Skip to main content Accessibility help

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.

Close cookie message
×
Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-lnqnp Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T16:20:21.487Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

6 - Evolved Psychological Mechanisms

Properties and Evidence, Misconceptions and Mismatches

from Part I - Foundations of Evolution

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 June 2022

By
Samuel Pearson  and
William von Hippel
Edited by
Todd K. Shackelford
Todd K. Shackelford
Affiliation:
Oakland University, Michigan
Get access

Summary

Understanding evolved psychological mechanisms (EPMs) is important for social scientists seeking a comprehensive understanding of human behavior and cognition. In this chapter we discuss the origins of EPMs, describing their functioning and situational sensitivity. We also discuss how EPMs offer a valuable framework for integrating proximate and distal explanations of psychological phenomena. We then describe methodologies and evidence that can be used to identify EPMs, before concluding with a discussion of how certain EPMs are mismatched with conditions of modern living, potentially interfering with the goal of a happy and healthy life.

Keywords

evolved psychological mechanismstesting evolutionary hypothesesproximate and ultimate explanationsevolutionary mismatches
Type
Chapter
Information
The Cambridge Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Sexual Psychology , pp. 114 - 134
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anderson, J. R., & Gallup, G. G. Jr. (2015). Mirror self-recognition: A review and critique of attempts to promote and engineer self-recognition in primates. Primates, 56(4), 317–326.Google Scholar
Apicella, C. L., Marlowe, F. W., Fowler, J. H., & Christakis, N. A. (2012). Social networks and cooperation in hunter-gatherers. Nature, 481(7382), 497–501.Google Scholar
Baker, M. D. Jr., & Maner, J. K. (2009). Male risk-taking as a context-sensitive signaling device. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45(5), 1136–1139.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Barnett, S. A. (1958). Experiments on “neophobia” in wild and laboratory rats. British Journal of Psychology, 49(3), 195–201.Google Scholar
Barrett, H. C., & Broesch, J. (2012). Prepared social learning about dangerous animals in children. Evolution and Human Behavior, 33(5), 499–508.Google Scholar
Birch, L. L. (1999). Development of food preferences. Annual Review of Nutrition, 19(1), 41–62.Google Scholar
Blumenthal, T. D., & Berg, K. W. (1986). Stimulus rise time, intensity, and bandwidth effects on acoustic startle amplitude and probability. Psychophysiology, 23(6), 635–641.Google Scholar
Boesch, C., & Boesch, H. (1984). Mental map in wild chimpanzees: An analysis of hammer transports for nut cracking. Primates, 25(2), 160–170.Google Scholar
Breuer, T., Ndoundou-Hockemba, M., & Fishlock, V. (2005). First observation of tool use in wild gorillas. PLoS Biology, 3(11), 380.Google Scholar
Buss, D. M. (1991). Evolutionary personality psychology. Annual Review of Psychology, 42(1), 459–491.Google Scholar
Buss, D. M., & Haselton, M. (2005). The evolution of jealousy. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 9(11), 506.Google Scholar
Buss, D. M., & Shackelford, T. K. (1997). Susceptibility to infidelity in the first year of marriage. Journal of Research in Personality, 31(2), 193–221.Google Scholar
Buss, D. M., & von Hippel, W. (2018). Psychological barriers to evolutionary psychology: Ideological bias and coalitional adaptations. Archives of Scientific Psychology, 6(1), 148–158.Google Scholar
Cappe, C., Thut, G., Romei, V., & Murray, M. M. (2009). Selective integration of auditory-visual looming cues by humans. Neuropsychologia, 47(4), 1045–1052.Google Scholar
Chagnon, N. A. (2013). Noble savages: My life among two dangerous tribes – the Yanomamo and the anthropologists. New York, NY: Simon & Schuster.Google Scholar
Chermahini, S. A., & Hommel, B. (2012). Creative mood swings: Divergent and convergent thinking affect mood in opposite ways. Psychological Research, 76(5), 634–640.Google Scholar
Daly, M., & Wilson, M. (1999). The truth about Cinderella: A Darwinian view of parental love. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Dawkins, R. (1982). The extended phenotype (Vol. 8). Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Fox, E. A., van Schaik, C. P., Sitompul, A., & Wright, D. N. (2004). Intra‐ and interpopulational differences in orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) activity and diet: Implications for the invention of tool use. American Journal of Physical Anthropology: The Official Publication of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists, 125(2), 162–174.Google Scholar
Gangestad, S. W., & Simpson, J. A. (2000). The evolution of human mating: Trade-offs and strategic pluralism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23(4), 573–587.Google Scholar
Garcia, J., Kimeldorf, D. J., & Koelling, R. A. (1955). Conditioned aversion to saccharin resulting from exposure to gamma radiation. Science, 122(3160), 157–158.Google Scholar
Grant, K. A., Prioleau, O., Nader, S. H., Nader, M. A., Gage, H. D., Morgan, D., … & Ehrenkaufer, R. L. (2002). Social dominance in monkeys: Dopamine D 2 receptors and cocaine self-administration. Nature Neuroscience, 5(2), 169–174.Google Scholar
Gürerk, Ö., Irlenbusch, B., & Rockenbach, B. (2006). The competitive advantage of sanctioning institutions. Science, 312(5770), 108–111.Google Scholar
Hagen, E. H., Roulette, C. J., & Sullivan, R. J. (2013). Explaining human recreational use of “pesticides”: The neurotoxin regulation model of substance use vs. the hijack model and implications for age and sex differences in drug consumption. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 4, 142.Google Scholar
Hamilton, W. D. (1964). The genetical evolution of social behaviour. II. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7(1), 17–52.Google Scholar
Haselton, M. G., & Buss, D. M. (2000). Error management theory: A new perspective on biases in cross-sex mind reading. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78(1), 81.Google Scholar
Henrich, J., & Muthukrishna, M. (2021). The origins and psychology of human cooperation. Annual Review of Psychology, 72, 207–240.Google Scholar
Humphrey, N. (1976). The social function of intellect. In Bateson, P. & Hinde, R. (Eds.), Growing points in ethology (pp. 303–317). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Huneman, P., & Machery, E. (2015). Evolutionary psychology: Issues, results, debates. In Heams, T. (Ed.,) Handbook of evolutionary thinking in the sciences (pp. 647–657). New York, NY: Springer.Google Scholar
Hunt, G. R. (1996). Manufacture and use of hook-tools by New Caledonian crows. Nature (London), 379(6562), 249–251.Google Scholar
Jaeggi, A. V., De Groot, E., Stevens, J. M. G., & van Schaik, C. P. (2013). Mechanisms of reciprocity in primates: Testing for short-term contingency of grooming and food sharing in bonobos and chimpanzees. Evolution and Human Behavior, 34(2), 69–77.Google Scholar
Jackson, R. E., & Cormack, L. K. (2007). Evolved navigation theory and the descent illusion. Perception & Psychophysics, 69(3), 353–362.Google Scholar
Jobe, L. E., & White, S. W. (2007). Loneliness, social relationships, and a broader autism phenotype in college students. Personality and Individual Differences, 42(8), 1479–1489.Google Scholar
Kipling, R. (1902). Just so stories. Basingstoke: Macmillan.Google Scholar
Koenig, W. D. (1988). Reciprocal altruism in birds: A critical review. Ethology and Sociobiology, 9(2–4), 73–84.Google Scholar
Krebs, J. R. (2009). The gourmet ape: Evolution and human food preferences. American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 90(3), 707–711.Google Scholar
Lee, A. J., Sidari, M. J., Murphy, S. C., Sherlock, J. M., & Zietsch, B. P. (2020). Sex differences in misperceptions of sexual interest can be explained by sociosexual orientation and men projecting their own interest onto women. Psychological Science, 31(2), 184–192.Google Scholar
Lewis, D. M. G., Al-Shawaf, L., Thompson, M. B., & Buss, D. M. (2020). Evolved psychological mechanisms. In Shackelford, T. (Ed.), The Sage handbook of evolutionary psychology: Foundations of evolutionary psychology (pp. 96–120). London: Sage.Google Scholar
Li, Q., Zhang, W., Heyman, G. D., Compton, B. J., & Lee, K. (2020). Susceptibility to being lured away by a stranger: A real-world field test of selective trust in early childhood. Psychological Science, 31(12), 1488–1496.Google Scholar
Lieberman, P. (1984). The biology and evolution of language. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Mallan, K. M., Lipp, O. V., & Cochrane, B. (2013). Slithering snakes, angry men and out-group members: What and whom are we evolved to fear? Cognition & Emotion, 27(7), 1168–1180.Google Scholar
Marlowe, F. (2010). The Hadza: Hunter-gatherers of Tanzania (Vol. 3). Stanford, CA: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Melis, A. P., & Semmann, D. (2010). How is human cooperation different? Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 365(1553), 2663–2674.Google Scholar
Mohr, J. P., Pessin, M. S., Finkelstein, S., Funkenstein, H. H., Duncan, G. W., & Davis, K. R. (1978). Broca aphasia: Pathologic and clinical. Neurology, 28(4), 311.Google Scholar
Nairne, J. S., & Pandeirada, J. N. S. (2010). Adaptive memory: Ancestral priorities and the mnemonic value of survival processing. Cognition and Psychology, 61(1), 1–22.Google Scholar
Nesse, R. M., & Williams, G. C. (2012). Why we get sick: The new science of Darwinian medicine. London: Vintage.Google Scholar
Neuhoff, J. G. (2001). An adaptive bias in the perception of looming auditory motion. Ecological Psychology, 13(2), 87–110.Google Scholar
Norman-Haignere, S. V., Kanwisher, N., McDermott, J. H., & Conway, B. R. (2019). Divergence in the functional organization of human and macaque auditory cortex revealed by fMRI responses to harmonic tones. Nature Neuroscience, 22(7), 1057–1060.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Oaten, M., Stevenson, R. J., & Case, T. I. (2009). Disgust as a disease-avoidance mechanism. Psychological Bulletin, 135(2), 303–321.Google Scholar
Penkunas, M. J., & Coss, R. G. (2013). Rapid detection of visually provocative animals by preschool children and adults. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 114(4), 522–536.Google Scholar
Pinker, S., & Bloom, P. (1990). Natural language and natural selection. Behavior and Brain Sciences, 13(4), 707–727.Google Scholar
Reader, S. M., & Laland, K. N. (2002). Social intelligence, innovation, and enhanced brain size in primates. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99(7), 4436–4441.Google Scholar
Redshaw, J., & Bulley, A. (2018). Future‑thinking in animals. In Oettingen, G., Sevincer, A. T., Gollwitzer, P., Anderson, F., & Atance, C. (Eds.), The psychology of thinking about the future (pp. 31–51). New York, NY: Guilford Press.Google Scholar
Rescorla, R. A. (2004). Superconditioning from a reduced reinforcer. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology Section B, 57(2), 133–152.Google Scholar
Ronay, R., & Hippel, W. V. (2010). The presence of an attractive woman elevates testosterone and physical risk taking in young men. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 1, 57–64.Google Scholar
Rozin, P. (1976). The selection of foods by rats, humans, and other animals. In Rosenblatt, J., Hinde, R., Shaw, E., & Beer, C. (Eds.), Advances in the study of behavior (Vol. 6, pp. 21–76). New York, NY: Elsevier.Google Scholar
Rutz, C., Hunt, G. R., & St. Clair, J. J. H. (2018). Corvid technologies: How do New Caledonian crows get their tool designs? Current Biology, 28(18), 1109–1111.Google Scholar
Sanz, C. M., Call, J., & Boesch, C. (2013). Tool use in animals: Cognition and ecology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Scarr, S., & Salapatek, P. (1970). Patterns of fear development during infancy. Merrill-Palmer Quarterly of Behavior and Development, 16(1), 53–90.Google Scholar
Sidelinger, R. J., & Booth-Butterfield, M. (2007). Mate value discrepancy as predictor of forgiveness and jealousy in romantic relationships. Communication Quarterly, 55(2), 207–223.Google Scholar
Street, S. E., Navarrete, A. F., Reader, S. M., & Laland, K. N. (2017). Coevolution of cultural intelligence, extended life history, sociality, and brain size in primates. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(30), 7908–7914.Google Scholar
Suddendorf, T. (2013). The gap: The science of what separates us from other animals. New York, NY: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Suddendorf, T., Bulley, A., & Miloyan, B. (2018). Prospection and natural selection. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences, 24, 26–31.Google Scholar
Suddendorf, T., & Corballis, M. C. (2007). The evolution of foresight: What is mental time travel, and is it unique to humans? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 30(3), 299–313.Google Scholar
Szolnoki, A., & Perc, M. (2010). Reward and cooperation in the spatial public goods game. EPL (Europhysics Letters), 92(3), 38003.Google Scholar
Thompson, M. E. (2014). Sexual conflict: Nice guys finish last. Current Biology, 24(23), 1125–1127.Google Scholar
Tinbergen, N. (1963). On aims and methods of ethology. Zeitschrift Für Tierpsychologie, 20(4), 410–433.Google Scholar
Tomasello, M. (1994). The question of chimpanzee culture. In Wrangham, R., McGrew, W., de Waal, F., & Heltne, P. (Eds.), Chimpanzee cultures (pp. 301–317). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Trivers, R. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. Quarterly Review of Biology, 46(1), 35–57.Google Scholar
Trivers, R. (2011). Deceit and self-deception: Fooling yourself the better to fool others. London: Penguin.Google Scholar
Urry, L. A., Meyers, N., Cain, M., Wasserman, S., Minorksy, P., & Reece, J. (2017). Campbell biology: Australian and New Zealand edition. Melbourne: Pearson Education Australia.Google Scholar
Van Boxtel, A., Boelhouwer, A. J. W., & Bos, A. R. (1998). Optimal EMG signal bandwidth and interelectrode distance for the recording of acoustic, electrocutaneous, and photic blink reflexes. Psychophysiology, 35(6), 690–697.Google Scholar
von Hippel, W. (2018). The social leap. New York, NY: HarperCollins.Google Scholar
von Hippel, W., & Buss, D. M. (2017). Do ideologically driven scientific agendas impede the understanding and acceptance of evolutionary principles in social psychology. In Crawford, J. & Jussim, L. (Eds.), The politics of social psychology (pp. 7–25). London: Routledge.Google Scholar
von Hippel, W., & Suddendorf, T. (2018). Did humans evolve to innovate with a social rather than technical orientation? New Ideas in Psychology, 51, 34–39.Google Scholar
Wellman, H. M. (1992). The child’s theory of mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Wellman, H. M., & Lagattuta, K. H. (2004). Theory of mind for learning and teaching: The nature and role of explanation. Cognitive Development, 19(4), 479–497.Google Scholar
Whiten, A., & Byrne, R. W. (1988). The Machiavellian intelligence hypotheses. Oxford: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Whiten, A., Spiteri, A., Horner, V., Bonnie, K. E., Lambeth, S. P., Schapiro, S. J., & De Waal, F. B. M. (2007). Transmission of multiple traditions within and between chimpanzee groups. Current Biology, 17(12), 1038–1043.Google Scholar
Wilkinson, G. S. (1988). Reciprocal altruism in bats and other mammals. Ethology and Sociobiology, 9(2–4), 85–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilkinson, G. S. (1990). Food sharing in vampire bats. Scientific American, 262(2), 76–83.Google Scholar
Williams, G. C. (1966). Natural selection, the costs of reproduction, and a refinement of Lack’s principle. The American Naturalist, 100(916), 687–690.Google Scholar
Zietsch, B. P., Sidari, M. J., Murphy, S. C., Sherlock, J. M., & Lee, A. J. (2020). For the good of evolutionary psychology, let’s reunite proximate and ultimate explanations. Evolution and Human Behavior, 42(1), 76–78.Google Scholar

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×