An Assignment on

Behavioral psychology

Submitted by

Nabeena Khatri

LC00016000035

Fourth semester

Nepal Business College

Author Note

This research paper was prepared for Psychology, BBA-3763, taught by Mr.Samir Singh

Sudansu, Professor at Nepal Business College, Janpath, BuddhabiharMarg, Biratnagar, Nepal

Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach to psychology that attempts to explain useful
mental and psychological traits—such as memory, perception, or language—as adaptations, i.e.,
as the functional products of natural selection.

The purpose of this approach is to bring the functional way of thinking about biological
mechanisms such as the immune system into the field of psychology, and to approach
psychological mechanisms in a similar way. In short, evolutionary psychology is focused on how
evolution has shaped the mind and behavior. Though applicable to any organism with a nervous
system, most research in evolutionary psychology focuses on humans. Evolutionary Psychology
proposes that the human brain comprises many functional mechanisms, called psychological
adaptations or evolved cognitive mechanisms designed by the process of natural selection.

Examples include language acquisition modules, incest avoidance mechanisms, cheater detection
mechanisms, intelligence and sex-specific mating preferences, foraging mechanisms, alliance-
tracking mechanisms, agent detection mechanisms, and so on.

Evolutionary psychology has roots in cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology. It also
draws on behavioral ecology, artificial intelligence, genetics, ethology, anthropology,
archaeology, biology, and zoology. Evolutionary psychology is closely linked to sociobiology,
but there are key differences between them including the emphasis on domain-specific rather
than domain-general mechanisms, the relevance of measures of current fitness, the importance of
mismatch theory, and psychology rather than behaviour. Many evolutionary psychologists,
however, argue that the mind consists of both domain-specific and domain-general mechanisms,
especially evolutionary developmental psychologists. Most sociobiological research is now
conducted in the field of behavioral ecology.

Functional Specialization

Evolutionary psychology assumes that this is also the case for the mind. Although there is
disagreement within the discipline on this topic, many researchers assume that the human mind
consists of a large number of functionally specialized components, rather than a small number of
general-function components (Pinker, 1997; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992).

The reasoning behind this position rests not on the analogy with organ systems, but rather on the
logic of computation. The mind, as an information-processing device, functions only insofar as it
performs useful computations on information. Further, for any given computational problem to
be solved, the broader the range of problems a mechanism is designed to solve, the worse it will
be at solving them, and, the more narrow the range of problems a computational mechanism is
designed to solve, the better it will be at solving them. For this reason, evolution will tend to
favor functionally specialized computational devices that are narrow in their function, whose
design assumes or embodies elements of the problem to be solved.
This basic idea is illustrated by Chomsky’s (1980) dissection of language learning. Chomsky
developed an argument he referred to as the “poverty of the stimulus,” that natural language
cannot be learned with only the information that the language learner (the child) receives as
input. This implies that there must be specialized language acquisition devices that embody
knowledge about what is to be learned in order to do the learning.

A similar argument has been made by others (Quine, 1960) and has been extensively studied in
vision. From any given set of information on the retina, an arbitrarily large number of visual
scenes could be generated. Because the human visual system has information processing
procedures that embody or assume features of the world, specialized computational systems can
act on retinal data to produce the percept.

Because the mind performs many different tasks, it must, it is argued, consist of a large number
of functionally specialized mechanisms, each of which embodies principles related to the domain
for which it is designed to function. These principles have been discussed under many labels. A
common term in evolutionary psychology is ‘’modularity.’’ This term is not intended to connote
the spatial sense, but rather the notion of functional specificity. This has been a source of some
debate both within the evolutionary psychology community, and a source of criticism outside of
it. (See Fodor, 1983, for an early use of the term, and Barrett & Kurzban, 2006, for a recent
discussion.)

Plausible Evolved Functions

Because of the way that natural selection operates, genes are selected by virtue of the effect that
they have on their own replication rate relative to alternatives in the population (see Dawkins,
1976, for a lucid discussion). Which genes lead to their own replication depends on how they
contribute to the solution of adaptive problems, the specific tasks, such as finding food, avoiding
predators, and so forth, faced by organisms of a given species. Adaptive problems are diverse,
and depend exquisitely on the life history of the species in question. That is, because different
organisms survive and reproduce in very different ways, the features – and thus the genes – that
are advantageous vary from one species to the next.

As a general rule, then, selection will cause the increase in frequency of genes that cause
phenotypes that are better at solving adaptive problems faced by the organism. Crucially,
adaptive problems can only shape selection when the problem is one that has been repeatedly
faced by the species in question – this is a consequence of the generational time scale over which
natural selection operates. Selection can have its effects only if it has a causal effect on
replication of the gene in question through reproduction, though this pathway can be arbitrarily
distal.

The idea that the brain is likely to consist of functionally specialized computational systems,
taken together with the idea that selection operates over long time scales, suggests that the
computational mechanisms humans possess are the ones generated by genes selected over the
course of human evolutionary history. This in turn implies that the search for specialized
computational mechanisms – adaptations – should be guided by the search for mechanisms that
had plausible functions relative to the tasks our ancestors faced.

This is not to say that humans cannot do many things that are evolutionarily novel, such as drive
cars and choose investment strategies. Because of the way that brains, and especially
development, work, humans can do many things for which there was not specifically selection in
the past.

Indeed, because natural selection only functions on what has happened in the past, every
organism, including humans, are in environments which are novel in some way relative to the
environment in which their adaptations were selected. Each new human being’s face is a novel
feature of the environment, but human brains are nonetheless, barring impairment, able to
perform computations to perceive, store, and recognize these novel faces. Because genes are
selected by virtue of how they contributed to reproductive success in the past, it is inevitable that
there can be elements of any given organism’s environment that do not match the environmental
features that played a causal role in the selection of the relevant genes. A frequently-used
example is the human taste for fats and sugars. In past environments, such appetites would
presumably have led to adaptive outcomes; in modern environments, because of the easy
availability of foods rich in sugar and fat, people consume foods that lead to unhealthful
outcomes (see Burnham and Phelan, 2000, for an engaging discussion).

Levels of Explanation

Evolutionary psychology is a framework that allows researchers to operate at different levels of

explanation. Although various scholars have broken these levels down in different ways (e.g.,
Tinbergen, 1963), it is convenient to break down explanations for biological phenomena into
three levels: function (what is the goal to be achieved?), algorithm (what computations are used
to achieve the goal?), and implementation (how are the computations physically implemented?).

To illustrate why different levels are required, consider the different ways that one might explain
the workings of a watch. One explanation for how it functions is that someone designed the
watch to perform the function of indicating the correct time. Another way to explain it would be
to describe how it keeps track of and represents time, including how it represents the passage of
time, the units it uses, and so on. A third way would be to give a physical description of the
watch, including the movement of the gears.

Because evolved psychological mechanisms have functions, they can also be explained at these
three levels. One of the most thoroughly described phenomena in psychology to be described is
vision. The eye – including structures from the lens and pupil to the neurophysiological
structures involved, such as V1 and other visual areas – functions to generate a representation of
the physical world. To do this, it takes input in the form of electromagnetic radiation, and
transforms it though many different steps, which include things like “edge detectors” and other
specialized computational devices. These computational systems are implemented neurally, and
substantial progress has been made in understanding how different neural systems implement the
computations necessary to perform the eye’s function, linking together the three levels of
analysis.

Usually – but not always – evolutionary psychology starts with an idea about function, the first
level of explanation. These ideas are used to develop hypotheses about the computational
systems that might exists to serve these functions. As such, hypotheses are usually stated at this
level. Cosmides and Tooby’s (1992) work suggesting that there is a set of computational
mechanisms designed to function to detect cheaters led to predictions about the computations
that one would expect if there existed such a system, which in turn led to the design of their
experiments to test for the existence of these features. Because some computations but not others
will contribute to the execution of any given putative function, a potential functional explanation
will carry entailments about the computational system. The notion of evolved function, therefore,
constrains the hypothesis space for evolutionary psychologists.

Development

Evolutionary psychology is committed to the same view of development that is common in

biology (see, e.g., West-Eberhard, 2003). That is, natural selection will retain genes that cause
interactions with the environment that lead to the reliable construction of the functional
mechanisms that solve adaptive problems. In this sense, evolutionary psychology is
“interactionist” in its view of development. Because genes have no functionally relevant
consequences unless they interact with the environment broadly construed –other genes, the
intracellular environment, the external world, and so on – development of any aspect of the
phenotype can only be understood as the interaction between genes and the environment. Natural
selection therefore can be thought of as a process that retains genes that interact with the
environment – i.e., cause development – in a way that leads to the reliable development of
functional elements of the phenotype.

This view makes some broad predictions about development, and can be used to make more
specific predictions in the context of a particular theory of function. For example, interactionist
notions of development entail that to the extent that the environment relevant to a particular
aspect of the phenotype changes, the developmental outcome is more likely to change. This
means that the extent that one knows what features are “developmentally relevant“ for the
gene/environment interaction in question, one can make textured predictions about the effect of
various features of the environment on development.

For example, Gangestad and Buss (1993) began with the premise that many factors can be used
as criteria in selecting a mate (physical appearance, personality characteristics, etc.), and these
criteria can be given more or less weight. They reasoned that a well-designed mate-choice
system should take into account cues to the levels of pathogens in the local ecology and put more
weight on physical attractiveness, which itself is a cue to pathogen resistance. They predicted,
and found evidence for, a developmental system that calibrated preferences to a specific feature
of the local ecology. In this way, theories of function can guide hypotheses regarding
environmental influences on development

Although evolutionary approaches are often equated with strong versions of nativism, these
characterizations do not capture the theoretical commitments of the approach. Evolutionary
psychology does not hold that neural systems – or any aspect of the phenotype – will be present
at birth, will develop independent of the properties of the environment, or will require no
environmental input for proper development of the system in question. Evolutionary approaches
– in humans and non-humans – take selection to shape how genes interact with the environment
by virtue of feedback loops between the genes in question and the structures that they cause to
develop.

Research Methods

Because evolutionary psychology is an approach rather than a content area, researchers in the
discipline use a variety of techniques. These include laboratory experiments, field experiments,
mathematical and agent-based simulations, surveys, neuroimaging, and so on. While much of the
research focuses on humans, comparative analyses and research with non-human animals are
also important parts of the enterprise. Evolutionary psychologists do not differ in their
methodological commitments from other researchers in the social and natural sciences. They rely
on middle-level theories to develop hypotheses, and the nature of the hypothesis determines what
methods are most usefully brought to bear to address the hypothesis in question.

A number of examples illustrate this point. Daly and Wilson (1988) used archival data about
infanticide to address a hypothesis derived from inclusive fitness theory. Cosmides and Tooby
(1992) used a method common in cognitive psychology, the Wason Selection Task, to address
their hypothesis about cheater detection. David Buss (1989) collected a corpus of cross-cultural
questionnaire data to address a set of hypotheses about evolved human mating psychology. The
techniques used by evolutionary psychologists are diverse because of the variation in the nature
of the questions they are trying to answer.

Standards of Evidence

Following conventions in evolutionary biology, evolutionary psychologists tend to follow

Williams (1966) in taking an adaptationist approach. This approach generally begins with
positing a function for some aspect of the organism’s phenotype. Functional hypotheses
necessarily require predictions regarding the way in which the function is accomplished. Each
additional design features that is accurately predicted is evidence in favor of the posited function.
For example, features of the eye – including its transparent lens, dilating pupil, photosensitive
receptors, and so on – are all evidence in favor of its function to recover information from the
world to construct a representation of the physical environment. As Williams stressed in his
original work, adaptation is a strong claim, and requires evidence. The adaptationist program
requires evidence that the object of study is designed for the specified purpose, rather than some
other purpose.

Misunderstandings

The theoretical commitments of evolutionary psychology described here are often

misunderstood. This might be due to social scientists’ lack of familiarity with evolutionary
biology, the novelty of the discipline, or other factors. A small number of the most frequent
misconceptions are very briefly discussed here, though this is not intended to be a complete list.

Genetic determinism

Some authors equate evolutionary approaches with genetic determinism, suggesting that the
discipline is committed to the view that brains are “hardwired,” with no influence from the
environment (see Buller, 2005; Rose & Rose, 2000). As indicated in the section on development
above, this does not accurately characterize the interactionist view of the field.

Panadaptationism

Stephen Jay Gould (2000), among others, have understood evolutionary psychologists to hold
that all parts of all organisms under any descriptions are adaptations. In contrast, evolutionary
psychology, like evolutionary biology, takes natural selection to be the only known source of
organized functional complexity, but does not take all features of organisms to be functional
features. Any functional aspect of the phenotype must necessarily have concomitant byproducts,
features that are incidental consequences that were not selected by virtue of a functional role.
The colors of internal organs are examples. The fact that the liver is brown is a byproduct of the
physiology, but its color does not contribute to its function per se. It is worth noting that
identifying byproducts requires the same type of rigor as identifying adaptations: a hypothesis
that a trait is a byproduct generally requires an account of the adaptation or adaptations of which
the trait in question is a byproduct.

Universality & Culture

While evolutionary psychology takes there to be a species-typical cognitive architecture – an

evolved “human nature” – this does not entail the prediction that all humans will be everywhere
the same. Variation has many sources, including genetic differences, contingent responses to the
environment (such as language learning, in which a putative universal language acquisition
system leads to differences in the specific language leaned depending on the environment), and
so on. Evolutionary psychology is committed to the view that there is a human nature, much as
there is a flamingo nature, mosquito nature, or oak tree nature. That is, there is a species-typical
design with variation among individuals coming from many sources, both genetic and
environmental.
One important source of variation between individuals derives from the fact that humans learn
from one another (Boyd & Richerson, 1985), and information accumulates over time. Because
information in other people’s minds is one aspect of the environment for humans, people in
different places and different times come to have beliefs because others in the local ecology have
them. Sets of beliefs that differ from one group of individuals to another are, therefore, another
part of the human phenotype to be explained. Evolutionary psychology takes what is usually
termed “culture” to be the product of human minds, albeit a complex one. Far from placing no
importance on the role of culture, evolutionary psychology sees culture as one of the most
important aspects of human nature to try to explain (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992).

Conslusion

Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach to psychology that attempts to explain useful

mental and psychological traits—such as memory, perception, or language—as adaptations, i.e.,
as the functional products of natural selection. Evolutionary psychology has roots in cognitive
psychology and evolutionary biology.