Evolutionary Psychology
“The goal of research in evolutionary psychology is to discover
and understand the design of the human mind. Evolutionary
psychology is an approach to psychology, in which knowledge
and principles from evolutionary biology are put to use in
research on the structure of the human mind…
In this view, the mind is a set of
information-processing machines that
were designed by natural selection
to solve adaptive problems faced by
our hunter-gatherer ancestors…
An evolutionary approach allows
one to recognize …natural
competences … it indicates that
the mind is a heterogeneous collection
of these competences and, most
importantly, it provides positive
theories of their designs.”
The Standard Social Science Model (SSSM)
“Both before and after Darwin, a common view among
philosophers and scientists has been that the human mind
resembles a blank slate, virtually free of content until written on
by the hand of experience …
Over the years, the technological metaphor used to describe the
structure of the human mind has been consistently updated, from
blank slate to switchboard to general purpose computer, but the
central tenet … has remained the same … [and] has become the
reigning orthodoxy in mainstream anthropology, sociology, and
most areas of psychology… According to this orthodoxy:
all of the specific content of the human mind originally derives
from the "outside" – from the environment and the social world –
and the evolved architecture of the mind consists solely or
predominantly of a small number of general purpose
mechanisms that are content-independent, and which sail under
names such as … 'learning,' 'intelligence,' 'imitation,‘ culture‘…
SSSM versus EP
SSSM: Same general-purpose mechanisms govern all
psychological tasks (except basic perception, language),
e.g., how one
• learns to recognize emotional expressions
• thinks about incest
• acquires ideas and attitudes about friends and reciprocity
Mechanisms of reasoning, learning, and memory operate
uniformly – they are content-independent or domain-general.
EP: All normal human minds reliably develop a collection of
domain-specific reasoning and regulatory circuits. “These
circuits organize the way we interpret our experiences, inject
certain recurrent concepts and motivations into our mental
life, and provide universal frames of meaning that allow us to
understand the actions and intentions of others”.
Five Principles
Principle 1: The brain is a physical system. It functions as a
computer. Its circuits are designed to generate behavior that
is appropriate to your environmental circumstances.
Principle 2: Our neural circuits were designed by natural
selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during
our species' evolutionary history.
“The reason we have one set of circuits rather than another is
that the circuits that we have were better at solving problems
that our ancestors faced during our species' evolutionary
history than alternative circuits were”.
For example, just as natural selection has shaped dung flies
to approach dung, it has shaped us to avoid it.
Five Principles
Principle 2: Our neural circuits were designed by natural
selection to solve problems that our ancestors faced during our
species' evolutionary history.
Designed to solve adaptive problems, i.e., problems
• that cropped up again and again during the evolutionary
history of a species
• whose solution affected the reproduction of individual
organisms
“Obviously, we are able to solve problems that no huntergatherer ever had to solve – we can learn math, drive cars,
use computers. Our ability to solve other kinds of problems is a
side-effect or by-product of circuits that were designed to solve
adaptive problems. For example, the fact that we can surf and
skateboard are mere by-products of adaptations designed for
balancing while walking on two legs”.
Five Principles
Principle 3: Consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg; most
of what goes on in your mind is hidden from you. As a result,
your conscious experience can mislead you into thinking that
our circuitry is simpler that it really is. Most problems that you
experience as easy to solve are very difficult to solve – they
require very complicated neural circuitry.
Principle 4: Different neural circuits are specialized for
solving different adaptive problems.
“A basic engineering principle is that the same machine is
rarely capable of solving two different problems equally well.
We have both screw drivers and saws because each solves
a particular problem better than the other”.
Five Principles
Principle 5: Our modern skulls house a stone age mind.
“Natural selection, the process that designed our brain, takes
a long time to design a circuit of any complexity. The time it
takes to build circuits that are suited to a given environment is
so slow it is hard to even imagine – it's like a stone being
sculpted by wind-blown sand. Even relatively simple changes
can take tens of thousands of years. “
Actually evidence is accumulating in many areas
that selection can occur quickly, at least sometimes.
The Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA):
Hunter-gatherer (foraging) societies of the African savanna.
Five Principles
Principle 4: Different neural circuits are specialized for
solving different adaptive problems.
Five Principles
T & C: Brains do not use the propositional calculus (or any
other general algorithm) to solve (many) problems.
Reasoning instincts: An example
Wason Selection Task: Subject is asked to look for violations
of a conditional rule of the form If P then Q.
Rule: "If a Cambridge resident goes into Boston, then that
person takes the subway.”
Boston
Arlington
subway
cab
Each card represents one person. One side of a card tells
where a person went, and the other side of the card tells how
that person got there.
Indicate only those card(s) you definitely need to turn over to
see if any of these people violate this rule.
Boston & cab cards – only ~25% of subjects get this right!
Reasoning instincts: An example
Wason Selection Task: Subject is asked to look for violations
of a conditional rule of the form If P then Q.
People who ordinarily cannot detect violations of if-then rules
can do so easily and accurately when that violation represents
cheating in a situation of social exchange/contract
Rule: "If you are drinking alcohol then you must be 21"
17
21
Drinking
Beer
Drinking
Coke
Indicate only those card(s) you definitely need to turn over
to see if any of these people violate this rule.
17 & drinking beer – most people get this right!
Reasoning instincts: An example
Wason Selection Task: Subject is asked to look for violations
of a conditional rule of the form If P then Q.
Rule: "If a card has an even number on one face, then its
opposite face is red”.
Which card(s) must be turned over to see if this rule has
been violated.
‘8’ and brown cards – only ~25% of subjects get this right!
Reasoning instincts: An example
Wason Selection Task: Subject is asked to look for violations
of a conditional rule of the form If P then Q.
Which of the following cards do you need to turn over to
either confirm or falsify the hypothesis that “if a card has an
even number on one side, it has a vowel on the other?”
1
2
A
B
‘2’ & ‘A’ cards – only ~25% of subjects get this right!
Reasoning instincts: An example
Social contract form again…
Which of the following cards do you need to turn over to
either confirm or falsify the hypothesis that If you charge a
purchase on your credit card, you must pay the bill.
Person
charges
purchase
Person
doesn’t
charge
Person
pays
bill
Person
doesn’t
pay bill
Most people get the right answer!
Cheater Detection & Social Contracts
• For altruism without kin selection to work,
need reciprocity
• Useful to have the payoffs delayed
• I’ll do this for you now if you agree to do that
for me (or my children) later
• Don’t want to make such deals with cheaters,
so its necessary to have a means of detecting
cheaters
• Conclusion: natural selection for a cheater
detection module!
General Processes vs. Modularity
From Descartes on, strong emphasis on unity of mind
• Flourens’ opposition to phrenology
• Opposition to brain localization in 20th century:
Lashley, Head et al
• Behaviorists’ general learning principles
But cognitive psychology has tended to emphasize
the division of the mind into specific processors,
responsible for different cognitive processes
• Memory, language, object recognition, etc.
• Strategies for dissociation designed to separate
processing components functionally (and
structurally in neuropsychology)
Chomsky’s mental organs proposal
“We may usefully think of the language faculty, the
number faculty, and other ‘mental organs,’ as
analogous to the heart or the visual system or the
system of motor coordination and planning. . . . In
short, there seems little reason to insist that the brain
is unique in the biological world, in that it is
unstructured and undifferentiated, developing on the
basis of uniform principles of growth or learning—say
those of some learning theory, or some yet-to-beconceived general purpose learning strategy—that
are common to all domains” (1980, p. 3).
Fodor’s Modularity of Mind
Distinction between horizontal and vertical modules.
Vertical modules:
• domain-specific
• mandatory in their operation
• allow only limited central access to the computations of
the modules
• fast,
• informationally encapsulated
• have shallow outputs
• associated with fixed neural architectures
• exhibit characteristic and specific breakdown patterns
• exhibit a characteristic pace and sequencing in their
development
Fodor’s Modularity of Mind
informationally
encapsulated
Challenges to Fodorian Modularity
Evidence for top-down (as opposed to bottom-up)
processing
Speech processing
• Word recognition based on acoustic and phonetic
information alone—syntax and semantics have no
influence
• Evidence from shadow speech—people restore the
correct word despite distortions, which they do not
do when the sound is presented in isolation
• Controversial case: McGurk Effect
McGurk Effect
• Seeing someone say “ga”
while hearing “ba” results
in perception of
intermediate sound.
• Could be entirely within
language module (motor
theory of speech
perception)
• Massaro: rather invokes
more general processing:
integration of information
and top-down as well as
bottom-up processing
McGurk Effect
• Seeing someone say “ga”
while hearing “ba” results
in perception of
intermediate sound.
• Could be entirely within
language module (motor
theory of speech
perception)
• Massaro: rather invokes
more general processing:
integration of information
and top-down as well as
bottom-up processing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-lN8vWm3m0
Evolutionary Psychology: Modules
all the way through
“We have all these specialized neural circuits because the
same mechanism is rarely capable of solving different adaptive
problems. For example, we all have neural circuitry designed to
choose nutritious food on the basis of taste and smell – circuitry
that governs our food choice. But imagine a woman who used
this same neural circuitry to choose a mate. She would choose
a strange mate indeed (perhaps a huge chocolate bar?). To
solve the adaptive problem of finding the right mate, our
choices must be guided by qualitatively different standards than
when choosing the right food, or the right habitat.
Consequently, the brain must be composed of a large collection
of circuits, with different circuits specialized for solving different
problems. You can think of each of these specialized circuits as
a minicomputer that is dedicated to solving one problem.
Evolutionary Psychology: Modules
all the way through
“Such dedicated mini-computers are sometimes called
modules. There is, then, a sense in which you can view the
brain as a collection of dedicated mini-computers – a collection
of modules. There must, of course, be circuits whose design is
specialized for integrating the output of all these dedicated
mini-computers to produce behavior. So, more precisely, one
can view the brain as a collection of dedicated mini-computers
whose operations are functionally integrated to produce
behavior.”
Cosmides & Tooby, Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer