Understanding Human Thought and Behavior: Evolutionary Cognitive Psychology - Prof. Jennif, Study notes of Cognitive Psychology

Download Understanding Human Thought and Behavior: Evolutionary Cognitive Psychology - Prof. Jennif and more Study notes Cognitive Psychology in PDF only on Docsity! week13.1: evolutionary cognitive psychology (brief overview) week13.1: evolutionary cognitive psychology (brief overview) 11.01.2007 / PSY332 week13.1: evolutionary cognitive psychology (brief overview) briefly all psychological mechanisms entail info-processing devices tailored to solve adaptive problems most adaptive problems humans confronted are/were intrinsically social cognitive psych. must deal with ways we process information about people week13.1: evolutionary cognitive psychology (brief overview) cog. psych → experiments select stimuli based on: ease of presentation ease of manipulability often intentionally use artificial stimuli to eliminate content effects week13.1: evolutionary cognitive psychology (brief overview) problems with general cog. psych approach experiments employ ecologically invalid stimuli categorization studies with triangles, circles, squares rather than “natural” categories such as kin, mates, enemies, or edible objects e.g., memory nonsense syllable studies content-free stimuli make sense if the mind is a general-purpose processor what if cognitive mechanisms are specialized to process info. re: particular tasks week13.1: evolutionary cognitive psychology (brief overview) problems with general processing mechanisms 1 what constitutes a successful adaptive solution differs from domain to domain food selection qualities differ from mate selection qualities 2 number of possible behaviors generated by unconstrained gen. mechanisms approaches infinity problem of combinatorial explosion e.g., organism has no way of determining successful adaptive solutions from the blizzard of unsuccessful ones week13.1: evolutionary cognitive psychology (brief overview) human error many cognitive functions involve problem solving/judgment under uncertain conditions humans are prone to error in these conditions (e.g., Nisbett & Ross, 1980; Tversky & Kahneman, 1974) 1 base-rate fallacy 2 conjunction fallacy week13.1: evolutionary cognitive psychology (brief overview) base-rate fallacy example room of people full of people: 70% lawyers 30% engineers what is George? George: dislikes novels likes to do carpentry on weekends wears a pocket protector in his shirt pocket to carry his pens has dull, mechanical writing has a great need for order and neatness week13.1: evolutionary cognitive psychology (brief overview) base-rate fallacy base-rate: overall proportion of something in a sample/population the fallacy → people ignore actual mathematical proportions (lawyers in the example do not appropriate combine base-rate & individuating information result, most people guess George is an engineer week13.1: evolutionary cognitive psychology (brief overview) evolutionary psych paradox humans routinely solve complex natural tasks object recognition grammar induction speech perception science has tools of logic and statistics, but humans outperform AI paradox: if humans are riddled with cognitive mechanisms that routinely cause errors & biases, how do we outperform AI? week13.1: evolutionary cognitive psychology (brief overview) ecological rationality/structure Greek to non-Greek example → too parochial ecological structure over evolutionary time, human environment had certain statistical regularities (e.g., ecological structure) rain often followed thunder violence sometimes followed angry shouts sex sometimes followed prolonged eye contact dangerous bites often followed getting to close to snakes ecological rationality → evolved mechanisms that utilize ecological structure for adaptive problem solving week13.1: evolutionary cognitive psychology (brief overview) statistical regularities, reiterated shape/form of cognitive mechanisms coordinate with the recurring statistical regularities of the ancestral environments in which humans evolved we fear snakes, not electrical outlets recurrent statistical regularity between snakes and bad consequences electrical outlets are too recent to have recurrently produced bad outcomes week13.1: evolutionary cognitive psychology (brief overview) back to biases & errors... from an evolutionary perspective must ask which adaptive problems human cognitive mechanisms evolved to solve what would compose “sound reasoning/judgment” e.g., trouble locating your car at night in a parking lot illuminated with sodium vapor lamps we conclude your visual system is fine, why? your eyes were designed to perceive color of objects under natural light (Shepard, 1992) week13.1: evolutionary cognitive psychology (brief overview) back to biases & errors 2... extend the sodium lamp example to cognitive testing experiments require Ss to make probability judgments based on a single event (Gigerenzer, 1991; 1998) reliable numerical statements re: probability of 1 event were rare in Pleistocene little-to-no number terms in modern band level societies (Tooby & Cosmides (?)) e.g., a woman cannot have 35% chance of pregnancy, so probabilities do not make sense when applied to a single case week13.1: evolutionary cognitive psychology (brief overview) not probability, frequencies I went to the valley 8 times, how many times did I find berries? last 3 times I put my arm around my potential mate, how many times was I rebuffed? experiments that require ss to calculate probabilities from single events are artificial week13.1: evolutionary cognitive psychology (brief overview) points to drive home, evo. psych suggests consider the format of the info. humans were designed to solve conduct experiments that more closely mimic the formats of info humans were designed to solve week13.1: evolutionary cognitive psychology (brief overview) evo. psych basics rather than a single intelligence, humans possess multiple intelligences rather than general reasoning ability, humans have many specialized abilities to reason human mind is filled with complex & problem-specific cognitive mechanisms each designed to solve a different adaptive problem instead of general abilities to learn, imitate, remember, etc. week13.1: evolutionary cognitive psychology (brief overview) marriage of evolutionary psych and social psych? most important adaptive problems human ancestors faced were social study of human cognition cannot be divorced from human social interaction “Mechanisms describable at the cognitive level underlie & organize all of human thought & behavior–not just knowledge acquisition–& so cognitive psychology needs to broaden its scope to include them” (Cosmides & Tooby,1994, p. 105) week13.1: evolutionary cognitive psychology (brief overview) capitalizing on evo. theories re: social phenomenon inclusive fitness theory (Hamilton, 1964) altruistic acts should be heavily directed toward other organisms, that: 1 likely have copies of the helper’s genes 2 have the ability to convert such help into increased survival or reproduction has profound consequences for the social psychology of family, altruism, helping, coalitions, & even aggression week13.1: evolutionary cognitive psychology (brief overview) capitalizing on evo. theories re: social phenomenon 2 sexual selection (Darwin, 1871) evolution can occur through mating advantage accrued through: besting intra-sexual competitors being preferentially chosen as a mate by members of the opposite sex social phenomenon of import: same-sex competition, homicide/violence, risk taking, mate choice, between-sex conflict, sex differences in status striving, sex differences in the risk of dying week13.1: evolutionary cognitive psychology (brief overview) capitalizing on evo. theories re: social phenomenon 3 parental investment theory (Trivers, 1972) sex that invests more in offspring is predicted to be more choosy in mate selection sex investing less in offspring predicted to be less choosy in mate selection & more competitive with its own sexual access to high-investing sex week13.1: evolutionary cognitive psychology (brief overview) heuristic value of evolutionary social psychology mating is an obvious domain linking the two sects also of import: status, prestige & reputation humans are a group-living species with well-articulated social hierarchies these occur universally across cultures & subcultures prestige, status & reputation determine alot of evo. important events such as survival & access to mates week13.1: evolutionary cognitive psychology (brief overview) in short “Evolutionary psychology, in short, provides a powerful meta-theory (Buss, 1995) for why humans are so profoundly fascinated by the plays of Shakespeare & stories on soap operas & in tabloid newspapers: mating, divorce, pregnancy, revelations about paternity, deceit, manipulation, power, sibling rivalries, paternal manipulations, & extramarital affairs” (Buss, 1999, p. 387).