What do you think?
Rate this book
The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology
The foundations of practice and the most recent discoveries in theintriguing newfield of evolutionary psychology Why is the mind designed the way it is? How does input from the environment interact with the mind to produce behavior? By taking aim at such questions, the science of evolutionary psychology has emerged as a vibrant new discipline producing groundbreaking insights. In The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology , leading contributors discuss the foundations of the field as well as recent discoveries currently shaping this burgeoning area of psychology. Guided by an editorial board made up of such luminaries as Leda Cosmides, John Tooby, Don Symons, Steve Pinker, Martin Daly, Margo Wilson, and Helena Cronin, the text's chapters delve into a comprehensive range of topics, covering the full range of the Foundations of evolutionary psychology Survival Mating Parenting and kinship Group living Interfaces with traditional disciplines of evolutionary psychology And interfaces across disciplines. In addition to an in-depth survey of the theory and practice of evolutionary psychology, the text also features an enlightening discussion of this discipline in the context of the law, medicine, and culture. An Afterword by Richard Dawkins provides some final thoughts from the renowned writer and exponent of evolutionary theory. Designed to set the standard for handbooks in the field, The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology is an indispensable reference tool for every evolutionary psychologist and student.
1028 pages, ebook
First published June 1, 2005
18 people are currently reading
1078 people want to read
About the author
David M. Buss
36 books714 followersDavid M. Buss is a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, known for his evolutionary psychology research on human sex differences in mate selection.
Buss earned his PhD in psychology at University of California, Berkeley in 1981. Before becoming a professor at the University of Texas, he was assistant professor for four years at Harvard University, and he was a professor at the University of Michigan for eleven years.
The primary topics of his research include mating strategies, conflict between the sexes, social status, social reputation, prestige, the emotion of jealousy, homicide, anti-homicide defenses, and—most recently—stalking. All of these are approached from an evolutionary perspective. Buss is the author of more than 200 scientific articles and has won many awards, including an APA Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology in 1988 and an APA G. Stanley Hall Lectureship in 1990.
Buss is the author of a number of publications and books, including The Evolution of Desire, The Dangerous Passion, and The Murderer Next Door, which introduces a new theory of homicide from an evolutionary perspective. He is also the author of Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, whose fourth edition was released in 2011. In 2005, Buss edited a reference volume, The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. His latest book is Why Women Have Sex, which he coauthored with Cindy Meston.
Buss is involved with extensive cross-cultural research collaborations and lectures within the U.S.
Education:
Ph.D.University of California,Berkeley:1981
B.A.University of Texas, Austin: 1976
Academic Employment History:
1996-Present Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin.
1991-1996 Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan.
1985-1991 Associate Professor: Department of Psychology, University of Michigan.
1981-1985 Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University (promoted to Associate Professor, Harvard, 1985)
Buss earned his PhD in psychology at University of California, Berkeley in 1981. Before becoming a professor at the University of Texas, he was assistant professor for four years at Harvard University, and he was a professor at the University of Michigan for eleven years.
The primary topics of his research include mating strategies, conflict between the sexes, social status, social reputation, prestige, the emotion of jealousy, homicide, anti-homicide defenses, and—most recently—stalking. All of these are approached from an evolutionary perspective. Buss is the author of more than 200 scientific articles and has won many awards, including an APA Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology in 1988 and an APA G. Stanley Hall Lectureship in 1990.
Buss is the author of a number of publications and books, including The Evolution of Desire, The Dangerous Passion, and The Murderer Next Door, which introduces a new theory of homicide from an evolutionary perspective. He is also the author of Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, whose fourth edition was released in 2011. In 2005, Buss edited a reference volume, The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. His latest book is Why Women Have Sex, which he coauthored with Cindy Meston.
Buss is involved with extensive cross-cultural research collaborations and lectures within the U.S.
Education:
Ph.D.University of California,Berkeley:1981
B.A.University of Texas, Austin: 1976
Academic Employment History:
1996-Present Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Texas, Austin.
1991-1996 Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Michigan.
1985-1991 Associate Professor: Department of Psychology, University of Michigan.
1981-1985 Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Harvard University (promoted to Associate Professor, Harvard, 1985)
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
July 16, 2023
I found the key ideas that unify the field of evolutionary psychology very interesting to think about. I anticipate that these ideas will influence how I see and respond to the phenomena I've been studying. I didn't read the entire handbook (they aren't designed for that), but the first chapter, "Conceptual foundations of evolutionary psychology" is imminently helpful, and I expect I might return to this handbook for topical chapters when it becomes relevant. So let me summarize these key ideas, which can be found in that first chapter (which is a nice, substantial 60 pages.)
The thrust of evolutionary psychological thinking is to counter an underlying assumption that drives how we think about the mind. That is the assumption that when it comes to problem solving and intelligence, there is just one general reasoning capacity built into the mind, which is very formal and applicable across any domain. For example, we tend to assume that human reasoning looks for maximizing efficiency and self-interest, and this will carry forward into any activity or experience of any subject matter to which we apply our reasoning. In contrast, evolutionary psychology, as a field, proposes as a starting point for theorizing that the mind has built into it collections of domain-specific "programs," which have evolved due to their adaptive value. So we don't reason in the same way across subject matters or domains. For example, there are different reasoning or problem-solving programs evolved for our dealings with others that we've identified as friends v. foes. There is a specific program evolved for dealing with sexual rivals, which isn't activated in our dealings with people with whom we stand in any other sort of relationship. There are specific programs evolved for how we relate to foods or goods that score high in variance (i.e., it is not reliable or predictable at all to obtain them), vs. those that score very low in variance. And so on.
Thinking of the mind as composed of heterogenous programs, as opposed to one general intelligence, is more explanatorily powerful. It's clear that in many contexts, behavior is inexplicable if we believe that humans are driven to maximize self-interest. We can be intrinsically motivated and desirous of self-sacrificial actions, under particular contexts, and we can be extremely selfish in others.
Evolutionary psychologists think that any field that studies the mind would be benefitted by proceeding in this way methodologically. First, we can specify an adaptive information processing problem (e.g., how to select a mate.) Second, we can analyze that problem into particular tasks, and ask what properties a computer program would have to possess to solve these tasks. Third, we can generate hypotheses about how the program needs to be structured, and then test these. (While this is stated in this introductory chapter, it looks like many papers in this anthology do not follow this methodology; they are rather situated at different levels of analysis, where the sort of "programs" proposed are not computational in character, but are rather functional in a way that's implicitly intentional. More on this below...)
The editors' moreover propose a fascinating account of emotions in this introductory chapter, where emotion is given a primary role above all information-processing programs. A conceptual problem arises from the starting premise that the mind has biologically innate programs that are heterogenous and domain-specific. There are situations in which different programs are activated, which produce outputs that stand in conflict with one another (e.g., you find an attractive potential mate but are already partnered.) Emotion is assigned the role of orchestrating or coordinating competing programs. Different emotion programs (understood as superordinate, above the subordinate information-processing programs) have developed, to address certain types of situations that regularly recurred to our ancestors (e.g., the situation in which a potential threat is detected; that in which a beloved dies; that in which a sexual partner is infidelious; so we have fear, grief, and jealousy). When we have an emotion, like fear, this systematically changes mental processing and activity across different levels of the organism (e.g., autonomic and hormonal responses; muscular and motor responses; attentional and perceptual deployment; cognition and thought; language use and communication). In fear, for example, you more clearly hear sounds from a distance, form hypotheses about sensory data's potentially being threats; and the priority ranking of your interests change, so that safety becomes the highest; and so on.
The editors didn't explicitly address how these details, of their characterization of emotion, are supposed to amount to the functional role of emotion's coordinating conflicting information-processing programs. Intuitively, I can imagine that this would just shut off certain programs that'd otherwise be activated under similar conditions, or this modifies the manner in which programs are activated.
The editors emphasize that emotion has a "recalibrational" role. There are various values distinctive of key domains in life, and in having an emotion, these values are readjusted. For example, one has a basic sense of how valuable one's mate is, how stable access to food is, one's social status, self-esteem, and so on. Emotion makes these values more personally salient and leads to their being challenged over the duration of the emotion episode. For example, in having guilt, this allows for the recalibration of priorities one has, when making trade-offs between actions that'll serve the self v. others. In depression, this allows for the recalibration of the value previously placed on a certain kind of pursuit or event, so that if one imagines undertaking that in the future, the affect activated in this imagining will no longer reflect such value.
I liked this approach to thinking about emotion insofar as it justifies the view that emotion ought not be reduced to any one mental category like physiological response, behavioral inclination, cognitive appraisal, or feeling states. This is a view I've been keen on objecting to, and finding an alternative for, of late. It's unnatural for me to have further thoughts about it, because it is framed at an information-processing level of analysis, which I don't transact in so much; I've been thinking about the mind from a personal- or experiential level of analysis. Objections that come to mind include that it seems unnecessary to think emotion specifically coordinates conflicting information-processing programs. Instead, it's more intuitive that we get emotional whenever something comes up that is either particularly relevant to our goals, or that is unexpected or novel in some way. Either case amounts to general urgency or need to address something. There need be no conflicts between sorts of concerns or interests, which would be required by the evolutionary psychological view proposed by the editors, since information-processing programs are individuated on the basis of subject matter or domain, which are heterogenous insofar as we relate to them in a matter of their being distinct interests.
The evolutionary psychological perspective is still useful. It seems right that there are basic types of situation that humans and phylogenetically close mammals have faced for much of history, and that certain types of emotion would correspond to those. I can imagine that ontogenetically, when emotional response types develop for a particular person, they come to experience situations that are diverse materially as manifesting the same overall type of situation for which a type of emotion has developed. For example, it is natural for a snake to be perceived as a threat, provoking fear; and if a person has a bicycle accident, they may come to perceive bicycles generally as threats. I'd like to think about how to reconcile this picture with an intuitive view I've held of emotion, that there are innumerably many different emotions, whose character is defined by the particular situation at which the emotion is held; and our folk psychological emotion words capture very general characteristics of any given emotion. So you won't find instances of anger, as you can find instances of tigers or volumes of water. I guess we can say that there are ontogenetically primitive emotions, but then over learning and experience, quickly these get to be recombined, and transformed via how a person reflects on and makes meaning of their experiences; so evolutionary primitive emotion programs can be said to provide constraints upon the possibilities of what sorts of emotions one comes to have.
My main worry about this field, as it is characterized in this introductory chapter, is that it offers little guidance as to the individuation of different levels of analysis of sorts of evolved programs. Maybe this field can be reconciled with the classical view that there's just one domain-neutral general intelligence that makes up the mind. There can surely be certain features of mental processes that are universally had across subject matters or domains; it just depends upon the sort of mental process under consideration, or at what level of analysis it is characterized. I've had the intuition that there's a 'general intelligence arrangement' in which there’s pre-reflective v. reflective meaning, which roughly corresponds to emotion and language use. Of course the way the two interact , or how we use these capacities, will differ across topical domains. For example, in sexual attraction there’s more insulation from effects of language use, where is other domains, language can make a greater impact. But this is not to deny that there are two capacities, and they have a certain relationship to one another, is universal.
There's another gripe I have with the way the editors present this field. They have much confidence in their ability to identify the types of situation that are ancestrally deep and significant, and their ability to say how humans would respond, in light of such situations. Of course, at a general level, we can identify certain types of situation that are evolutionarily primitive, i.e., any identified at a general enough of a level that we can see the problems faced by many different species as counting as instances of it. But then once identified at that level, it is so general that there could be an immense diversity of ways it could be experienced by humans, or instantiated in the human world; and so there are many different ways that humans could respond, in addressing these variants of the problem they face. (This is just a long-winded way of saying that we're prone to telling 'just-so' stories.) This made for a sociologically interesting experience when I skimmed through chapters in this book, especially those of the "mating" section. Many of those chapters are co-authored by large groups of men, where the claims they make are about women. One's imagination can easily go to how these claims could be biased in various ways, in light of the absence of any woman's perspective on the matters at hand. For example, it's been proposed (by men) that the female orgasm has no adaptive function, but is a byproduct of the fact that the clitoris is "derived" from the penis (and there's no argument as to why the direction of derivation should be understood to hold like this).
The impression I got from this anthology is that evolutionary psychological thinking can be methodologically helpful, even crucial, when it comes to theorizing about general phenomenon (e.g., the relation or differences between memory and imagination; the role of emotion; the nature of aggression and violence), with the caveat that the evolved, adaptive functions ascribed should remain in a sufficiently general description, as activated in types of situation that are also described at a sufficiently general level. But as soon as it attempts to touch particulars (e.g., the female organism; the nature of relationships had between sexual rivals), we should be very careful, if not downright skeptical.
The thrust of evolutionary psychological thinking is to counter an underlying assumption that drives how we think about the mind. That is the assumption that when it comes to problem solving and intelligence, there is just one general reasoning capacity built into the mind, which is very formal and applicable across any domain. For example, we tend to assume that human reasoning looks for maximizing efficiency and self-interest, and this will carry forward into any activity or experience of any subject matter to which we apply our reasoning. In contrast, evolutionary psychology, as a field, proposes as a starting point for theorizing that the mind has built into it collections of domain-specific "programs," which have evolved due to their adaptive value. So we don't reason in the same way across subject matters or domains. For example, there are different reasoning or problem-solving programs evolved for our dealings with others that we've identified as friends v. foes. There is a specific program evolved for dealing with sexual rivals, which isn't activated in our dealings with people with whom we stand in any other sort of relationship. There are specific programs evolved for how we relate to foods or goods that score high in variance (i.e., it is not reliable or predictable at all to obtain them), vs. those that score very low in variance. And so on.
Thinking of the mind as composed of heterogenous programs, as opposed to one general intelligence, is more explanatorily powerful. It's clear that in many contexts, behavior is inexplicable if we believe that humans are driven to maximize self-interest. We can be intrinsically motivated and desirous of self-sacrificial actions, under particular contexts, and we can be extremely selfish in others.
Evolutionary psychologists think that any field that studies the mind would be benefitted by proceeding in this way methodologically. First, we can specify an adaptive information processing problem (e.g., how to select a mate.) Second, we can analyze that problem into particular tasks, and ask what properties a computer program would have to possess to solve these tasks. Third, we can generate hypotheses about how the program needs to be structured, and then test these. (While this is stated in this introductory chapter, it looks like many papers in this anthology do not follow this methodology; they are rather situated at different levels of analysis, where the sort of "programs" proposed are not computational in character, but are rather functional in a way that's implicitly intentional. More on this below...)
The editors' moreover propose a fascinating account of emotions in this introductory chapter, where emotion is given a primary role above all information-processing programs. A conceptual problem arises from the starting premise that the mind has biologically innate programs that are heterogenous and domain-specific. There are situations in which different programs are activated, which produce outputs that stand in conflict with one another (e.g., you find an attractive potential mate but are already partnered.) Emotion is assigned the role of orchestrating or coordinating competing programs. Different emotion programs (understood as superordinate, above the subordinate information-processing programs) have developed, to address certain types of situations that regularly recurred to our ancestors (e.g., the situation in which a potential threat is detected; that in which a beloved dies; that in which a sexual partner is infidelious; so we have fear, grief, and jealousy). When we have an emotion, like fear, this systematically changes mental processing and activity across different levels of the organism (e.g., autonomic and hormonal responses; muscular and motor responses; attentional and perceptual deployment; cognition and thought; language use and communication). In fear, for example, you more clearly hear sounds from a distance, form hypotheses about sensory data's potentially being threats; and the priority ranking of your interests change, so that safety becomes the highest; and so on.
The editors didn't explicitly address how these details, of their characterization of emotion, are supposed to amount to the functional role of emotion's coordinating conflicting information-processing programs. Intuitively, I can imagine that this would just shut off certain programs that'd otherwise be activated under similar conditions, or this modifies the manner in which programs are activated.
The editors emphasize that emotion has a "recalibrational" role. There are various values distinctive of key domains in life, and in having an emotion, these values are readjusted. For example, one has a basic sense of how valuable one's mate is, how stable access to food is, one's social status, self-esteem, and so on. Emotion makes these values more personally salient and leads to their being challenged over the duration of the emotion episode. For example, in having guilt, this allows for the recalibration of priorities one has, when making trade-offs between actions that'll serve the self v. others. In depression, this allows for the recalibration of the value previously placed on a certain kind of pursuit or event, so that if one imagines undertaking that in the future, the affect activated in this imagining will no longer reflect such value.
I liked this approach to thinking about emotion insofar as it justifies the view that emotion ought not be reduced to any one mental category like physiological response, behavioral inclination, cognitive appraisal, or feeling states. This is a view I've been keen on objecting to, and finding an alternative for, of late. It's unnatural for me to have further thoughts about it, because it is framed at an information-processing level of analysis, which I don't transact in so much; I've been thinking about the mind from a personal- or experiential level of analysis. Objections that come to mind include that it seems unnecessary to think emotion specifically coordinates conflicting information-processing programs. Instead, it's more intuitive that we get emotional whenever something comes up that is either particularly relevant to our goals, or that is unexpected or novel in some way. Either case amounts to general urgency or need to address something. There need be no conflicts between sorts of concerns or interests, which would be required by the evolutionary psychological view proposed by the editors, since information-processing programs are individuated on the basis of subject matter or domain, which are heterogenous insofar as we relate to them in a matter of their being distinct interests.
The evolutionary psychological perspective is still useful. It seems right that there are basic types of situation that humans and phylogenetically close mammals have faced for much of history, and that certain types of emotion would correspond to those. I can imagine that ontogenetically, when emotional response types develop for a particular person, they come to experience situations that are diverse materially as manifesting the same overall type of situation for which a type of emotion has developed. For example, it is natural for a snake to be perceived as a threat, provoking fear; and if a person has a bicycle accident, they may come to perceive bicycles generally as threats. I'd like to think about how to reconcile this picture with an intuitive view I've held of emotion, that there are innumerably many different emotions, whose character is defined by the particular situation at which the emotion is held; and our folk psychological emotion words capture very general characteristics of any given emotion. So you won't find instances of anger, as you can find instances of tigers or volumes of water. I guess we can say that there are ontogenetically primitive emotions, but then over learning and experience, quickly these get to be recombined, and transformed via how a person reflects on and makes meaning of their experiences; so evolutionary primitive emotion programs can be said to provide constraints upon the possibilities of what sorts of emotions one comes to have.
My main worry about this field, as it is characterized in this introductory chapter, is that it offers little guidance as to the individuation of different levels of analysis of sorts of evolved programs. Maybe this field can be reconciled with the classical view that there's just one domain-neutral general intelligence that makes up the mind. There can surely be certain features of mental processes that are universally had across subject matters or domains; it just depends upon the sort of mental process under consideration, or at what level of analysis it is characterized. I've had the intuition that there's a 'general intelligence arrangement' in which there’s pre-reflective v. reflective meaning, which roughly corresponds to emotion and language use. Of course the way the two interact , or how we use these capacities, will differ across topical domains. For example, in sexual attraction there’s more insulation from effects of language use, where is other domains, language can make a greater impact. But this is not to deny that there are two capacities, and they have a certain relationship to one another, is universal.
There's another gripe I have with the way the editors present this field. They have much confidence in their ability to identify the types of situation that are ancestrally deep and significant, and their ability to say how humans would respond, in light of such situations. Of course, at a general level, we can identify certain types of situation that are evolutionarily primitive, i.e., any identified at a general enough of a level that we can see the problems faced by many different species as counting as instances of it. But then once identified at that level, it is so general that there could be an immense diversity of ways it could be experienced by humans, or instantiated in the human world; and so there are many different ways that humans could respond, in addressing these variants of the problem they face. (This is just a long-winded way of saying that we're prone to telling 'just-so' stories.) This made for a sociologically interesting experience when I skimmed through chapters in this book, especially those of the "mating" section. Many of those chapters are co-authored by large groups of men, where the claims they make are about women. One's imagination can easily go to how these claims could be biased in various ways, in light of the absence of any woman's perspective on the matters at hand. For example, it's been proposed (by men) that the female orgasm has no adaptive function, but is a byproduct of the fact that the clitoris is "derived" from the penis (and there's no argument as to why the direction of derivation should be understood to hold like this).
The impression I got from this anthology is that evolutionary psychological thinking can be methodologically helpful, even crucial, when it comes to theorizing about general phenomenon (e.g., the relation or differences between memory and imagination; the role of emotion; the nature of aggression and violence), with the caveat that the evolved, adaptive functions ascribed should remain in a sufficiently general description, as activated in types of situation that are also described at a sufficiently general level. But as soon as it attempts to touch particulars (e.g., the female organism; the nature of relationships had between sexual rivals), we should be very careful, if not downright skeptical.
December 3, 2014
Thank god for this book!!! I use this book so much. It is a fun read and a great reference tool. I cant count how many times i have had to grab this book to respond to a reviewer of my own manuscripts or just to grab a reference.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews