Evolutionary psychology is known for dark parts of our nature, like homicide. But it also explains prosocial behaviors, like love. Welcome to the arc of evolutionary psychology.
Can we successfully outsource love? A new evolutionary psychology paper argues that virtual "girlfriend experiences" are booming because they offer users the emotional and sexual rewards of dating without the evolutionary costs of mutual mate selection and conflict.
Courtney L. Crosby and David M. Buss[1]
Introduction
One of the first emotions explored by Charles Darwin, disgust, presumably evolved to solve adaptive problems related to our health. Examples of these problems include avoiding ingesting toxic or pathogenic substances, such as rotting meat or moldy mushrooms. However, a key scientific question is whether disgust evolved to solve adaptive challen…
Shortly after the publication of his new book, The Social Leap , I spoke to William von Hippel at the Seminary Co-op Bookstore at the University of Chicago. The Social Leap is a fascinating exploration of the evolutionary origins of our modern psychology. The book is divided into three parts: what evolution has to say about how we became who we are, how the past helps us to understand the present…
Evolutionary approaches to human behavior often try to “carve nature at its joints.” This phrase, somehow evocative of Pinocchio, means that when we try to describe or classify psychological phenomena, we shouldn’t use just any old arbitrary organization scheme. Rather, we should base our thinking on underlying natural, evolutionarily informed, realities.
This principle is especially salient to e…
