David Buss: Evolutionary Psychology

• Natural Selection


  A more general form of artificial selection in which nature rather than people select the traits; involves "evolved strategies" for a species' survival
• Traits


  Traits that predispose organisms to survive in an environment are passed from parents to their offspring
• Sexual Selection


  Operates when members of the opposite sex find certain traits more appealing and attractive than others and thereby produce offspring with those traits
• Finding "The One:" A process model of human mate selection

  1. Field of eligible partners

  2. Propinquity filter: Physical proximity

  3. Attraction filter: Attractiveness, individual characteristic (personality)

  4. Homogamy filter: Age, Education, Socioeconomic Status, Race/Ethnicity, Religion

  5. Compatibility filter: Attitudes, values, needs, roles

  6. Trial filter: Cohabitation, engagement

  7. Decision filter: Marriage
• Adaptations


  Evolved strategies that solve important survival and/or reproductive problems
• By-products

  Traits that happen as a result of adaptations but are not part of the functional design
• Noise

  Also known as "random effects"; occurs when evolution produces random changes in design that do not affect function
• Born on April 14, 1953 in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Arnold H. Buss, Sr. and Edith Nolte
• Grew up in an academic family but during his teenage years, he drifted toward mediocre grades in school and got involved in drugs in high school, even being arrested twice on drug charges
• Dropped out of high school and worked at a truck stop but experienced life-threatening incidents in three months that made him realized "there must be better ways to make a living"
• One drunken driver threatened to "take a tomahawk to your long hair"
• A young man beat Buss with a club for no apparent reason other than to start a fight
• Decided to enroll in night classes to finish his high school degree
• Was admitted to college at the University of Texas in 1971, despite his poor grades, via a random lottery pick of those not in the top 10% of their graduating class
• Courses in geology and astronomy exposed him to the importance of evolution
• By his junior year, he wrote his first paper on evolution and behavior titled "Dominance/Access to Women", proposing that men are highly motivated to achieve dominance and high status because those traits are attractive to women
• At the same time that David was an undergraduate in psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, his father was in the same department as a professor and published the first introductory psychology textbook with evolution as the unifying theme, Psychology —Man in Perspective
• In contrast to his middle school and high school performance, as an undergraduate in college, David Buss excelled and developed a passion for psychology and human behavior and went on to a PhD program in personality psychology at the University of California at Berkeley from 1976 to 1981
• At Berkeley, he worked with Jack and Jeanne Block, Richard Lazarus, and Harrison Gough, and yet his most fruitful collaboration was with Ken Craik, where they developed a behaviorally-based assessment to personality called the "act-frequency" approach
• Had his first professorship position at Harvard University, where he collaborated with two graduate students—Leda Cosmides and John Tooby—who, along with Buss, would go on to establish the field of "evolutionary psychology"
• Authored several books, such as Evolutionary Psychology (1999) and garnered many awards over the course of his career, including Early Career Contribution to Personality Psychology by APA in 1988
• In the later 19th century, Charles Darwin wrote his influential book titled The Origin of Species (1859), where he emphasized the origins and development of social behavior from an evolutionary perspective
• Herbert Spencer coined the term "survival of the fittest" in 1864 which was later commonly termed "social Darwinism," and argued that evolution meant progress, improvement, and eventually perfection of the social organism
• Evolutionary Psychology


  Coined in 1973 by biologist Michael Ghiselin, popularized by the anthropologist John Tooby and psychologist Leda Cosmides in the early 1990s, defined as the scientific study of human thought and behavior from an evolutionary perspective
• Key questions in Evolutionary Psychology

  • Why is the human mind designed the way it is, and how did it take its current form?
  • How is the human mind designed?
  • What function do the parts of the mind have, and what is it designed to do?
  • How do the evolved mind and current environment interact to shape human behavior?
• Evolutionary Theory of Personality


  Assumes that the true origin of personality is evolution, and that personality is caused by an interaction between an ever-changing environment and a changing body and brain
• In the 1990s, Tooby and Cosmides pointed out a serious problem between personality and evolution, as natural selection typically works to lessen individual differences
• Fundamental Attribution Error


  Tendency to ignore situational (environmental) forces when explaining human behavior and instead focus on internal dispositions
• Fundamental Situational Error


  Tendency to assume that the environment alone can produce behavior
• The nature versus nurture dichotomy is false because neither can function without the other, and evolution is an interaction between biology and environment
• Adaptive Problems and Their Solutions

  Survival and reproduction are the two fundamental problems of adaptation, solved using physical and/or psychological mechanisms
• Physical Mechanisms


  Physiological organs and systems that evolved to solve problems of survival
• Psychological Mechanisms


  Internal and specific cognitive, motivational, and personality systems that solve specific survival and reproduction problems
• Psychological Mechanisms Relevant to Personality


  • Goals/drives/motives
  • Emotions
  • Personality traits
• Goals/Drives/Motives


  Power and intimacy are the chief goals and motives governing an individual's behavior
• Emotions


  Adaptations that directly alert the individual to situations that are either harmful or beneficial to his or her well-being
• Personality Traits


  Signal to other people an individual's ability to solve survival and reproductive problems, closely resembling the Big Five trait approach
• Big Five Personality Traits

  • Surgency/Dominance
  • Agreeableness/Hostility
  • Conscientiousness
  • Emotional Stability/Neuroticism
  • Openness/Intellect
• Personality traits have adaptive significance and are not identical in structure to the Big Five
• Sources of Individual Differences

  • Environmental: Early experiential calibration, attachment style, alternative niche specialization
  • Heritable/Genetic: Traits under genetic influence such as body type, facial morphology, and degree of physical attractiveness
  • Nonadaptive: Neutral genetic variations that are neither harmful nor beneficial
  • Maladaptive: Traits that actively harm one's chance for survival or decrease one's sexual attractiveness