5
votes
What is the evolutionary advantage of being embarrassed?
Marks and Nesse investigated evolutionary causes of anxiety disorders and reported about embarrassment in particular:
Social threats evoke responses that promote group acceptance, for
example, ...
5
votes
Why do we long for freedom?
Too lazy to paraphrase right now, so quoting from a newsletter
Brehm [the guy how introduced the notion Psychological Reactance--my note] has made but one remark about why people seem to behave as ...
5
votes
What are the evolutionary advantages of displaying fear?
I'd turn the question on its head: it's not necessary that there are evolutionary advantages to displaying fear, it's that there are evolutionary advantages to being afraid, and to some extent for ...
- 7,780
4
votes
Accepted
What do chimpanzees do with fire in the wild, and can they be trained to manipulate burning objects?
Primatologist Jill Pruetz at Iowa State University in Ames was observing savanna chimpanzees in Senegal and found that chimps there have mastered the first step in controlling fire.
However there is ...
- 12.3k
4
votes
Accepted
Why fear is the opposite of desire and not disgust?
Just because two phenomena (partially!) share brain architecture does not mean they are experientially similar or opposite. There is little understanding of how neuronal activity creates conscious ...
- 1,478
4
votes
How can be explained from an evolutionary perspective the fact that some successful people do not want to have children?
Before addressing your true question, I just want to say that you can find individuals with almost any characteristic, even non-adaptive ones. Variation can exist for many reasons including genetic (e....
- 700
3
votes
Why are we the smartest species on the whole known universe?
The evolution of higher intelligence in hominids is an empirically difficult enough evolutionary question that (a) it might be better for biology.se and (b) any answer needs to be taken with a pinch ...
- 201
3
votes
Accepted
Why are we the smartest species on the whole known universe?
I just finished a special issue on 'Humans - Why we're unlike any other species on the planet' (Sci Am, September 2018).
In this issue, Kevin Laland has a paper (How we became a different kind of ...
- 20.8k
3
votes
Accepted
Why do brains prefer internal consistency?
Short answer
Cognitive dissonance arises because people want to protect their world-view or self-concept. Even people well versed in science may deny the facts in favor of false beliefs.
Background
...
- 20.8k
2
votes
Accepted
Recognizing which object is new, while forgetting original objects
Is there a name for this phenomenon in cognitive science?
What you are describing is a number of things that in general have to do with attention and memory.
The first one of them is priming. ...
- 597
2
votes
Bottom up thinking - what is it?
Hutchinson, B. (2002), an article in the book Synergy Matters by Adrian M. Castell may help in understanding what is meant by bottom up thinking and the opposite, top down thinking.
[T]he term ‘top ...
- 12.3k
2
votes
Why do people tend to put stigma on victims of offences against the person such as rape or bullying?
But why does the victim feel shame?
Victims feel guilty for not preventing the victimization. Even going so far as to consider that they may have caused it in some way, or somehow were deserving. In ...
- 184
1
vote
Why do people tend to put stigma on victims of offences against the person such as rape or bullying?
There are several perspectives to address this question. I personally believe they have more overlap than not, but please note the later sections of this answer may contain some less conventional ...
- 171
1
vote
Accepted
What would be the evolutionary benefits of Hate?
The primary evolutionary advantage of hate is self preservation. Typically, hate is experienced when the target stimulus (i.e., a person, season, ideology, thing, etc.) threatens one's fundamental ...
1
vote
Accepted
Why is Autistic Spectrum Disorder compatible with the Schizophrenia Spectrum in the DSM-V?
We do not understand what causes either autism (ASD) or schizophrenia in the brain. There are some theories and ideas, but nothing conclusive and certainly nothing as simple as a single receptor. ...
- 7,780
1
vote
Why engage in intellectual activities?
Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective.
The core idea is that "psychological traits and ...
- 847
1
vote
What are the various evolutionary theories of social dominance orientation?
SDO theory was developed outside the paradigm of evolutionary psychology, but I think it is possible to make a connection.
A person with a high social status can optimize his/her fitness by being ...
- 111
1
vote
Predisposition toward organizing information in a hierarchical manner?
This is not out of desire, it is out of necessity of abiding a feature of information and knowledge itself. Quite frankly, this goes into a bit of data science and information theory (I personally ...
1
vote
How could siblings rivalry / jealousy be useful to human evolution?
First, it must be understood that not all traits in an animal are evolved or selected traits – some are only variations. Some of these variations may be selected by some evolutionary pressure in the ...
- 1,845
1
vote
Can new emotions be created or discovered?
The atlas of personality, emotion and behaviour catalogues over 3,000 emotions (Mobbs, 2020). The atlas's approach taken to identifying and cataloguing the emotions was to start with existing lists ...
- 1,748
1
vote
Is there an evolutionary psychology explanation why children have high pitched voices?
Children have high pitched voices relative to adults because their vocal folds are shorter and physics demands that short vocal folds result in higher pitches. The format frequencies of children are ...
- 2,633
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