Evolution, Biology, and Attraction

Mating and reproduction are central to natural selection, and decisions associated with one’s choice of mate can have significant fitness consequences. From an evolutionary perspective, attraction functions to direct one’s attention and energy toward pursuing, mating with, and retaining individuals who display traits that contribute to greater survival and reproductive success. Humans are theorized to possess a suite of psychological mechanisms that facilitate the identification of such individuals. One trait that humans have potentially evolved to be attracted to is genetic dissimilarity or diversity in the major histocompatibility complex, which is argued to promote greater immunocompetence and pathogen resistance and, hence, health in one’s mate and putative offspring. Another trait is bilateral symmetry, which is theorized to function as a cue to a potential mate’s genetic quality and ability to withstand developmental stressors. Yet another trait is sexual dimorphism. Women are theorized to be attracted to masculinity in men, which is theorized to function as a reliable signal of underlying genetic quality. In contrast, men are theorized to be attracted to femininity in women, which is argued to signal their reproductive viability. Importantly, evolutionary perspectives propose that many attraction mechanisms evolved to adaptively adjust to local conditions. Thus, when faced with high pathogen prevalence, people have heightened preferences for symmetry, which indicates having good genes and thus, greater ability to withstand disease. As another example, when potential mates of the other sex are in relative abundance, people tend to be more selective in their mate choice and exaggerate their preferences for other-sex mates with sex-typical traits. Additionally, near peak fertility, women may have evolved to increase their preferences for masculinity in men, which signals underlying genetic quality. In addition to having psychological mechanisms that facilitate the identification of potential mates, humans may have also evolved psychological mechanisms that adaptively increase the motivation to allocate attention and energy toward pursuing viable mates that have been identified. Both sets of psychological mechanisms are necessary to successful mate selection, and likely operate in tandem. In this regard, dopamine may be centrally involved in driving behaviors associated with attraction and mate pursuit. Finally, recent studies have shown that the evidence for some of the hypothesized attraction preferences is not conclusive; future scholarship will profit from more careful research design and robust methodology.

Old minds, new marketplaces: How evolved psychological mechanisms trigger mismatched food preferences

Principally due to unhealthy food choices that people make in grocery stores, almost half of adults worldwide are overweight and obese. Current food retail practices bear some responsibility for such public health issues. This paper argues that numerous attempts to promote healthy eating fail due to neglecting evolutionarily outdated food acquisition mechanisms. To understand underlying motives behind food choices, we distinguish proximate and ultimate explanations of consumer behavior, which complement the traditional approach to studying consumer behavior. Building on the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis and contrasting ancestral versus present-day foraging environments, we discuss how marketing activities exploit evolutionarily old food preferences and elicit unhealthy food choices. We conclude by explaining how to mitigate this harmful trend by applying the law of law’s leverage to facilitate effective strategies to increase healthy food choices. Notably, we show how evolutionary psychology principles can be used to reconcile competing interests between consumers, retailers, and decision-makers responsible for public health policies.

Noncompliance With Safety Guidelines as a Free-Riding Strategy: An Evolutionary Game-Theoretic Approach to Cooperation During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Evolutionary game theory and public goods games offer an important framework to understand cooperation during pandemics. From this perspective, the COVID-19 situation can be conceptualized as a dilemma where people who neglect safety precautions act as free riders, because they get to enjoy the benefits of decreased health risk from others’ compliance with policies despite not contributing to or even undermining public safety themselves. At the same time, humans appear to carry a suite of evolved psychological mechanisms aimed at curbing free riding in order to ensure the continued provision of public goods, which can be leveraged to develop more effective measures to promote compliance with regulations. We also highlight factors beyond free riding that reduce compliance rates, such as the emergence of conspiratorial thinking, which seriously undermine the effectiveness of measures to suppress free riding. Together, the current paper outlines the social dynamics that occur in public goods dilemmas involving the spread of infectious disease, highlights the utility and limits of evolutionary game-theoretic approaches for COVID-19 management, and suggests novel directions based on emerging challenges to cooperation.

Pathogen disgust sensitivity protects against infection in a high pathogen environment

Disgust is hypothesized to be an evolved emotion that functions to regulate the avoidance of pathogen-related stimuli and behaviors. Individuals with higher pathogen disgust sensitivity (PDS) are predicted to be exposed to and thus infected by fewer pathogens, though no studies have tested this directly. Furthermore, PDS is hypothesized to be locally calibrated to the types of pathogens normally encountered and the fitness-related costs and benefits of infection and avoidance. Market integration (the degree of production for and consumption from market-based economies) influences the relative costs/benefits of pathogen exposure and avoidance through sanitation, hygiene, and lifestyle changes, and is thus predicted to affect PDS. Here, we examine the function of PDS in disease avoidance, its environmental calibration, and its socioecological variation by examining associations among PDS, market-related lifestyle factors, and measures of bacterial, viral, and macroparasitic infection at the individual, household, and community levels. Data were collected among 75 participants (ages 5 to 59 y) from 28 households in three Ecuadorian Shuar communities characterized by subsistence-based lifestyles and high pathogen burden, but experiencing rapid market integration. As predicted, we found strong negative associations between PDS and biomarkers of immune response to viral/bacterial infection, and weaker associations between PDS and measures of macroparasite infection, apparently mediated by market integration-related differences. We provide support for the previously untested hypothesis that PDS is negatively associated with infection, and document variation in PDS indicative of calibration to local socioeconomic conditions. More broadly, findings highlight the importance of evolved psychological mechanisms in human health outcomes.

Emotions Across Cultures

What can evolutionary theories tell us about emotions, and how can research on emotions inform evolutionary theories? In this chapter, we discuss links between evolutionary theories of emotion and the cross-cultural study of emotion. We examine what predictions can be derived from evolutionary theories about cross-cultural consistency and variability. In particular, we emphasise the notion that evolved psychological mechanisms result in cultural differences instantiated as variations on common themes of human universals. We focus on two components of emotions: emotion experience and nonverbal expressions. Several case studies from emotion science are outlined to illustrate this framework empirically. In the domain of emotion experience, we highlight shame as an illustration of the idea of variations occurring across cultures around a common theme. In the domain of nonverbal expression of emotion, this idea is illustrated by the in-group advantage, that is, superior recognition of emotional expressions produced by members of one's own group. We consider both statistical learning and motivational explanations for this phenomenon in light of evolutionary perspectives. Lastly, we review three different theoretical accounts of how to conceptualise cross-culturally shared themes underlying emotions. We conclude that the cross-cultural study of consistency and variation in different emotion components offers a valuable opportunity for testing predictions derived from evolutionary psychology.

Old minds, new marketplaces: How evolved psychological mechanisms trigger mismatched consumption responses

The national lockdowns related to the COVID-19 pandemic revealed that few days of limited travel and consumption are enough to improve air quality worldwide, thus contributing to sustainable development. But under regular circumstances, shoppers are reluctant to change their consumption habits for the common good. Why is that? To answer this question, we delineate proximate and ultimate explanations of consumer behavior. The former—pervasive in the marketing literature—focuses on how behaviors occur, whereas the latter—underrepresented in marketing thought and practice—focuses on why human evolution fashioned such behaviors. The evolutionary approach to consumer behavior considers both explanations. We draw on the fundamental motives framework, which explains why certain behaviors—often irrational at first glance—solve specific adaptive problems found in ancestral and modern societies. Finally, we show how evolutionary mismatches—where mechanisms solving adaptive problems in ancient times produce maladaptive outcomes nowadays—distort optimal and sustainable decision-making in three domains: voting, buying status-signaling goods, and food consumption. We conclude by showing how to apply the law of law's leverage to facilitate cost-effective policymaking.

An Introduction to Evolutionary Perspectives on Religion

Given that religious beliefs and behaviors are so pervasive and have such a powerful influence, it is vital to try to understand the psychological underpinnings of religiosity. This chapter introduces the topic of evolutionary perspectives on religion, beginning with an attempt to define “religion,” followed by a primer on evolutionary psychology and the concept of evolved psychological mechanisms. With this framework in place, the chapter then provides an overview of key adaptationist and byproduct hypotheses of various components of religion, highlighting the complementary nature of these hypotheses and their roles in forming a cohesive understanding of the evolution of religion. Concepts introduced in this chapter include hyperactive agency detection, minimally counterintuitive concepts, in-group cooperation, costly signaling theory, gods as moralizing agents, and cultural evolution.