Knowledge Tree
Psychological adaptations
Also known as: Psychological adaptation
Facts (19)
Sources
Evolutionary psychology - Wikipedia en.wikipedia.org 18 facts
claimHumans feel guilty when they fail to reciprocate, which matches expectations for adaptations evolved to maximize the benefits and minimize the drawbacks of reciprocity.
claimPsychological adaptations are specialized for the environment in which an organism evolved, a concept known as the environment of evolutionary adaptedness.
procedureEvolutionary psychologists use three primary strategies to develop and test hypotheses about whether a psychological trait is an evolved adaptation: (1) Cross-cultural Consistency, which presumes that human universals like smiling and crying are adaptations; (2) Function to Form, which uses known problems like paternity uncertainty to predict solutions like male sexual jealousy; and (3) Form to Function, which uses reverse-engineering to identify the function of traits like morning sickness.
claimSteven Pinker argues that the universal human ability to learn to talk between the ages of 1 and 4, without explicit training, suggests that language acquisition is a distinctly human psychological adaptation.
claimPsychological adaptations are hypothesized to be innate or relatively easy to learn and manifest across cultures worldwide.
claimEvolutionary psychologists operate within a nature-nurture interactionist framework that acknowledges that many psychological adaptations are facultative, meaning they are sensitive to environmental variations during individual development.
claimEvolutionary psychologists assert that natural selection has provided humans with psychological adaptations, similar to how it has generated anatomical and physiological adaptations.
claimEvolutionary psychology focuses on the study of distal or ultimate causality, specifically the evolution of psychological adaptations, rather than proximate analyses of behavior.
claimEvolutionary psychologists argue that much of human behavior is the output of psychological adaptations that evolved to solve recurrent problems in human ancestral environments.
claimHumans may have an evolved set of psychological adaptations that predispose them to be more cooperative with members of their tribal in-group and nastier to members of tribal out-groups, a concept known as strong reciprocity or tribal reciprocity.
claimEvolutionary psychology and cognitive neuropsychology are mutually compatible fields, where evolutionary psychology identifies psychological adaptations and their ultimate evolutionary functions, while cognitive neuropsychology identifies the proximate manifestations of those adaptations.
claimEvolutionary psychologists study proximate mechanisms (also termed mental mechanisms or psychological adaptations) by analyzing their information inputs, processing methods, and outputs.
referenceJohn Tooby and Leda Cosmides argued in 1989 that the human mind consists of many domain-specific psychological adaptations, some of which may constrain what cultural material is learned or taught.
claimFacultative adaptations are psychological adaptations that are sensitive to typical environmental variation and function like 'if-then' statements.
claimEvolutionary psychology seeks to identify human psychological adaptations with regard to the ancestral problems they evolved to solve.
claimA toddler's ability to learn language with virtually no training is considered a likely psychological adaptation.
claimObligate adaptations are psychological adaptations that are relatively robust in the face of typical environmental variation, such as the sweet taste of sugar and the pain of hitting one's knee against concrete.
claimHumans possess psychological adaptations that developed to help identify cheaters, also known as non-reciprocators.
Evolutionary Psychology | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy iep.utm.edu 1 fact
quoteThe fact that any given page out of Gray’s Anatomy describes in precise anatomical detail individual humans from around the world demonstrates the pronounced monomorphism present in complex human physiological adaptations. Although we cannot directly ‘see’ psychological adaptations …, no less could be true of them.