Browse 435 quotes about Evolutionary Psychology.
“We humans are complex creatures and we live multifaceted lives; there is rarely a single reason for any aspect of what we feel or for how we behave.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“In good times, when material resources are abundant and women have plentiful social support, maternal negativity has little place in the lives of women. However, in times of scarcity and/or when women are unsupported, negative feelings can emerge to color the emotional palette and behavior of mothers.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“The standard model of schooling in which 20 or more young people of the same age are taught in classrooms for about 5 hours a day on most days of the year for 10 years certainly runs counter some of our evolved behavioral strategies.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“From the perspective of life history theory, a speeded-up metabolism, less trust, less relaxation and more suspicion and risk-taking might be adaptive for abusive homes or violent neighborhoods. In such environments there is little emotional security or expectation that things will work out well.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“It is also important to note that not all pathological presentations are caused by the environment. A child may have underlying difficulties such as intellectual disabilities or other neurodevelopmental disorders. On the other hand, just because a child has survived unscathed does not mean that the environment was benign. We know that some children are naturally less sensitive to environmental influences and as such are more resilient to harsh environments.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“Humans can survive in a wide range of physical environments, from the Arctic to rainforests to the Sahara. They can also survive in a wide range of emotional environments, from loving to neglectful to violent ones.”
Source: Evolutionary Psychiatry: Current Perspectives on Evolution and Mental Health
“People often expect religious believers to act in especially prosocial ways, which they often do, but religiosity is not always a predictor or moral kindness.”
Source: The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution
“So there was a clear economic rationale for an ancestral division of labor, where individuals of each sex contributed more of what was comparatively advantageous to them. Women of course (and sometimes do) hunt, but men are on average more productive hunters; men can (and often do) gather and process foods, but they are not any more productive than women at the task.”
Source: Minds Make Societies: How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create
“Which men are most likely to be controlling? Those who are lower in mate value. These men ramp up heavy mate guarding because they believe they have lucked out in attracting a desirable woman and believe that she will be difficult or impossible to replace.”
Source: When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault
“Men need to understand the sexual over-perception bias that afflicts their mating minds. They should know that, most of the time, the women smiling at them are merely being friendly or polite, not signaling sexual interest.”
Source: When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault
“From the moment of conception, when the one tiny sperm joins the nutrient-rich egg, women are already contributing much more than the man.”
Source: When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault
“Within-species sexual conflict arms races are analogous to arms races between predators and prey.”
Source: When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault
“The modern proliferation of porn consumption, in short, has escalated both conflict between the sexes and the harms of female-female competition. The technology behind porn is modern. The sexual psychology it exploits is evolutionary ancient.”
Source: When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault
“Female choice about when, where, with whom, and under which conditions they consent to sex is the deepest and most fundamental component of women's sexual psychology. It is a fundamental human right. Although men have coevolved strategies to undermine it, that freedom of choice should never be compromised.”
Source: When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault
“Most sexual predators are people we know in settings we normally inhabit -at a party of a friend, at the department of a date, or in the sanctuary of our homes.”
Source: When Men Behave Badly: The Hidden Roots of Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault
“This made me reflect upon the fair skins of our English ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only because they are of our own size, and their defects not to be seen through a magnifying glass, where we find by experiment that the smoothest and whitest skins look rough and coarse, and ill colored.”
Source: Gulliver's Travels
“Our sense of beauty was shaped by evolution to embody awareness of what is difficult as opposed to easy, rare as opposed to common, costly as opposed to cheap, skillful as opposed to talentless, and fit as opposed to unfit.”
Source: The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature
“Our sense of beauty was shaped by evolution to embody an awareness of what is difficult as opposed to easy, rare as opposed to common, costly as opposed to cheap, skillful as opposed to talentless, and fit as opposed to unfit.”
Source: The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature
“Every atom in the world is teeming with lessons, but no atom is free from biases and predispositions.”
Source: Amantes Assemble: 100 Sonnets of Servant Sultans
“Change is always optional. Evolution is not!”
Source: Quantraz
“Anything which does not change along the evolution path eventually perishes.”
Source: Quantraz
“In our current world, checking of cell phones is a commonly observed compulsive displacement act known to reduce anxiety. In situations where food or drink is available, eating and drinking could serve as a displacement act. It makes sense that, over time and with environmental support, these schedule-induced consumptions could become persistent, generalized habits. This process represents what many people report as -I eat when I’m bored-. Perhaps a more accurate descriptor is, -I eat when experiencing a compulsive need to so something during a period of minimal reinforcement-.”
Source: A Guide to the Psychology of Eating
“Another cognitive fallacy, -dose insensitivity-, also was observed among participants studied by Rozin and colleagues. Dose insensitivity refers to our tendency to evaluate a food as equally healthy or harmful, regardless of how much was consumed. That is, something is harmful in large amounts, it if often viewed as similarly harmful in small amounts. Dose insensitivity undermines moderation and encourages adoption of fad diets that rely on strict adherence to or elimination of foods or sometimes entire food groups.”
Source: A Guide to the Psychology of Eating
“The bonus cookies in the grocery basket could be considered -irrational- as they require extra cost and effort to purchase and do not align with goals for a balanced diet, yet eating the cookies will generate a positive reward.”
Source: A Guide to the Psychology of Eating
“Eating behavior is predicted by consideration of immediate consequences, whereas exercising behavior is related to consideration of future consequences. Compensatory health beliefs are the expectation that engaging in healthy behaviors can compensate for unhealthy actions.”
Source: A Guide to the Psychology of Eating
“Our body certainly learns from the signals associated with energy balance to adjust behavior: we respond to interoceptive cues to initiate eating when hungry, and food deprivation clearly increases food-seeking behavior in animals.”
Source: A Guide to the Psychology of Eating
“There is no denying the fact that we humans are a voracious bunch of animals. Its almost as if our insatiable appetite is trying to fill a bottom less belly carved out by the past hungers our ancestors experienced. That’s why the most gluttonous survived. We are also a fickle and forgetful species. There’s one thing, though, we’ve never been able to forgive or forget, and that’s hunger. Even if we tried to forget, it wasn’t long before another famine came along to retell a very old story. Which is why we should all be excused for our rapaciousness -its literally been hardwired into our DNA.”
Source: The Better Half: On the Genetic Superiority of Women
“There is no denying the fact that we humans are a voracious bunch of animals. Its almost as if our insatiable appetite is trying to fill a bottomless belly carved out by the past hungers our ancestors experienced. That’s why the most gluttonous survived. We are also a fickle and forgetful species. There’s one thing, though, we’ve never been able to forgive or forget, and that’s hunger. Even if we tried to forget, it wasn’t long before another famine came along to retell a very old story. Which is why we should all be excused for our rapaciousness -its literally been hardwired into our DNA.”
Source: The Better Half: On the Genetic Superiority of Women
“Since we are born with strong tendencies to be sensitive to others’ emotional expressions, we are less likely to consume foods when we perceive disgust in others as they consume those foods.”
Source: A Guide to the Psychology of Eating
“For millions of years our human, and before them, hominid ancestors lived in small bands of a few hundred persons wherein the women contributed most of the calories by gathering edible plants and men provided much of the protein through hunting. Most of our behavioral predispositions were evolved to adapt us to this type of life, and not to our very different, contemporary world of computers, cars and concrete.”
Source: Sex and War: How Biology Explains Warfare and Terrorism and Offers a Path to a Safer World
“Cooking was a great discovery not merely because it gave us better food, or even because it made us physically human. It did something even more important: it helped make our brains uniquely large, providing a dull human body with a brilliant human mind.”
Source: Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human
“When humans invented socioeconomic status, they invented a way to subordinate like nothing hierarchical primates had ever seen before.”
Source: Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
“Our inherited legacy of adaptatios is literally precious. Even the poorest parents give their children vast riches, in the form of senses, emotions, and mental faculties that have been optimized through millions of years of product development.”
Source: Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior
“Our inherited legacy of adaptations is literally precious. Even the poorest parents give their children vast riches, in the form of senses, emotions, and mental faculties that have been optimized through millions of years of product development.”
Source: Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior
“Not Evolved For Peace (The Sonnet)
Human mind has not evolved to find peace,
It has evolved to be anxious, insecure and panic.
In the jungle once you let your guard down,
To the predator you shall end up as dinner meat.
Which means to be at peace and to make peace,
We gotta go against our most natural tendency.
We gotta nourish the feeble spark of civility within,
To transform the norm from cruelty to humanity.
Biologically, cruelty is our first nature,
And that's where all the trouble begins.
We gotta know we are more animal than human,
To discover ways to tame the animal inklings.
Human mind may not have evolved to be at peace.
But if we are willing to be the civilized anomaly,
slowly but surely we shall foster all necessary peace.”
Source: Mukemmel Musalman: Kafir Biraz, Peygamber Biraz
“Human mind has not evolved to find peace,
It has evolved to be anxious, insecure and panic.
In the jungle once you let your guard down,
To the predator you shall end up as dinner meat.”
Source: Mukemmel Musalman: Kafir Biraz, Peygamber Biraz
“Consumerism has become our most potent ideology because it so contemptuously dismisses our natual human modes of trait display, and it keeps us too busy -working, shopping. and product displaying- to remember what we can signal without all the products.”
Source: Spent: Sex, Evolution, and Consumer Behavior
“Instincts are older, but thoughts are recent, that's why instincts are more powerful than thoughts - that's why it takes great will power to express a thought through action, while instincts come so easily. However, if we continue practicing our thoughts long enough, eventually the instincts that hold power over us will turn powerless. And this my friend, ought to be the next step of our evolution, and that's why it's no longer merely a matter of natural selection, it's what I hereby dub "sapient selection", that is the process of determining the path of our evolution ourselves.”
Source: Ain't Enough to Look Human
“Evolutionarily speaking, love is all about procreation.”
“There is no human society without some musical tradition. Although the traditions are very different, some principles can be found everywhere.”
Source: Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought
“The greatest threat to the world is not any specific faith, for faith is nature's anti-dote to misery. The greatest threat to the world is intolerance, regardless of its religious, non-religious, political or intellectual background.”
Source: Aşkanjali: The Sufi Sermon
“Если Триверс прав, если формирование совести молодого человека включает частично инструкцию о выгодном обмане (и выгодную защиту от обмана), то можно ожидать, что маленькие дети будут легко изучать практику обмана. И это, пожалуй, преуменьшение. Джин Пиагет, в своём исследовании морального развития в 1932 году, написала, что "склонность говорить неправду — естественная тенденция… Непринуждённая и универсальная". Последующие исследования подтвердили это.
[...]
Смысл здесь в том, что эти детские неправды — это не только стадия безвредного проступка, на который мы закрываем глаза, но первый из серии тестов на корыстную непорядочность. Посредством положительного подкрепления (для необнаруженных и плодотворных неправд) и отрицательного подкрепления (для неправд, которые раскрываются товарищами или влекут выговор семьи) мы изучаем, где можно, а где нельзя избежать последствий, и что наша семья рассматривает (или нет), как законный обман.
То, что родители редко читают детям лекции про ложь и добродетель, не означает, что они не обучают их лгать. Дети явно продолжают лгать, если это не будет настоятельно пресекаться. И не только те дети, чьи родители лгут чаще, чем в среднем, имеют шансы стать хроническими лгунами; но также дети, растущие без должного родительского присмотра. Если родители не препятствуют неправде детей, заведомо выгодной для них, и если они говорят такие неправды в их присутствии, то они дают им продвинутый курс лжи.”
Source: Моральное животное
“Natural selection shaped us to care enormously about waht other people think about our resources, abilities, and character. This is what self-esteem is all about. We constantly monitor how much others value us. Low self-esteem is a signal to try harder to please others.”
Source: Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
“Natural selection shaped us to care enormously about what other people think about our resources, abilities, and character. This is what self-esteem is all about. We constantly monitor how much others value us. Low self-esteem is a signal to try harder to please others.”
Source: Good Reasons for Bad Feelings: Insights from the Frontier of Evolutionary Psychiatry
“Some tasks that require good systemizing, such as tracking animals or inventing a new tool, take a long time. They might take days, months, or years. Many such tasks benefit from a lack of distraction and lots of hard concentration, preferably in solitude.
So it might be that even if you were good at systemizing you might never accomplish anything great if you were also good at empathizing, since you might then have an equally strong drive to socialize. But supposing you were low on empathizing. You might then be content to lock yourself away for days without much conversation, to focus long and deep on the system that was your current project. In pre-industrial societies this could involve fixing old axe-heads, or perhaps a four-day trek into the forest in search of food for your family (this might be the ancestral equivalent of the modern day pilot). The pay-off from not needing people as much as others do could be great”
Source: The Essential Difference: Male And Female Brains And The Truth About Autism
“The scientific method liberates us to pursue truth regardless of who we are. Similarly, evolutionary psychology, a discipline viscerally despised by many progressives, is expressly anti-racist in that it recognizes that underneath many of our surface differences, human minds were borne of the same evolutionary forces irrespective of our racial or ethnic backgrounds. Environmental forces (or culture) do affect our thinking styles, reasoning, and decision making, but these effects are not immutable elements of one’s race or ethnicity. There is no “black mind” or “white mind,” no “white male way of knowing” or “indigenous way of knowing,” there is only one truth, and we find it through the scientific method.”
Source: Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense
“All life began underneath the ocean. So I'm giving people a taste of what existence might have been like before civilization.'
'But we were amoebas and tiny shrimplike creatures. We didn't start off in deep-sea-diving outfits.'
'We all come into this world with an oxygen tube in our belly button.'
'True.'
She put her hands up to her own belly. There had so recently been a sea creature evolving in there, trying its best to get its act together. It had perished under the deep, deep, deep sea.”
Source: The Lonely Hearts Hotel
“History is far more important than evolutionary theorizing as a reminder about human potential, because the historical evidence of change is so much more vivid.”
Source: The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution
“Mankind willfully changing the global electromagnetic radiation environment has created what I expect will become known as the man-made evolution era.”
“Taken by themselves, emotions are pretty useless. Simply being fearful doesn't do an organism any good. But if a fearful state prompts an organism to flee, hide, or counterattack, it may well save its life. Emotions evolve, in short, for their capacity to induce adaptive reactions to danger, competition, mating opportunities, and so on. Emotions are action-prone.”
Source: Mama's Last Hug: Animal Emotions and What They Tell Us about Ourselves