This chapter addresses how cognitive flexibility enables an individual to respond adaptively to new situations and respond appropriately to any situation. Interrupting automaticity avoids being trapped in mindsets that foreclose generating new options; avoiding reductive bias reduces the tendency to oversimplify and turn dynamic processes into fixed objects and make complex interactions linear; avoiding functional fixedness reduces the tendency to apply the same solution to different situations; and cognitive connectivity opens up to new approaches in which mental models can be transformed, schemata reorganized, and cognitive bridges built between previous expertise and new situations. This kind of cognitive flexibility enables individuals to respond and adapt to the new situation into which they are moving. This is discussed in light of the retrospective interviews with twenty-four elite performers in three domains (business, sports, and music) who successfully and repeatedly transitioned to higher positions within their field.

Evolutionary psychology and human behavioral ecology are two complementary approaches to understanding human behavior within the evolutionary social sciences. This chapter reviews the shared histories and current states of these approaches, with an eye toward the futures of both. The chapter explore the many ways in which the theoretical and empirical approaches of evolutionary psychology and human behavioral ecology overlap and complement each other, highlighting the synergies that lie at the intersection of these approaches. The chapter also addresses the ways in which these approaches diverge in their theoretical assumptions and the phenomena that they have been used to study. Understanding these divergences can help to identify gaps in the understanding of human behavior, and it can point to ways to bridge those gaps through broadening the visions of each approach. The chapter reviews directions in which evolutionary psychology and human behavioral ecology might evolve in the coming years, including expanding the range of phenomena under study, looking to new sources of theory, and increasing diversity and representation of researchers and communities involved in research.

This chapter considers the cognitive construct, domain specificity, which is invoked in a number of different research programs in cognitive science, to indicate cognitive capacities that are limited in certain ways. Some cognitive capacities are restricted in their application to a certain domain, whereas others range freely beyond that domain. The challenge arises in saying what constitutes the domain of a capacity, especially since areas of knowledge do not come neatly compartmentalized. Building on the work of some cognitive scientists, I argue that the best way to understand the proper domain of a cognitive capacity is by invoking evolutionary considerations. This means that domain-specific capacities are individuated etiologically (at least in part), based on their evolutionary history. They are also identified on the basis of their synchronic causal powers, what they can and cannot do, since domain-specific cognitive capacities cannot range beyond their proper domains (whereas domain-general ones can). Given this cluster of causal features, I argue that there is a prima facie case to be made for considering domain specificity to be a cognitive kind.

The development of creativity is simultaneously possible and impossible. It is impossible because creativity is very domain specific, which means there is no general, all-purpose creative-thinking skill or set of skills that is applicable across domains. Just as there is no such thing as domain-general expertise – one can be an expert in one or many domains, but one cannot be an all-purpose expert in all domains – there is no domain-general creativity. There being no such domain-general skills, there are no domain-general creativity-relevant skills to be nurtured. On the other hand, the nurturance of creativity domain by domain is quite possible. This chapter explores the issue of how domain specificity affects the development of creativity.

The quality of any research is undoubtedly based on a sound methodological approach, and this is certainly true for acculturation psychology. Unfortunately, acculturation psychology has had its own challenges and limitations. In this chapter, we will review the development and evolution of models, measures and methods that are specific to psychological acculturation research as well as explore the mechanisms underlying acculturation processes. We approach this by describing three generations of acculturation theory and research in terms of their areas of emphasis and major contributions to the field: (i) Models; (ii) Measurements and Methods; and (iii) Mechanisms. We conclude with a note on re-visioning acculturation and speculate about the next cycle of developments.

Research suggests that critical thinking skills are often surprisingly domain-specific. We survey the case histories of several Nobel Prize winners in the sciences to demonstrate that even extremely bright individuals can fall prey to bizarre ideas. These findings strongly suggest that intellectual brilliance and acceptance of weird ideas are not mutually incompatible. They also highlight the domain-specificity of critical thinking and the surprising independence of general intelligence from critical thinking. A number of cognitive errors, including bias blind spot and the senses of omniscience, omnipotence, and invulnerability; personality traits such as narcissism and excessive openness; and the “guru complex” may predispose highly intelligent individuals to disastrous critical thinking errors.