“It is widely believed that mirror neurons are a genetic adaptation for action understanding; that they were designed by evolution to fulfill a specific socio-cognitive function”
Mirror neurons have been used time and again to explain behavior such as empathy, but they fall short of a full explanation because they do not account for the temporal nature of a feelings like empathy. The mirror neuron theory says that mirror neurons fire both when an animal is performing an action and when it sees another animal perform a similar action. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of the other. So when we see someone in distress, according to this theory we feel distressed too because of mirror neurons firing. Can this be an explanation of empathy. I don’t think so. In the case of empathy, there is not only the immediate reaction of sharing that empathy with the individual in distress but also an attempt to understand the individual’s situation. In fact, even when we are out of this individual’s company, we still carry on the feeling of empathy. It’s a temporal process that lasts for a far longer period than the firing of mirror neurons. Mirror neurons can explain the activation of the process of shared experience but cannot explain the lastingness of these cognitive states or the cognitive state themself.
This article nicely laid out the serious limitations of evolutionary psychology. I've summarized the limitations down to two points. First, the field suffers from the poverty of the stimulus problem; where exactly would the learning have come from in the evolutionary past? Like was said in the article, we do not possess a videotape of deep time that would reveal all of the selective events over millions of years that have led to the current design of the human body and mind. Second, it is currently scientifically impossible to parse whether a psychological phenomena is evolved, or learned. This is further complicated by the fact we live in a post-industrial, post-internet era and our culture is so far removed from the one in which our species evolved. Sure there are some phenomena that are rooted in our evolutionary past, but since the would-be experimental subjects are soaked in a culture, especially if they’re soaked in a post-industrial culture, it is very hard to get at these inborn phenomena experimentally. This is why the findings in the field largely come together post hoc. Overall, like all other branches of psychology, it suffers from a lack of knowledge of the mechanisms of our cognition.
I’ve held the view for a while now that while it is very entertaining to read, evolutionary psychology isn’t a particularly valid, or useful field. However the section at the end of the article got me to think about it’s clinical applications, or how it can give us insights in to how to design better lifestyles. In our modern era, some of our more innate categories are maladaptive, yet they continue to stick around, like a thorn in our side. Often we are prone to do the wrong thing, with a certain kind of thing. For example, if we see a high-status person on a billboard looking happy in their expensive car, we are more likely to see purchasing such as car as a means to climb the ranks. Similarly, my fear response kicks in whenever I try to speak in class; my heart beats very fast and I lose the ability to think clearly. As there is no life-threatening danger in our classroom, response is very maladaptive because it makes it very difficult for me to earn discussion points. I don’t know how much labeling a maladaptive series of neuro-circuits (or a psychopathology) as rooted in evolution, does anything to help us? Maybe a cognitive behavioural therapy might be able to use it as a tool… it doesn’t seem like a very helpful insight though.
One thing I do think will be useful, is when we have the ability to decipher inborn, quick-to-condition, circuits in the brain from more learned ones, on a neurobiological level. Maybe evolutionary psychological theories will help us do the science once we have the tech?
How do these recent environmental novelties affect human evolved psychology? There are at least two approaches to answering this question. First, mismatches between modern and ancestral environments may negate the adaptive utility of some evolved psychological mechanisms. Mechanisms that once influenced reproductive success may no longer have the same effect. Our evolved taste for foods containing fat and sugar, adaptive in the past, now leads to obesity and Type 2 diabetes in modern environment replete with highly processed foods available cheaply and in great abundance. Second, novel environmental stimuli, such as media images or pornography, may trigger, hijack, or exploit our evolved psychological mechanisms.
The article presents examples of what evolutionary psychology explained correctly, but criticizes its infidelity in all domains. I found it quite interesting that psychological science makes a clear distinction between the role males and females play in the evolution--whether it be genetic or social. With reference to the above section from the article, the mismatches may have been caused as a result of indulgence. Even in ancestral environments, over consuming fat and sugar led to obesity (e.g., Louis XIV of France), although one may argue that 17th century is considered modern environment, it was significantly different from the industrialized and mass-scale society of the 21st century. And once again, the overflowing novel environmental stimuli can hijack our attention, but it is our choice to allow ourselves to be exposed and we can choose to avoid it.
For example, pornography, in today’s context, is accessible and abundant. As described in the article, the male arousal mechanism was designed to work in actual presence, not on paper or on a screen. It seems plausible that the male arousal mechanism fails to work even in an actual presence of “an attractive, unclothed, sexually receptive woman.” In summary, active seeking and consumption of pornography may lead to erectile dysfunction (Zillmann, D., & Bryant, J. (1982). Pornography and sexual callousness, and the trivialization of rape. Journal of Communication, 32(4), 10-21.).
Maybe we have more freedom, but because of that freedom, we have to make more decisions, even on trivial things. This inevitably leads to decision fatigue by the time we get to the important decisions. Maybe it’s time for us to reconsider the cost of “freedom” and whether it is worth increasing the number of choices that are made available to us.
I found this article very interesting in the way it relates to artificial intelligence. The prevalence of phobias of spiders and snakes over guns made me think of when I learned about Bayesian neural nets. While the net will predict the likelihood of diagnosing cancer from scan results correctly, doctors do not because of heuristic biases. It seems that in the case of an AI who is a T3, experience alone would not be enough to allow them to behave like humans, because they would have to be more afraid of spiders than guns. However, based on experience they would see that guns are far more deadly than spiders and the AI would be more afraid of guns. If human behavior is influenced by evolution, these influences will many times be archaic. This is because evolution takes a very long time to work. In contrast, learning is very quick. Therefore, to behave indistinguishably from a human some of the innate behaviors such as the patterns of phobias and heuristics we use would need to be programmed into the AI. However, this may be problematic, because all possible evolutionary biases would need to be mapped out in addition to the impact they have on learned and societal interaction in order to create an AI whose performance is indistinguishable from that of a human. Another consideration is that AIs would need to have the same evolutionary drives as humans, such as procreation and survival. Machines do not have to eat or mate in the same way humans do. I believe that this would be problematic in making an AI that acts the same way as we do.
Interesting points. I guess it depends on what the goal of our AI is. If it is to understand our cognition (and make a T3, or T4) then reverse engineering our more quick-to-condition behaviours is important. If it is to design AI that can aid in human flourishing, then we probably don't want all of those evolutionary biases built in. Considering your spider/gun example, it would be more beneficial if our AI were afraid of real, statistically-bound dangers; dangers our evolutionary biases make it hard for us to perceive. For example, a more realistic and helpful survival-related-fear today would be the fear of dying in a car accident, and a more realistic and helpful reproduction-related-fear would be global warming. If we want to design helpful AI, they should probably not equip them with the type of evolved cognition that would cause them to fear snakes/spiders, and instead equip them with the ability to use big data to design a 'limbic system' more soaked in statistical reality.
Hi Valentina, I think you bring up a really good point. Its an issue I think we started to see during the Categorization week with needing to program innate categorical biases, but its not just limited to categorical biases but in fact, any innate evolutionary bias. Is it even possible to map out all of these to know which ones need to be programmed? It seems like we are still far away from mapping all these out, is there another way to get around this problem? Hi Lauren, it seems like you are distinguishing strong vs. weak AI, where a helpful AI with a different type of evolved cognition that reflects our current selection pressures would be different from humans (not able to pass T3). So it would still not be able to explain the more difficult problem of how human cognition works, but would simply aid the advancement of human society.
I found the authors’ discussion of the human mind as an integrated network of specifically evolved circuits particularly interesting in light of last week’s readings on categorization. The authors’ main point is that a bunch of very different problems that have been around for ages (from snakes to incest) have resulted in specific psychological adaptations via evolutionary processes. These adaptations, or adaptive solutions, seem contingent upon our ability to categorize these problems appropriately as they arise. The authors claim that a domain-general problem-solving capacity like “rationality” cannot be a coverall mechanism underlying resulting behavior, but what about categorization as that coverall mechanism? For example, the authors cite the statistical improbability of walking in on a cheating lover and the speed of the jealous, outraged behavioral reaction as evidence that there is a highly specific, evolved psychological adaptation in response to the adaptive problem of cheaters. They claim that the jilted lover is not consciously weighting past experiences and appropriate reactions using some domain-general rationality, but that the behavior is generated automatically and is hard-wired after evolutionary processes have taken place. Is this incompatible with the idea that categorization underlies our cognitive abilities, including our ability to almost immediately categorize and react to this type of situation?
I am not totally sold on the author's argument against the predictive power of the domain-general "rational thinking" hypothesis. It would be rational for women to care about emotional cues because diversion of paternal resources could possibly decrease the chances of survival or proper development of offspring. For men, paternity uncertainty is a rational concern, because they are interested in passing their own genes to offspring, not just their mates. I do not think these ideas are "ad hoc", I think they are reasonably rational explanations. Just because these ideas were not thought of in the initial stages of the studies does not mean they are therefore invalid and cannot be postulated.
Their second point, regarding the reaction of a man finding his wife with another man, also does not seem to totally disprove a domain general hypothesis. Such an acute, emotionally charged event could lead to an "affective" domain general mechanism overpowering a "rational" mechanism. While this is admittedly speculation, it seems just as reasonable in terms of its explanatory power. I think the authors are focusing on one single domain general process instead of exploring the idea that there are multiple.
Re: “Socialization is another explanation that is sometimes proposed as an alternative to evolutionary psychological explanations.”
The way that the authors described and discussed how socialization is not a refutation of evolutionary psychology seems suspect. For example, they discussed how parents have limited influence on boys and girls in terms of socialization practices except for sex-typed activities. Relating to the overall course question of how and why is it that we do what we do, evolutionary psychology misses the boat when it conceptualizes people as either individuals or as a species. Despite the talk of taking into account culture (evoked and transmitted) as well as novel environmental phenomena, ‘deep evolutionary time’ can only ever be explanatory in a distant and abstract way that hardly gives us any real answer of why and how it is that we do what we do. Specifically, I take issue with evolutionary psychology’s lack of a strong conceptualizing of what exactly is examined; in evolutionary terms, people are either individuals or considered as a species. But if we just consider day-to-day living and how we can explain what we do, a huge part of what underlies our daily life and what we do is that we live in a society. Charles Taylor: “men are self-sufficient outside of society … Man is a social animal, indeed a political animal, because he is not self-sufficient alone, and in an important sense is not self-sufficient outside a polis”. More than evolution, which I see as equivalent to Hobbes’ notion of the State of Nature, people are political and social entities who are tied at the hip in virtue of living in a society/body politic. I cannot see how evolutionary psychology can conceptually account for this crucial component of how it is that we do what we do on a day-to-day basis. What evolutionary psychology cannot explain is what John Searle sets out in Construction of Social Reality, accounting for how many objective facts depend on human institutions. So, a view of socialization based on a conceptualization of people as individuals or as a species misses the social reality of why and how it is we do what we do. We cognize in a social reality - not in evolutionary time.
As I was reading Confer et al's paper on the evolutionary psychology, I was intrigued by the distinction between "ultimate" and "proximate" explanations and the similarities I saw between those explanations and the "easy" and "hard" problems in cognition. Proximate explanations deal with the mechanisms of a trait and how it functions while ultimate explanations serve to explore the goal of the trait or the problem it was meant to solve. The easy problem deals more in questions of 'how' cognition functions - its neural mechanisms - while the hard problem tackles the bigger question of why those neural mechanisms have developed over others.
Although these two distinctions don't map perfectly onto each other, one can see the similarities. The 'easy problem' and 'proximate explanation' both are deeply rooted in scientific techniques and questions of 'function'. The 'hard problem' and 'ultimate explanation' both require a combinatorial approach to answer. Ultimate explanations involve a kind of detective work, using anthropological, psychological and biological research (among others) to recreate the original context of the development of the trait. Likewise, the hard problem uses current research in the fields of neuroscience, psychology and computer sciences to inform its theories. For both, underdetermination - the existance of several answers to a particular problem - remains a problem. Additionally, critical thinking remains the keystone to both of these domains.
*some how rather my comment didn't manage to publish from last week, so here is my sky writing for this reading*
RE: paternity uncertainty has been a recurrent adaptive problem for men, evolutionary psychologists hypothesized that men's jealousy would be triggered by cues of sexual infidelity, whereas women's jealousy would center on
This article was very engaging and brought up very intriguing points that I found highly pertinent to us. However, I found some of the examples brought up in this article rather skeptical. Regarding the paternal uncertainty, although psychologists hypothesized it as an evolutionary result, I believe that in our day and age, there could be many external factors such as social and cultural factors that play an effect on this phenomena. Couldn't jealousy be due to other factors like personality, past experiences with infidelity, values and cultures of the individual? Not everyone has sex because they want to reproduce or are even unable to reproduce? - what does it say about these people? The author tends to over generalize many examples. I wonder how the author would go about explaining friendship jealousy or sexual jealousy between homosexual relationships. Not that I'm trying to argue that male jealousy is socially/culturally learned but I feel like there's more to just evolutionary reasons and it is a collection of different interacting factors that have an effect on this idea.
“The researchers concluded that “survival processing is one of the best encoding procedures yet identified in human memory research.” This was an interesting example of testable hypothesis in evolutionary psychology. The claim that it makes is broad; any information that is associated with “survival processing” is encoded and retrieved with greater “urgency- it would seem- as it is recalled with greater frequency than all other types of information. Yet one can argue that the type of information that would be considered “survival processing” in the present day is different from that which would be so a few century or millenia ago. Moreover, the medium of information (visual, verbal, auditory), would also probably be different given the particular period in evolutionary development. Thus it seems reasonable to say that the “beneficial dispositions” which evolutionary psychology posits nonetheless have caveats and are realized differently given the sociocultural circumstances as many before have discussed. So, maybe it doesn’t make sense to use evolutionary psychology explanations for very specific observations of behaviour (ie. men prefer women with long hair because it shows that they have been healthy for a long time as opposed to the ambiguous health profile of a woman with short hair.”) Moreover, It remains controversial to ascribe our behaviour today to evolutionary processes as a behaviour that might have been adaptive earlier may have the opposite effect today (the example with sugar in class, also true of their example of heightened receptivity to threat, which could be construed as over-anxious and maladaptive today.)
Regarding the “poverty of the stimulus” section; “The sexual infidelity of a man’s mate has been statistically associated with increased paternity uncertainty over deep evolutionary time. It is highly improbable, however, that men could learn this statistical regularity during development.” They go on to state that a man would have to witness thousands of cases of sexual infidelity to come to the conclusion statistically, but this seems like a weak explanation to me as the finding (sexual proximity of a mate is associated with increased uncertainty of paternity) could be learned by a simple explanation and not necessarily the arduous process described above. Basically, evolution is not the best explanation for men’s awareness about this phenomenon.
I think I asked this question in class about thrill seeking people and those who raise spiders or snakes as pets, but I just want to double check. So during war time those intrepid people can be adaptive but generally speaking they are not the norm selected by evolution?
Maybe I am not understanding your question correctly, but you can't talk about adaptive genetic traits without tracing it back to the original environment. Predators like snake were common and in close proximity to humans and you needed to escape from them, so humans who learned to fear snakes and other such predators would have a survival advantage and therefore would be more likely to reproduce.
RE: Suggesting that people just figure it out Here the authors are suggesting that instead of a domain specific ideology based on adaptations, people may use a domain general ideology which has to do with “rationality.” In terms of the romantic jealousy I think that the rationality view makes sense where “rationality combined with the general desire people have to keep what is theirs” is a reasonable explanation however I also believe that evolution has a part in it as well. If you do not have a partner, or your partner is with someone else it will affect your chances to have offspring, and evolutionary speaking isn’t that what the goal is? To have offspring, and pass on your genes to a new generation?
Hey Jenna, although the rationality explanation can make sense in evolutionary terms, I think the authors have a point when they say domain general ideology such as rationality can be rather post hoc, especially because its not predictive.
“Evolutionarily ancient dangers such as snakes, spiders, heights and strangers consistently appear on lists of common fears and phobias far more often than do evolutionarily modern dangers such as cars and guns, even though cars and guns are more dangerous to survival in the modern environment.”
This touches on a couple of the important concepts that were discussed in class, including the contrast between original and current environment; to speculate about the origins of a trait, one must trace it back to the original environment. Evolutionary psychology can undoubtedly contribute to functional explanations about why we have more innate fears for old context threats like snakes and spiders than modern ones like guns and cars, but it’s necessarily limited in its reach (i.e. in its explanatory power/generalizability to our cognitive lives). Speculative evolutionary theories derived from post-hoc analyses of limited evolutionary data cannot be reliably tested, which opens the way for ridiculous claims to be made especially about higher order functions (recall from class the explanation of language as having evolved from sexual preferences).
Even though specific hypotheses in evolutionary psychology can be falsifiable, evidence that supports these hypotheses only acknowledge and provide data that these differences or effects exist, but not why they exist. The ‘why’ is only provided by the hypotheses and as a potential explanation for the observed empirical data, and although logical, it still seems somewhat post hoc because we lack a lot of knowledge about the selection pressures that humans faced over the millions of years of their existence. Even though there have been a lot of empirical studies showing the sex differences in response to sexual and emotional infidelity, where is the evidence supporting the causal link from paternity uncertainty to sexual infidelity? Although some of the evolutionary hypotheses can be specific, predictive, and falsifiable enough to count as scientific, there is always the possibility that the empirical data is also resulting from alternative explanations such that labeling something as “evolved” does not constitute a complete scientific explanation, an example being potential culture co-evolutionary processes.
First of all I have to give credit to the authors for making me reconsider my opinion about evolutionary psychology. This field is fascinating, but it is, as the authors noted, new, very, very publicized, and the hypotheses are often hardly falsifiable. Regarding this last point though, I am still a little unconvinced. There are definitely some hypotheses that are falsifiable (which for many is the condition for a field to be considered to be sound science), but one example they gave was women's preference for some types of mates. I do not agree with that claim. It is easy to take a set of related evidences (that women will prefer high-status men given the gender roles in a society like ours for example is hardly a surprise) and then make a claim about the evolutionary role of such preferences a long time ago. The evolutionary role of such preferences a long time ago itself cannot be verified at all, and all that remains is an observation about our society nowadays. Then we can argue that the gender roles today are inherited from those older eras, but again there is no way to check... I might be harsher on this discipline than i am on others, but one reason for that is that often, explaining becomes the basis for justifying (ex: the Kanazawa study on "objective" beauty among different races).
The authors brings up the example of a person faced with a threatening lion and problems of hunger and how you will supress that hunger until you are say. This just seems like an instinct or automatic response that would occur. I can see that they’re arguing that it’s a psychological adaptation, because your body reacts this way physiologically to survive, and you could argue that the need to survive is a psychological need. But does this suggest that there were (once upon a time), ancestors who would not act in a manner that would lead to a safer life? Or ancestors that would choose looking for food than trying to get away from a lion?
I really like your point Anthea... It seems absurd that there might have once existed ancestors that would not prioritize immediate survival needs over less immediate survival needs. It is tempting to assume that it was always innate to our ancestors to prioritize immediate survival needs, but then the question of how this innate quality arose without nature weeding out those ancestors who lacked this capability still lingers.
It is important to discuss the framework of a field of study, especially if it is new, such as evolutionary psychology. A lack of attention to the framework leads to poorly formulated hypotheses vulnerable to falsification and empirical failure. I found that social psychology and behavioural economics are examples of a new field of study that requires more investment in its framework. At the moment, the fields seem to hinge on testing hypotheses that show that outcomes are counterintuitive and not logical. The Confer et al. reading warns against such precisely formulated hypotheses such as the kin altruism theory of male sexuality, which are meant to produce scientific predictions about design features, because of their vulnerability to empirical failure. Moreover, the reading emphasizes that these hypotheses don’t exist insularly and they tend to feed into each other to create a network of theories. The example in the text was how the female preference for males who invest in them and their offspring hypothesis is derived from parental investment theory, which in turn derives from inclusive fitness theory.
Glossing over and indulging in many of the fields problematic practices, I think this article just contributes to the literature on Evolutionary Psychology that needs more nuance. First, much of the research seems to be unnecessarily creating and finding explanations for phenomena. Just because a prediction confirms a hypothesis, neither may be meaningful. For example, the ‘confirmed’ descent illusion hypothesis may just be an effect of our visual perceptual abilities – like the effect of the optical illusion where two lines of the same size appear different in size due to arrows that point different directions and the lines’ end points.
Further, the amount of speculation and assumption involved in evolutionary psychology goes beyond what should be acceptable. Every part of the associated empirical process (besides what is observed in the experiment) is grounded in assumption. Many of the hypotheses are “embedded within a larger theoretical network” (a.k.a another level of assumption). The evolution psychologist is making assumptions about the (ultimately unknowable) conditions and behaviors of the past, about which predictions are meaningful, and about the nature of the phenomenon under study!! Although other disciplines assume and have bias, evolutionary psychology goes one step further in that the hypothesis tested and predictions created stem from multiple layers of assumption. The root layer of assumption being the actual presence of whatever psychological phenomenon the hypothesis seeks to explain. It’s apparent from the article that much of the success of this field lies in explaining sex different psychological adaptions. But, so much of the science that “proves” the existence of these sex differences is extremely poor and has been debunked. Take the large body of evidence that ‘proves’ males are more empathetic. The methods used are self-report and constructed in a way that reflects social bias rather than actual tendency. Asking people to self-report empathy is like assessing musical ability by merely asking “Can you play music amazingly,” and may elicit responses not reflective of capacity but of social bias linked to the term. In non-self-report studies that make it less obvious that empathy is being assessed gender differences disappear. Science that claims certain psychological responses or tendencies of types of individuals is easily biased, and the same assumptions that drive the hypothesis and methods drive the participant to respond in a biased way. So, when saying Girls do X because of Y, whatever X is could be an experimental artifact or result of social priming.
Also, the argument regarding domain-general mechanisms in the paper is weak because “rationality” was the only mechanism considered. Domain-general adaptations could reflect a more general adaptation or ability that has been co-opted for different purposes/ contexts. The predictability and rapidity of a response don’t contest domain-general theories, like the article implies, but could result from physiological responses or the way certain responses have developed and strengthened over an individual’s lifetime. The effects of jealousy talked about in the article could result from a more general adapted trait of jealousy, and the observed reports of sex differences could result from testing bias or effects of how the individual has been socialized. The brain aims to optimize, and in contrast to the paper I think domain general theories offer more parsimonious explanations, whereby creating specialized adaptations for every little type of thing would be extremely complex and effortful. To me, this field seems to offer solutions that are not novel or very helpful. For example, as indicated in the article, the recommendations that stem from evolutionary psychology in regards to depression, from linking the symptoms to “miss-matches in life style from early times,” are not insightful whatsoever-- exercise, socializing with friends and good sleep and hygiene are activities known to increase well-being, mood, and health for a variety of reasons. Although there is merit in the idea that our brains have formed from evolutionary pressures, the extent to which the field attributes behavior and psychological processes to adaptions goes too far.
RE: Evolutionarily ancient dangers such as snakes, spiders, heights, and strangers consistently appear on lists of common fears and phobias far more often than do evolutionarily modern dangers such as cars and guns, even though cars and guns are more dangerous to survival in the modern environment. This statement made me think of one of the reasons why I just cannot get behind evolutionary psychology. The results are often given post-hoc or ‘just-so’ evolutionary explanations that make sense but have no way to verify them. Maybe the reason snakes and spiders are more commonly feared than cars is because we are more often exposed to them in threatening situations, such as stories or movies, than cars that we see every day as a harmless mode of transportation. If someone was raised with a common exposure to spiders and snakes, but all they knew about cars was how many people died in driving-related accidents, what would they fear more?
In this article the authors make the case for evolutionary psychology, that is for the theory of evolution via natural selection to be applied to psychological traits. I do not deny that natural selection is likely to have acted on psychological traits that provide a certain evolutionary advantage within a species’ environment in the same way it does for other biological traits. However, I find some of the claims that the author draws rather dubious.
The paper outlines how an evolutionary psychology hypothesis is formed and tested empirically. The hypothesis must be specific and falsifiable. Evolutionary psychology then draws on convergent evidence (e.g. from archaeology, biology, anthropology) to confirm or disprove the hypothesis and therefore stating it is erroneous to claim that evolutionary psychology explanations are “just so” stories. While I appreciate that the approach outlined by the authors introduces an element of scientific rigour that may be overlooked at times, I do not believe that the conclusions that can be drawn from such testing can be presented as definitive by any means. How do we know that the trait we are observing emerged as an adaptation to a particular event in human history? If we cannot answer this question with a certain degree of confidence then evolutionary psychology explanations are “just so” stories.
For one, evolutionary psychology often links hypotheses to vague events that have occurred over history such as transitioning to agricultural societies or our hunters and gatherers lifestyle. To do draw a causal relationship one must find that link by showing before an event the trait did not exist or was far less pronounced however after the event the trait emerged because it conferred some evolutionary adaptive value. Evidence with this level of temporal precision is often lacking for events that occurred hundreds or thousands of years ago. Cross-cultural comparisons can assist in drawing these conclusions if evolutionary psychologists can isolate the effect of a specific variable that differs between the two groups. However in the case of cultural universals there is a lack of negative evidence. Perhaps cross-species comparisons can be used here to compensate (such as in the case of language being present in humans yet absent in all other animal species). However due to the range of differences between humans and animals (and even between animals) such cross-species comparisons are likely to be limited in their application.
Overall, I am concerned that due to a lack of rigour in its hypothesis testing evolutionary psychology may be prone to inappropriately reinforcing gender or racial prejudice from theories that are not sufficiently substantiated. I appreciate that the authors propose an interactionist framework for understanding the role of genetic and environmental (ie cultural) influences. However, I do think that is very difficult to disentangle culture from biology leading to a chicken and the egg problem. I worry that evolutionary psychology could be used to explain traditional gender roles as a product of evolved biological differences and neglect the role society has in socializing and reinforcing binary gender stereotypes.
“It is widely believed that mirror neurons are a genetic adaptation for action understanding; that they were designed by evolution to fulfill a specific socio-cognitive function”
ReplyDeleteMirror neurons have been used time and again to explain behavior such as empathy, but they fall short of a full explanation because they do not account for the temporal nature of a feelings like empathy. The mirror neuron theory says that mirror neurons fire both when an animal is performing an action and when it sees another animal perform a similar action. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of the other. So when we see someone in distress, according to this theory we feel distressed too because of mirror neurons firing. Can this be an explanation of empathy. I don’t think so. In the case of empathy, there is not only the immediate reaction of sharing that empathy with the individual in distress but also an attempt to understand the individual’s situation. In fact, even when we are out of this individual’s company, we still carry on the feeling of empathy. It’s a temporal process that lasts for a far longer period than the firing of mirror neurons. Mirror neurons can explain the activation of the process of shared experience but cannot explain the lastingness of these cognitive states or the cognitive state themself.
ReplyDeleteThis article nicely laid out the serious limitations of evolutionary psychology. I've summarized the limitations down to two points. First, the field suffers from the poverty of the stimulus problem; where exactly would the learning have come from in the evolutionary past? Like was said in the article, we do not possess a videotape of deep time that would reveal all of the selective events over millions of years that have led to the current design of the human body and mind. Second, it is currently scientifically impossible to parse whether a psychological phenomena is evolved, or learned. This is further complicated by the fact we live in a post-industrial, post-internet era and our culture is so far removed from the one in which our species evolved. Sure there are some phenomena that are rooted in our evolutionary past, but since the would-be experimental subjects are soaked in a culture, especially if they’re soaked in a post-industrial culture, it is very hard to get at these inborn phenomena experimentally. This is why the findings in the field largely come together post hoc. Overall, like all other branches of psychology, it suffers from a lack of knowledge of the mechanisms of our cognition.
I’ve held the view for a while now that while it is very entertaining to read, evolutionary psychology isn’t a particularly valid, or useful field. However the section at the end of the article got me to think about it’s clinical applications, or how it can give us insights in to how to design better lifestyles.
In our modern era, some of our more innate categories are maladaptive, yet they continue to stick around, like a thorn in our side. Often we are prone to do the wrong thing, with a certain kind of thing. For example, if we see a high-status person on a billboard looking happy in their expensive car, we are more likely to see purchasing such as car as a means to climb the ranks. Similarly, my fear response kicks in whenever I try to speak in class; my heart beats very fast and I lose the ability to think clearly. As there is no life-threatening danger in our classroom, response is very maladaptive because it makes it very difficult for me to earn discussion points. I don’t know how much labeling a maladaptive series of neuro-circuits (or a psychopathology) as rooted in evolution, does anything to help us? Maybe a cognitive behavioural therapy might be able to use it as a tool… it doesn’t seem like a very helpful insight though.
One thing I do think will be useful, is when we have the ability to decipher inborn, quick-to-condition, circuits in the brain from more learned ones, on a neurobiological level. Maybe evolutionary psychological theories will help us do the science once we have the tech?
This comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteHow do these recent environmental novelties affect human evolved psychology? There are at least two approaches to answering this question. First, mismatches between modern and ancestral environments may negate the adaptive utility of some evolved psychological mechanisms. Mechanisms that once influenced reproductive success may no longer have the same effect. Our evolved taste for foods containing fat and sugar, adaptive in the past, now leads to obesity and Type 2 diabetes in modern environment replete with highly processed foods available cheaply and in great abundance. Second, novel environmental stimuli, such as media images or pornography, may trigger, hijack, or exploit our evolved psychological mechanisms.
ReplyDeleteThe article presents examples of what evolutionary psychology explained correctly, but criticizes its infidelity in all domains. I found it quite interesting that psychological science makes a clear distinction between the role males and females play in the evolution--whether it be genetic or social. With reference to the above section from the article, the mismatches may have been caused as a result of indulgence. Even in ancestral environments, over consuming fat and sugar led to obesity (e.g., Louis XIV of France), although one may argue that 17th century is considered modern environment, it was significantly different from the industrialized and mass-scale society of the 21st century. And once again, the overflowing novel environmental stimuli can hijack our attention, but it is our choice to allow ourselves to be exposed and we can choose to avoid it.
For example, pornography, in today’s context, is accessible and abundant. As described in the article, the male arousal mechanism was designed to work in actual presence, not on paper or on a screen. It seems plausible that the male arousal mechanism fails to work even in an actual presence of “an attractive, unclothed, sexually receptive woman.” In summary, active seeking and consumption of pornography may lead to erectile dysfunction (Zillmann, D., & Bryant, J. (1982). Pornography and sexual callousness, and the trivialization of rape. Journal of Communication, 32(4), 10-21.).
Maybe we have more freedom, but because of that freedom, we have to make more decisions, even on trivial things. This inevitably leads to decision fatigue by the time we get to the important decisions. Maybe it’s time for us to reconsider the cost of “freedom” and whether it is worth increasing the number of choices that are made available to us.
I found this article very interesting in the way it relates to artificial intelligence. The prevalence of phobias of spiders and snakes over guns made me think of when I learned about Bayesian neural nets. While the net will predict the likelihood of diagnosing cancer from scan results correctly, doctors do not because of heuristic biases. It seems that in the case of an AI who is a T3, experience alone would not be enough to allow them to behave like humans, because they would have to be more afraid of spiders than guns. However, based on experience they would see that guns are far more deadly than spiders and the AI would be more afraid of guns. If human behavior is influenced by evolution, these influences will many times be archaic. This is because evolution takes a very long time to work. In contrast, learning is very quick. Therefore, to behave indistinguishably from a human some of the innate behaviors such as the patterns of phobias and heuristics we use would need to be programmed into the AI. However, this may be problematic, because all possible evolutionary biases would need to be mapped out in addition to the impact they have on learned and societal interaction in order to create an AI whose performance is indistinguishable from that of a human.
ReplyDeleteAnother consideration is that AIs would need to have the same evolutionary drives as humans, such as procreation and survival. Machines do not have to eat or mate in the same way humans do. I believe that this would be problematic in making an AI that acts the same way as we do.
Interesting points. I guess it depends on what the goal of our AI is. If it is to understand our cognition (and make a T3, or T4) then reverse engineering our more quick-to-condition behaviours is important. If it is to design AI that can aid in human flourishing, then we probably don't want all of those evolutionary biases built in. Considering your spider/gun example, it would be more beneficial if our AI were afraid of real, statistically-bound dangers; dangers our evolutionary biases make it hard for us to perceive. For example, a more realistic and helpful survival-related-fear today would be the fear of dying in a car accident, and a more realistic and helpful reproduction-related-fear would be global warming. If we want to design helpful AI, they should probably not equip them with the type of evolved cognition that would cause them to fear snakes/spiders, and instead equip them with the ability to use big data to design a 'limbic system' more soaked in statistical reality.
DeleteHi Valentina, I think you bring up a really good point. Its an issue I think we started to see during the Categorization week with needing to program innate categorical biases, but its not just limited to categorical biases but in fact, any innate evolutionary bias. Is it even possible to map out all of these to know which ones need to be programmed? It seems like we are still far away from mapping all these out, is there another way to get around this problem?
DeleteHi Lauren, it seems like you are distinguishing strong vs. weak AI, where a helpful AI with a different type of evolved cognition that reflects our current selection pressures would be different from humans (not able to pass T3). So it would still not be able to explain the more difficult problem of how human cognition works, but would simply aid the advancement of human society.
I found the authors’ discussion of the human mind as an integrated network of specifically evolved circuits particularly interesting in light of last week’s readings on categorization. The authors’ main point is that a bunch of very different problems that have been around for ages (from snakes to incest) have resulted in specific psychological adaptations via evolutionary processes. These adaptations, or adaptive solutions, seem contingent upon our ability to categorize these problems appropriately as they arise. The authors claim that a domain-general problem-solving capacity like “rationality” cannot be a coverall mechanism underlying resulting behavior, but what about categorization as that coverall mechanism? For example, the authors cite the statistical improbability of walking in on a cheating lover and the speed of the jealous, outraged behavioral reaction as evidence that there is a highly specific, evolved psychological adaptation in response to the adaptive problem of cheaters. They claim that the jilted lover is not consciously weighting past experiences and appropriate reactions using some domain-general rationality, but that the behavior is generated automatically and is hard-wired after evolutionary processes have taken place. Is this incompatible with the idea that categorization underlies our cognitive abilities, including our ability to almost immediately categorize and react to this type of situation?
ReplyDeleteI am not totally sold on the author's argument against the predictive power of the domain-general "rational thinking" hypothesis. It would be rational for women to care about emotional cues because diversion of paternal resources could possibly decrease the chances of survival or proper development of offspring. For men, paternity uncertainty is a rational concern, because they are interested in passing their own genes to offspring, not just their mates. I do not think these ideas are "ad hoc", I think they are reasonably rational explanations. Just because these ideas were not thought of in the initial stages of the studies does not mean they are therefore invalid and cannot be postulated.
ReplyDeleteTheir second point, regarding the reaction of a man finding his wife with another man, also does not seem to totally disprove a domain general hypothesis. Such an acute, emotionally charged event could lead to an "affective" domain general mechanism overpowering a "rational" mechanism. While this is admittedly speculation, it seems just as reasonable in terms of its explanatory power. I think the authors are focusing on one single domain general process instead of exploring the idea that there are multiple.
Re: “Socialization is another explanation that is sometimes proposed as an alternative to evolutionary psychological explanations.”
ReplyDeleteThe way that the authors described and discussed how socialization is not a refutation of evolutionary psychology seems suspect. For example, they discussed how parents have limited influence on boys and girls in terms of socialization practices except for sex-typed activities. Relating to the overall course question of how and why is it that we do what we do, evolutionary psychology misses the boat when it conceptualizes people as either individuals or as a species. Despite the talk of taking into account culture (evoked and transmitted) as well as novel environmental phenomena, ‘deep evolutionary time’ can only ever be explanatory in a distant and abstract way that hardly gives us any real answer of why and how it is that we do what we do. Specifically, I take issue with evolutionary psychology’s lack of a strong conceptualizing of what exactly is examined; in evolutionary terms, people are either individuals or considered as a species. But if we just consider day-to-day living and how we can explain what we do, a huge part of what underlies our daily life and what we do is that we live in a society. Charles Taylor: “men are self-sufficient outside of society … Man is a social animal, indeed a political animal, because he is not self-sufficient alone, and in an important sense is not self-sufficient outside a polis”. More than evolution, which I see as equivalent to Hobbes’ notion of the State of Nature, people are political and social entities who are tied at the hip in virtue of living in a society/body politic. I cannot see how evolutionary psychology can conceptually account for this crucial component of how it is that we do what we do on a day-to-day basis. What evolutionary psychology cannot explain is what John Searle sets out in Construction of Social Reality, accounting for how many objective facts depend on human institutions. So, a view of socialization based on a conceptualization of people as individuals or as a species misses the social reality of why and how it is we do what we do. We cognize in a social reality - not in evolutionary time.
As I was reading Confer et al's paper on the evolutionary psychology, I was intrigued by the distinction between "ultimate" and "proximate" explanations and the similarities I saw between those explanations and the "easy" and "hard" problems in cognition. Proximate explanations deal with the mechanisms of a trait and how it functions while ultimate explanations serve to explore the goal of the trait or the problem it was meant to solve. The easy problem deals more in questions of 'how' cognition functions - its neural mechanisms - while the hard problem tackles the bigger question of why those neural mechanisms have developed over others.
ReplyDeleteAlthough these two distinctions don't map perfectly onto each other, one can see the similarities. The 'easy problem' and 'proximate explanation' both are deeply rooted in scientific techniques and questions of 'function'. The 'hard problem' and 'ultimate explanation' both require a combinatorial approach to answer. Ultimate explanations involve a kind of detective work, using anthropological, psychological and biological research (among others) to recreate the original context of the development of the trait. Likewise, the hard problem uses current research in the fields of neuroscience, psychology and computer sciences to inform its theories. For both, underdetermination - the existance of several answers to a particular problem - remains a problem. Additionally, critical thinking remains the keystone to both of these domains.
*some how rather my comment didn't manage to publish from last week, so here is my sky writing for this reading*
ReplyDeleteRE: paternity uncertainty has been a recurrent adaptive problem for men, evolutionary psychologists hypothesized that men's jealousy would be triggered by cues of sexual infidelity, whereas women's jealousy would center on
This article was very engaging and brought up very intriguing points that I found highly pertinent to us. However, I found some of the examples brought up in this article rather skeptical. Regarding the paternal uncertainty, although psychologists hypothesized it as an evolutionary result, I believe that in our day and age, there could be many external factors such as social and cultural factors that play an effect on this phenomena. Couldn't jealousy be due to other factors like personality, past experiences with infidelity, values and cultures of the individual? Not everyone has sex because they want to reproduce or are even unable to reproduce? - what does it say about these people? The author tends to over generalize many examples. I wonder how the author would go about explaining friendship jealousy or sexual jealousy between homosexual relationships. Not that I'm trying to argue that male jealousy is socially/culturally learned but I feel like there's more to just evolutionary reasons and it is a collection of different interacting factors that have an effect on this idea.
“The researchers concluded that “survival processing is one of the best encoding procedures yet identified in human memory research.” This was an interesting example of testable hypothesis in evolutionary psychology. The claim that it makes is broad; any information that is associated with “survival processing” is encoded and retrieved with greater “urgency- it would seem- as it is recalled with greater frequency than all other types of information. Yet one can argue that the type of information that would be considered “survival processing” in the present day is different from that which would be so a few century or millenia ago. Moreover, the medium of information (visual, verbal, auditory), would also probably be different given the particular period in evolutionary development. Thus it seems reasonable to say that the “beneficial dispositions” which evolutionary psychology posits nonetheless have caveats and are realized differently given the sociocultural circumstances as many before have discussed. So, maybe it doesn’t make sense to use evolutionary psychology explanations for very specific observations of behaviour (ie. men prefer women with long hair because it shows that they have been healthy for a long time as opposed to the ambiguous health profile of a woman with short hair.”) Moreover, It remains controversial to ascribe our behaviour today to evolutionary processes as a behaviour that might have been adaptive earlier may have the opposite effect today (the example with sugar in class, also true of their example of heightened receptivity to threat, which could be construed as over-anxious and maladaptive today.)
ReplyDeleteRegarding the “poverty of the stimulus” section; “The sexual infidelity of a man’s mate has been statistically associated with increased paternity uncertainty over deep evolutionary time. It is highly improbable, however, that men could learn this statistical regularity during development.” They go on to state that a man would have to witness thousands of cases of sexual infidelity to come to the conclusion statistically, but this seems like a weak explanation to me as the finding (sexual proximity of a mate is associated with increased uncertainty of paternity) could be learned by a simple explanation and not necessarily the arduous process described above. Basically, evolution is not the best explanation for men’s awareness about this phenomenon.
I think I asked this question in class about thrill seeking people and those who raise spiders or snakes as pets, but I just want to double check. So during war time those intrepid people can be adaptive but generally speaking they are not the norm selected by evolution?
ReplyDeleteMaybe I am not understanding your question correctly, but you can't talk about adaptive genetic traits without tracing it back to the original environment. Predators like snake were common and in close proximity to humans and you needed to escape from them, so humans who learned to fear snakes and other such predators would have a survival advantage and therefore would be more likely to reproduce.
DeleteRE: Suggesting that people just figure it out
ReplyDeleteHere the authors are suggesting that instead of a domain specific ideology based on adaptations, people may use a domain general ideology which has to do with “rationality.” In terms of the romantic jealousy I think that the rationality view makes sense where “rationality combined with the general desire people have to keep what is theirs” is a reasonable explanation however I also believe that evolution has a part in it as well. If you do not have a partner, or your partner is with someone else it will affect your chances to have offspring, and evolutionary speaking isn’t that what the goal is? To have offspring, and pass on your genes to a new generation?
Hey Jenna, although the rationality explanation can make sense in evolutionary terms, I think the authors have a point when they say domain general ideology such as rationality can be rather post hoc, especially because its not predictive.
Delete“Evolutionarily ancient dangers such as snakes, spiders, heights and strangers consistently appear on lists of common fears and phobias far more often than do evolutionarily modern dangers such as cars and guns, even though cars and guns are more dangerous to survival in the modern environment.”
ReplyDeleteThis touches on a couple of the important concepts that were discussed in class, including the contrast between original and current environment; to speculate about the origins of a trait, one must trace it back to the original environment. Evolutionary psychology can undoubtedly contribute to functional explanations about why we have more innate fears for old context threats like snakes and spiders than modern ones like guns and cars, but it’s necessarily limited in its reach (i.e. in its explanatory power/generalizability to our cognitive lives). Speculative evolutionary theories derived from post-hoc analyses of limited evolutionary data cannot be reliably tested, which opens the way for ridiculous claims to be made especially about higher order functions (recall from class the explanation of language as having evolved from sexual preferences).
Even though specific hypotheses in evolutionary psychology can be falsifiable, evidence that supports these hypotheses only acknowledge and provide data that these differences or effects exist, but not why they exist. The ‘why’ is only provided by the hypotheses and as a potential explanation for the observed empirical data, and although logical, it still seems somewhat post hoc because we lack a lot of knowledge about the selection pressures that humans faced over the millions of years of their existence. Even though there have been a lot of empirical studies showing the sex differences in response to sexual and emotional infidelity, where is the evidence supporting the causal link from paternity uncertainty to sexual infidelity? Although some of the evolutionary hypotheses can be specific, predictive, and falsifiable enough to count as scientific, there is always the possibility that the empirical data is also resulting from alternative explanations such that labeling something as “evolved” does not constitute a complete scientific explanation, an example being potential culture co-evolutionary processes.
ReplyDeleteFirst of all I have to give credit to the authors for making me reconsider my opinion about evolutionary psychology. This field is fascinating, but it is, as the authors noted, new, very, very publicized, and the hypotheses are often hardly falsifiable. Regarding this last point though, I am still a little unconvinced. There are definitely some hypotheses that are falsifiable (which for many is the condition for a field to be considered to be sound science), but one example they gave was women's preference for some types of mates. I do not agree with that claim. It is easy to take a set of related evidences (that women will prefer high-status men given the gender roles in a society like ours for example is hardly a surprise) and then make a claim about the evolutionary role of such preferences a long time ago. The evolutionary role of such preferences a long time ago itself cannot be verified at all, and all that remains is an observation about our society nowadays. Then we can argue that the gender roles today are inherited from those older eras, but again there is no way to check... I might be harsher on this discipline than i am on others, but one reason for that is that often, explaining becomes the basis for justifying (ex: the Kanazawa study on "objective" beauty among different races).
ReplyDeleteThe authors brings up the example of a person faced with a threatening lion and problems of hunger and how you will supress that hunger until you are say. This just seems like an instinct or automatic response that would occur. I can see that they’re arguing that it’s a psychological adaptation, because your body reacts this way physiologically to survive, and you could argue that the need to survive is a psychological need. But does this suggest that there were (once upon a time), ancestors who would not act in a manner that would lead to a safer life? Or ancestors that would choose looking for food than trying to get away from a lion?
ReplyDeleteI really like your point Anthea... It seems absurd that there might have once existed ancestors that would not prioritize immediate survival needs over less immediate survival needs. It is tempting to assume that it was always innate to our ancestors to prioritize immediate survival needs, but then the question of how this innate quality arose without nature weeding out those ancestors who lacked this capability still lingers.
DeleteIt is important to discuss the framework of a field of study, especially if it is new, such as evolutionary psychology. A lack of attention to the framework leads to poorly formulated hypotheses vulnerable to falsification and empirical failure. I found that social psychology and behavioural economics are examples of a new field of study that requires more investment in its framework. At the moment, the fields seem to hinge on testing hypotheses that show that outcomes are counterintuitive and not logical. The Confer et al. reading warns against such precisely formulated hypotheses such as the kin altruism theory of male sexuality, which are meant to produce scientific predictions about design features, because of their vulnerability to empirical failure. Moreover, the reading emphasizes that these hypotheses don’t exist insularly and they tend to feed into each other to create a network of theories. The example in the text was how the female preference for males who invest in them and their offspring hypothesis is derived from parental investment theory, which in turn derives from inclusive fitness theory.
ReplyDeleteGlossing over and indulging in many of the fields problematic practices, I think this article just contributes to the literature on Evolutionary Psychology that needs more nuance. First, much of the research seems to be unnecessarily creating and finding explanations for phenomena. Just because a prediction confirms a hypothesis, neither may be meaningful. For example, the ‘confirmed’ descent illusion hypothesis may just be an effect of our visual perceptual abilities – like the effect of the optical illusion where two lines of the same size appear different in size due to arrows that point different directions and the lines’ end points.
ReplyDeleteFurther, the amount of speculation and assumption involved in evolutionary psychology goes beyond what should be acceptable. Every part of the associated empirical process (besides what is observed in the experiment) is grounded in assumption. Many of the hypotheses are “embedded within a larger theoretical network” (a.k.a another level of assumption). The evolution psychologist is making assumptions about the (ultimately unknowable) conditions and behaviors of the past, about which predictions are meaningful, and about the nature of the phenomenon under study!! Although other disciplines assume and have bias, evolutionary psychology goes one step further in that the hypothesis tested and predictions created stem from multiple layers of assumption. The root layer of assumption being the actual presence of whatever psychological phenomenon the hypothesis seeks to explain. It’s apparent from the article that much of the success of this field lies in explaining sex different psychological adaptions. But, so much of the science that “proves” the existence of these sex differences is extremely poor and has been debunked. Take the large body of evidence that ‘proves’ males are more empathetic. The methods used are self-report and constructed in a way that reflects social bias rather than actual tendency. Asking people to self-report empathy is like assessing musical ability by merely asking “Can you play music amazingly,” and may elicit responses not reflective of capacity but of social bias linked to the term. In non-self-report studies that make it less obvious that empathy is being assessed gender differences disappear. Science that claims certain psychological responses or tendencies of types of individuals is easily biased, and the same assumptions that drive the hypothesis and methods drive the participant to respond in a biased way. So, when saying Girls do X because of Y, whatever X is could be an experimental artifact or result of social priming.
Also, the argument regarding domain-general mechanisms in the paper is weak because “rationality” was the only mechanism considered. Domain-general adaptations could reflect a more general adaptation or ability that has been co-opted for different purposes/ contexts. The predictability and rapidity of a response don’t contest domain-general theories, like the article implies, but could result from physiological responses or the way certain responses have developed and strengthened over an individual’s lifetime. The effects of jealousy talked about in the article could result from a more general adapted trait of jealousy, and the observed reports of sex differences could result from testing bias or effects of how the individual has been socialized. The brain aims to optimize, and in contrast to the paper I think domain general theories offer more parsimonious explanations, whereby creating specialized adaptations for every little type of thing would be extremely complex and effortful. To me, this field seems to offer solutions that are not novel or very helpful. For example, as indicated in the article, the recommendations that stem from evolutionary psychology in regards to depression, from linking the symptoms to “miss-matches in life style from early times,” are not insightful whatsoever-- exercise, socializing with friends and good sleep and hygiene are activities known to increase well-being, mood, and health for a variety of reasons. Although there is merit in the idea that our brains have formed from evolutionary pressures, the extent to which the field attributes behavior and psychological processes to adaptions goes too far.
DeleteRE: Evolutionarily ancient dangers such as snakes, spiders, heights, and strangers consistently appear on lists of common fears and phobias far more often than do evolutionarily modern dangers such as cars and guns, even though cars and guns are more dangerous to survival in the modern environment.
ReplyDeleteThis statement made me think of one of the reasons why I just cannot get behind evolutionary psychology. The results are often given post-hoc or ‘just-so’ evolutionary explanations that make sense but have no way to verify them. Maybe the reason snakes and spiders are more commonly feared than cars is because we are more often exposed to them in threatening situations, such as stories or movies, than cars that we see every day as a harmless mode of transportation. If someone was raised with a common exposure to spiders and snakes, but all they knew about cars was how many people died in driving-related accidents, what would they fear more?
In this article the authors make the case for evolutionary psychology, that is for the theory of evolution via natural selection to be applied to psychological traits. I do not deny that natural selection is likely to have acted on psychological traits that provide a certain evolutionary advantage within a species’ environment in the same way it does for other biological traits. However, I find some of the claims that the author draws rather dubious.
ReplyDeleteThe paper outlines how an evolutionary psychology hypothesis is formed and tested empirically. The hypothesis must be specific and falsifiable. Evolutionary psychology then draws on convergent evidence (e.g. from archaeology, biology, anthropology) to confirm or disprove the hypothesis and therefore stating it is erroneous to claim that evolutionary psychology explanations are “just so” stories. While I appreciate that the approach outlined by the authors introduces an element of scientific rigour that may be overlooked at times, I do not believe that the conclusions that can be drawn from such testing can be presented as definitive by any means. How do we know that the trait we are observing emerged as an adaptation to a particular event in human history? If we cannot answer this question with a certain degree of confidence then evolutionary psychology explanations are “just so” stories.
For one, evolutionary psychology often links hypotheses to vague events that have occurred over history such as transitioning to agricultural societies or our hunters and gatherers lifestyle. To do draw a causal relationship one must find that link by showing before an event the trait did not exist or was far less pronounced however after the event the trait emerged because it conferred some evolutionary adaptive value. Evidence with this level of temporal precision is often lacking for events that occurred hundreds or thousands of years ago. Cross-cultural comparisons can assist in drawing these conclusions if evolutionary psychologists can isolate the effect of a specific variable that differs between the two groups. However in the case of cultural universals there is a lack of negative evidence. Perhaps cross-species comparisons can be used here to compensate (such as in the case of language being present in humans yet absent in all other animal species). However due to the range of differences between humans and animals (and even between animals) such cross-species comparisons are likely to be limited in their application.
Overall, I am concerned that due to a lack of rigour in its hypothesis testing evolutionary psychology may be prone to inappropriately reinforcing gender or racial prejudice from theories that are not sufficiently substantiated. I appreciate that the authors propose an interactionist framework for understanding the role of genetic and environmental (ie cultural) influences. However, I do think that is very difficult to disentangle culture from biology leading to a chicken and the egg problem. I worry that evolutionary psychology could be used to explain traditional gender roles as a product of evolved biological differences and neglect the role society has in socializing and reinforcing binary gender stereotypes.