Evolutionary psychology

From Liberpedia

Evolutionary psychology studies how evolution has shaped the psychological capacities through which people perceive, learn, value and act. It asks how these capacities develop and operate, and what problems their evolution may have helped to solve. A particular influential programme, associated with Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, proposes numerous mechanisms specialised for recurrent adaptive problems. The extent of such specialisation, and the relative roles of inherited organisation, development and learning, are disputed within evolutionary approaches to the mind.[1]

For economics, its potential contribution is an explanation of the motives, expectations and decision mechanisms that economic models often take as given. It can complement the analysis of choice, incentives and institutions while also challenging particular psychological assumptions. Explaining how a disposition evolved does not establish that it is beneficial in every present environment or morally justified.

What it can add to economics

An economic model can explain how choices change when prices, resources or opportunities change, given specified preferences and beliefs. Further questions concern why people have those preferences, how they recognise a situation, what information attracts their attention, and which rules they use to decide. Evolutionary hypotheses address these questions by proposing mechanisms and deriving predictions about their operation.

Cosmides and Tooby argue that psychological explanation is needed for successful reasoning as well as for apparent mistakes. Their proposed connection to economics includes the formation of preferences, reasoning about social exchange, and the psychological capacities through which knowledge is acquired and transmitted. Their argument is a research programme: its particular claims about cognitive architecture and ancestral functions require evidence.[2]

The explanatory levels should be distinguished. A person may seek affection, food, status or security without intending to maximise reproduction. An account of why a psychological capacity spread in ancestral populations is different from an account of the person's present aims.[3]

Motives, utility and fitness

David Sloan Wilson distinguishes economic utility, psychological motives and evolutionary fitness. Fitness concerns effects on survival and reproduction; a psychological explanation concerns the mechanisms producing behaviour. Utility can represent a wider range of preferences.[4]

He distinguishes psychological altruism — valuing another person's welfare as an end — from altruism defined by fitness effects. Helping may arise from concern for the recipient or from a desire to feel good. Observing help alone therefore does not identify its motive.[4]

Austrian economics: purposes, knowledge and institutions

Ludwig von Mises distinguishes praxeology, the formal study of purposeful action, from psychology, which investigates the internal events leading to particular actions. His use of rational action does not imply that people possess correct information or calculate without error.[5]

On that distinction, a possible division of labour is straightforward: economic analysis examines the implications of pursuing ends with scarce means, while psychology investigates how particular ends, beliefs and expectations arise. An evolutionary explanation of a motive does not remove the need to analyse the choices it motivates. Conversely, classifying behaviour as purposeful does not supply a complete causal account of the mechanism producing it.

This relationship is contested. Geoffrey Hodgson argues against excluding causal investigations of purposes and beliefs from social science, and uses evolutionary psychology to challenge restrictions he identifies in Austrian and related approaches. The issue is therefore partly methodological: how should explanations of choice connect with explanations of the chooser?[6]

Viktor Vanberg argues that taking subjective beliefs and purposes seriously does not require rejecting causal explanation. He distinguishes causal inquiry from imitating physics or reducing action to simple stimulus–response rules. In his interpretation of Hayek, complexity limits precise prediction while allowing explanations of underlying principles.[7]

Vanberg also treats interpretations of motives as hypotheses that need evidence independent of the behaviour being explained. This connects investigation of psychological mechanisms with Austrian questions about knowledge and expectations, without establishing any particular evolutionary account.[7]

Friedrich Hayek provides another point of contact through his work on knowledge, cognition and evolved social rules. Paul Rubin and Evelyn Gick explicitly compare Hayek with modern evolutionary theory, while arguing that some details of his account need revision. Biological evolution of psychological capacities and cultural evolution of institutions should be distinguished, even when they interact.[8]

Rubin and Gick propose two applications: that preferences formed in low-growth environments may contribute to zero-sum intuitions about wealth, and that concern for identifiable people may favour visible beneficiaries over dispersed policy costs. These are hypotheses about psychological mechanisms; the economic effects of a policy do not establish why people support it.[8]

Vernon Smith's Rationality in Economics develops a related connection between experimental findings, Hayek and emergent institutions. It distinguishes deliberately reasoned, constructivist arrangements from ecological processes through which rules and institutions emerge. Successful coordination need not imply that each participant understands the whole system.[9]

Chicago economics: preferences and the economic approach

Gary Becker's work offers a useful comparison with an influential Chicago approach. His economic analysis extends beyond commercial exchange to the family, crime, discrimination and social interaction. It does not assume that every motive is selfish or monetary: Becker expressly rejected that interpretation. His The Economic Approach to Human Behavior also includes an essay on altruism, egoism and genetic fitness.[10][11]

EP can complement such work by generating independent predictions about the content and context of preferences. These predictions can then be combined with economic analysis and tested against competing explanations. Incentives, learning and institutional differences remain part of the explanation; neither approach requires treating every person as an identical calculator.

David Friedman illustrates the connection with a hypothesis about just prices. Resentment at departures from customary prices might function as a bargaining commitment in markets with few counterparties. He proposes this as a possible explanation of price-fairness responses and related puzzles. The evolutionary account must be evaluated against alternatives; the observation that someone resents a price increase does not establish its ancestral cause.[3]

Intertemporal choice and institutional reliability

Friedman's earlier 2001 article extends this approach to choices over time. Someone may prefer $1,000 today to $1,100 next week, yet prefer $1,100 in a year and a week to $1,000 in a year. He proposes that distrust of deferred promises could have been useful where future performance was difficult to secure. Such a disposition might persist in settings with more reliable institutions.[12]

His proposal depends on how uncertainty changes with delay. He explicitly notes that a constant weekly probability of default produces exponential discounting; uncertainty alone therefore does not explain the preference reversal. He instead considers relationships that can deteriorate and recover, or delayed offers that signal non-performance. The article presents these as hypotheses requiring stronger tests. An evolutionary account of a decision mechanism does not by itself demonstrate that a particular choice is mistaken: the reliability of the promised payment still matters.[12]

Individuals, cooperation and group selection

In discussing cultural evolution, Douglas Glen Whitman argues that group selection — the spread of traits or practices associated with the relative success of groups — can be compatible with methodological individualism: explaining social outcomes through individual actions and interactions. Individualism in this sense does not itself require selfish motives, perfect calculation or exclusively unplanned outcomes. Evolutionary reasoning may help explain which preferences or rules enter an economic model; the model must still show how individuals produce its social results. Whitman treats his applications to firms and common resources as possibilities requiring further evidence.[13]

Wilson proposes multilevel selection as the framework for explaining adaptive groups. He argues that describing every outcome as self-interested does not explain when groups become adaptive units; the effects of selection within and between groups must be distinguished.[4]

Richard Langlois agrees about compatibility, but emphasises learning, experimentation and systems of interdependent rules. In his reading of Hayek, cultural change involves innovation and imitation as well as solving free-rider problems; strong loyalty within a group can also obstruct wider cooperation.[14]

Todd Zywicki makes the empirical requirements more explicit: a trait or rule must benefit the group, groups must compete or transmit practices through mechanisms such as migration or imitation, and free riding must be restrained enough for the advantage to persist. These conditions identify what an explanation must establish; they do not demonstrate that a particular institution arose in this way.[15]

Whitman's reply distinguishes methodological individualism from individual-level selection. It also accepts a correction to his earlier example: under the Prisoner's Dilemma conditions discussed, random grouping alone is insufficient to sustain cooperation. He accepts the need for assortative grouping, in which cooperators are more likely than defectors to meet other cooperators.[16]

Learning, culture and evidence

An evolutionary approach need not treat learning and culture as competing explanations to be discarded. Cecilia Heyes distinguishes social-learning effects from the mechanisms producing them, and argues that social and asocial learning can depend on common learning processes. Observing that people learn from others does not, by itself, identify a dedicated adaptation for the task.[17]

Heyes separates input mechanisms — perception, attention and motivation, which supply information for learning — from the processes that encode it for long-term storage. A bias toward information from other agents could arise through natural selection or individual experience while the encoding process remains shared with asocial learning. Greater copying therefore does not by itself establish an inherited, specialised learning mechanism. In this paper, her definition of social learning excludes intentional teaching and symbolic communication; she does not claim that all learning or social cognition is associative.[17]

Robert Boyd, Peter J. Richerson and Joseph Henrich argue that cumulative culture allows useful knowledge to build across generations beyond what one person could discover. Their examples of Arctic subsistence illustrate dependence on learned local skills, rather than intelligence alone.[18]

In the models they discuss, copying that merely saves acquisition costs does not by itself improve population adaptation. Selective learning, incremental improvement and recombination can do so. Social-learning biases can also spread maladaptive practices, and successful copying need not imply causal understanding.[18]

Bolhuis and colleagues challenge strong claims about massive modularity and a mind fixed to a single ancestral setting. They emphasise evidence concerning development, cultural processes and continuing evolution. Such criticism does not reject studying the mind evolutionarily; it disputes particular assumptions and explanations.[1]

A plausible ancestral story is therefore a starting hypothesis, not a completed explanation. Useful comparisons distinguish a behavioural effect, its psychological mechanism, its developmental history and its proposed evolutionary function. They also separate predictions supported by experiments or comparative evidence from interpretations that remain open.

Neither an evolved preference nor an evolved institution establishes a moral entitlement. Explaining cooperation, competition or coercion does not by itself justify any of them. Nor does showing that a practice produces a benefit settle how it compares with feasible alternatives.

Books connecting the fields

  • Roger Koppl, ed., Evolutionary Psychology and Economic Theory, Advances in Austrian Economics, vol. 7. A direct collection on the intersection, including David Friedman on economics and EP, Hodgson on individual action, Rubin and Gick on Hayek, and Viktor Vanberg on methodological dualism and subjectivism. The publisher lists the volume in 2005 and chapter copyrights in 2004.
  • Vernon L. Smith, Rationality in Economics: Constructivist and Ecological Forms, Cambridge University Press. Connects experiments, personal and impersonal exchange, emergent institutions and Hayek.
  • Gerd Gigerenzer and Reinhard Selten, eds., Bounded Rationality: The Adaptive Toolbox, MIT Press, 2001. An adjacent research programme on decision rules, emotions and social tools under limited knowledge and time; it is not identical to the Cosmides–Tooby programme.
  • Paul H. Rubin, Darwinian Politics: The Evolutionary Origin of Freedom, Rutgers University Press, 2002. Applies evolutionary reasoning to political preferences, cooperation and conflict.

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Johan J. Bolhuis, Gillian R. Brown, Robert C. Richardson and Kevin N. Laland, “Darwin in Mind: New Opportunities for Evolutionary Psychology”, PLOS Biology 9(7), 2011, e1001109. The essay distinguishes the broader evolutionary study of cognition from the specific Santa Barbara programme it criticises.
  2. ↑ Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, “Better than Rational: Evolutionary Psychology and the Invisible Hand”, American Economic Review 84(2), May 1994, pp. 327–332, especially sections III–IV.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 David Friedman, “Economics and Evolutionary Psychology”, 29 November 2023, especially “What Evolutionary Psychology Adds” and “Economic Puzzles”. Friedman presents several evolutionary explanations as hypotheses.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 David Sloan Wilson, “The New Fable of the Bees: Multilevel Selection, Adaptive Societies, and the Concept of Self Interest”, in Koppl, ed., Evolutionary Psychology and Economic Theory, pp. 201–220. Author-archive publisher proof, especially pp. 207–208, 215–218 and Table 1 on p. 216.
  5. ↑ Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, chapter I, and Epistemological Problems of Economics, selections reproduced in “Chapter 1: Human Action”, The Mises Reader Unabridged, especially “Purposeful Action and Animal Reaction” and “The Distinction Between Means and Ends: The ‘Irrational’”.
  6. ↑ Geoffrey M. Hodgson, “Austrian Economics, Evolutionary Psychology and Individual Actions”, in Roger Koppl, ed., Evolutionary Psychology and Economic Theory, Advances in Austrian Economics, vol. 7. See the publisher's abstract.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Viktor J. Vanberg, Austrian Economics, Evolutionary Psychology and Methodological Dualism: Subjectivism Reconsidered, Freiburg Discussion Paper 04/3, 2004, sections 3 and 6, especially pp. 9–14 and 23–29. This is the working-paper version of the contribution listed in Koppl's Evolutionary Psychology and Economic Theory.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Paul H. Rubin and Evelyn Gick, “Hayek and Modern Evolutionary Theory”, in Koppl, ed., Evolutionary Psychology and Economic Theory, vol. 7, pp. 79–100, especially pp. 84–89 and 94–96. Public author-uploaded full text.
  9. ↑ Vernon L. Smith, Rationality in Economics: Constructivist and Ecological Forms, Cambridge University Press. See the publisher's description and contents.
  10. ↑ Gary S. Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior, University of Chicago Press, 1976, contents, especially chapter 13.
  11. ↑ Gary Becker's Nobel-lecture explanation of the scope of the economic approach, reproduced in “A rational choice”, University of Chicago Magazine, October 2010.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 David D. Friedman, “Economics and Evolutionary Psychology”, InDret 2/2001, April 2001, pp. 9–11, including note 20. This earlier public article is distinct from the later contribution listed in Koppl's volume.
  13. ↑ Douglas Glen Whitman, Group Selection and Methodological Individualism: Compatible and Complementary, author-hosted manuscript of the contribution to Koppl's Evolutionary Psychology and Economic Theory, especially manuscript pp. 15–18 and 31–43.
  14. ↑ Richard N. Langlois, Comment on “Group Selection and Methodological Individualism: Compatible and Complementary” by Douglas Glen Whitman, December 2003 manuscript for Advances in Austrian Economics, pp. 1–6.
  15. ↑ Todd J. Zywicki, “Reconciling Group Selection and Methodological Individualism”, in Koppl, ed., Evolutionary Psychology and Economic Theory, pp. 267–277, especially pp. 270–271 and 276.
  16. ↑ Douglas Glen Whitman, Group Selection and Methodological Individualism: Reply to Comments, author-hosted manuscript, PDF pp. 4–6. See also Theodore C. Bergstrom, “Evolution of Social Behavior: Individual and Group Selection”, Journal of Economic Perspectives 16(2), 2002, Proposition 1 and its proof, pp. 71–72.
  17. ↑ 17.0 17.1 Cecilia Heyes, “What's Social About Social Learning?”, Journal of Comparative Psychology 126(2), 2012, pp. 193–202, especially pp. 193–195 and 198–200, including note 1 on p. 193.
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 Robert Boyd, Peter J. Richerson and Joseph Henrich, “The cultural niche: Why social learning is essential for human adaptation”, PNAS 108, 2011, pp. 10918–10925. Author-hosted early edition, especially PDF pp. 4–6.
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