Research topics at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology
Reprints are provided for scholarly purposes only. Permission to reprint any article must be sought from the holder of the copyright.
Scientists at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology specialize in finding new ways that an evolutionary perspective can inform research on the design of the human mind. In so doing, we have been researching many new topics, as well as trying out new approaches to old topics. Below we provide a partial list with links to some relevant research papers.
For an introduction to the field of evolutionary psychology, see The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture (J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby, eds. 1992 Oxford University Press). The first two chapters--"The psychological foundations of culture"--(Tooby & Cosmides) and "On the use and misuse of Darwinism in the study of human behavior" (Symons) -- provide an introduction to theoretical issues underpinning the field.
Principles of evolutionary psychology
Social exchange (reciprocation, reciprocal altruism, cooperation, generosity)
Coalitional psychology (us versus them; collective action; perceptions of race; multi-individual cooperation)
Evolutionary Biology: Intragenomic Conflict, Pathogens & the Evolution of Sexual Recombination; Banker's Paradox (etc)
Emotion (emotions as super-ordinate programs solving the problem of mechanism coordination in a multimodular mind)
Judgment under uncertainty (intuitive statistics; optimal foraging; ecological rationality; heuristics & biases)
Attention (domain-specificity; specializations for monitoring animals)
Kin detection (as regulator of incest avoidance; altruism)
Memory (memory systems; specializations; personality trait database; self-knowledge)
Friendship and Deep Engagement Relationships
Darwinian medicine, Darwinian psychiatry
Economics, Business, and Organizational Behavior
Courtship, Mate Choice, and Human Sexuality
Hazard Management (precautionary reasoning)
Culture
Intelligence (improvisational intelligence; dedicated intelligence; decoupled reasoning (counterfactual reasoning, suppositional reasoning, metarepresentation)
Theoretical foundations of psychology and the behavioral sciences
Environments of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA; Why the past explains the present)
Evolutionary psychology and Philosophy