Evolutionary Psychology : Study with Video Lessons, Practice Problems & Examples

Evolutionary Psychology

This video is going to be about evolutionary psychology, which began to rise as a field in the 1980s. So evolutionary psychology is a field that focuses on how human behavior and mental processes have been shaped by natural selection. Now, as I'm sure you remember, historically speaking, functionalism had taken evolution into account. So very early psychologists were thinking about evolution. However, behaviorism had totally shifted the focus.

And then right after behaviorism, we had really big fields like social psychology, cognitive psychology, and developmental psychology sort of taking the stage, and evolution just got, like, pushed to the side. Now the idea of studying evolution got reintroduced partly due to collaboration with other fields. So by this point in history, psychology was quite popular. Universities and colleges had psychology departments, and because of that, there was a lot more cross-academic collaboration happening. So, in particular, early evolutionary psychologists were taking these theories and methods from anthropology and beginning to apply them in psychology.

So the main research question here is how and why did common psychological traits and behaviors evolve through natural selection? Now we have a couple of important founders here. So first up, we have John Garcia, and John Garcia's research happened well before the 1980s but it kind of set the stage for what was eventually to become evolutionary psychology. So, John Garcia was doing research back in the 1960s on how rats respond to radiation sickness and he found something very interesting. Basically, rats were learning very easily to associate taste with nausea.

However, they had a very hard time learning to associate nausea with either visual or auditory stimuli. Basically, when it came to associating taste and nausea, it would happen almost instantly. Whereas even with repeated learning trials, rats really were having a hard time associating nausea with, like, a visual or auditory stimulus. And this is something I bet you have experienced as well. I know I certainly have where if you get a stomach bug sometimes whatever food you ate right before you got sick, just the thought of it will make you feel nauseous afterwards.

For me, tragically, it is mangoes. I can't eat mangoes anymore. And it happened to me 2 years ago, and that association is as strong as it was back then. So this is a really, really powerful learning technique that our brain does. And this phenomenon came to be known as biological preparedness.

And this is basically the idea that our brain makes some associations easier or faster than others because it gave us an evolutionary advantage. Obviously, it is very evolutionarily advantageous to not eat foods that make you sick, so that is why we have that really strong association. Now in the 1980s, a power couple, if I have ever seen one, Leah Cosmides who is a psychologist and John Tooby who is an anthropologist. They're a husband and wife duo. They began to do research throughout the 1980s and '90s, applying evolutionary theory systematically to psychology.

And so they researched topics like mate selection, detection of cheaters in social situations, parental investment, decision making, and memory. Basically taking evolutionary theory and again just very systematically going through different, you know, very popular common topics or concepts in psychology and applying evolution to them. And they are really the ones credited with making evolutionary psychology into a formal field. So big thank you to them, they did a fantastic job. Now we are not going to have a separate chapter or section just for evolutionary psychology because evolutionary psychology really can be applied to any aspect of the human experience.

It can be applied to any cognitive process, mental process, behavior, as long as you are looking at that thing through an evolutionary lens. So you're going to see evolutionary theory kind of pop up randomly throughout the course, but we're not going to have a dedicated chapter for it, so just to kind of make you aware of what you're going to see coming up. Alright, so that is our little intro into evolutionary psychology and I'll see you guys in our next one.

Evolutionary Psychology Example 1

Okay, so Dr. Silver is a psychologist who studies emotion, specifically how emotions like guilt and shame can motivate prosocial behaviors, very cool stuff. So, an excerpt from her most recent paper reads, prosocial behaviors increase communal acceptance and rank within the social hierarchy, both of which contribute to mate selection and reproductive capacity. Based on this, what type of psychologist do you think Dr. Silver is?

And then our choices are cognitive, developmental, evolutionary, or a neuroscientist. So let's look through this and look for some keywords. So, she's talking about how prosocial behavior might increase communal acceptance. She's also talking about rank within a social hierarchy. And then her, kind of, downstream effects that she's interested in are mate selection and reproductive capacity.

And these two things, in particular, are sounding very evolutionary psych to me. Basically, what she's trying to understand is how the development of emotions would have been evolutionarily advantageous. Why would we have developed emotions like guilt and shame? So, it's looking like she's probably an evolutionary psychologist. If she were a cognitive psychologist or a developmental psychologist, she probably wouldn't be particularly interested in these types of outcomes.

She'd probably be trying to understand something about information processing or, you know, memory or attention as a cognitive psychologist. As a developmental psychologist, she'd be much more interested in how those emotions might develop or change throughout the lifespan, and as a neuroscientist, she'd be more interested in the biological aspects of these emotions, potentially. So, it is looking like Dr. Silver is an evolutionary psychologist. And there you go.