Psychological Adaptation - Evolutionary Psychology As Adaptation

Evolutionary Psychology As Adaptation

Evolutionary psychologists are scarce because they try and determine not the interaction between environment behavior but why a behavior is created in a specific environment. In a Darwinian outlook, evolutionary psychology is seen as a succession of psychological adaptations occurring at individual times. Not every trait of humans or animals are adaptations, but the ones that are tend to reflect the trend of the current population. Evolutionary psychologists tend to study adaptations to give meaning to specific behaviors found in humans today.

Evolutionary psychologist, David Buss, lays out six properties of evolved psychological mechanisms (EPM's):

  1. An EPM exists in the form that it does because it solved a specific problem of survival or reproduction recurrently over evolutionary history.
  2. An EPM is designed to take in only a narrow slice of information
  3. The input of an EPM tells an organism the particular adaptive problem it is facing
  4. The input of an EPM is transformed through decision rules into output
  5. The output of an EPM can be physiological activity, information to other psychological mechanisms, or manifest behaviors
  6. The output of an EPM is directed toward the solution to a specific adaptive problem

Read more about this topic:  Psychological Adaptation

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