44 Facts About Evolutionary psychology

Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective.

Evolutionary psychology psychologists hold that behaviors or traits that occur universally in all cultures are good candidates for evolutionary adaptations, including the abilities to infer others' emotions, discern kin from non-kin, identify and prefer healthier mates, and cooperate with others.

The theories and findings of evolutionary psychology have applications in many fields, including economics, environment, health, law, management, psychiatry, politics, and literature.

Criticism of evolutionary psychology involves questions of testability, cognitive and evolutionary assumptions, importance of non-genetic and non-adaptive explanations, as well as political and ethical issues due to interpretations of research results.

Evolutionary psychology is an approach that views human nature as the product of a universal set of evolved psychological adaptations to recurring problems in the ancestral environment.

Evolutionary psychology is the long-forestalled scientific attempt to assemble out of the disjointed, fragmentary, and mutually contradictory human disciplines a single, logically integrated research framework for the psychological, social, and behavioral sciences – a frameworkthat not only incorporates the evolutionary sciences on a full and equal basis, but that systematically works out all of the revisions in existing belief and research practice that such a synthesis requires.

Evolutionary psychology has roots in cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology but draws on behavioral ecology, artificial intelligence, genetics, ethology, anthropology, archaeology, biology, and zoology.

Evolutionary psychology has its historical roots in Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection.

Content of evolutionary psychology has derived from, on the one hand, the biological sciences and, on the other, the human sciences, especially psychology.

From Evolutionary psychology there are the primary streams of developmental, social and cognitive Evolutionary psychology.

Theories on which evolutionary psychology is based originated with Charles Darwin's work, including his speculations about the evolutionary origins of social instincts in humans.

Evolutionary psychology is based on the hypothesis that, just like hearts, lungs, livers, kidneys, and immune systems, cognition has a functional structure that has a genetic basis, and therefore has evolved by natural selection.

Evolutionary psychology psychologists seek to understand psychological mechanisms by understanding the survival and reproductive functions they might have served over the course of evolutionary history.

Consistent with the theory of natural selection, evolutionary psychology sees humans as often in conflict with others, including mates and relatives.

Evolutionary psychology recognizes the role of kin selection and reciprocity in evolving prosocial traits such as altruism.

One of the tasks of evolutionary psychology is to identify which psychological traits are likely to be adaptations, byproducts or random variation.

Evolutionary psychology psychologists hold that behaviors or traits that occur universally in all cultures are good candidates for evolutionary adaptations.

Evolutionary psychology psychologists contrast their approach to what they term the "standard social science model, " according to which the mind is a general-purpose cognition device shaped almost entirely by culture.

Evolutionary psychology argues that to properly understand the functions of the brain, one must understand the properties of the environment in which the brain evolved.

Evolutionary psychology, therefore, proposes that the majority of human psychological mechanisms are adapted to reproductive problems frequently encountered in Pleistocene environments.

Evolutionary psychology's explained junk food as an exaggerated stimulus to cravings for salt, sugar, and fats, and she says that television is an exaggeration of social cues of laughter, smiling faces and attention-grabbing action.

Evolutionary psychology's argument is that humans are not adapted to work in large, anonymous bureaucratic structures with formal hierarchies.

Evolutionary psychology psychologists are interested in identifying these proximate mechanisms and what type of information they take as input, how they process that information, and their outputs.

Foundational areas of research in evolutionary psychology can be divided into broad categories of adaptive problems that arise from evolutionary theory itself: survival, mating, parenting, family and kinship, interactions with non-kin, and cultural evolution.

Evolutionary psychology psychologists contend that perception demonstrates the principle of modularity, with specialized mechanisms handling particular perception tasks.

Evolutionary psychology suggests that this indicates a so-called face-reading module.

Evolutionary psychology psychologists believe that humans learn language along an evolved program, with critical periods.

Evolutionary psychology found evidence that humans share at least five basic emotions: fear, sadness, happiness, anger, and disgust.

Evolutionary psychology is primarily interested in finding commonalities between people, or basic human psychological nature.

Evolutionary psychology criticizes some strands of evolutionary psychology for suggesting a pan-adaptionist view of evolution, and dismisses Pinker and Bloom's question of whether "Language has evolved as an adaptation" as being misleading.

Evolutionary psychology argues instead that from a biological viewpoint the evolutionary origins of language is best conceptualized as being the probable result of a convergence of many separate adaptations into a complex system.

Evolutionary psychology psychologists recognize that these theories are all speculative and that much more evidence is required to understand how language might have been selectively adapted.

Researchers in the emerging field of evolutionary social psychology have made many discoveries pertaining to topics traditionally studied by social psychologists, including person perception, social cognition, attitudes, altruism, emotions, group dynamics, leadership, motivation, prejudice, intergroup relations, and cross-cultural differences.

Evolutionary psychology has been applied to explain criminal or otherwise immoral behavior as being adaptive or related to adaptive behaviors.

Coalitional psychology is an approach to explain political behaviors between different coalitions and the conditionality of these behaviors in evolutionary psychological perspective.

Coalitional Evolutionary psychology offers falsifiable ex ante prediction by positing five hypotheses on how these psychological adaptations operate:.

Critics of evolutionary psychology accuse it of promoting genetic determinism, panadaptationism, unfalsifiable hypotheses, distal or ultimate explanations of behavior when proximate explanations are superior, and malevolent political or moral ideas.

Critics have argued that evolutionary psychology might be used to justify existing social hierarchies and reactionary policies.

Evolutionary psychology has been entangled in the larger philosophical and social science controversies related to the debate on nature versus nurture.

Evolutionary psychology psychologists respond that they are working within a nature-nurture interactionist framework that acknowledges that many psychological adaptations are facultative .

Frequent critique of the discipline is that the hypotheses of evolutionary psychology are frequently arbitrary and difficult or impossible to adequately test, thus questioning its status as an actual scientific discipline, for example because many current traits probably evolved to serve different functions than they do now.

Evolutionary psychology psychologists respond that they do know many things about this environment, including the facts that present day humans' ancestors were hunter-gatherers, that they generally lived in small tribes, etc.

Hagen argues that most evolutionary psychology research is based on the fact that females can get pregnant and males cannot, which Hagen observes was true in the EEA.

Evolutionary psychology psychologists have addressed many of their critics .