Author: Greg Bole

This is just a test, not an assignment, but I thought I’d post an interesting article I found recently.  In a few weeks I’m sure we’ll be talking about Evolutionary Psychology, so for those who want to get a jump start:

Evolutionary Psychology and the Public Media: Rekindling the Romance

My favorite paragraph, which refers to a professor right here in the UBC department of psychology:

“At the most recent annual meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, the first plenary speaker was Joseph Henrich, who obtained his PhD with Robert Boyd and whose address was titled “Culture and the Evolution of Human Sociality.” Henrich also spoke about proximate psychological mechanisms that evolved by genetic evolution, not as adaptations to specific adaptive problems, but as adaptations that enable individuals and groups to adapt to their current environments in a rapid and open-ended fashion. For example, a “prestige bias” causes us to grant status to individuals who have something to offer and to use them as role models. A “conformity bias” causes us to copy the most common behavior in the absence of other information. “Strong reciprocity” impels us to uphold norms and punish transgressions, even at our own cost. These are the social equivalents of what B.F. Skinner called “reinforcers,” which guide open-ended individual learning. Henrich’s talk represents what I regard as the most newsworthy development in the field of evolutionary psychology writ large. The headline should read “Evolutionary Psychology Captures the Middle Ground!” There is something between the Cosmides/Tooby blueprint and the Standard Social Science Model that we are beginning to articulate, which is richly innate and richly open-ended at the same time.”