). Sociosexual orientation, or sociosexuality, is the individual difference in the willingness to engage in sexual activity outside of a committed relationship. Individuals with a more restricted sociosexual orientation are less willing to engage in casual sex; they prefer greater love, commitment and emotional closeness before having sex with romantic partners. Individuals who have a more unrestricted sociosexual orientation are more willing to have casual sex and are more comfortable engaging in sex without love, commitment or closeness.

informational social influence

influence resulting from one's willingness to accept others' opinions about reality.

adaptively relevant environmental input

information received from an organism's environment that affects the expression of adaptations.

epigenetic inheritance

inheritance of traits transmitted by mechanisms that do not involve the nucleotide sequence.

culturally acquired information

knowledge acquired by an organism that is not part of its innate complement of Information or abilities.

basin of attraction

locally stable ecological configurations.

selective sweep

loss of genetic variation following positive selection. Occurs when a gene rapidly evolves from mutation to fixation in a population.

metanarrative (grand narrative)

metanarrative in critical theory and particularly in postmodernism is a narrative aboutnarratives of historical meaning, experience, or knowledge, which offers a society legitimationthrough the anticipated completion of a (as yet unrealized) master idea.

within-group morality

moral and ethical standards observed within groups that do not necessarily apply to outgroups.

group slection

natural selection occurring at the level of the group. Groups can differentially survive more efficiently than individuals.

sociosexual behavior

nonreproductive sexual behavior that serves to resolve conflicts and/or reinforce alliances and coalitions.

cultural relativism

not judging a culture but trying to understand it on its own terms.

evolutionary mismatch

occurs when an organism finds itself living in an environment other than the one for which it is adapted, often with deleterious consequences for its survival.

eusocial

organism population in which the role of each organism is specialized and not all of the organisms will reproduce.

social exhibitionism (Jordan, 2019)

ostentatious or extreme manifestations of group fidelity meant to reaffirm loyalty to the group or enhance status. Social exhibitionism can be practical and directive, such as to avoid social ostracism, or simply a free-form expression of group solidarity with no avowed purpose. Social exhibitionistic acts can be innocuous, such as body painting at athletic events, or deleterious and even deadly, such as acts of violence meant to demonstrate commitment to the group.

status (class) identity

part of personal identity associated with a person's self-perceived status or class.

evolutionary personality psychology (theory)

personality, from an evolutionary perspective, represents a meta-category of the output of a suite of species-typical, relatively domain-specific, evolved psychological mechanisms designed in response to the social adaptive problems recurrently faced by our ancestors. This conceptualization of human personality provides for novel and valuable reinterpretations of several areas of personality psychology including personality consistency, individual differences in personality, sex differences and similarities, and contextual determinants of personality. Explaining human personality from an evolutionary perspective has led to discoveries about the function of social information conveyed through standings on the Big-Five personality dimensions and discoveries in topics such as social anxiety, jealousy, altruism, aggression, psychopathology, mate preferences, and desire for sexual variety.

George C. Williams

pioneered the idea of gene selection being part of Darwinism--the idea is that animals don't select each other; genes do. And when an animal dies, its gene still lives on and gets passed to future generations. In his first book, Adaptation and Natural Selection, Williams advocated a "ground rule - or perhaps doctrine would be a better term - ... that adaptation is a special and onerous concept that should only be used where it is really necessary", and, that, when it is necessary, selection among genes or individuals would in general be the preferable explanation for it. He elaborated this view in later books and papers, which contributed to the development of a gene-centered view of evolution; Richard Dawkins built on Williams' ideas in this area in the book The Selfish Gene.

social grooming

primates grooming is often used to maintain social bonds.

social priming

priming affecting action. One of the most well-known of these studies reported that reading words related. to elderliness (e.g., "Florida", "Bingo") caused subjects to walk slower when exiting the laboratory, compared to subjects who read words unrelated to the elderly. Though cited more than 5,000 times,controversy has emerged because several recent studies failed to replicate the finding. Starting in 2013 and 2014, many additional reports began to emerge of failures to replicate findings from Bargh's lab. These included "social distance priming" and "achievement goal priming" and lonely people's preferences for hot baths. (However, in 2015 there was report, by Bargh and Shalev, of a successful replication of the association between loneliness and bathing habits, published in the journal Emotion, indicating a possible role for cultural differences in this case.) In March 2015 yet another paper from Bargh lab was reported to be unreproducible: Rotteveel and colleagues sought to duplicate two studies by Chen & Bargh (1999) arguing that objects are evaluated automatically, triggering a tendency to approach or avoid.

genetic drift

random change in allele frequencies that occurs in small populations.

identity negotiation

refers to the processes through which people reach agreements regarding "who is who" in their relationships. Once these agreements are reached, people are expected to remain faithful to the identities they have agreed to assume. The process of identity negotiation thus establishes what people can expect of one another. Identity negotiation thus provides the interpersonal "glue" that holds relationships together.

Darwinian functional mechanisms

replication, variation (diversity), and selection.

niche competitive advantage

seeks to target and effectively serve a single segment of the market

Multi-level selection

selection pressures can act on organisms at more than one level, e.g. individual and group. Many selection pressures are multi-level.

within-group selection

selection pressures that act against cooperation, with individuals of the same group competing with each other.

between-group selection

selection pressures that act on competition between groups, resulting in differential reproduction and survival.

autotropy

self-induced neurochemical changes, e.g. consumption of alcohol.

W.D. Hamilton

seminal thinker in evolutionary science. Hamilton's Number.

Darwinian assumptions

sex, death, and finite resources.

adaptive nudge (Richerson & Boyd, 2005)

small changes in human culture that cumulate into significant cultural adaptations. Peter J. Richerson & Robert Boyd (2005), Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution

social anxiety (state and trait)

social anxiety is nervousness in social situations. Some disorders associated with the social anxiety spectrum include anxiety disorders, mood disorders, autism, eating disorders, and substance use disorders. Individuals higher in social anxiety avert their gazes, show fewer facial expressions, and show difficulty with initiating and maintaining conversation. Trait social anxiety, the stable tendency to experience this nervousness, can be distinguished from state anxiety, the momentary response to a particular social stimulus. The function of social anxiety is to increase arousal and attention to social interactions, inhibit unwanted social behavior, and motivate preparation for future social situations.

collective efficacy

social control exerted by cohesive communities and based on mutual trust, including intervention in the supervision of children and maintenance of public order. In the sociology of crime, the term collective efficacyrefers to the ability of members of a community to control the behavior of individuals and groups in the community. Control of people's behavior allows community residents to create a safe and orderly environment. Collective efficacy involves residents monitoring children playing in public areas, acting to prevent truancy and street corner "hanging" by teenagers, and confronting individuals who exploit or disturb public spaces.

social facts

social facts are values, cultural norms, and social structures that transcend the individual and can exercise social control. The French sociologist Émile Durkheim defined the term, and argued that the discipline of sociology should be understood as the empirical study of social facts. For Durkheim, social facts "... consist of manners of acting, thinking and feeling external to the individual, which are invested with a coercive power by virtue of which they exercise control over him."

sociobiology

sociobiology is a field of biology that aims to examine and explain social behavior in terms of evolution. It draws from disciplines including ethology, anthropology, evolution, zoology, archaeology, and population genetics. Within the study of human societies, sociobiology is closely allied to Darwinian anthropology, human behavioral ecology and evolutionary psychology. Sociobiology investigates social behaviors such asmating patterns, territorial fights, pack hunting, and the hive society of social insects. It argues that just as selection pressure led to animals evolving useful ways of interacting with the natural environment, so also it led to the genetic evolution of advantageous social behavior. While the term "sociobiology" originated at least as early as the 1940s, the concept did not gain major recognition until the publication of E. O. Wilson's book Sociobiology: The New Synthesis in 1975. The new field quickly became the subject of controversy. Critics, led by Richard Lewontin and Stephen Jay Gould, argued that genes played a role in human behavior, but that traits such as aggressiveness could be explained by social environment rather than by biology. Sociobiologists responded by pointing to the complex relationship between nature and nurture.

symbiotic teletropy

stimulating a neurochemical response in another.

social baseline model

suggests the human brain expects access to social relationships that mitigate risk and diminish the level of effort needed to meet a variety of goals. This is accomplished in part by incorporating relational partners into neural representations of the self. By contrast, decreased access to relational partners increases cognitive and physiological effort. Relationship disruptions entail re-defining the self as independent, which implies greater risk, increased effort, and diminished well being. The ungrafting of the self and other may mediate recovery from relationship loss.

identity markers

symbols, behaviors, thoughts, beleifs, and other human indications of personal or group identity.

mate retention

tactics comprise a broad menu of behaviors ranging from acts of kindness and resource provisioning, to vigilance, manipulation, and violence. Mate retention effort often occurs in response to a perceived or actual relationship threat. Sex differences and individual differences exist in the use of specific mate retention tactics, which share the common goal of reducing the probability of partner defection or infidelity. In order to understand the origins of these behaviors, it is necessary to understand the processes that underlie mate selection and the negative implications of partner loss.

exploitative teletropy

taking advantage of another in order to stimulate a neruochemical response.

ethnocentricity

tendency to view one's own race or culture as central, based on the deep-seated belief that one's own group is superior to all others. Ethnocentrism is a form of egocentrism extended from the self to the group. Much uncritical or selfish critical thinking is either egocentric or ethnocentric in nature. (Ethnocentrism and sociocentrism are often used synonymously, though sociocentricity is broader, relating to any group, including, for example, sociocentricity regarding one's profession.) The "cure" for ethnocentrism or sociocentrism is empathic thought within the perspective of opposing groups and cultures. Such empathic thought is rarely cultivated in the societies and schools of today. Instead, many people develop an empty rhetoric of tolerance, saying that others have different beliefs and ways, but without seriously considering those beliefs and ways, what they mean to those others, and their reasons for maintaining them.

legitimate knowledge

that knowledge accepted by a group or society as veracious.

adaptationism

the Darwinian view that many physical and psychological traits of organisms are evolved adaptations. Pan-adaptationism is the strong form of this, deriving from the early 20th century modern synthesis, that all traits are adaptations, a view now shared by few biologists. Adaptationists perform research to try to distinguish adaptations (e.g., the umbilical cord) from byproducts (e.g., the belly button) or random variation (e.g., convex or concave shape of the belly button).George Williams' Adaptation and Natural Selection(1966) was highly influential in its development, defining some of the heuristics used to identify adaptations.

Heritability

the ability of a trait to be passed down from one generation to the next.

Darwinian fitness

the ability of an individual to survive and reproduce in its environment.

behavioral flexibility

the ability to alter behavior to adapt to new situations and to relate in new ways when necessary.

status anxiety

the anxiety supposedly evoked by concerns about social or class status, believed to be especially pronounced in capitalist and commodified societies.

evolutionary educational psychology

the application of evolutionary science in the study of human education.

Niche Construction Theory

the argument that human alteration of the environment through intentional efforts to achieve a goal plays a crucial role in human evolution.

social traits

the attributes of a group.

coalition building

the banding together of organisms for mutual benefit.

Evolutionism

the belief that the physical universe, including life, was not created, but happened by chance. Evolutionism is a term used (often derogatorily) to denote the theory of evolution. Its exact meaning has changed over time as the study of evolution has progressed. In the 19th century, it was used to describe the belief that organisms deliberately improved themselves through progressive inherited change (orthogenesis). The teleological belief went on to include cultural evolution and social evolution. In the 1970s the term Neo-Evolutionism was used to describe the idea "that human beings sought to preserve a familiar style of life unless change was forced on them by factors that were beyond their control". The term is most often used by creationists to describe adherence to the scientific consensus on evolution as equivalent to a secular religion. The term is very seldom used within the scientific community, since the scientific position on evolution is accepted by the overwhelming majority of scientists. Because evolutionary biology is the default scientific position, it is assumed that "scientists" or "biologists" are "evolutionists" unless specifically noted otherwise. In the creation-evolution controversy, creationists often call those who accept the validity of the modern evolutionary synthesis "evolutionists" and the theory itself "evolutionism".

modularity of mind

the concept that the mind consists, in addition to a central processing unit, of many separate modules, each performing specific tasks.

symbotype-phenotype relationship

the congruence between an individual's symbolic representation of reality--symbotype--and the manifest expression of the symbotype in observable behaviors--phenotype. Analogous to genotype-phenotype relationship that describes genetic evolution.

social connectedness

the degree to which individuals are integrated into society- extended families, neighborhoods, religious organizations, and other social units.

convergent cultural evolution

the development of similar cultural adaptations to similar environmental conditions by different peoples with different ancestral cultures. Applicable to other human phenomena such as businesses.

adaptive radiation

the diversification of a group of organisms into forms filling different ecological niches.

Social Responsibility

the duty of a business to contribute to the well-being of a community.

The Modern Synthesis

the early 20th-century synthesis reconciling Charles Darwin's theory of evolution and Gregor Mendel's ideas on heredity in a joint mathematical framework. Julian Huxley coined the term in his 1942 book, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis.

heritable calibration of thresholds of psychological mechanisms

the extent to which the expression of adaptive psychological mechanisms is affected by genetics.

illusion of explanatory depth (IOED)

the false belief that we know more than we do because we benefit from the collective knowledge of our community, culture, and species. As explained by its originators Leonid Rozenblit and Frank Keil in 2002 , it is the powerful but inaccurate feeling of knowing more than you actually know. "Most people feel they understand the world with far greater detail, coherence, and depth than they really do."

Tinbergen's Function Question

the first of the four questions, along with (2) history, (3) mechanism, and (4) development, that ethologist and Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen specified must be asked in understanding any product of evolution.

Tinbergen's Four Questions

the four questions (FHMD) that ethologist and Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen specified as indispensable for understanding evolutionary products. They in include (1) what is the function, if any, of a given trait, (2) what is its history, (3) what purpose does it serve (mechanism), and (4) what was its development?

Tinbergen's Development Question

the fourth of the four questions, along with (1) function, (2) history, and (3) mechanism, that ethologist and Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen specified must be asked in understanding any product of evolution.

selection by consequences

the fundamental principle of operant conditioning. All forms of operant behavior are selected, shaped, and maintained by their consequences during an individual's lifetime. B. F. Skinner is best known for the development of operant conditioning — the process by which the consequences of our behavior affect the future probability of its recurrence given particular antecedent conditions. What you might not know is that he conceptualized operant conditioning as a type of selection, analogous to Darwin's biological selection. In other words, Skinner thought of those behaviors which are reinforced and recur more often in the future to be "selected" by those consequences. Much like Darwin thought that biological traits are selected based on their survival value, Skinner thought of reinforcement as a type of "survival" in the sense that the behavior of which reinforcement is contingent is more likely to continue into the future. Those behaviors that do not contact operant consequences undergo "extinction" and fade away — just like the dinosaurs. However, Skinner also talked of a third type of selection — cultural selection. This type of selection differs from operant selection in two ways. First, cultural selection pertains to the spread of innovative technologies or ways of doing things within populations of people. For example, long ago there was MySpace — one of the most popular social media sites up until that time. A few years later, however, Facebook came along. Today you hardly hear of MySpace and it seems that everyone across all age groups is on Facebook. Skinner's cultural selection could help explain why Facebook is more reinforcing than MySpace and how the practice of using Facebook spread and overcame the practice of using MySpace. Secondly, cultural selection is based on group consequences, rather than consequences for the individual. Skinner (1981)makes this point abundantly clear. However, exactly what he meant by "group" consequences that are different than individual consequences was never precisely articulated. If you look through his writings, though, a clearer picture begins to emerge.

Dunbar's number

the idea that a person can only have a limited number of close relationships, probably around 150.

niche concept

the idea that each species has a distribution that reflects its adaptations and that it would be most abundant where it is most suited to live and vice-versa.

narrative knowledge

the kind of knowledge prevalent in "primitive" or "traditional' societies, and is based on storytelling, sometimes in the form of ritual, music and dance. Narrative knowledge has no recourse to legitimation--its legitimation is immediate within the narrative itself, in the "timelessness" of the narrative as an enduring tradition--it is told by people who once heard it to listeners who will one day tell it themselves. There is no question of questioning it. Indeed, Lyotard suggests that there is an incommensurability between the question of legitimation itself and the authority of narrative knowledge.

adaptive optima

the necessary environmental conditions for the expression of an adaptive attribute.

Modularity

the notion that certain cognitive processes (or regions of the brain) are restricted in the type of information they process. In evolutionary psychology, modularity is the basis for understanding human thoughts and behaviors from the perspective of differential reproduction and survival.

evolutionary complexification

the occurrence of increasingly complex organisms from less complex ones, e.g. nucleated cells from simple cells.

Paradox of Thrift

the paradox of thrift (or paradox of saving) is a paradox of economics. The paradox states that an increase in autonomous saving leads to a decrease in aggregate demand and thus a decrease in gross output which will in turn lower total saving. The paradox is, narrowly speaking, that total saving may fall because of individuals' attempts to increase their saving, and, broadly speaking, that increase in saving may be harmful to an economy. Both the narrow and broad claims are paradoxical within the assumption underlying the fallacy of composition, namely that which is true of the parts must be true of the whole. The narrow claim transparently contradicts this assumption, and the broad one does so by implication, because while individual thrift is generally averred to be good for the economy, the paradox of thrift holds that collective thrift may be bad for the economy. It had been stated as early as 1714 in The Fable of the Bees, and similar sentiments date to antiquity. It was popularized by John Maynard Keynes and is a central component of Keynesian economics. It has formed part of mainstream economics since the late 1940s.

hidden ovulation

the paternal investment hypothesis is strongly supported by many evolutionary biologists. Several hypotheses regarding human evolution integrate the idea that women increasingly required supplemental paternal investment in their offspring. The shared reliance on this idea across several hypotheses concerning human evolution increases its significance in terms of this specific phenomenon. This hypothesis suggests that women concealed ovulation to obtain men's aid in rearing offspring. Schoroder summarizes this hypothesis outlined in Alexander and Noonan's 1979 paper: if women no longer signaled the time of ovulation, men would be unable to detect the exact period in which they were fecund. This led to a change in men's mating strategy: rather than mating with multiple women in the hope that some of them, at least, were fecund during that period, men instead chose to mate with a particular woman repeatedly throughout her menstrual cycle. A mating would be successful in resulting in conception when it occurred during ovulation, and thus, frequent matings, necessitated by the effects of concealed ovulation, would be most evolutionarily successful. A similar hypothesis was proposed by Lovejoy in 1981 that argued that concealed ovulation, reduced canines and bipedalismevolved from a reproductive strategy where males provisioned food resources to his paired female and dependent offspring.

bonding satiation

the point at which a person reachs satisfaction with the number and intensity of interpersonal and group relationships, thus satisfying the drive to bond (D2) as hypothesized by Lawrence and Nohria (2002). The bonding satiation point varies for different people. Reference Paul R. Lawrence and Nitin Nohria (2002), Driven: How Human Nature Shapes Our Choices

fixation (evolution)

the point reached in a population when a mutation pervades the population.

social identity

the portion of an individual's self-concept derived from perceived membership in a relevant social group. As originally formulated by social psychologists Henri Tajfel and John Turner in the 1970s and the 1980s, social identity theoryintroduced the concept of a social identity as a way in which to explain intergroup behaviour. Social identity theory is described as a theory that predicts certain intergroup behaviours on the basis of perceived group status differences, the perceived legitimacy and stability of those status differences, and the perceived ability to move from one group to another. This contrasts with occasions where the term "social identity theory" is used to refer to general theorizing about human social selves.

social regulation

the processes employed by a society, whether formal or informal, to attempt to maintain effective social functioning.

evolutionary dynamics of cooperation (Wilson, 2019)

the profound effects wrought on species' evolutionary history by cooperative interactions. Described in David Sloan Wilson's "This View of Life: Completing the Darwinian Revolution," 2019, p. 121.

social signaling hypothesis

the proposal that social signaling is an adaptation for maintaining group effectiveness.

Tinbergen's History Question

the second of the four questions, along with (1) function, (3) mechanism, and (4) development, that ethologist and Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen specified must be asked in understanding any product of evolution.

Cognitive Big Bang

the seeming burst of complex human social organization, innovation, and creativity associated with the Upper Paleolithic. The Upper Paleolithic (or Upper Palaeolithic, Late Stone Age) is the third and last subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. Very broadly, it dates to between 50,000 and 10,000 years ago (the beginning of the Holocene), according to some theories coinciding with the appearance of behavioral modernity in early modern humans, until the advent of the Neolithic Revolution and agriculture.

environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA)

the set of selective pressures faced by a human population during the time that a particular trait evolved.

Sociobiology/Evolutionary Psychology

the study of how evolutionary forces affect our behavior.

Epigenetics

the study of influences on gene expression that occur without a DNA change.

evolutionary biology

the study of organisms and their changes through a biological theoretical frame.

behavioral economics

the study of situations in which people make choices that do not appear to be economically rational.

behavioral ecology

the study of the ecological and evolutionary basis for animal behavior. Behavioral ecology, also spelled behavioural ecology, is the study of the evolutionary basis for animal behavior due to ecological pressures. Behavioral ecology emerged from ethology after Niko Tinbergen outlined four questions to address when studying animal behaviors that are the proximate causes, ontogeny, survival value, and phylogeny of behavior.

evolutionary psychology

the study of the evolution of behavior and the mind, using principles of natural selection. Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in the social and natural sciences that examines psychological structure from a modern evolutionaryperspective. It seeks to identify which human psychological traits are evolved adaptations - that is, the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection in human evolution. Adaptationist thinking about physiological mechanisms, such as the heart, lungs, and immune system, is common in evolutionary biology. Some evolutionary psychologists apply the same thinking to psychology, arguing that the modularity of mind is similar to that of the body and with different modular adaptations serving different functions. Evolutionary psychologists argue that much of human behavior is the output of psychological adaptations that evolved to solve recurrent problems in human ancestral environments. Evolutionary psychology is not simply a subdiscipline of psychology but its evolutionary theory can provide a foundational, metatheoretical framework that integrates the entire field of psychology in the same way evolutionary biology has for biology. Evolutionary psychologists hold that behaviors or traits that occur universally in all cultures are good candidates for evolutionary adaptations including the abilities to infer others' emotions, discern kin from non-kin, identify and prefer healthier mates, and cooperate with others. There have been studies of human social behaviour related to infanticide, intelligence, marriage patterns, promiscuity, perception of beauty, bride price, and parental investment, with impressive findings.

evolutionary psychology

the study of the evolution of behavior and the mind, using principles of natural selection. Evolutionary psychology is one of many biologically informed approaches to the study of human behavior. Along with cognitive psychologists, evolutionary psychologists propose that much, if not all, of our behavior can be explained by appeal to internal psychological mechanisms. What distinguishes evolutionary psychologists from many cognitive psychologists is the proposal that the relevant internal mechanisms are adaptations—products of natural selection—that helped our ancestors get around the world, survive and reproduce. To understand the central claims of evolutionary psychology we require an understanding of some key concepts in evolutionary biology, cognitive psychology, philosophy of science and philosophy of mind. Philosophers are interested in evolutionary psychology for a number of reasons. For philosophers of science —mostly philosophers of biology—evolutionary psychology provides a critical target. There is a broad consensus among philosophers of science that evolutionary psychology is a deeply flawed enterprise. For philosophers of mind and cognitive science evolutionary psychology has been a source of empirical hypotheses about cognitive architecture and specific components of that architecture. Philosophers of mind are also critical of evolutionary psychology but their criticisms are not as all-encompassing as those presented by philosophers of biology. Evolutionary psychology is also invoked by philosophers interested in moral psychology both as a source of empirical hypotheses and as a critical target.

ecological niche

the sum of a species' use of the biotic and abiotic resources in its environment.

cultural inheritance

the sum of the cultural products transmitted generationally.

social loafing

the tendency for people in a group to exert less effort when pooling their efforts toward attaining a common goal than when individually accountable.

functional fixedness

the tendency to perceive an item only in terms of its most common use.

social brain hypothesis

the theory that cognitive demands inherent in social living led to the evolution of large primate brains.

social exchange theory

the theory that our social behavior is an exchange process, the aim of which is to maximize benefits and minimize costs.

Theory of Multi-level Selection

the theory that selection pressures acting on an organism can occur at many levels.

Tinbergen's Mechanism Question

the third of the four questions, along with (1) function, (2) history, and (4) development, that ethologist and Nobel laureate Niko Tinbergen specified must be asked in understanding any product of evolution.

assortative mating

the type of mating that occurs when an organism selects a mating partner that resembles itself.

evolutionary metatheory

the use of evolutionary theory as a theoretical and conceptual frame for a discipline or field of study. For example, David M. Buss has proposed evolutionary theory as a profitable--if not indispensable--metatheory for the social sciences.

knowledge illusion

thinking we know more than we do and understand more than we do.

cultural inheritance

traits that are transmitted by behavior and learning.

Veblen (social; snob) goods

types of luxury goods for which the quantity demanded increases as the price increases, an apparent contradiction of the law of demand, resulting in an upward-sloping demand curve. A higher price may make a product desirable as a status symbol in the practices of conspicuous consumption and conspicuous leisure. A product may be a Veblen good because it is a positional good, something few others can own. Veblen goods are named after American economist Thorstein Veblen, who first identified conspicuous consumption as a mode of status-seeking in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899). A corollary of the Veblen effect is that lowering the price decreases the quantity demanded.

Universal Darwinism

universal Darwinism (also known as generalized Darwinism, universal selection theory, or Darwinian metaphysics) refers to a variety of approaches that extend the theory of Darwinism beyond its original domain of biological evolution on Earth. Universal Darwinism aims to formulate a generalized version of the mechanisms of variation, selection and heredity proposed by Charles Darwin, so that they can apply to explain evolution in a wide variety of other domains, including psychology, economics, culture, medicine, computer science and physics.

Darwinian algorithm

unseen and therefore largely unappreciated aspect of behaviour is the use of decision-making rules or "Darwinian algorithms." Organisms rely on these rules to process information from their physical and social environments and result in particular behavioral outputs that guide key behavioral and life-history decisions. Darwinian algorithms are made up of the sensory and cognitive processes that perceive and prioritize cues within an individual's perceptual range. These inputs are then translated into motor outputs. A Darwinian algorithm may involve a stimulus threshold (such as "when the day-length exceeds 10 hours, migrate north") or may depend on the occurrence of a cue that is normally associated with a fitness-enhancing outcome (such as "build nests in dense vegetation where chick survival is predictably high"). Darwinian algorithms are shaped through evolutionary time by the specific selective regime of each population. Which cues are relied upon depends on the certainty with which a cue can be recognized, the reliability of the relationship between the cue and the anticipated environmental outcome, and the fitness benefits of making a correct decision versus the costs of making an incorrect decision. In general, Darwinian algorithms underlying behavioral and life-history decisions are only as complex as is necessary to yield adaptive outcomes under a species' normal environmental circumstances but not so complex as to cover all experimentally or anthropogenically induced contingencies.

symbo-therapy

various activities and processes that help a person alter or reconceptualize their conditions to enhance well-being. Analogous to gene therapy.

Modularity Theory

views each domain of reasoning as a distinct and separate set of mental processes that has evolved to handle domain-specific information and that changes very little over the course of development.

niche construction

when an organism actively perturbs the environment or when it actively moves into a different environment, thereby modifying the selection pressures it is subject to.

sociosexuality

willingness to engage in sexual relations in the absence of a serious relationship.

commodification

within a capitalist economic system, Commodification is the transformation of goods, services, ideas and people into commodities or objects of trade. A commodity at its most basic, according to Arjun Appadurai, is "anything intended for exchange," or any object of economic value. Commodification is often criticised on the grounds that some things ought not to be treated as commodities—for example water, education, data, information, knowledge, human life, and animal life. According to Gøsta Esping-Andersen people are commodified or 'turned into objects' when selling their labour on the market to an employer. Slavery is a form of the commodification of people.

Étienne de la Boétie (1530-1563)

Étienne or Estienne de La Boétie (1 November 1530 - 18 August 1563) was a French judge, writer and "a founder of modern political philosophy in France". He is best remembered as the great and close friend of the eminent essayist Michel de Montaigne "in one of history's most notable friendships", as well as an earlier influence for anarchist thought. La Boétie's writings include a few sonnets, translations from the classics and an essay attacking absolute monarchy and tyranny in general, Discours de la servitude volontaire ou le Contr'un (Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, or the Anti-Dictator). The essay asserts that tyrants have power because the people give it to them. Liberty has been abandoned once by society, which afterward stayed corrupted and prefers the slavery of the courtesan to the freedom of one who refuses to dominate as he refuses to obey. Thus, La Boétie linked together obedience and domination, a relationship which would be later theorised by latter anarchist thinkers. By advocating a solution of simply refusing to support the tyrant, he became one of the earliest advocates of civil disobedience and nonviolent resistance.