evolutionary psychology critical thinking

Evolutionary thinking: a new perspective on how our brains control behavior takes evolution into account

by Amanda Parker | Jul 22, 2021 | Research

We watch a ball as it falls into our glove. We hear a strange sound in another part of the house and listen intently. In neuroscience, the act of narrowing our senses in response to an environmental event is called “attention,” and it is understood that when we attend to a stimulus, we lose the ability to focus on other surrounding inputs.

“The explanation that the neuroscience community gives for this—the textbook answer—is that we have limited cognitive mechanisms,” said W. Martin Usrey, Professor of Neurobiology, Physiology and Behavior and Neurology at UC Davis, “and we have to distribute those to certain areas because there is an inherent limitation to what the cortex can do.”

But is the cortex itself inherently limited? And if so, why would this be? Assuming we evolve to better survive our environments, wouldn’t it be more useful, for example, for a mouse to be able to focus on both the owl in the sky and the rustling in the grass at the same time and with equal power?

These questions are at the heart of a perspective published on July 22 in Neuron by Usrey and University of Chicago Maurice Goldblatt Professor of Neurobiology, S. Murray Sherman.

“With the big cerebral cortex that we have, one question that’s always bothered Murray and me is why we can’t heighten our awareness of everything,” said Usrey. “The cortex has this incredible computational power. Why can’t all areas be heightened at once? Why diminish one region so that another area can be enhanced?”

Now, Sherman and Usrey argue that our inability to focus our attention on all stimuli at once is not due to a limitation in the cortex itself, but is a product of the physical constraints in which it must operate. In other words, Sherman and Usrey suggest that attention as we know it is a direct consequence of the way our brain’s structure has evolved.

The cortex and evolution

In all mammals, the brain is composed of numerous components that reflect its evolutionary heritage. The most recent component is the cerebral cortex, which is particularly large and well-developed in humans. Exceptionally intricate, the cortex contains tens of billions of interconnected neurons and underlies all our conscious perceptions and abstract thought. Importantly, the cortex functions by interacting and cooperating with the other, evolutionarily older components.

“It’s almost like you can see the history, like geologists see when they look at layers of sediment,” described Sherman. “In the brain, most of the old circuits are still there and functioning—you add things on, but you don’t throw away the old stuff.”

In other words, as the cortex emerged, the older structures of our brain did not fall away. Instead, they remained, and the cortex evolved to work with them.

“The cortex, which is the pinnacle of our evolution as far as the brain is concerned, doesn’t generally have direct access to our motor neurons to control behavior,” said Sherman. “It has to go through all these old circuits. And in doing that, it has to play nice with all the old circuits that are trying to control behavior at the same time.”

To affect behavior, the cortex must send signals through the older subcortical regions. This represents a bottleneck in the flow of signals originating in the cortex, and these subcortical structures could not function properly if all cortical area simultaneously tried to control them.

“If all cortical areas tried to take control of these subcortical structures without anything to judge what’s best, you’d have utter chaos,” said Sherman.

Not only are there physical constraints to funneling large amounts of information through smaller regions, but without any prioritization of signals, we might receive contradictory information.

“Imagine if your visual cortical areas tell you to go left and the auditory areas tell you to go right,” explained Sherman.

What we call attention, then, Sherman and Usrey suggest, is the prioritization the brain must employ to permit only appropriate cortical areas to dominate subcortical routes to behavior. And this prioritization is required due to the very process of evolution that produced the cortex.

“It’s the filtering,” said Sherman, “to determine which cortical areas or subcortical areas at any given time are going to take control of behavior, which we now think we recognize as attention.”

New ways of thinking

If attention as we know it is a product of our brain’s structural evolution, as Sherman and Usrey argue, why did it evolve this way? Why didn’t we evolve to be able to focus on all environmental stimuli at once?

“An engineer building something as complex as the brain might go through a number of different stages, said Sherman, “and when a better way of doing something is developed, the old way might be thrown out. But evolution doesn’t work that way.”

As Sherman and Usrey say in their article, “evolution is messy.” It doesn’t scrap the whole thing and start fresh when things get complicated. Instead, we change by building upon and adapting what already exists. Although we are always evolving to become better suited for our environments, that evolution is constrained by our current structure and functionality.

In the case of the brain, subcortical structures had already developed circuits for complex motor control. When the cortex subsequently evolved, instead of reproducing all the needed neural circuitry, it took advantage of what was already there.

Attention is traditionally seen as a purely cortical mechanism, which is why the “textbook answer” for why we must limit our focus has been that our cortex must have a limited supply of resources to devote. But Sherman and Usrey argue that, because of the context in which it evolved, the cortex does not function on its own.

“We hope to change the way people think about cortical functioning, writ large,” said Sherman. “If you want to understand the brain, I assert you must take evolution into consideration.”

By Amanda Parker, PhD

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Making Sense of the Relationship Between Adaptive Thinking and Heuristics in Evolutionary Psychology

Original Article
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Published: 09 February 2021
Volume 16 , pages 16–29, ( 2021 )

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evolutionary psychology critical thinking

Shunkichi Matsumoto ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3333-2963 1

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In recent years, quite a few evolutionary psychologists have come to embrace a heuristic interpretation of the discipline. They claim that, no matter how methodologically incomplete, adaptive thinking works fine as a good heuristic that effectively reduces the hypothesis space by generating novel and promising hypotheses that can eventually be empirically tested. The purpose of this article is to elucidate the use of heuristics in evolutionary psychology, thereby clarifying the role adaptive thinking has to play. To that end, two typical heuristic interpretations—Machery’s "bootstrap strategy" and Goldfinch’s heuristically streamlined evolutionary psychology—are examined, focusing on the relationship between adaptive thinking and heuristics. The article draws two primary conclusions. The first is that the reliability of the heuristic hypothesis generation procedure (in the context of discovery) should count no less than the conclusiveness of the final testing procedure (in the context of justification) in establishing scientific facts; nature does not always get the last word. Philosophy also counts. The second is that adaptive thinking constitutes a core heuristic in evolutionary psychology that provides the discipline with its raison d'être , but this is only possible when adaptive thinking is substantiated with sufficient historical underpinnings.

The Broad Foundations of Adaptationist-Computational Evolutionary Psychology

Evolutionary Theory and the Epistemology of Science

Evolutionary Psychology and Normal Science: in Search of a Unifying Research Program

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Introduction

The controversy revolving around evolutionary psychology does not seem to be subsiding; however, the focus of the debate has been gradually shifting. Before, the trend used to be that the debate primarily revolved around the objections raised by critics from a methodological point of view. Some problematized the stability of the Pleistocene environment as the human Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA) that is necessary for natural selection to work out robust solutions over an evolutionary time scale (Sterelny 1995 ; Sterelny and Griffiths 1999 ; Buller 2005 ; Richerson and Boyd 2005 ).

Some others cast a question about the grain with which the ancient adaptive problems should be identified: does fear in general constitute a single adaptive problem, or should the fear of predators and that of heights be considered as separate problems to be subsumed under a related domain (Sterelny and Griffiths 1999 ; Buller 2005 )?

Still others doubted the feasibility or logical consistency of adaptive thinking. For the purpose of identifying ancient adaptive problems with sufficient precision to be able to pick out only relevant aspects of the environment while screening out unnecessary information, we need to know quite a good deal about the trait in advance (Griffiths 1996 ; Buller 2005 ; Laland and Brown 2011 ).

In recent years, however, quite a few evolutionary psychologists or their defenders have come to emphasize evolutionary psychology as a scientific discipline based on heuristic predictions and eventual confirmation (Gigerenzer and Selten 2001 ; Andrews et al. 2002 ; Goldfinch 2015 ; Hagen 2016 ; Machery forthcoming). According to them, no matter how methodologically incomplete, adaptive thinking (a core methodology of evolutionary psychology to be clarified later) works fine as a good heuristic in effectively reducing the hypothesis space. The methodological objections raised by critics we just synopsized above do not doom evolutionary psychology, because they all concern the context of discovery, not the context of justification: if the hypotheses discovered ought to have been justified in terms of methodological consistency in advance of their final testing, those objections would surely be crucial. However, if the truthfulness of the hypotheses is to be entirely determined by final testing, it will not make any serious difference which methodology is employed in the process of discovering hypotheses, or where they come from. After all, it is not philosophy (methodology) but nature that gets the last word (Symons 1992 ).

For example, Edouard Machery advocates such a heuristic interpretation. According to him, what he calls "the forward-looking heuristic" ( adaptive thinking , in our terms) assumes a central place in evolutionary psychology reasoning. Yet, at the same time, he remarks that although it is useful for discovering our psychological traits, it need not be necessary. Sometimes it is supplemented by a backward-looking reasoning, and at other times its speculative character needs to be constrained by some other non-evolutionary sources of information. Since the forward-looking heuristic is just a heuristic, it need not stand on its own as a complete and self-contained hypothesis generator (Machery forthcoming).

Andrew Goldfinch brings such a heuristic aspect to the fore and argues that it is this aspect that evolutionary psychology as a scientific practice conducted by today’s most pragmatic researchers on a daily basis ought to be identified with. According to his diagnosis, the reason why evolutionary psychology at its early stage provoked such fierce antipathy from critics is because its leading pioneers such as Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, David Buss, and others ventured to sell "a package of strong views" that presented it as a "game-changer," a "scientific revolution" in psychology, the unifying principle in behavioral and social sciences, or even having a bearing on public policy making. Instead, Goldfinch insists that evolutionary psychology be "streamlined" by letting go of these sorts of excessive promises unlikely ever to be fulfilled, in order to circumvent irrelevant criticisms against it. Evolutionary psychology should rather be taken as a hypothesis-driven empirical science, the daily practice of which consists in a kind of adaptationist version of the hypothetico-deductive method; that is, focusing on adaptive problems, hypothesizing dedicated solutions to the problems, and then subjecting these hypotheses to testing (Goldfinch 2015 , p. 132).

However, as we will argue later, heuristics come with their own problems. Using heuristics to find solutions to given problems means committing ourselves to more or less reductive explanations to make them tractable by reducing the complexity of the system concerned. But this, in turn, makes it prone to oversimplified conceptions of its components, contexts, environments, and their interactions, likely resulting in "reductionist biases" (Wimsatt 2007 ).

This is especially true of evolutionary psychology where, as we will see later, adaptive thinking is feasible only in so far as some drastic simplifying assumptions are in place, such as those concerning the existence of nonselective forces, persistence of ancient selection pressures, effects of epistatic interactions, or existence of developmental or phylogenetic constraints.

The purpose of this article is to elucidate the use of heuristics in evolutionary psychology and thereby clarify the role adaptive thinking has to play. To that end, in the next section, the situation will be reviewed in which the pioneers of evolutionary psychology tried to advertise adaptive thinking as the proprietary methodology that enabled them with its heuristic function to enjoy a methodological advantage over that of beleaguered sociobiologists.

In the third section, I will take up one major methodological objection to evolutionary psychology as a case example—the charge of circular reasoning in identifying adaptive problems—and examine whether Machery’s idea of "bootstrap strategy" as a response to it—that adaptive thinking can get away with the charge by being supplemented by reverse engineering—can address it properly.

In the following section, I will turn to Goldfinch’s proposal of heuristically streamlined evolutionary psychology. There I will focus on his proposal of division of labor between evolutionary psychology as managing heuristic hypothesis generation and adjacent relevant fields as justifying them in order to see if it can circumvent the conventional charge that evolutionary psychological hypothesization wants evidential supports.

In the fifth section, I will introduce Matthew Rellihan’s analysis of the type of adaptive thinking employed in evolutionary psychology (Rellihan 2012 ) in order to clarify the role of adaptive thinking and thereby identify one of the core (biasing) assumptions inherent in the program.

In the sixth section, I will readdress the initial issue of the possibility of construing evolutionary psychology as a heuristic project and what to make of the relationship between adaptive thinking and heuristics.

Two primary points will be drawn by the end of this article. The first is that the reliability of the heuristic hypothesis generation procedure (in the context of discovery) should count no less than the conclusiveness of the final testing procedure (in the context of justification) in establishing scientific facts; nature does not necessarily get the last word. Philosophy also counts. The second is that adaptive thinking constitutes a core heuristic in evolutionary psychology that provides the discipline with its raison d'être but that this is only possible when adaptive thinking is substantiated with sufficient historical underpinnings.

Adaptive Thinking in Evolutionary Psychology

In this brief section, for the argument to follow, I will preliminarily delineate what adaptive thinking means in evolutionary psychology and how its pioneers appealed to it to establish their methodological advantage over other approaches.

Adaptive thinking is a type of reasoning in which, on the basis of prespecified selection pressures, structures or behaviors of the organism that must have been evolved as adaptive responses are inferred; it is a forward-looking inference from past functions (survival values) to current forms. Usually adaptive thinking is contrasted with reverse engineering, which infers backwardly from current forms to past functions. Put another way, "Reverse engineering infers the adaptive problem from the solution which was adopted. Adaptive thinking infers the solution from the adaptive problem" (Griffiths 1996 , p. 514).

The pioneers of evolutionary psychology initially advertised their methodological advantage over that of sociobiologists of older generations by appealing to adaptive thinking, or what they called "evolutionary functional analysis" (Tooby and Cosmides 1992 ). Sociobiologists used to be accused of untestable post hoc storytelling about the historical origins they conjectured by the reverse engineering of currently observed traits. In contrast, evolutionary psychologists are supposed to be exempted from such accusations because the end-products of their forward-looking reasoning, namely, the psychological mechanisms possessed by modern humans, can directly be put to empirical testing. This way, adaptive thinking can better lend itself to the typical formula of hypothesis-driven scientific reasoning—focusing on adaptive problems, hypothesizing solutions to them, and finally confirming them empirically.

For example, Cosmides, Tooby, and Barkow ( 1992 , p. 11) states that, "One virtue of this approach is that it is immune to the usual (but often vacuous) accusation of post hoc storytelling: The researcher has predicted in advance the properties of the mechanism."

Adaptive thinking is also supposed to have heuristic value. By figuring out the solutions that might have solved postulated adaptive problems, adaptive thinking is expected to lead to the discovery of previously unknown features. Thus, "an explanation for a fact by a theory cannot be post hoc if the fact was unknown until after it was predicted by the theory and if the reason the fact is known at all is because of the theory" (Tooby and Cosmides 1992 , p. 75).

At the same time, it can serve as a kind of winnow to narrow down the vast hypothesis space by identifying "out of the millions of possible theories" those "that are more likely to be true" (Tooby and Cosmides 1998 , p. 197), namely, by sorting out a handful of promising hypotheses from the rest of those unworthy of serious consideration in accordance with whether they make evolutionary sense.

The Charge of Circular Reasoning in Identifying Adaptive Problems and Machery’s Idea of the "Bootstrap Strategy"

Many different types of criticism have been levelled against adaptive thinking as a central methodology of evolutionary psychology. Here, I will pick out one, for it concerns the feasibility—or internal logical consistency—of the forward-looking inference itself, and thus I think is central among all. That is the problem related to identifying adaptations in our ancestral past (Rose and Lauder 1996 ; Buller 2005 ; Richardson 2007 ; Fox and Westneat 2010 ; Laland and Brown 2011 ). It may not be impossible to infer whether a given trait is an adaptation by conjecturing which traits might have been favored by natural selection in the past, provided that sufficient knowledge of evolutionary processes and ancestral environmental conditions are available (Cosmides and Tooby 1987 ; Tooby and Cosmides 1990 ). However, whether such conjectures can be meaningfully made in practice is a matter of controversy. Since researchers are rarely completely ignorant of the features of the trait in question, they may be in a position to cheat and fudge an evolutionary scenario that predicts features of the trait that are already known (Laland and Brown 2011 , p. 133). If this is the case, the credibility of the confirmation process of those predictions where they are confronted with the current data—be it through experiments, questionnaires, or cross-cultural studies—will be compromised.

Against this conventional criticism, Machery argues that evolutionary psychologists can escape the charge by construing the whole reasoning procedure as a "bootstrap strategy" in which the preceding reverse-engineering and the following adaptive thinking work together in tandem. He writes,

Moreover, the forward-looking heuristic is often complemented by a bootstrap strategy. Evolutionary psychologists often use the knowledge accumulated by psychologists about the structure of known psychological traits to infer what past selective pressures might have been (backward-looking reasoning). These hypotheses about past selective pressures are then used to develop novel hypotheses about some properties of these known psychological traits or to attempt to discover new psychological traits (forward-looking reasoning). (Machery forthcoming, p. 8).

Edward Hagen also endorses Machery’s view:

Used separately, these two types of arguments each do have limitations. Used together, however, and in combination with well-tested theories from evolutionary biology, they are able to make genuine contributions to understanding human evolution. (Hagen 2016 , p. 149)

The point is that the hypotheses about past selective pressures reached by backward-looking reasoning can then serve as a springboard for further conducting a forward-looking one for developing novel hypotheses about some properties of the traits in question. Forward-looking reasoning cannot stand alone, indeed. But with the auxiliary help of backward-looking reasoning based on already known traits—on top of other circumstantial evidence available—it can "boot up" and perform the desired function.

Herein lies the problem: is it really a virtuous circle as Machery and Hagen envisage, or might it be perhaps a vicious circle as critics suspect? (Caporael 1989 ; Davies 1999 ; Buller 2005 ) Even those proponents admit that both forward- and backward-looking reasonings are in themselves incomplete—a forward-looking one being beset with the problem of the incomplete identifiability of the EEA adaptive problems at the outset, and a backward-looking one being saddled with the problem of underdetermination by available evidence among the multiple competing hypotheses consistent with what we observe now. Footnote 1 If so, can two in-themselves incomplete methods complement each other to form a more reliable one? Or might it not be the case that an uncertain inference method that builds on an in-itself uncertain premise will end up with something like a house of cards?

Since Machery does not give us concrete examples of how this strategy works, let us consider instead the case Hagen makes. Following the above quote, Hagen argues as follows to instantiate the bootstrap strategy:

The universal aspects of mate preferences of contemporary women provide a decent hypothesis for the mate preferences of ancestral women, for instance, …. These hypothesized ancestral female preferences are then essential components of the EEA of male-mating strategies of humans …. (Hagen 2016 , p. 149)

This sounds slightly simplistic. First, how can he assert that those aspects of women currently observed are "universal"? He seems to neglect the variations existing among contemporary women (e.g., not all women prefer high-status men). Second, he identifies the ancestral female preferences hypothesized through backward-looking reasoning immediately with the essential components of the EEA constituting the male adaptive problems from which to start forward-looking reasoning. However, the "hypothesized" preferences are not the actual ones, unless confirmed so.

Finally, if we reconstruct the reasoning presented in his sketchy argument, using standard evolutionary psychology doctrine to fill in the missing links, we would have the following chain of reasoning:

The universal features of modern women that prefer certain types of male behavioral patterns (industriousness, strife for high status, etc.) can be projected onto those of ancestral women using backward-looking reasoning.

These projected female features in turn can be used to infer the sorts of selection pressures that contemporary men were forced to face in order to survive the intrasexual competition of the time.

These ancient selection pressures, combined with what is predicted from Trivers’s parental investment theory that men were placed under severer intrasexual competition (Trivers 1972 ), are supposed to serve as a springboard for the subsequent forward-looking reasoning to hypothesize the specialized psychological mechanisms that our male ancestors should have evolved by the end of the Pleistocene, in regard to a mating strategy.

These evolved male mechanisms are what modern men are supposed to inherit virtually unchanged due to the lack of necessary time for evolution of complex adaptations after the end of the Pleistocene. Footnote 2

This explains why modern men are innately disposed to behave in a way that conforms to preferences of modern women observed at the outset.

Now, whether this chain of reasoning as a composite of backward- and forward-looking reasonings proves to be a successful case of the bootstrap strategy to yield a novel prediction or collapses into an unproductive circularity seems to hinge upon whether there is any chance to subject the end products of this chain (i.e., predicted male mechanisms) to empirical confirmation that can be designed independently of the corresponding behavioral patterns supposed to supervene on those mechanisms (in terms of, say, identifying the underlying neuronal circuits responsible for those patterns). If, on the other hand, the intended confirmation was a mere reassurance of those patterns observed at the outset, then the whole detour to and from the ancestral environments would be redundant. Yet, at least up to the present point in time, the alleged confirmation conducted by evolutionary psychologists has not met this requirement.

For instance, let us take up Buss’s well-received theory of jealousy (Buss et al. 1992 ; Buss 2000 , 2008 ). This is a partial application of Trivers’s theory of parental investment and sexual selection as a middle-range evolutionary theory to a specifically human case (Trivers 1972 ). Footnote 3 According to it, the sex that is more heavily investing in offspring tends to be choosier in mate selection; whereas the less-investing sex tends to be more promiscuous and simultaneously forced into competitive intrasexual selection.

Now, on the one hand, human females are, as in most other mammalian and bird species, investing more than males; therefore, Trivers’s theory applies to humans. However, on the other, there are some peculiarities among humans; as female ovulation is concealed, paternity uncertainty becomes a problem among males. In addition, human males are, differently from other primate relatives, considerably committed to parental investment, especially postnatally. Trivers’s theory predicts that these factors can lead men to be "choosier" in their own manner, namely, more vigilant about the reproductive activities of their mates than other primate counterparts. If a man’s partner has an affair with another man, it poses a serious threat to his reproductive prospect as he is not certain about the paternity of the child his partner bears, and, hence, he risks misallocating his resources on a child he did not father. In contrast, his partner’s emotional attachment to another man is less serious as long as she is sexually faithful. On the other hand, for a woman (as the higher-investing sex and, therefore, in need of resources), her partner’s emotional attachment to another woman poses a serious threat to her reproductive prospects, for then part of the resources she was supposed to receive will likely be allocated to another woman. In contrast, her partner having brief extramarital affairs is of lesser concern as long as he is emotionally faithful.

Buss predicts, from these considerations, that human males must have evolved an innate jealousy module that makes them more alert to their mates’ sexual infidelities, whereas their female counterparts must have evolved one that makes them more alert to their mates’ emotional infidelities.

Now let us turn to the hitherto attempted verification of this prediction. Buss and others have conducted it primarily counting on either self-reports on forced-choice questionnaires or the measurement of the physiological stress responses of male and female test subjects who were asked to imagine an uncomfortable scene where their partner, with whom the subject is deeply involved, is being (emotionally or sexually) unfaithful with another person. The researchers then reported that their predictions about sex-biased jealousy sensitivity were confirmed (Buss et al. 1992 ).

The problem I see is, however, whatever the result—whether those predictions be positively or negatively confirmed—what is sought to be verified here is whether the relevant jealous emotions (or some associated bodily responses) are aroused in subjects, not whether they are brought about by some underlying mechanisms . Buss should indeed be credited for designing experiments to confirm, in a quantitative measure, the extent to which the types of jealous emotions entertained by the different sexes differ. Still, until it is demonstrated—or, at least, the experimental design is proposed to demonstrate—that the behavioral differences are caused by some underlying modules hardwired differently between the sexes, the alleged confirmation of the sex-biased sensitivity will remain as a mere reassurance or an accommodation of known facts, rather than a prediction of novel phenomena, albeit adding some quantitative underpinning.

This situation is typical of hypothesization and confirmation in evolutionary psychology; it is usually the case that the required mechanisms are presumed to lie at the underlying information-processing level as something responsible for the corresponding behavioral outputs, namely, they are postulated just as hypothetical placeholders for what we can currently observe. They do not have any chance to play substantial roles in the confirmation of hypotheses, at least for the time being, and thus are theoretically unnecessary. This will make the detour to and from the ancient EEA seem redundant; Machery's remedy against the charge of circularity does not seem promising.

Goldfinch’s Proposal of Heuristically Streamlined Evolutionary Psychology

Goldfinch adds another twist to this issue. He admits that if given an explanatory interpretation, evolutionary psychology may well end up with a circular explanation consisting in projecting forward into the present that which was once obtained by projecting back into the past that which is currently observed. However, evolutionary psychology can manage to break loose from this vicious circle charge by being interpreted as a heuristic project, not as an explanatory project.

The key to this interpretation is a distinction between explanations and heuristic hypothesis generations. According to Goldfinch, evolutionary psychology should not be considered to provide final explanations of phenomena; rather, it should be regarded as just producing hypotheses to be confirmed later. The difference between the two can be put as follows: while explanations are expected not only to provide hypotheses but also to eventually justify them, heuristic projects can stop short of this justificatory procedure.

For instance, if one is to propose via adaptive thinking that trait T is an adaptation for X , all that is required of heuristic projects is to make the following inference in the form of a conditional (here X refers to some adaptive problem, T some trait as a solution to X , C some properties exhibited by T , and P some observable phenomena derived from C ): "If trait T is an adaptation for X , trait T should have configuration C , and so we should find phenomenon P " (Goldfinch 2015 , p. 144). Making a further factual claim that trait T is actually an adaptation for X is not in the purview of a heuristic project, much less justifying it.

According to Goldfinch, it is because evolutionary psychology hypotheses have been unduly deemed as self-contained final pronouncements that unnecessary objections expressing doubt about them are raised. Instead, if they are considered to be just hypotheses waiting (and wanting) to be verified, then those objections will disappear, and other adjacent relevant disciplines will take up the baton and put them to the test.

I wonder if we can separate hypotheses from explanations in such a dichotomous manner. In my eyes, they are more or less mutually exchangeable concepts. In science, every time a new thus-far-unknown phenomenon is discovered, scientists try to explain it, no matter how tentative that explanation may be. Any and all explanations are fallible and left open to revision, thus assuming a hypothetical character. On the other hand, any hypotheses are products of the attempt to explain thus-far-unexplained phenomena and, therefore, are themselves already kinds of explanations, with their provisional character being emphasized. It is not that mere hypotheses waiting to be tested and full-blown explanations established as true are qualitatively separated. Hence, it does not seem that, by simply renaming the concept from "explanations" to "hypotheses," the situation will change so drastically that the critical backlash from skeptics will subside.

The situation will rather be that the probability of hypotheses becoming true propositions is a function of both the reliability of the procedure generating them (i.e., context of discovery) and the conclusiveness of the final testing procedure (i.e., context of justification). The more reliable the former procedure already is, the more likely to be true the hypothesis generated will be, and the less crucial role the latter procedure will have. In contrast, if the former is error-prone in some way or another, the evidential criteria for the eventual confirmation will have to be all the more demanding. Furthermore, it is often the case that the initial errors made in the context of discovery have an overarching biasing effect on practices done in the context of justification without being noticed by practitioners. We can substantiate this point by referring to Wimsatt’s argument about the "reductionist problem-solving heuristics" (Wimsatt 2007 ; see also Tversky and Kahneman 1974 ). Footnote 4

According to Wimsatt, using heuristics is applying a kind of reductionistic research strategy for reducing the complexity of the system to a tractable level by introducing simplifications, idealizations, or approximations. Footnote 5 As such, it is prone to the same kind of errors or biases of reductionism in general. Among them, the most relevant to our current argument is that, "The errors produced by using a heuristic are not random but systematically biased" (Wimsatt 2007 , p. 76). That is, even different heuristics slightly modified by different practitioners to get better fits tend to "generate errors in the same direction" (2007, p. 84) if they share the initial biasing assumptions introduced by the originators of the research program.

Wimsatt goes on to argue that "heuristics can hide their tracks" (2007, p. 86). That is, those multiple reductionist models sharing the initial basic assumptions have a generic tendency to constrain the overall direction along which to expect the results in such a way that each model covers up each other's inadequacies; rather than producing independent results either confirming or disconfirming a hypothesis, heuristic models frequently create pseudo-robust conclusions confirming initial theoretical biases. Therefore, instead of fulfilling the expected function of significantly reducing the hypothesis space, the use of heuristics may often end up entrenching the underlying biases and thus compromising the falsifiability, as it were, of the research program.

In this same vein, Paul Griffiths ( 1996 ) notes a "negative heuristic effect" of adaptive thinking to draw attention not just to the ease with which an adaptive hypothesis can be invoked to accommodate existing or novel findings but, more importantly, to its tendency to rule out other equally plausible hypotheses borne out by different sets of findings once a particular hypothesis has become predominant. As an example, he raises the case for parent/offspring conflict that was first put forward by Trivers ( 1974 ) and immediately gained considerable momentum among sociobiologists (and has remained in some circles up to today). Although the idea that the parent wants to conserve its resources for future offspring, whereas the offspring wants as much as it can get now, is quite appealing, Griffiths notes, empirical evidence for parent/offspring tug-of-war (especially over weaning) is very weak. On the contrary, he cites Bateson's ( 1994 ) review of a number of studies that failed to find aggressive interactions at weaning in various species; namely, studies that report voluntary weaning on offspring's part or ones that found both parties signaling to each other in order to coordinate peaceful weaning, although these studies have largely been underappreciated. The point here is that a predominant hypothesis can suppress others by heuristically (i.e., selectively) picking out evidence that fits it most.

These points of argument have a great bearing on Goldfinch's proposal of division of labor between evolutionary psychology as engaging in just hypothesis generation and adjacent relevant fields as undertaking the task of justifying them: the task ought to be taken on by evolutionary psychologists themselves of systematically investigating heuristic biases and their adverse effects inherent in the program. If it is delegated to practitioners in other fields, they will more likely try to collect evidences either confirming or disconfirming the artifacts created by those biases rather than detect the underlying biases themselves that even evolutionary psychologists could not notice.

In order to substantiate these points, in the next section I will look at Rellihan’s argument on the nature of "Adaptationism and Adaptive Thinking in Evolutionary Psychology" (Rellihan 2012 ) and bring out one of the core biasing assumptions initially introduced by the pioneers into the program.

Rellihan’s Analysis of Adaptationism in Evolutionary Psychology

According to Rellihan, the type of adaptive thinking typical of evolutionary psychology is in fact what can be termed "strong adaptationism." This is the idea that the force of natural selection is so powerful and overwhelming to any obstacles that, once given perennial selection pressures, the destination of adaptive evolution is uniquely predictable no matter what phenotypes a given population may have started with in the distant past—a much stronger version than the one evolutionary psychologists typically think themselves committed to.

Rellihan notes that the usual justification by evolutionary psychologists for the use of adaptive thinking is given by appealing to a rather modest form of adaptationism, to the effect that "the mind’s adaptive complexity reveals it to be a product of selection" (Rellihan 2012 , p. 245). But he argues that this justification is insufficient, for the mind’s being an adaptation is only a necessary and not a sufficient condition for the validity of adaptive thinking. Even granted that most of our mind's features are designed to perform fine-tuned adaptive functions, it does not warrant the deducibility of those functions from hypothesized initial conditions. Therefore, much stronger assumptions are needed in order to be able to predict the psychological mechanisms possessed by modern humans on the basis of knowledge about the selection pressures faced by our ancestors. Footnote 6 Then what are those assumptions?

First, Rellihan defines adaptive thinking succinctly as an inference strategy in accordance with the following formula:

From the fact that there was a significant selection pressure for organism O to evolve trait T , infer that O has evolved T. (Rellihan 2012 , p. 249) Footnote 7

Then he introduces the notion of an "adaptive landscape" as a graphical way to represent what this inference strategy will amount to. Imagine an N -dimensional graph with a separate axis for each conceivable phenotypic property. Movement along an axis corresponds to quantitative change of the value of its associated property. Thus, such phenotypic properties as height, beak size, linguistic capacity, speaking in general terms, are represented by corresponding axes. By adding one extra axis representing the relative fitness of the organism that comprises those properties, we will then get an adaptive landscape for the species concerned.

In this landscape, organisms are represented as points on the surface, populations as clusters of associated points, evolution as the process in which these clusters travel across the surface, and evolution by natural selection as the process in which populations ascend fitness peaks. Nonadaptive evolutionary change such as through genetic drift is represented as wandering about along a contour line. And saltatory evolution, say by means of macromutations, if any, is represented as a leap to a different position far from the current one. Thus, the power of selection can be thought of as the extent to which a population's evolutionary trajectory is determined by the surrounding topography as a gradual hill-climbing process without leaps. Since adaptationism is a position that sees the power of selection as by far the most predominant of all the factors influencing evolution, adaptationists insist the trajectory be mostly (if not exclusively) determined by the topography (Orzack and Sober 1994 ).

Now evolutionary psychology is committed to adaptive thinking, a special type of adaptationism with a predictive focus, according to which a population’s evolutionary trajectory, and hence its destination all the way from its current position, can be predicted mostly by taking the power of selection into account. Therefore, according to Rellihan, in order to justify the use of adaptive thinking, we must presuppose the validity of what he calls "strong adaptationism," defined as follows:

The evolutionary path of a population across the adaptive landscape is largely determined by (and therefore predictable on the basis of) the population’s current position on the landscape together with the neighboring topography of the landscape. (Rellihan 2012 , p. 256)

However, when we begin to take into account the actual constraints of the epistatic interaction between component phenotypes—what Kauffman ( 1995 ) calls "conflicting constraints"—the fitness contribution of one trait becomes contingent upon the presence or absence of another one, thus, contributions by different traits become more and more nonadditive. Accordingly, the landscape becomes increasingly rugged with many a local optimum appearing here and there.

In such a situation, it will be difficult to predict the evolutionary destination (and the trajectory leading to it) solely on the basis of the landscape’s topography plus the current position of the population. If the landscape were simple and smooth, such that there were only one global peak as with Mt. Fuji, we would not have to specify the point of departure and the intermediary pathway in order to predict that a population would eventually arrive at the peak; from anywhere on the landscape there could always be found a continuously uphill route leading to the peak. In contrast, if the landscape gets more and more rugged as a result of epistasis, it gets increasingly harder to predict to which peak a population will eventually ascend and along what route.

What does this all amount to for evolutionary psychology? If the actual landscape involved in the evolutionary history of the human mind happens to be simple and smooth, with a single optimal solution specifiable to the ancient problems, no matter what psychological phenotypes our ancestral population was initially possessed of, it is assured of evolving that solution over time, as the orthodoxy of evolutionary psychology teaches us. On the other hand, if the landscape becomes more or less rugged, just being able to specify the initial problems is not nearly sufficient to predict the end products unless at the same time sufficient information is provided both about the state of ancestral phenotypes and the sequential intermediary stages of their evolution.

What then does the actual landscape look like? Rellihan argues that there is evidence that it has always been considerably rugged. In the original "NK model" put forward by Kauffman and Levin ( 1987 ), where N represents the number of distinct components of the system—genes in the case of a genotype, traits in the case of a phenotype—and K the degree of epistatic interaction between them, K = 0 corresponds to the case where the landscape is smooth, containing a single global peak, whereas at K = 2 "the landscape already begins to resemble the French Alps," and at the extreme of K = N -1 "it looks more like a bed of nails." The number of peaks increases exponentially as either K or N increases. According to Kauffman and Levin’s mathematical model, there will be 10 28 peaks when N = 100 and K = 99, and 10 48 peaks when N = 1024 and K = 1. In contrast, the human genome contains around 25,000 to 30,000 genes and our phenotypes consists of thousands of distinguishable traits (Rellihan 2012 , p. 260).

The lesson to be drawn from the consideration above is that although the use of adaptive thinking is essential in evolutionary psychology theorizing, the condition in which it can be justified is extremely limited.

Recall Wimsatt's argument that using heuristics is applying a kind of reductionistic research strategy for reducing the complexity of the system by introducing simplifications or idealizations. This disregard of the effects of epistasis constitutes one of the core simplifying assumptions set in the discipline by its pioneers and henceforth having been inherited by inertia , as it were, by their followers. This is not an innocuous but a pernicious type of simplification, for it misleads us into accepting a caricatured picture of evolution on the grounds of the irresistibility of a naive intuition that the mind’s adaptive complexity reveals it to be a product of selection.

Adaptive thinking is an inference justifiable only in idealized conditions: the extent to which epistatic interaction occurs should be extremely low, as we just saw above. Besides that, evolutionary forces other than selection should be negligible, ancient selection pressures should have remained robust at least until the relevant psychological adaptations were set in place, and there should not be any major developmental constraints that compromise the optimizing force of natural selection. Accordingly, if adaptive thinking is to serve as an effective heuristic that can significantly reduce the hypothesis space by picking out promising candidates worthy of serious consideration, those idealized conditions must have approximated the historical conditions in which evolution of the human mind has actually taken place. On the other hand, if these conditions are too ideal for any actual historical condition to come close to, adaptive thinking will not be serviceable even as an effective heuristic.

This state of affairs may be better understood with the help of the following analogous situation. Galileo’s law of free fall obtains only in idealized conditions where there are no other forces than gravity that act on the object. The reason that this law can approximate the behavior of an actual object falling in the air is because the effect of air resistance is negligible compared to the force of gravity. However, the stronger the viscosity of the surrounding medium becomes, the less reliable will the application of this idealization to an actual condition be, such that the law can no longer predict the movement of an object sinking in the water, for instance.

The Relationship Between Adaptive Thinking and Heuristics

Now we will get back to the initial issue of whether evolutionary psychology can be construed as a heuristic program. What has become of the claim that since empirical data gets the last word in confirming hypotheses, adaptive thinking can settle for the minor status of just a heuristic device?

First, we want to ensure that adaptive thinking constitutes a core heuristic in evolutionary psychology, which even its proponents would willingly endorse.

For instance, Machery argues that tracing back to the historical origins of the trait by means of adaptationist thinking—whether it be in a forward- or backward-looking manner—is what provides evolutionary psychology with its "originality" or raison d'être:

So far, there is no difference between evolutionary psychologists’ hypotheses and the hypotheses developed by other psychologists. What distinguishes the structure of evolutionary psychologists’ theories is a third, distinctive level of hypothesis: Evolutionary psychologists attempt to identify the origins of the psychological traits under consideration . (Machery forthcoming, p. 15; emphasis in original)

That is, without an adaptationist perspective, evolutionary psychology would not deserve the name of evolutionary psychology, for then it would be deprived of the critical tool to identify the historical origins.

Of course, heuristics in evolutionary psychology do not have to be confined to adaptive thinking. A variety of sources of information can serve as heuristics so long as they can generate some testable hypotheses. Machery mentions the usefulness of nonselectionist sources of information coming from such areas as cross-species comparisons, hunter-gatherer studies, and paleoanthropology. Nonetheless, he treats them as "constraints" that only play supplementary roles to curb the speculative character of adaptive thinking. Footnote 8 This suggests that unless adaptive thinking constitutes an integral part that binds up all these auxiliary sources, evolutionary psychology may end up with a mere hodgepodge of heterogeneous bodies of knowledge, such that its disciplinary integration will be jeopardized.

Second, as we noted time and again, one of the important functions heuristics are expected to perform is to narrow down the hypothesis space by sorting out a handful of promising hypotheses more likely to be true from the rest of the worthless ones. But then it follows that even heuristics already have to have some justificatory function—not just a discovering one. Therefore, if adaptive thinking functions as a core heuristic in evolutionary psychology, as we noted above, it cannot just settle for an innocuous role as generator of whatever hypotheses make evolutionary sense; rather, it has to take on a more active role in turning how-possibly explanations to how-actually ones as much as possible in advance of final testing. This is a reassurance of our previous point that the probability of hypotheses becoming true is a function of both the reliability of the context of discovery and the conclusiveness of that of justification and hence that we cannot draw a sharp line between the two. Footnote 9

Since Hans Reichenbach ( 1938 ) proposed it, the notion of the "context distinction" between those of discovery and justification had been predominant in the mainstream philosophy of science throughout the 20th century (Schickore 2018 ). In actual practice in science, however, the distinction cannot necessarily be drawn that neatly; this distinction has rather been utilized for sanctifying the role of philosophy of science à la logical positivism than for describing real scientific practices.

For example, getting back to Goldfinch’s formula of the adaptationist version of the hypothetico-deductive method—that "if trait T is an adaptation for X , trait T should have configuration C , and so we should find phenomenon P "—it can be schematically represented as follows:

X → T → C → P .

Leaving off the intermediary stage C and dividing the whole into two qualitatively distinct stages of the generation and confirmation of hypotheses, it can be represented as:

where the first part X → T may be called the context of discovery and the second part T → P the context of justification.

Here it might be argued that what happens in the context of justification screens off the information about what had happened in the context of discovery. Footnote 10 That is, no matter in what way T had been derived from X , once T is proposed at all, all the relevant information for designing and conducting confirmatory research of T should be sought in the semantic content of T alone, thereby rendering the information about how T is generated in the first place irrelevant. Footnote 11

This seems to be what Goldfinch actually has in mind. For, in his argumentation, the part of the predictive project X → T is supposed to be carried on almost automatically: once an adaptive problem ( X ) is given, somehow the necessary solutions to it ( T ) are almost bound to be forthcoming. The explanatory gap between X and T is too easily bridged. Compared to all the weight he places on and pages he allocates to describing how the confirmation of the hypotheses heuristically generated by evolutionary psychology should be carried out reliably in relevant adjacent fields (Goldfinch 2015 , Chap. 4), his lack of interest in this phase of how the solutions to given problems should be predicted reliably is noteworthy.

But proposing some trait as a candidate adaptation is not an easy task. As George Williams argued, "adaptation is a special and onerous concept that should be used only where it is really necessary" (Williams 1966 , p. 4); that is, it should not be invoked when less onerous and more parsimonious explanations are sufficient to do the trick. Therefore, this way of tipping the scale of the weight of establishing scientific facts exclusively to the side of final testing, thereby downplaying the weight to be carried by reliable hypothesis generation, is unbalanced.

Goldfinch’s underappreciation of the necessity of providing reliable evidential particulars in generating adaptationist hypotheses is understandable, considering that one of his primary targets is Robert Richardson’s Evolutionary Psychology as Maladapted Psychology (2007), which presented an exactly opposite case to his position, and therefore it appears that Goldfinch could not take a sympathetic stance toward what Richardson had emphasized. In that book, Richardson dismisses evolutionary psychology as a collection of unfounded speculations, because evolutionary psychologists seldom provide historical details only with which their adaptationist hypotheses can be substantiated. He draws on Brandon’s ( 1990 ) analysis on the evidential criteria that any "adaptation explanations" have to meet to qualify as reliable ones. They consist in providing historically informed evidential details concerning the following five conditions: (1) selection, (2) ecological factors, (3) heritability, (4) population structure, and (5) trait polarity. Without the information about, at least, several of these conditions, any adaptation explanations will remain as unreliable stories (Brandon 1990 , Chap. 5; Richardson 2007 , pp. 99f.). Footnote 12

The same case for the necessity of basing hypotheses on reliable historical underpinnings could be made by the following consideration. One of the rivals of evolutionary psychology in its budding stage in the 1980s through the 1990s was contemporary cognitive psychology (on top of sociobiology, as I argued in the second section). The pioneers of evolutionary psychology of the time had to demonstrate their methodological superiority to cognitive psychologists by claiming that only an evolutionary perspective could provide deeper insights into the historical origin of the now apparently synchronic constitution of the human mind. This was supposed to be possible by having access to the vantage point of the ancient selection pressures imposed on our ancestors.

In those days, the brain structure remained a "black box" with the neural circuits inside almost invisible. Although cognitive psychology had developed powerful techniques that provided clues to understanding it at levels above individual neurons, it still counted on quite indirect ways of investigation, such as stimulating the brain with images, sounds, or questions and inferring its structure from the corresponding outputs such as buttons pressed or boxes checked (Hagen 2002 ). Under such a situation, an evolutionary perspective could be a promising alternative for better approaching the structure and functions of the brain. The currently synchronic functional organization of the brain may be a close reflection of the survival and reproductive necessities in our ancestral environments. Studying the past remained much easier than studying brain wiring. It should be an evolutionary perspective "that sets the agenda for cognitive science, telling it what to look for and how to interpret what it finds" (Griffiths 2011 , p. 405). That is, conjecturing past adaptive problems and hypothesizing solutions to them could provide heuristically useful targets for later more rigorous empirical research to zero in on in a search space otherwise too vast to search exhaustively. Thus, "The major insight of evolutionary psychology is that if you want to understand the brain, look deeply at the environment of our ancestors as focused through the lens of reproduction" (Hagen 2002 , p. 520).

For example, in an effort to explain the so-called content effect on the Wason selection task, Cosmides and Tooby attempted to establish the methodological advantage of their "Social Contract Theory" over contemporary rival theories such as the "Pragmatic Reasoning Schemas" put forward by cognitive psychologists Patricia Cheng and Keith Holyoak (Cheng and Holyoak 1985 ). In doing so, they relied heavily on an evolutionary perspective for eliminating their rival theories; in one context, Cosmides argues that her social contract theory is based on the idea of domain-specific mechanisms while the rival theory is based on domain-general ones, and that evolutionary theory adjudicates in favor of the former:

The more important the adaptive problem, the more intensely selection should have specialized and improved the performance of the mechanism for solving it […]. Thus, the realization that the human mind evolved to accomplish adaptive ends indicates that natural selection would have produced special-purpose, domain-specific mental algorithms including rules of inference for solving important and recurrent adaptive problems (such as learning a language […]). (Cosmides 1989 , p. 193)

I will not delve here into whether or not this way of appealing to evolutionary theory was legitimate, an issue that has already been given exhaustive consideration in the literature. Footnote 13 What I want to stress here instead is that this way of discriminating its proprietary methodology from that of its rivals by appealing to an evolutionary (adaptationist) perspective was built in by its pioneers as one of the core identities of evolutionary psychology without which the discipline would not deserve the title. At the same time, however, this is only possible when adaptive thinking is substantiated with as sufficient historical underpinnings as possible.

Evolutionary psychology is, prima facie, going along the right track as a steady scientific discipline. A variety of psychological and behavioral traits of humans have been given evolutionary interpretations. Further, its methodology is extending beyond psychology into such surrounding areas as mental health, study of religion, criminology, consumer psychology, and so forth (cf. Buss 2016 ). For instance, the reinterpretations of mental disorders (on top of other diseases) in evolutionary medicine may be promising in that they can provide ultimate, etiological explanations for "why we get sick" (Nesse and Williams 1994 ), distinguished from, say, the typological classifications by methods of traditional psychiatry such as given in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). I am one of those who have a positive expectation that evolutionary psychology could eventually provide deeper understanding of our psychology and behaviors by bringing ultimate, evolutionary inquiries to bear on the study of proximate, mechanical causes.

Nevertheless, it is also true that pop hypotheses that attract media coverage have been constantly generated in some circles and disseminated without being put through rigorous tests. More importantly, even those hypotheses allegedly having been put through scientific confirmation are oftentimes more of a sort of reassurance of findings that are supposed to supervene on (or just correlate with) the hypothesized entities, rather than the confirmation of those entities themselves (like in the confirmation of jealousy modules in Buss et al. 1992 ). Otherwise, the alleged confirmations are often artifacts resulting from using theoretical models as what Wimsatt calls "pattern-matching templates": in an attempt to test a theoretical model, more often than not the researcher tends to use it as a pattern to organize phenomena by classifying results according to whether or not they fit the model, thereby choosing the parameters to be measured not independently of the model (Wimsatt 2007 ).

Then, can this state of affairs be attributed to the issue of the research ethics or morality of some researchers who lack sufficient methodological awareness? Not necessarily. My view tends to be rather that some kind of vulnerability or instability is inherent in the methodology of evolutionary psychology itself that makes it prone to those kinds of errors. That is, it appears that practitioners in evolutionary psychology today are still being largely constrained by theoretical presuppositions that the pioneers of the discipline had to incorporate, rather hastily, in need of confronting their rivals in traditional psychology of the time by demonstrating the superiority of their methodology.

Since the end of the 20th, however, situations surrounding evolutionary biology from which evolutionary psychology heavily draws as its theoretical authority have changed drastically. The initial biasing assumptions inherent in the Modern Synthesis itself have been brought to the fore, such that its received view of evolution cannot be taken at face value today.

For instance, the theory of niche construction, or cultural evolution in general, teaches us that we humans can reconstruct our social, cultural, or even ecological environments in such a way that the altered environments can in turn exert feedback effects on the selection pressures relevant to our evolution, especially of our cognitive capacities (Odling-Smee et al. 2003 ). This can happen in such a relatively short time in evolutionary terms that Mother Nature has to adopt a tinkering expedient to exapt (or co-opt ) preexisting structures for meeting the novel and urgent needs rather than creating adaptations from scratch (Gould and Vrba 1982 ). This makes the relevance of the Pleistocene EEA to the evolution of the human mind less significant than postulated by evolutionary psychologists.

In addition, research in epigenetics brought out that DNA modifications triggered by environmental changes organisms encounter pre- or postnatally play important roles in the developmental plasticity of various morphological and behavioral traits of animals, including human brain structures, and that some of these effects can be transmitted across generations without underlying changes in the DNA sequence (Jablonka and Lamb 1995 , 2005 ; Meaney 2001 ; McGowan et al. 2009 ).

Adding further to the list of new trends of research that are diametrically opposed to the nativist leaning of evolutionary psychology, the discovery of neuroplasticity in neuroscience revealed that, rather than comprising full-blown domain-specific cognitive modules, the human brain houses rudimentary module-like neuronal assemblies that become the substrate for developmental processes to mold into individually idiosyncratic neuronal pattern by the dynamic reassembling mediated through learning or experiences (Merzenich and Jenkins 1995 ; Panksepp and Panksepp 2000 ).

Therefore, there is less and less need for present-day evolutionary psychologists to continue to be constrained by the historical limitations that the pioneers of the discipline had to settle for in order to weather the initial predicaments they faced by superficially assimilating the orthodoxies of Modern Synthesis at the time, before such new trends of life and behavioral sciences as touched on above began to truly have bearing on the study of human cognition and emotions. Nevertheless, many of today's pragmatically minded evolutionary psychologists seem to be indifferent to these kind of basic issues while engaging in the so-called puzzle-solving in the phase of normal science à la Kuhn.

With respect to the above-mentioned use of theoretical models as "pattern-matching templates," trying to fit the data to the models rather than the other way around, Wimsatt ( 2007 , pp. 88–89) further states as follows:

these kinds of promotion of a theoretical or experimental model to a paradigm … can defer for a long time the noticing or analyzing of questions that were far more obvious at the start of this line of investigation. This phenomenon—the increasing entrenchment of a theoretical or experimental paradigm—in part serves to explain why disciples of an approach are often far less flexible and far less methodologically conscious than the originators of that approach.

This statement is not explicitly addressed to evolutionary psychology, but the extent to which it is applicable to it is remarkable. Unless evolutionary psychologists become more aware of these issues and embark on pursuing more reality-oriented—rather than doctrine-oriented—ways of establishing the science of the human mind, it may someday end up being remembered in history as one of the exemplary cases of degenerative research programs in the Lakatosian sense, comparable to phrenology. For a research program's being carried out in line with the typical formula of hypothesis-driven scientific reasoning is just a necessary—but not a sufficient—reason for it to qualify as a science in a productive and progressive state.

Bringing up one example of this latter problem (an example of the former problem is to be discussed shortly), the Archaeopteryx foot exhibits a design for grasping, but this observation alone is insufficient for determining whether it evolved to grasp branches (i.e., to perch), implying that Archaeopteryx was adapted for flight, or to grab prey, implying that it was a terrestrial predator (Richardson 2007 ; Hagen 2016 ).

According to Smith (2020), even this assumption of the sameness of the traits of our ancestors and those of modern humans naively postulated and shared by evolutionary psychologists (implicit in the first and fourth links in this chain) is enough to make us doubt the possibility of evolutionary psychology. For, without the explicit demonstration that the modern trait is descended from the ancestral one along the same lineage and therefore that the function that affects the fitness of the modern trait is nothing but the function that caused the ancient trait to be selected for—what she dubs "strong vertical homology"— the whole research program of evolutionary psychology would collapse. I agree that this is an aspect that has been overlooked even by critics, let alone evolutionary psychologists, that has a serious consequence. I will remain neutral on this issue for the time, however, just for the sake of my current argument.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (C) from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan (Grant Number: JP19K00277). I would like to thank the Numerical Algorithms Group and Editage for language and editing services.

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Matsumoto, S. Making Sense of the Relationship Between Adaptive Thinking and Heuristics in Evolutionary Psychology. Biol Theory 16 , 16–29 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-020-00369-0

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2.5: Humanist, Cognitive, and Evolutionary Psychology

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Page ID 123517

Jorden A. Cummings
University of Saskatchewan

Jennifer Walinga

Learning Objectives

Understand the key principles of humanistic psychology.
Differentiate humanistic psychology from biological, psychodynamic, and behaviourist psychology.
Critically discuss and differentiate between key humanistic concepts such as motivation, need, adaptation, and perception.
Identify how humanistic psychology, and its related streams of cognitive and evolutionary psychology, have influenced aspects of daily life and work.

Humanistic psychology emerged as the third force in psychology after psychodynamic and behaviourist psychology. Humanistic psychology holds a hopeful, constructive view of human beings and of their substantial capacity to be self-determining . This wave of psychology is guided by a conviction that intentionality and ethical values are the key psychological forces determining human behaviour. Humanistic psychologists strive to enhance the human qualities of choice, creativity, the interaction of the body, mind, and spirit, and the capacity to become more aware, free, responsible, life-affirming, and trustworthy.

Emerging in the late 1950s, humanistic psychology began as a reaction against the two schools of thought then dominating American psychology. Behaviourism’s insistence on applying the methods of physical science to human behaviour caused adherents to neglect crucial subjective data, humanists believed. Similarly, psychoanalysis’s emphasis on unconscious drives relegated the conscious mind to relative unimportance.

The early humanistic psychologists sought to restore the importance of consciousness and offer a more holistic view of human life. Humanistic psychology acknowledges that the mind is strongly influenced by determining forces in society and the unconscious, and emphasizes the conscious capacity of individuals to develop personal competence and self-respect. The humanistic orientation has led to the development of therapies to facilitate personal and interpersonal skills and to enhance the quality of life. During the 1950s and 1960s, Carl Rogers, for instance, introduced what he called person or client-centred therapy , which relies on clients’ capacity for self-direction, empathy, and acceptance to promote clients’ development . Abraham Maslow (1908-1970) developed a hierarchy of motivation or hierarchy of needs culminating in self-actualization . Rollo May (1909 – 1994) brought European existential psychotherapy and phenomenology into the field by acknowledging human choice and the tragic aspects of human existence, and Fritz Perls developed gestalt therapy in his workshops and training programs at the Esalan Institute and elsewhere.

During the 1970s and 1980s, the ideas and values of humanistic psychology spread into many areas of society. As a result, humanistic psychology has many branches and extensions, as outlined in Table 2.2.

Client-centred therapy provides a supportive environment in which clients can re-establish their true identity . Central to this thinking is the idea that the world is judgmental, and many people fear that if they share with the world their true identity, it would judge them relentlessly. People tend to suppress their beliefs, values, or opinions because they are not supported, not socially acceptable, or negatively judged. To re-establish a client’s true identity, the therapist relies on the techniques of unconditional positive regard and empathy. These two techniques are central to client-centred therapy because they build trust between the client and therapist by creating a nonjudgmental and supportive environment for the client.

Existential therapy contrasts the psychoanalysts’ focus on the self and focuses instead on “man in the world.” The counsellor and the client may reflect on how the client has answered life’s questions in the past, but attention ultimately emphasizes the choices to be made in the present and future and enabling a new freedom and responsibility to act. By accepting limitations and mortality, a client can overcome anxieties and instead view life as moments in which he or she is fundamentally free.

Gestalt therapy focuses on the skills and techniques that permit an individual to be more aware of their feelings . According to this approach, it is much more important to understand what patients are feeling and how they are feeling rather than to identify what is causing their feelings. Supporters of gestalt therapy argued that earlier theories spent an unnecessary amount of time making assumptions about what causes behaviour. Instead, gestalt therapy focuses on the here and now.

Research Focus

In his seminal work “Significant Aspects of Client-Centered Therapy,” Rogers described the discovery of the “capacity of the client” (1946):

Naturally the question is raised, what is the reason for this predictability in a type of therapeutic procedure in which the therapist serves only a catalytic function? Basically the reason for the predictability [page 418] of the therapeutic process lies in the discovery — and I use that word intentionally — that within the client reside constructive forces whose strength and uniformity have been either entirely unrecognized or grossly underestimated. It is the clearcut and disciplined reliance by the therapist upon those forces within the client, which seems to account for the orderliness of the therapeutic process, and its consistency from one client to the next.

I mentioned that I regarded this as a discovery. I would like to amplify that statement. We have known for centuries that catharsis and emotional release were helpful. Many new methods have been and are being developed to bring about release, but the principle is not new. Likewise, we have known since Freud’s time that insight, if it is accepted and assimilated by the client, is therapeutic. The principle is not new. Likewise we have realized that revised action patterns, new ways of behaving, may come about as a result of insight. The principle is not new.

But we have not known or recognized that in most if not all individuals there exist growth forces, tendencies toward self-actualization, which may act as the sole motivation for therapy. We have not realized that under suitable psychological conditions these forces bring about emotional release in those areas and at those rates which are most beneficial to the individual. These forces drive the individual to explore his own attitudes and his relationship to reality, and to explore these areas effectively.

We have not realized that the individual is capable of exploring his attitudes and feelings, including those which have been denied to consciousness, at a rate which does not cause panic, and to the depth required for comfortable adjustment. The individual is capable of discovering and perceiving, truly and spontaneously, the interrelationships between his own attitudes, and the relationship of himself to reality. The individual has the capacity and the strength to devise, quite unguided, the steps which will lead him to a more mature and more comfortable relationship to his reality. It is the gradual and increasing recognition of these capacities within the individual by the client-centered therapist that rates, I believe, the term discovery. All of these capacities I have described are released in the individual if a suitable psychological atmosphere is provided.

Rogers identified five characteristics of the fully functioning person:

Open to experience: Both positive and negative emotions are accepted. Negative feelings are not denied, but worked through (rather than resort to ego defence mechanisms).
Existential living: Being in touch with different experiences as they occur in life, avoiding prejudging and preconceptions. Being able to live in and fully appreciate the present, not always looking back to the past or forward to the future (i.e., living for the moment).
Trust feelings: Feelings, instincts, and gut-reactions are paid attention to and trusted. A person’s own decisions are the right ones and we should trust ourselves to make the right choices.
Creativity: Creative thinking and risk taking are features of a person’s life. A person does not play it safe all the time. This involves the ability to adjust and change and seek new experiences.
Fulfilled life: A person is happy and satisfied with life, and always looking for new challenges and experiences.

Humanistic psychology recognizes that human existence consists of multiple layers of reality: the physical, the organic, and the symbolic. It contests the idea — traditionally held by the behavioural sciences — that the only legitimate research method is an experimental test using quantitative data. It argues for the use of additional methods specifically designed to study qualitative factors such as subjective experience, emotion, perception, memory, values, and beliefs. Whereas other approaches take an objective view of people — in essence asking, What is this person like? — humanistic psychologists give priority to understanding people’s subjectivity, asking, What is it like to be this person? (Clay, 2002).

Humanistic psychology has, of course, quietly influenced North American psychology and culture over many decades by informing the civil rights debate and the women’s rights movement, for example. In the academic world, however, humanistic psychology’s rejection of quantitative research in favour of qualitative methods caused its reputation to suffer and its adherents to be marginalized. But in recent years, there’s mounting evidence of renewal in the field itself.

Abraham Maslow’s view of human needs was more complex than Rogers’s. While Rogers believed that people needed unconditional positive regard, Maslow acknowledged that people have a variety of needs that differ in timing and priority (Figure 2.15).

Hierarchy of Needs. Long description available.

Figure 2.15 Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. [Long Description]

Maslow called the bottom four levels of the pyramid deficiency needs because a person does not feel anything if they are met, but becomes anxious if they are not . Thus, physiological needs such as eating, drinking, and sleeping are deficiency needs, as are safety needs, social needs such as friendship and sexual intimacy, and ego needs such as self-esteem and recognition. In contrast, Maslow called the fifth level of the pyramid a growth need [2] because it enables a person to self-actualize or reach his or her fullest potential as a human being . Once a person has met the deficiency needs, he or she can attend to self-actualization; however, only a small minority of people are able to self-actualize because self-actualization requires uncommon qualities such as honesty, independence, awareness, objectivity, creativity, and originality.

Frederick Taylor’s scientific management principles of the early 1900s, born of the industrial revolution and focused on scientific study of productivity in the workplace, fostered the development of motivation theory , which held that all work consisted largely of simple, uninteresting tasks, and that the only viable method to get people to undertake these tasks was to provide incentives and monitor them carefully . In order to get as much productivity out of workers as possible, it was believed that a person must reward the desired behaviour and punish the rejected behaviour — otherwise known as the “carrot-and-stick” approach.

During this time, scientists believed in two main drives powering human behaviour: the biological drive , including hunger, thirst, and intimacy; and the reward-punishment drive . However, scientists began to encounter situations during their experiments where the reward-punishment drive wasn’t producing the expected performance results. In 1949, Harry F. Harlow, professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, began to argue for a third drive: intrinsic motivation — the joy of the task itself .

Harlow’s theory (1950) was based on studies of primate behaviour when solving puzzles. He found that when presented with a puzzle, monkeys seemed to enjoy solving the puzzles without the presence or expectation of rewards. He found these monkeys, driven by intrinsic motivation, solved the puzzles quicker and more accurately than monkeys that received food rewards.

Edward Deci and Richard Ryan (1985) went on to explore and replicate these findings with humans many times over in their studies of families, classrooms, teams, organizations, clinics, and cultures. They concluded that conditions supporting the individual’s experience of autonomy, competence, and relatedness foster the greatest motivation for and engagement in activities while enhancing performance, persistence, and creativity.

Dan Pink (2010) provides ample evidence to support the notion that a traditional carrot-and-stick approach can result in:

Diminished intrinsic motivation (the third drive)
Lower performance
Less creativity
Crowding out of good behaviour
Unethical behaviour
Short-term thinking

Research Focus: When the Lights Went on

The term “Hawthorne Effect” was coined in 1950 by Henry A. Landsberger when analyzing earlier experiments from 1924 to 1932 at the Hawthorne Works (a Western Electric factory outside Chicago). The Hawthorne Works had commissioned a study to see if their workers would become more productive in higher or lower levels of light. (Most industrial/occupational psychology and organizational behaviour textbooks refer to these illumination studies.) In these lighting studies, light intensity was altered to examine its effect on worker productivity. The workers’ productivity seemed to improve when changes were made, and slumped when the study ended. It was suggested that the productivity gain occurred as a result of the motivational effect on the workers of the interest being shown in them. George Elton Mayo (1945) described the Hawthorne Effect in terms of a positive emotional effect due to the perception of a sympathetic or interested observer. Although illumination research of workplace lighting formed the basis of the Hawthorne Effect, other changes such as maintaining clean work stations, clearing floors of obstacles, and even relocating work stations resulted in increased productivity for short periods. Today the term is used to identify any type of short-lived increase in productivity based on attention to human needs.

Humanistic psychology gave birth to the self-help movement, with concepts grounded in emotion and intuition. The recent positive psychology movement is one form of neo-humanistic psychology that combines emotion and intuition with reason and research . Similarly, modern crisis counselling’s emphasis on empathetic listening finds its roots in Rogers’s humanistic psychology work. In the wider culture, the growing popularity of personal and executive coaching also points to humanistic psychology’s success. Humanistic psychology’s principles may become increasingly relevant as the nation ages, creating a culture preoccupied with facing death and finding meaning in life.

In 1998, a paradigm shift in thinking occurred when University of Pennsylvania psychologist Martin Seligman, in his presidential address to the American Psychological Association (APA), urged psychology to “turn toward understanding and building the human strengths to complement our emphasis on healing damage” (1998b). Though not denying humanity’s flaws, the new approach suggested by positive psychologists recommends focusing on people’s strengths and virtues as a point of departure. Rather than analyze the psychopathology underlying alcoholism, for example, positive psychologists might study the resilience of those who have managed a successful recovery through Alcoholics Anonymous. Instead of viewing religion as a delusion and a crutch, as did Freud, they might identify the mechanisms through which a spiritual practice like meditation enhances mental and physical health. Their lab experiments might seek to define not the conditions that induce depraved behaviour, but those that foster generosity, courage, creativity, and laughter.

Seligman developed the concepts of learned optimism (1998a) and authentic happiness (2002). Learned optimism follows an ABCDE model:

A=Adversity
C=Consequence
D=Disputation
E=Energization

In this model, when faced with adversity (A) such as a criticism or failure, a person might form the belief (B) that he or she is underperforming or incapable, and consider the consequence (C) of quitting. However, disputation (D) would challenge the underlying assumptions or beliefs that have formed. The person would then form a new belief in his or her capacity to grow from the critique or learn from the failure. From there, the person would become energized (E) as he or she pursues a new performance path.

In collaboration with Seligman, and within the positive psychology framework, Dr. Mihalyi Csikszentmihályi from Claremont University developed the theory of flow (1988; 1990). Flow is a state of optimal performance . A flow state can be entered while performing any activity, although it is most likely to occur when a person is wholeheartedly performing a task or activity for intrinsic purposes. Csikszentmihályi identified the following six factors as encompassing an experience of flow:

Intense and focused concentration on the present moment
Merging of action and awareness
Loss of reflective self-consciousness
Sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity
Distortion of temporal experience (i.e., a person’s subjective experience of time being altered)
Experience of the activity being intrinsically rewarding (also referred to as an autotelic experience )

Flow theory suggests that three conditions have to be met to achieve a flow state. First, a person must be involved in an activity with a clear set of goals and progress. This adds direction and structure to the task. Second, the task at hand must have clear and immediate feedback. This helps the person negotiate any changing demands and allows him or her to adjust performance to maintain the flow state. And last, a person must have a good balance between the perceived challenges of the task at hand and his or her own perceived skills. The person must have confidence in his or her ability to complete the task at hand (Figure 2.16).

Mental state depending on a person’s skill and the task’s difficulty. Long description available

Figure 2.16 Factors of Flow State. [Long Description]

Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive psychology is the study of mental processes such as attention, memory, perception, language use, problem solving, creativity, and thinking . Much of the work derived from cognitive psychology has been integrated into various other modern disciplines of psychological study including social psychology, personality psychology, abnormal psychology, developmental psychology, educational psychology, and economics.

Ulric Neisser (1928-2012) is credited with formally coining the term cognitive psychology and defining it as “all processes by which the sensory input is transformed, reduced, elaborated, stored, recovered, and used” (1967, page 4). Cognition came to be seen as involved in everything a human being might possibly do: every psychological phenomenon is a cognitive phenomenon. Theories of cognition include developmental, cultural, neural, computational, and moral perspectives.

While behaviourism and cognitive schools of psychological thought may not agree theoretically, they have complemented each other in practical therapeutic applications, such as in cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) that has demonstrable utility in treating certain pathologies, such as simple phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and addiction. CBT replaces maladaptive strategies with more adaptive ones by challenging ways of thinking and reacting. CBT techniques focus on helping individuals challenge their patterns and beliefs and replace erroneous thinking, such as overgeneralizing, magnifying negatives, or catastrophizing, with more realistic and effective thoughts, thus decreasing self-defeating emotions and behaviour and breaking what can otherwise become a negative cycle. These errors in thinking are known as “cognitive distortions.” CBT helps individuals take a more open, mindful, and aware posture toward their distorted thoughts and feelings so as to diminish their impact (Hayes, Villatte, Levin, & Hildebrandt, 2011).

The psychological definition of attention is a state of focused awareness on a subset of the available perceptual information . The key function of attention is to filter out irrelevant data, enabling the desired data to be distributed to the other mental processes. The human brain may, at times, simultaneously receive inputs in the form of auditory, visual, olfactory, taste, and tactile information. Without the ability to filter out some or most of that simultaneous information and focus on one or typically two inputs at most, the brain would become overloaded as a person attempted to process all the information.

Modern conceptions of memory typically break it down into three main subclasses:

Procedural memory: memory for the performance of particular types of action , is often activated on a subconscious level, or at most requires a minimal amount of conscious effort (e.g., driving to work along the same route).
Semantic memory: the encyclopedic knowledge that a person possesses, such as what the Eiffel Tower looks like, or the name of a friend from Grade 6.
Episodic memory: memory of autobiographical events that can be explicitly stated , contains all memories that are temporal in nature, such as when you last brushed your teeth, or where you were when you heard about a major news event.

Perception involves both the physical senses (sight, smell, hearing, taste, touch, and proprioception) as well as the cognitive processes involved in selecting and interpreting those senses. It is how people come to understand the world around them through interpretation of stimuli.

Language use

Cognitive psychologists began exploring the cognitive processes involved with language in the 1870s when Carl Wernicke (1848-1905) proposed a model for the mental processing of language (1875/1995). Significant work has been done recently on understanding the timing of language acquisition and how it can be used to determine if a child has, or is at risk of developing, a learning disability.

Problem solving

Metacognition involves conscious thought about thought processes and might include monitoring a person’s performance on a given task, understanding a person’s capabilities on particular mental tasks, or observing a person’s ability to apply cognitive strategies. Much of the current study regarding metacognition within the field of cognitive psychology deals with its application within the area of education. Educators strive to increase students’ metacognitive abilities in order to enhance their learning, study habits, goal setting, and self-regulation.

Research Focus: Divided Attention

Relating to the field of cognitive psychology is the concept of divided attention , which refers to a person’s ability to focus on two or more things at one time. A number of early studies dealt with the ability of a person wearing headphones to discern meaningful conversation when presented with different messages in each ear. Key findings demonstrated the mind’s ability to focus on one message, while still being somewhat aware of information taken in by the ear that was not consciously attended to. Participants who were wearing earphones were told that they would be hearing separate messages in each ear and that they were expected to attend only to information related to basketball. When the experiment started, the message about basketball was presented to the left ear, and non-relevant information was presented to the right ear. At some point the message related to basketball was switched to the right ear, and the non-relevant information to the left ear. When this happened, the listener was usually able to repeat the entire message at the end, having attended to the left or right ear only when it was appropriate (Glucksberg & Cowan, 1970).

Evolutionary Psychology

Evolutionary psychology has emerged as a major perspective in psychology. It seeks to develop and understand ways of expanding the emotional connection between individuals and the natural world, thereby assisting individuals with developing sustainable lifestyles and remedying alienation from nature. The main premise of evolutionary psychology is that while today the human mind is shaped by the modern social world, it is adapted to the natural environment in which it evolved. According to the hypothesis of biologist E.O. Wilson, human beings have an innate instinct to connect emotionally with nature. What distinguishes evolutionary psychologists from many cognitive psychologists is the proposal that the relevant internal mechanisms are adaptations — products of natural selection — that helped our ancestors get around the world, survive, and reproduce. Evolutionary psychology is founded on several core premises:

The brain is an information-processing device, and it produces behaviour in response to external and internal inputs.
The brain’s adaptive mechanisms were shaped by natural selection.
Different neural mechanisms are specialized for solving problems in humanity’s evolutionary past.
The brain has evolved specialized neural mechanisms that were designed for solving problems that recurred over deep evolutionary time, giving modern humans stone-age minds.
Most contents and processes of the brain are unconscious; and most mental problems that seem easy to solve are actually extremely difficult problems that are solved unconsciously by complicated neural mechanisms.
Human psychology consists of many specialized mechanisms, each sensitive to different classes of information or inputs. These mechanisms combine to produce manifest behaviour.

Evolutionary psychologists sometimes present their approach as potentially unifying, or providing a foundation for, all other work that aims to explain human behaviour (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). This claim has been met with skepticism by many social scientists who see a role for multiple types of explanation of human behaviour, some of which are not reducible to biological explanations of any sort.

Key Takeaways

Humanistic psychology emerged as the “third force” in psychology after psychodynamic and behaviourist psychologies.
The key principles of humanistic psychology include human capacity for self-actualization, self-direction, and choice.
Carl Rogers identified five principles of a fully functioning person as open, present, trusting, creative, and fulfilled.
Humanistic psychology relies on subjective factors and utilizes qualitative methods of study.
Abraham Maslow introduced a hierarchy of human needs including physiological, safety, belonging, esteem, and self-actualization.
With the advance of humanistic psychology, human motivation theory shifted from a purely external or extrinsic focus to the acknowledgment of an intrinsic focus.
Positive psychology recommends focusing on people’s strengths and virtues as a point of departure rather than analyzing the underlying psychopathology.
Flow is a state of optimal performance that can be entered when a person is wholeheartedly performing a task or activity for intrinsic purposes.
Cognitive psychology is the study of mental processes such as attention, memory, perception, language use, problem solving, creativity, and thinking.
The main premise of evolutionary psychology is that while today the human mind is shaped by the modern social world, it is adapted to the natural environment in which it evolved.

Exercises and Critical Thinking

What model do you believe the current educational system follows? Are students trained according to the behavioural model or do educators also address the subjective beliefs, thoughts, and feelings of the student?
What are some of the psychological traits you possess that might contribute to your survival or “fitness”? Can you provide an example of when this trait contributed to your success?
Can you see applications for the principles of evolutionary psychology in the workplace or community (e.g., certain psychological qualities will ensure that you perform more effectively in a job interview)?
Conduct a cultural analysis of your family, cohort, or social group. What are some of the values and beliefs communicated in your family or group? In what shape or form are these values manifested or expressed? Through what ways of doing, artifacts, activities, and/or traditions are these values communicated or expressed?

Image Attributions

Figure 2.15: Diagram of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs . by J. Finkelstein ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Maslow ’s_hierarchy_of_needs.png) used under CC BY SA 3.0 license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en ).

Figure 2.16: Challenge vs skill Commons by Dr. enh ( http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...ll_Commons.jpg ) is in the public domain.

Clay, Rebecca A. (2002). A renaissance for humanistic psychology. American Psychological Association Monitor , 33 (8), 42.

Csikszentmihályi, M. (1988). The flow experience and its significance for human psychology, in Csikszentmihályi, M., (Ed.) Optimal experience: psychological studies of flow in consciousness , Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, page. 15–35.

Csikszentmihályi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience . New York: Harper & Row.

Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (1985). Intrinsic motivation and self-determination in human behavior . New York: Plenum.

Glucksberg, S., & Cowen, C. N., Jr. (1970). Memory for nonattended auditory material. Cognitive Psychology , I , 149-156.

Harlow, H.F. (1950). Early social deprivation and later behavior in the monkey. page. 154-173. In A.Abrams, H.H. Gurner & J.E.P. Tomal, (Eds.), Unfinished tasks in the behavioral sciences (1964). Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins.

Hayes, Steven C., Villatte, Matthieu, Levin, Michael, & Hildebrandt, Mikaela. (2011). Open, aware, and active: Contextual approaches as an emerging trend in the behavioral and cognitive therapies. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology , 7, 141–168.

Mayo, Elton (1945). Social problems of an industrial civilization . Boston: Division of Research, Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University, page 64.

Neisser, U. (1967). Cognitive psychology . Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Pink, Daniel H. (2010). Drive – The surprising truth about what motivates us . Edinburgh, UK: Canongate Books.

Rogers, C. R. (1946). Significant aspects of client-centered therapy. American Psychologist , 1, 415-422.

Seligman, M. E. P. (1998a). Building human strength: Psychology’s forgotten mission. APA Monitor , 29 (1).

Seligman, M.E.P. (1998b). Learned optimism: How to change your mind and your life . Second edition. New York: Pocket Books (Simon and Schuster).

Seligman, M. E. P. (2002). Authentic happiness: Using the new positive psychology to realize your potential for lasting fulfillment. New York: Free Press.

Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1992). The psychological foundations of culture. In H. Barkow, L. Cosmides & J. Tooby (Eds.), The adapted mind , New York: Oxford University Press, page 19–136.

Wernicke, K. (1875/1995). The aphasia symptom-complex: A psychological study on an anatomical basis. In Paul Eling (Ed.) Reader in the history of aphasia . Amsterdam: John Benjamins Pub Co. page 69–89.

Long Descriptions

Figure 2.15 long description: In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, there are five levels.

Physiological needs: Breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, excretion.
Safety needs: Security of body, of employment, of resources, of morality, of the family, of health, of property.
Long and belonging needs: Friendship, family, sexual intimacy.
Esteem needs: Self-esteem, confidence, chievement, respect of others, respect by others.
Self-Actualization: Morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts.
Adapted by J. Walinga.
A growth need allows one to reach full potential as a human being.

Contributors and Attributions

Introduction to Psychology by Jorden A. Cummings & Lee Sanders is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.
Refer to Source Chapter Attributions for more details

Evolutionary Psychology

The evolutionary psychology of murphy's law, why thinking that “everything that can go wrong will go wrong” is adaptive..

Updated April 24, 2024 | Reviewed by Davia Sills

Murphy's Law, or the idea that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, is a common social-perceptual bias.
In everyday life, assuming worst-case scenarios has both benefits and costs.
From an evolutionary perspective, assuming the worst may well actually be quite adaptive.

So picture this: Dinner is done and I offer to clean up. About half the chicken and split pea soup (which was really good, by the way!) is left. In the spirit of getting the tough stuff out of the way, I figure I'll start by putting that in a Tupperware. I choose a round Tupperware that I think is plenty large enough for the amount of leftover soup.

As Murphy's Law (which is pretty much the maxim that anything that can go wrong will go wrong) would have it, there was about an eighth of a cup of soup more than was appropriate for the size of the Tupperware. In other words, my Tupperware was not quite big enough. As (bad) luck would have it, that extra eighth of a cup of soup landed pretty much all over the kitchen counter and floor. Let's just say the cleanup ended up being a larger job than was initially expected. "Figures," I thought to myself. "Murphy's Law..."

The idea of assuming the worst as a general psychological strategy in life—in other words, adopting the idea of Murphy's Law—is actually, when we think about things from an evolutionary perspective, quite sensible. In other words, this particular social-perceptual bias may well have had the capacity to increase the probabilities of both survival and reproduction for our ancestors.

Examples of Murphy's Law in Everyday Life

Largely attributed to U.S. aerospace scientist Edward Murphy (whose work was conducted predominantly in the 1940s), Murphy's Law is a somewhat satirical and pessimistic sentiment at its core: Whatever can go wrong will go wrong (see Matthews, 1997). It is interesting that this concept was borne of the field of aerospace engineering, as this is a field where small errors may lead to major catastrophes. If you're an aerospace engineer, in other words, you better make sure that you know you're making the right decisions. Mistakes are not particularly welcomed in this field.

Since the 1940s, this concept has been expanded well beyond the aerospace industry. Murphy's Law, essentially, applies to pretty much everything. Here are some examples of Murphy's Law in everyday life:

If your buttered toast falls off your plate, it will certainly fall butter-side down.
If you think that you accidentally texted a questionable message to the incorrect person, you almost certainly did exactly that.
If you are late to a job interview and rushing along the sidewalk, there are likely multiple banana peels ahead of you on the path.
If you forget your laptop computer on a cross-country flight, you are pretty much guaranteed to run out of battery and lose all your data just before you land.

And so forth.

In terms of our lived experiences, it certainly often feels that things are just stacked against us. In a sense, we can think of this general issue as the negativity bias (see Rozin & Royzman, 2001) which permeates so much of our psychology. It certainly, quite often, feels that everything that could go wrong, even in terms of the most benign outcomes, does go wrong. Murphy's Law is often the stuff of memes . And we often find these memes funny because they are so relatable to so many of us.

An Evolutionary Perspective on Murphy's Law

In a powerful paper on social-cognitive biases, evolutionary psychologists Martie Haselton and Daniel Nettle (2006) discuss humans as paranoid optimists . This conception of common social psychological biases focuses partly on the idea that humans (even everyday "normal" humans) are often overly paranoid.

As we are 200 miles on our road trip across the country, we might find ourselves afraid that we have left the stove on. After we have sent an email to our full organizational community, we re-read it three times to make sure that we have said nothing that could possibly be construed as offensive. After we post a video on social media , we watch it—and re-watch it—multiple times, working to make absolutely certain that we have said nothing that makes no sense, makes us look bad, or might be taken the wrong way, etc.

According to Haselton and Nettle (2006), such a tendency toward pessimism could have all kinds of evolutionary benefits. Being pessimistic is, in their conception, akin to an overly sensitive smoke detector: That particular smoke detector is wrong most of the time. But darn—the benefits that follow from the smoke detector being right even once can truly be life-saving.

Such a pessimistic bias, as unpleasant as it may be, may well save our lives—increasing Darwin's bottom line: the capacity to survive and reproduce.

Bottom Line

Sure, a pessimistic bias may be quite unpleasant. It may cause us to drive 200 miles straight back home to check the stove. It may cause us to re-read a to-be-sent email 20 times. It may well lead us to check our face in the mirror a dozen times during a night out on the town ( Is there spinach in my teeth?) .

Such everyday paranoia can be seen as boiling down to a lay understanding of Murphy's Law. Often, in our everyday lives, we feel and act as if the worst-case scenario is nearly guaranteed. We act as if anything that can go wrong certainly will go wrong.

While this bias hardly matches the observable, empirical world in all cases (i.e., it's not really always the case that worst-case scenarios happen all the time), holding such a view may well help us put out the rare fires that actually do flare up on occasion in everyday life. And being overly vigilant about such outcomes may well have helped our ancestors to live another day.

Long live Murphy's Law!

(Now let's hope that this piece has no typos, as I have proofread it about 30 times...)

Haselton MG, Nettle D. The paranoid optimist: an integrative evolutionary model of cognitive biases. Pers Soc Psychol Rev. 2006;10(1):47-66. doi: 10.1207/s15327957pspr1001_3. PMID: 16430328.

Matthews, Robert A.J. (April 1997). "The Science of Murphy's Law" . Scientific American . 276 (4): 88–91. Bibcode : 1997SciAm.276d..88M . doi : 10.1038/scientificamerican0497-88 .

Rozin, P., & Royzman, E. B. (2001). Negativity Bias, Negativity Dominance, and Contagion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 5(4), 296–320. https://doi.org/10.1207/S15327957PSPR0504_2

Glenn Geher, Ph.D. , is professor of psychology at the State University of New York at New Paltz. He is founding director of the campus’ Evolutionary Studies (EvoS) program.

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Notes to Evolutionary Psychology

1. Buller refers to “evolutionary psychology” as a “paradigm”. Here we adopt Laudan’s ‘research tradition’ terminology as research traditions have a more fluid structure than paradigms and Laudan allows for sharing of theoretical resources between research traditions.

2. Ethology has since moved away from this line of thinking (Ereshefsky 2007).

3. There is a similarity between the case made for massive modularity and the case made for the language of thought hypothesis. Both cases are made on the basis of argumentation. Austin Booth has argued that the case for the latter looks something like a transcendental argument (Booth 2004).

4. Evolutionary psychologists also propose other accounts of innateness.

5. Buller also presents a version of this argument (2005, 157–158).

6. This is a small subset of the huge critical literature on evolutionary psychology.

7. Richard Lewontin (1998) argues for a much stronger skeptical position, in which he effectively claims that evolutionary psychology is impossible. Subrena Smith (2020) has recently argued for an equally strong skeptical stance to Lewontin’s, also arguing that evolutionary psychology is impossible.

8. Here we follow Buller’s (2005) account of the approach. The term “reverse engineering” was first used in an evolutionary context by Daniel Dennett. (He explains and elaborates upon the concept in his 1995.) Steven Pinker (1997) also champions the approach as do many in evolutionary psychology.

9. Peter Godfrey-Smith (1996) examines this idea in some detail and a version of it is taken up and pursued in Sterelny (2003).

10. Cosmides’s hypothesis was first generated and tested in the context of the psychology of reasoning and not in the context of moral psychology. She proposed the cheat detection module to explain the fact that our performance on reasoning tasks improves dramatically when they are re-cast in terms of social exchange.

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COMMENTS

Evolutionary thinking: a new perspective on how our brains control
We watch a ball as it falls into our glove. We hear a strange sound in another part of the house and listen intently. In neuroscience, the act of narrowing our senses in response to an environmental event is called "attention," and it is understood that when we attend to a stimulus, we lose the ability to focus on other surrounding inputs.
Evolutionary Psychology
She also adds a novel critical appraisal of evolutionary psychology. She argues that, as currently practiced, evolutionary psychology is not a fruitful guide to social policy regarding human flourishing. ... Rellihan, M., 2012, "Adaptationism and Adaptive Thinking in Evolutionary Psychology", Philosophical Psychology, 25: 245-277 ...
How Evolutionary Psychology Explains Human Behavior
Evolutionary psychology contradicts domain-general rationality, which states that behaviors are the result of in-the-moment critical thinking. Contrary to many modern theories, ...
Evolutionary Psychology in the Modern World: Applications, Perspectives
Evolutionary psychology is the scientific study of the human mind as a product of evolution through natural selection (Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby, 1992; Barrett, Dunbar, and Lycett, 2002; Buss, 2005).Although still a relatively young academic discipline, in less than 20 years it has penetrated virtually every existing branch of psychology, including social, organizational, cognitive ...
New thinking: the evolution of human cognition
They represent new thinking about new thinking; leading edge, evidence-based theory about the new forms of cognition that emerged in the course of human evolution. The new theory and evidence come from a range of disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, economics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, philosophy and psychology.
New thinking: the evolution of human cognition
In contrast to Evolutionary Psychology , new thinking about the evolution of human cognition assigns an important role to cultural evolution. Godfrey-Smith distinguishes three types of cultural evolution: Darwinian imitation (micro level), cumulative cultural adaptation (meso) and cultural phylogenetic change (macro). In the first, change ...
Evolutionary Psychology in the Modern World: Applications, Perspectives
Evolutionary psychology is the scientific study of the human mind as a product of evolution through natural selection ( Barkow, Cosmides, and Tooby, 1992; Barrett, Dunbar, and Lycett, 2002; Buss, 2005 ). Although still a relatively young academic discipline, in less than 20 years it has penetrated virtually every existing branch of psychology ...
Introduction New thinking: the evolution of human cognition
They represent new thinking about new thinking; leading edge, evi-dence-based theory about the new forms of cognition that emerged in the course of human evolution. The new theory and evidence come from a range of disciplines, including anthropology, archaeology, econ-omics, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, philosophy and psychology. The new ...
Evolutionary Psychology
With a wealth of student-friendly pedagogy including critical-thinking questions and case study boxes supporting the application of evolutionary psychology to real-world situations, this is an invaluable resource for undergraduates studying psychology, biology and anthropology. The textbook is also supported by a range of instructor resources ...
Evolutionary Psychology
Evolutionary Psychology features a wealth of student-friendly pedagogy including critical-thinking questions and case study boxes designed to show how to apply evolutionary psychology to real-life situations. It is an invaluable resource for undergraduates studying psychology, biology and anthropology.
Notes to Evolutionary Psychology
Ethology has since moved away from this line of thinking (Ereshefsky 2007). ... This is a small subset of the huge critical literature on evolutionary psychology. 7. Richard Lewontin (1998) argues for a much stronger skeptical position, in which he effectively claims that evolutionary psychology is impossible. 8.
Evolutionary psychology: Controversies, questions, prospects, and
Evolutionary psychology has emerged over the past 15 years as a major theoretical perspective, generating an increasing volume of empirical studies and assuming a larger presence within psychological science. At the same time, it has generated critiques and remains controversial among some psychologists. Some of the controversy stems from hypotheses that go against traditional psychological ...
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The field of evolutionary cognitive psychology has stimulated considerable interest and debate among cognitive psychologists and those working in related areas. In this collection, leading experts evaluate the status of this new field, providing a critical analysis of its most controversial hypotheses. These hypotheses have far reaching ...
Using Evolutionary Theory to Promote Critical Thinking in Psychology
The evolutionary theme can help us to integrate the various realms of psychology and can provide a foundation for thinking critically about theories and ideas within each realm. More specifically, it can provide a foundation for (a) thinking about the functions of all of our psychological capacities and tendencies; (b) thinking critically about the use of cross-species comparisons in ...
Evolution and the Psychology of Thinking
The field of evolutionary cognitive psychology has stimulated considerable interest and debate among cognitive psychologists and those working in related areas. In this collection, leading experts evaluate the status of this new field, providing a critical analysis of its most controversial hypotheses. These hypotheses have far reaching ...
Making Sense of the Relationship Between Adaptive Thinking and
In recent years, quite a few evolutionary psychologists have come to embrace a heuristic interpretation of the discipline. They claim that, no matter how methodologically incomplete, adaptive thinking works fine as a good heuristic that effectively reduces the hypothesis space by generating novel and promising hypotheses that can eventually be empirically tested. The purpose of this article is ...
Evolutionary psychology
Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that examines cognition and behavior from a modern ... theories on reciprocity and parental investment helped to establish evolutionary thinking in psychology and the other social sciences. In 1975, Edward O. Wilson combined evolutionary theory with ... also with critical periods ...
2.5: Humanist, Cognitive, and Evolutionary Psychology
Cognitive psychology is the study of mental processes such as attention, memory, perception, language use, problem solving, creativity, and thinking. The main premise of evolutionary psychology is that while today the human mind is shaped by the modern social world, it is adapted to the natural environment in which it evolved.
PDF PSY 410/510: Evolutionary Psychology CRN 24345
Evolutionary psychology is not a subfield but an approach that can inform and give perspective to all areas of psychology. We will cover evolutionary ... • develop critical thinking skills relating to evolutionary analysis in psychology • understand evolutionary basics and their applications to the array of adaptive
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For philosophers of science —mostly philosophers of biology—evolutionary psychology provides a critical target. There is a broad consensus among philosophers of science that evolutionary psychology is a deeply flawed enterprise. ... This line of thinking also captures evolutionary psychologists' view of human nature: human nature is our ...
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Evolutionary psychology seeks to identify and understand human psychological traits that have evolved in much the same way as biological traits, through adaptation to environmental cues. Furthermore, it tends toward viewing the vast majority of psychological traits, certainly the most important ones, as the result of past adaptions, which has generated significant controversy and criticism ...
The Evolutionary Psychology of Murphy's Law
An Evolutionary Perspective on Murphy's Law. In a powerful paper on social-cognitive biases, evolutionary psychologists Martie Haselton and Daniel Nettle (2006) discuss humans as paranoid ...
Notes to Evolutionary Psychology
Ethology has since moved away from this line of thinking (Ereshefsky 2007). ... This is a small subset of the huge critical literature on evolutionary psychology. 7. Richard Lewontin (1998) argues for a much stronger skeptical position, in which he effectively claims that evolutionary psychology is impossible. Subrena Smith (2020) has recently ...

Evolutionary thinking: a new perspective on how our brains control behavior takes evolution into account

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Making Sense of the Relationship Between Adaptive Thinking and Heuristics in Evolutionary Psychology

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Introduction

Adaptive Thinking in Evolutionary Psychology

The Charge of Circular Reasoning in Identifying Adaptive Problems and Machery’s Idea of the "Bootstrap Strategy"

Goldfinch’s Proposal of Heuristically Streamlined Evolutionary Psychology

Rellihan’s Analysis of Adaptationism in Evolutionary Psychology

The Relationship Between Adaptive Thinking and Heuristics

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2.5: Humanist, Cognitive, and Evolutionary Psychology

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