Why do people hate evolutionary psychology

Thus, people who radiated confidence were those who ended up with the best chances of passing on their genes. The legacy of this dynamic is that human beings put confidence before realism and work hard to shield themselves from any evidence that would undermine their mind games.

Countless management books have been written extolling the virtues of confidence; they cleverly feed right into human nature. Given their biogenetic destiny, people are driven to feel good about themselves. But if you operate on a high-octane confidence elixir, you run into several dangers. You neglect, for instance, to see important clues about impending disasters. You may forge into hopeless business situations, assuming you have the right stuff to fix them.

The truth is, even with self-confidence we cannot control the world. Some events are random. Or ask any young M. Perhaps that it makes sense sometimes to challenge human nature and ask questions such as, Am I being overly optimistic? Yes, you can train people, teach them about different ideas, and exhort them to change their attitudes. But evolutionary psychology asserts that there is a limit to how much the human mind can be remolded. The theory of evolutionar y psychology is complex, and its implications equally so.

But below is a summary of some points that evolutionary psychologists would make to managers tr ying to understand human behavior. Classification Before Calculus. The world of hunter-gatherers was complex and constantly presented new predicaments for humans. Which berries can be eaten without risk of death? Where is good hunting to be found? What kind of body language indicates that a person cannot be trusted? In order to make sense of a complicated universe, human beings developed prodigious capabilities for sorting and classifying information.

In fact, researchers have found that some nonliterate tribes still in existence today have complete taxonomic knowledge of their environment in terms of animal habits and plant life.

They have systematized their vast and complex world. In the Stone Age, such capabilities were not limited to the natural environment. To prosper in the clan, human beings had to become expert at making judicious alliances.

They had to know whom to share food with, for instance—someone who would return the favor when the time came. They had to know what untrustworthy individuals generally looked like, too, because it would be foolish to deal with them. Thus, human beings became hardwired to stereotype people based on very small pieces of evidence, mainly their looks and a few readily apparent behaviors.

Whether it was sorting berries or people, both worked to the same end. Classification made life simpler and saved time and energy. Your classification system told you instantly. Every time a new group came into view, you could pick out the high-status members not to alienate. And the faster you made decisions like these, the more likely you were to survive. Sitting around doing calculus—that is, analyzing options and next steps—was not a recipe for a long and fertile life.

And so classification before calculus remains with us today. People naturally sort others into in-groups and out-groups—just by their looks and actions. In fact, research has shown that managers sort their employees into winners and losers as early as three weeks after starting to work with them. People are complex and many sided. But it is illuminating to know that we are actually programmed not to see them that way.

This perhaps helps to explain why, despite the best efforts of managers, some groups within organizations find it hard to mix. The battle between marketing and manufacturing is as old as—well, as old as marketing and manufacturing.

The techies of IT departments often seem to have difficulty getting along with the groups they are supposed to support, and vice versa. Everyone is too busy labeling others as outsiders and dismissing them in the process. A final point must be made on the matter of classification before calculus, and it comes in the area of skill development.

Lists are attractive and often memorable. But advanced math and science education largely relies on sophisticated models of processes—complex explanations of cause and effect in different circumstances.

It also advocates probabilistic ways of thinking, in which people are taught to weigh the combined likelihoods of different events together as they make decisions. Many people may come to understand and use these methods—weather forecasters and investment analysts are examples—but even lengthy training cannot fully eliminate our irrational and simplifying biases. Along with a scarcity of food, clothing, and shelter, and the constant threat of natural disaster, the Stone Age was also characterized by an ever-shifting social scene.

From one season to the next, it was not easy to predict who would have food to eat, let alone who would be healthy enough to endure the elements. In other words, the individuals who ruled the clan and controlled the resources were always changing.

Survivors were those who were savvy enough to anticipate power shifts and swiftly adjust for them, as well as those who could manipulate them. They were savvy because they engaged in, and likely showed a skill for, gossip. That has always been true in human society. The people who chat with just the right people at just the right time often put themselves in just the right position. In fact, it is fair to assume that human beings have stayed alive and increased their chances of reproducing because of such artful politicking.

What are the implications for managers? And since the interest in rumors is ingrained into human nature, it makes little sense to try to eliminate such interest by increasing the flood of official communications. Rather, managers would be smart to keep tabs on the rumor mill. They might even use their own networks to plug into the grapevine. But when it comes to gossip, it may be that managing by wandering about is the most effective way to communicate, as long as it is performed in a climate of trust and openness.

Empathy and Mind Reading. Simply stated, these two skills are the building blocks of gossip. People are much more likely to hear secrets and other information if they appear trustworthy and sympathetic. Likewise, people with a knack for guessing what others are thinking tend to ask better—that is, more probing and leading—questions. Thus, because empathy and mind reading abet the survival skill of gossip, they too became hardwired into the human brain. At the same time, people are also programmed for friendliness.

Sharing food was the basis for the cooperative exchange with relative strangers in the hunter-gatherer clan. Human beings, or at least those who survived, became adept at building peaceful social alliances and carrying out negotiations with win-win outcomes. We can see barter and trade even among very young children at play.

And so it is that friendly exchanges of information and favors remain our preferred way of dealing with nonfamily and a key to building political alliances for social success. The good news for managers on this front is that empathy and friendliness are, in general, positive dynamics to have around the organization. It pays to empathize with customers, for instance, and we can assume that things like commitment and loyalty grow when employees are friendly to one another.

The bad news is that the instinct for empathy very easily leads us to imagine that people are more similar to ourselves, as well as more competent and trustworthy, than they really are. Further, the drive to act friendly can make delivering bad news—about performance, for instance—very difficult. The employment interview is one situation that exploits the capacities for friendliness and imaginative empathy to its fullest extent.

Our natural tendency to sympathize with the person across the table drives us to make excuses for their weaknesses or to read more substance into their work or personal experiences than truly exists. At the same time, our programming for classification—sorting people into in-groups and out-groups—can make us harshly judge those who appear to be in the out-group.

We will even focus on and exaggerate the differences we perceive. Thus, strict controls and lengthy training are needed to make interviews effective procedures for objective judgment, and even then they remain highly vulnerable to empathy and mind-reading biases. Contest and Display. Finally, status in tribal groups was often won in public competitions. Such competitions were not introduced by human beings; indeed, they were dramas commonly played out by primates.

To establish status in early human societies, people especially males frequently set up contests, such as games and battles, with clear winners and losers. Likewise, they displayed their status and mental gifts in elaborate public rituals and artistic displays.

The underlying purpose of such practices was to impress others. Successful—that is, high-status—and healthy males were thought to produce strong and intelligent progeny. For survival-driven females, determined not only to reproduce but to nurture their babies once they arrived, such males were…well, irresistible. For their part, women found contests amongst themselves unnecessary, although they did seek to be more attractive than one another so they could have the prime pick of high-status males.

And so the ingrained male desire to do public battle and display virility and competence persists today. That should not surprise any denizen of the corporate world.

Men are forever setting up contests between themselves to see who will be promoted, win a new account, or gain the ear of leaders. Winners of these contests are frequently given to public displays of chest thumping. And even in organizational settings, which would benefit from cooperation, men frequently choose competition.

The answer is sensitive territory, because it gets into the inborn differences between men and women and what that means for managers. Some heralded the concept of the so-called Mommy Track—a term not coined by Schwartz, by the way—but many feminists excoriated her work. Suffice it to say, then, that managers should be aware that you can urge men to refrain from one-upmanship, but you may be fighting their programming.

In addition, companies might ask themselves if their rules of success were written by men and for men. It might be that the reason most women are not breaking the glass ceiling is because they find those rules abhorrent—or at the very least, against their nature. When all is said and done, evolutionary psychology paints a rather illuminating picture of human thinking and feeling. We may wish human beings were more rational, but our brains, created for a different time and place, get in the way.

But the truth is, today we need rationality more than ever. The world is increasingly complex, and we must make harder, more layered decisions faster and faster. Of course, people have devised wonderful instruments to help predict and manage uncertainty.

On modern trading floors, for example, computer modeling is widely used to estimate risks and probabilities in an unbiased fashion. Traders and managers collectively pore over risk-bearing market positions to limit financial exposure. Reward and punishment systems encourage openness about loss and heavily penalize concealment. Responsibility for different elements of trading deals is divided across functions to prevent an individual from committing fraud.

But even with these controls and safeguards, it is a sure thing that enormous costs are still being incurred through the exercise of human irrationality in these and other complex information-based environments. Evolutionary psychologists contend, however, that our primitive psychorationality, so well adapted to the precarious life of hunter-gatherers, will continue to call the tune whenever it is free to do so. In the choices businesspeople make, one can expect the hidden agendas of emotion, loss aversion, over-confidence, categorical thinking, and social intuition to continue regularly to prevail.

Evolutionary psychology thus suggests how important it is for us to have a clear view of our biased natures so that we can construct a mind-set to guard against their worst consequences.

Along with the workings of the human mind, evolutionary psychology also explores the dynamics of the human group. How does natural selection explain the ways in which people organize? What aspects of social behavior can be explained by our evolved circuitry? To identify our programming for social living, scientists in the field of evolutionary psychology have looked for common features across human societies, past and present, and extrapolated from them what must be biogenetic.

The concept of coevolution is critical to this method of analysis—the idea that cultures and social institutions are adaptations that make compromises between environmental conditions, such as food supply and population density, and the enduring characteristics of human psychology.

So, as comparative anthropologists have pointed out, when one looks across the astonishing variety of human societies, one repeatedly encounters common themes, dilemmas, and conflicts. These common factors are inborn and drive many aspects of social relations today.

Organizational Design. Like the primates that came before them, human beings were never loners. Indeed, the family is the centerpiece of all human societies.

Thus, negative reciprocity holds the promise of restoring or building a cooperative relationship. It is an evolved strategy meant to achieve a delicate balancing act: it seeks to end unjust or apparently inequitable behavior, while repairing a cooperative relationship with the one who has wronged you. We are social organisms. That means we are particularly vulnerable to exploitation, but it also means that we depend heavily on others for valuable cooperative opportunities.

There are two parts to the success of negative reciprocity as a conflict resolution strategy: proportionality and forgiveness. Although punishment is most likely an adaptation designed to prevent exploitation, the chosen punishment must be measured if the relationship is to be restored. A weak response sends the signal that you can be exploited, but an excessive response sends the signal that you intend to escalate the conflict.

The second component of negative reciprocity is forgiveness. Jeni Burnette and colleagues have demonstrated that forgiveness is likely produced by a set of adaptations designed to repair damaged relationships.

Specifically, forgiveness is contingent upon two types of information: the relationship value of the wrongdoer, and the probability that the wrongdoer will harm us again in the future. The combination of these two elements goes a long way to determine whether individuals and groups are likely to forgive transgressions, and this can also help to explain why apologies on their own can so inconsistently lead to forgiveness from others.

To illustrate, consider two examples from international politics. In one study, Philpot and Hornsey found that political apologies for mistreatment of Australian prisoners of war during World War II had no effect on the willingness of Australians to forgive the perpetrators.

Rather than revealing the weak and inconsistent nature of political apologies, these examples help to demonstrate two important points about political forgiveness. These conditions were arguably much more present in the case of the friendly fire incident than in the prisoners of war case. Second, forgiveness tends to follow, rather than create, the conditions for reconciliation. Indeed, the political and economic relationship between the U. Apology and forgiveness may indeed be less frequent internationally, but its success is neither random nor impossible.

Discover how to overcome barriers to forgiveness. How forgiving are you? It is not a valid argument for remaining ignorant. Additionally, the types of arguments made by Rippon among others, falsely conflate equality with sameness.

They presume that our moral commitment to equal treatment of the sexes is dependent on there being no differences between the sexes. Instead of dispassionately inquiring into scientific questions, facts from politically controversial research are being distorted out of concern for how the data might be used by the worst among us. And today most of the distortion of the science of human nature is coming from the extreme political Left.

That our worst behaviors are hardwired, and therefore cannot be changed? Not at all. Most of these arguments stem from misconceptions of the field, namely, believing that evolutionary psychologists are committing the naturalistic fallacy, conflating proximate with ultimate explanations, and attempting to make everything into an adaptation. For instance, taking the point of view of an evolutionary psychologist to whom he is opposed, Gould writes:.

Our accursed genes have made us creatures of the night. But what evolutionary psychologist is Gould imagining that would take evolutionary theory as an invitation to escape moral responsibility for committing a crime? It must have been one made of straw. I believe that most of the resistance to evolutionary psychology both then and now stems from two fallacies: 1 that the nasty aspects of our human nature, such as tendencies for violence, are natural and therefore, good.

This is known as the naturalistic fallacy; and 2 that an evolved human nature necessarily implies genetic determinism and inflexibility, both of which are found in the above quote. Like gravity or the laws of thermodynamics, natural selection proceeds without regard for human morals, increasing the frequency of those genes that lead to higher reproductive fitness in individuals that have them. A description of human nature is in no way a prescription for how we ought to be.

To deduce the latter from the former is to commit a logical error that jumps from saying, for example, homicidal tendencies are at least partly an adaptation to saying that homicidal tendencies are good and should be encouraged. If homicidal tendencies were adaptive, that would be something interesting and worth understanding, but would say nothing about how we ought to be. No matter the evidence about human nature, whether tendencies towards homicide and rape are in our nature, or whether intelligence is 10 percent or 90 percent heritable, our moral commitments to correcting social injustices, treating people as morally worthy individuals, and facilitating political and economic equality should not waver.

Second, that something is a part of human nature does not necessarily mean it will be expressed. Pioneers of evolutionary psychology, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, give the example of a callus-forming adaptation that all humans have coded in their genome.

This is because callus formation depends on both the genetic blueprint and the environmental determinant for it, namely, friction. Similarly, many forms of violence likely are consequences of adaptations, which, therefore, have a genetic basis.

Fortunately, moral, cultural, and social norms and institutions of the modern world can, as it were, act as the glove that prevents these violent tendencies from being expressed. They can facilitate the expression of better aspects of our human nature like altruism, cooperation, self-control, empathy—the better angels of our nature. A book of that title outlines vast amounts of empirical data arguing just that. Scientists like Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin who have never failed to bristle at the notion that the human mind is a product of Darwinian selection, but are perfectly fine with the notion that the human body is, are fighting a losing battle.

This has been called the blank slate view of the mind because it is a view of human nature that denies any innate structure to the mind and instead claims that humans are born with a clean slate, awaiting the hand of culture to mold it.

For one, socialization and culture do not exist independently of human minds, a fact one would think is too obvious to have to be stated and yet is commonly forgotten. Human minds are what created culture in the first place. Secondly, it would be virtually impossible for humans to take up and learn their culture and all its complexity without innate mechanisms in place to make it happen, in the same way that acquiring a language is virtually an impossible task for a blank slate that lacks built-in assumptions about the common structure and regularities of languages.

In their paper, Buss and Hippel argue that some of the resistance to evolutionary psychology stems from psychological adaptations for maintaining in-group coalitions and punishing competing coalitions.

Evolutionary psychologists seem to be going against these admirable goals by researching into such politically and morally sensitive topics as the psychological differences between the sexes. However, again, this is a non sequitur. Our moral commitment to value individuals does not hinge on what the data show. Far from objectionable, many hypotheses about mind and behavior coming from evolutionary psychology are so obvious that an explanation often seems superfluous.

A commonplace example that bears the unmistakable stamp of evolutionary logic is fear. Fear is an emotion with a function, namely to solve a recurrent and important problem posed to humans throughout their evolutionary history: survival. The same information-processing, evolutionary logic holds for most other emotions like shame, guilt, anger, and sexual jealousy.

In this sense, behaviors, emotions, and other mental faculties can be dissected and understood like a liver, spleen, or a heart, all of which have adaptive functions that were selected among alternative designs through evolutionary time. Today, sugar is far from rare, but is instead added to everything from drinks to hamburger buns.

Obesity, as opposed to starvation is a significant problem in the developed world. And it is largely a consequence of a mismatch between the environment in which we evolved—where sugar was scarce—and the environment in which we are now—where sugar is plentiful.

Admittedly, humans are different from all other life forms. Humans have culture. And human culture differs widely throughout the world. Undoubtedly, cultural factors influence human mind and behavior. For example, men are more violent than women, committing almost all forms of violent crime more often than women. Perhaps throughout their upbringing, boys are encouraged to display their aggression and physical prowess in sports, whereas girls are discouraged from sports and are encouraged into more caring and stereotypically feminine roles.

Additionally, media may influence behavior. More often boys play violent video games and watch violent films, which might make them more violent in the long run. Parents are constantly scolding their sons for misbehaving. Parents and teachers tell young boys again and again to keep their hands to themselves, to stop acting out, to be nicer, and have empathy. The sociocultural stance would somehow have to provide evidence that boys are receiving one message and girls are receiving another consistently enough to cause distinct differences in their mind and behavior.