Behavioral scientists routinely publish broad claims about human psychology and behavior in the world's top journals based on samples drawn entirely from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) societies. Researchers – often implicitly – assume that either there is little variation across human populations, or that these “standard subjects” are as representative of the species as any other population. Are these assumptions justified? Here, our review of the comparative database from across the behavioral sciences suggests both that there is (...) substantial variability in experimental results across populations and that WEIRD subjects are particularly unusual compared with the rest of the species – frequent outliers. The domains reviewed include visual perception, fairness, cooperation, spatial reasoning, categorization and inferential induction, moral reasoning, reasoning styles, self-concepts and related motivations, and the heritability of IQ. The findings suggest that members of WEIRD societies, including young children, are among the least representative populations one could find for generalizing about humans. Many of these findings involve domains that are associated with fundamental aspects of psychology, motivation, and behavior – hence, there are no obviousa priorigrounds for claiming that a particular behavioral phenomenon is universal based on sampling from a single subpopulation. Overall, these empirical patterns suggests that we need to be less cavalier in addressing questions ofhumannature on the basis of data drawn from this particularly thin, and rather unusual, slice of humanity. We close by proposing ways to structurally re-organize the behavioral sciences to best tackle these challenges. (shrink)

In this 1958 book, Professor Hanson turns to an equally important but comparatively neglected subject, the philosophical aspects of research and discovery.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Foreword xi Steven Pinker Acknowledgments xvii Contributors xix Introduction: The Emergence of Evolutionary Psychology xxiii David M. Buss PART I FOUNDATIONS OF EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY David M. Buss 1 Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology 5 John Tooby and Leda Cosmides 2 Life History Theory and Evolutionary Psychology 68 Hillard S. Kaplan and Steven W. Gangestad 3 Domain Specificity and Intuitive Ontology 96 Pascal Boyer and H. Clark Barrett 4 Methods of Evolutionary Sciences 119 Jeffry A. Simpson and Lorne (...) Campbell 5 Controversial Issues in Evolutionary Psychology 145 Edward H. Hagen PART II SURVIVAL David M. Buss 6 Locating Places 177 Irwin Silverman and Jean Choi 7 Adaptations to Predators and Prey 200 H. Clark Barrett 8 Adaptations to Dangers from Humans 224 Joshua D. Duntley PART III MATING David M. Buss Adaptationism and Human Mating Psychology 255 Donald Symons 9 Fundamentals of Human Mating Strategies 258 David P. Schmitt 10 Physical Attractiveness in Adaptationist Perspective 292 Lawrence S. Sugiyama 11 Adaptations to Ovulation 344 Steven W. Gangestad, Randy Thornhill, and Christine E. Garver-Apgar 12 Female Infidelity and Sperm Competition 372 Todd K. Shackelford, Nicholas Pound, Aaron T. Goetz, and Craig W. LaMunyon 13 Sexual Coercion 394 Neil M. Malamuth, Mark Huppin, and Bryant Paul 14 Commitment, Love, and Mate Retention 419 Lorne Campbell and Bruce J. Ellis PART IV PARENTING AND KINSHIP Martin Daly and Margo Wilson 15 Cooperation and Conflict among Kin 447 Jeffrey A. Kurland and Steven J. C. Gaulin 16 Evolution of Paternal Investment 483 David C. Geary 17 Parental Investment and Parent-Offspring Conflict 506 Catherine Salmon 18 Altruism and Genetic Relatedness 528 Eugene Burnstein 19 Hormones and the Human Family 552 Mark V. Flinn, Carol V. Ward, and Robert J. Noone PART V GROUP LIVING David M. Buss 20 Neurocognitive Adaptations Designed for Social Exchange 584 Leda Cosmides and John Tooby 21 Aggression 628 Anne Campbell 22 Managing Ingroup and Outgroup Relationships 653 Robert Kurzban and Steven Neuberg 23 Dominance, Status, and Social Hierarchies 676 Denise Cummins 24 The Evolution of Language 698 Peter F. MacNeilage and Barbara L. Davis 25 The Evolution of Cognitive Bias 724 Martie G. Haselton, Daniel Nettle, and Paul W. Andrews 26 The Evolution of Morality 747 Dennis Krebs PART VI EVOLUTIONIZING TRADITIONAL DISCIPLINES OF PSYCHOLOGY David M. Buss 27 Evolutionary Cognitive Psychology 776 Peter M. Todd, Ralph Hertwig, and Ulrich Hoffrage 28 Evolutionary Social Psychology 803 Douglas T. Kenrick, Jon K. Maner, and Norman P. Li 29 Evolutionary Developmental Psychology 828 David F. Bjorklund and Carlos Hernández Blasi 30 Evolutionary Personality Psychology 851 Aurelio José Figueredo, Jon A. Sefcek, Geneva Vasquez, Barbara H. Brumbach, James E. King, and W. Jake Jacobs 31 Biological Function and Dysfunction 878 Jerome C. Wakefield 32 Evolutionary Psychology and Mental Health 903 Randolph M. Nesse PART VII APPLICATIONS OF EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY TO OTHER DISCIPLINES David M. Buss 33 Literature and Evolutionary Psychology 931 Joseph Carroll 34 Evolutionary Psychology and the Law 953 Owen D. Jones Afterword 975 Richard Dawkins Author Index 981 Subject Index 1009. (shrink)

1. Sexual Brains and Body Politics 2. Hormones and Hardwiring 3. Making Sense of Brain Organization Studies 4. Thirteen Ways of Looking at Brain Organization 5. Working Backward from “Distinct‘ Groups 6. Masculine and Feminine Sexuality 7. Sexual Orienteering 8. Sex-Typed Interests 9. Taking Context Seriously 10. Trading Essence for Potential.

In the international bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, the renowned psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive (...) biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions. -/- Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Winner of the National Academy of Sciences Best Book Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and selected by The New York Times Book Review as one of the ten best books of 2011, Thinking, Fast and Slow is destined to be a classic. (shrink)

Thomas S. Kuhn's classic book is now available with a new index.

Experiments with young infants provide evidence for early-developing capacities to represent physical objects and to reason about object motion. Early physical reasoning accords with 2 constraints at the center of mature physical conceptions: continuity and solidity. It fails to accord with 2 constraints that may be peripheral to mature conceptions: gravity and inertia. These experiments suggest that cognition develops concurrently with perception and action and that development leads to the enrichment of conceptions around an unchanging core. The experiments challenge claims (...) that cognition develops on a foundation of perceptual or motor experience, that initial conceptions are inappropriate to the world, and that initial conceptions are abandoned or radically.. (shrink)

Tested the 2-process theory of detection, search, and attention presented by the current authors in a series of experiments. The studies demonstrate the qualitative difference between 2 modes of information processing: automatic detection and controlled search; trace the course of the learning of automatic detection, of categories, and of automatic-attention responses; and show the dependence of automatic detection on attending responses and demonstrate how such responses interrupt controlled processing and interfere with the focusing of attention. The learning of categories is (...) shown to improve controlled search performance. A general framework for human information processing is proposed. The framework emphasizes the roles of automatic and controlled processing. The theory is compared to and contrasted with extant models of search and attention. (shrink)

I assess Churchland's views on folk psychology and conceptual thinking, with particular emphasis on the connection between these topics.

Jerry Fodor has consistently cited the persistence of illusions--especially the M.

Is our case strong enough to go to trial? Will interest rates go up? Can I trust this person? Such questions - and the judgments required to answer them - are woven into the fabric of everyday experience. This book, first published in 2002, examines how people make such judgments. The study of human judgment was transformed in the 1970s, when Kahneman and Tversky introduced their 'heuristics and biases' approach and challenged the dominance of strictly rational models. Their work highlighted (...) the reflexive mental operations used to make complex problems manageable and illuminated how the same processes can lead to both accurate and dangerously flawed judgments. The heuristics and biases framework generated a torrent of influential research in psychology - research that reverberated widely and affected scholarship in economics, law, medicine, management, and political science. This book compiles the most influential research in the heuristics and biases tradition since the initial collection of 1982. (shrink)

Churchland's paper "Perceptual Plasticity and Theoretical Neutrality" offers empirical, semantical and epistemological arguments intended to show that the cognitive impenetrability of perception "does not establish a theory-neutral foundation for knowledge" and that the psychological account of perceptual encapsulation that I set forth in The Modularity of Mind "[is] almost certainly false". The present paper considers these arguments in detail and dismisses them.

A study in the philosophy of science, proposing a strong form of the doctrine of scientific realism' and developing its implications for issues in the philosophy of mind.

The present essay is addressed simultaneously to two distinct audiences.

A Neurocomputationial Perspective illustrates the fertility of the concepts and data drawn from the study of the brain and of artificial networks that model the...

Modularity has been the subject of intense debate in the cognitive sciences for more than 2 decades. In some cases, misunderstandings have impeded conceptual progress. Here the authors identify arguments about modularity that either have been abandoned or were never held by proponents of modular views of the mind. The authors review arguments that purport to undermine modularity, with particular attention on cognitive architecture, development, genetics, and evolution. The authors propose that modularity, cleanly defined, provides a useful framework for directing (...) research and resolving debates about individual cognitive systems and the nature of human evolved cognition. Modularity is a fundamental property of living things at every level of organization; it might prove indispensable for understanding the structure of the mind as well. (shrink)

A variety of scientific disciplines have set as their task explaining mental activities, recognizing that in some way these activities depend upon our brain. But, until recently, the opportunities to conduct experiments directly on our brains were limited. As a result, research efforts were split between disciplines such as cognitive psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence that investigated behavior, while disciplines such as neuroanatomy, neurophysiology, and genetics experimented on the brains of non-human animals. In recent decades these disciplines integrated, and with (...) the advent of techniques for imaging activity in human brains, the term cognitive neuroscience has been applied to the integrated investigations of mind and brain. This book is a philosophical examination of how these disciplines continue in the mission of explaining our mental capacities. (shrink)

Introduction 3 Chapter One: Natural Cognition 11 Chapter Two: Maturational Naturalness 31 Chapter Three: Unnatural Science 83 Chapter Four: Natural Religion 145 Chapter Five: Surprising Consequences 223.

In Mindblindness, Simon Baron-Cohen presents a model of the evolution and development of "mindreading." He argues that we mindread all the time, effortlessly, automatically, and mostly unconsciously. It is the natural way in which we interpret, predict, and participate in social behavior and communication. We ascribe mental states to people: states such as thoughts, desires, knowledge, and intentions. Building on many years of research, Baron-Cohen concludes that children with autism, suffer from "mindblindness" as a result of a selective impairment in (...) mindreading. For these children, the world is essentially devoid of mental things. Baron-Cohen develops a theory that draws on data from comparative psychology, from developmental, and from neuropsychology. He argues that specific neurocognitive mechanisms have evolved that allow us to mindread, to make sense of actions, to interpret gazes as meaningful, and to decode "the language of the eyes." A Bradford Book. (shrink)

Thomas Gilovich offers a wise and readable guide to the fallacy of the obvious in everyday life. When can we trust what we believe—that "teams and players have winning streaks," that "flattery works," or that "the more people who agree, the more likely they are to be right"—and when are such beliefs suspect? Thomas Gilovich offers a guide to the fallacy of the obvious in everyday life. Illustrating his points with examples, and supporting them with the latest research findings, he (...) documents the cognitive, social, and motivational processes that distort our thoughts, beliefs, judgments and decisions. In a rapidly changing world, the biases and stereotypes that help us process an overload of complex information inevitably distort what we would like to believe is reality. Awareness of our propensity to make these systematic errors, Gilovich argues, is the first step to more effective analysis and action. (shrink)

In _ Plato's Camera_, eminent philosopher Paul Churchland offers a novel account of how the brain constructs a representation -- or "takes a picture" -- of the universe's timeless categorical and dynamical structure. This construction process, which begins at birth, yields the enduring background conceptual framework with which we will interpret our sensory experience for the rest of our lives. But, as even Plato knew, to make singular perceptual judgments requires that we possess an antecedent framework of abstract categories to (...) which any perceived particular can be relevantly assimilated. How that background framework is assembled in the first place is the motivating mystery, and the primary target, of Churchland's book. Unexpectedly, this neurobiologically grounded account of human cognition also provides a systematic story of how such low-level epistemological activities are integrated within an enveloping framework of linguistic structures and regulatory mechanisms at the social level. As Churchland illustrates, this integration of cognitive mechanisms at several levels has launched the human race on an epistemological adventure denied to all other terrestrial creatures. (shrink)

Ideas about heredity and evolution are undergoing a revolutionary change. New findings in molecular biology challenge the gene-centered version of Darwinian theory according to which adaptation occurs only through natural selection of chance DNA variations. In Evolution in Four Dimensions, Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb argue that there is more to heredity than genes. They trace four "dimensions" in evolution -- four inheritance systems that play a role in evolution: genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, and symbolic. These systems, they argue, can all (...) provide variations on which natural selection can act. Evolution in Four Dimensions offers a richer, more complex view of evolution than the gene-based, one-dimensional view held by many today. The new synthesis advanced by Jablonka and Lamb makes clear that induced and acquired changes also play a role in evolution.After discussing each of the four inheritance systems in detail, Jablonka and Lamb "put Humpty Dumpty together again" by showing how all of these systems interact. They consider how each may have originated and guided evolutionary history and they discuss the social and philosophical implications of the four-dimensional view of evolution. Each chapter ends with a dialogue in which the authors engage the contrarieties of the fictional "I.M.," or Ifcha Mistabra -- Aramaic for "the opposite conjecture" -- refining their arguments against I.M.'s vigorous counterarguments. The lucid and accessible text is accompanied by artist-physician Anna Zeligowski's lively drawings, which humorously and effectively illustrate the authors' points. (shrink)

In this path-breaking work, Paul Thagard draws on history and philosophy of science, cognitive psychology, and the field of artificial intelligence to develop a ...

Aristotle's observation that all human beings by nature desire to know aptly captures the spirit of "intellectualist" research in psychology and anthropology. Intellectualists in these fields agree that humans' have fundamental explanatory interests (which reflect their rationality) and that the idioms in which their explanations are couched can differ considerably across places and times (both historical and developmental). Intellectualists in developmental psychology (e.g., Gopnik and Meltzoff, 1997) maintain that young children's conceptual structures, like those of scientists, are theories and that (...) their conceptual development--like the development of science--is a process of theory formation and change. They speculate that our explanatory preoccupations result, at least in part, from a natural drive to develop theories. Intellectualists in the anthropology of religion (e.g., Horton, 1970 and 1993) hold that, although it may do many other things as well, religion is primarily concerned with providing explanatory theories. They maintain that religion and science have the same explanatory goals; only the idioms of their explanations differ. The connections between the concern for explanation, the pursuit of science, the persistence of religion, and the cognitive processes underlying each clearly merit further examination. By considering both their cultural manifestations and their cognitive foundations, I hope to clarify not only how science and religion are related but some of the ways their explanatory projects differ. I shall argue that, despite their centuries' old antagonisms, no development in science will ever seriously threaten the persistence of religion or the forms of explanation religion employs or the emergence of new religions. (I strongly suspect that science will never seriously threaten the persistence of particular religions either, but I only aim to defend the weaker, collective claim here.) In this paper's fourth section I shall show that religion and its characteristic forms of explanation 1 are a natural outgrowth of the character and content of human association and cognition.. (shrink)

In this new volume in the Oxford Psychology Series, the author presents a highly readable account of the cognitive unconscious, focusing in particular on the problem of implicit learning. Implicit learning is defined as the acquisition of knowledge that takes place independently of the conscious attempts to learn and largely in the absence of explicit knowledge about what was acquired. One of the core assumptions of this argument is that implicit learning is a fundamental, "root" process, one that lies at (...) the very heart of the adaptive behavioral repertoire of every complex organism. The author's goals are to outline the essential features of implicit learning that have emerged from the many studies that have been carried out in a variety of experimental laboratories over the past several decades; to present the various alternative perspectives on this issue that have been proposed by other researchers and to try to accommodate these views with his own; to structure the literature so that it can be seen in the context of standard heuristics of evolutionary biology; to present the material within a functionalist approach and to try to show why the experimental data should be seen as entailing particular epistemological perspectives; and to present implicit processing as encompassing a general and ubiquitous set of operations that have wide currency and several possible applications. Chapter 1 begins with the core problem under consideration in this book, a characterization of "implicit learning" as it has come to be used in the literature. Reber puts this seemingly specialized topic into a general framework and suggests a theoretical model based on standard heuristics of evolutionary biology. In his account, Reber weaves a capsule history of interest in and work on the cognitive unconscious. Chapter 2 turns to a detailed overview of the experimental work on the acquisition of implicit knowledge, which currently is of great interest. Chapter 3 develops the evolutionary model within which one can see learning and cognition as richly intertwining issues and not as two distinct fields with one dominating the other. Finally, Chapter 4 explores a variety of entailments and speculations concerning implicit cognitive processes and their general role in the larger scope of human performance. (shrink)