Healthy Living Reconsidered

In recent years, the evolutionary approach to health and medicine has led to major advances in our understanding of physical and mental health. A core concept in this area pertains to evolutionary mismatch, which helps explain why people gravitate toward unhealthy diets and sedentary lifestyles. Further, several common mismatches can help us understand issues with mental health. For instance, the large-scale prevalence of highly addictive cell phones and related technologies ultimately has adverse psychological consequences for people for various reasons. If we want to understand issues of human health, we must utilize an evolutionary perspective. Practices like selflessness, virtuosity, temperance, altruism, and even diet and exercise are nothing new. By studying facets of positive psychology through an evolutionary lens, it can be seen more clearly how these positive emotions and practices of healthy living have been adaptive for humans all along.

The Bright Side of Religion

Evolutionists are famous for being at odds with religion. However, a current movement in the field of evolutionary studies focuses on using evolution to help understand religion, as opposed to simply having ideological debates that can be draining. This chapter focuses on exactly this approach: using evolutionary principles to shed light on the nature of religious experiences. From this perspective, religion can be understood in terms of its ability to help cultivate social groups in which individuals take an other-oriented approach. Implications for understanding all kinds of human groups are discussed, with an eye toward demarcating principles that lead to positive group outcomes.

Darwin’s Quick Tips for Living a Richer Life

This book was written as something of a guidebook for both researchers and for people in general. This chapter provides guidance for both audiences. For researchers in the behavioral sciences, guidance is provided to think about how the idea of positive evolutionary psychology might help shape one’s research agenda. Specific examples of novel research hypotheses influenced by this approach are provided. And for people in general, specific suggestions for living life, based on the ideas from this book, are spelled out. Such suggestions pertain to various life domains, including physical health, one’s emotional life, social life, religion, and community. Ultimately, this chapter provides a road map for scholars to conduct more meaningful research and for all humans to take steps to live a richer life.

Building Darwin’s Community

Positive psychologists focus not only on the health of individuals but also on the health of human communities. And when it comes to understanding human communities, the evolutionary perspective has a lot to say. Human communities can be understood in terms of ancestral conditions that surrounded our nomadic ancestors. Under such conditions, communities were naturally small, and individuals within communities had long-standing relationships with one another. Modeling modern human communities after such ancestral communities can help us create communal environments that best match our evolved psychology. This chapter looks outward and, as such, focuses on applications of evolutionary psychological principles to questions of communal functioning.

Evolutionary Psychology of Resilience

Dealing with environmental stressors is a basic part of life for any organism. Positive psychology focuses largely on the topic of resilience and how people can move past difficult situations and interactions. The evolutionary perspective has much to offer in terms of the topic of resilience. This chapter describes resilience and stress reactions from an evolutionary perspective. Further, this chapter uses the concept of natural selection as a model for how failures are to be expected and how success in any domain for any organism owes largely to a long string of failures. This model is used to help provide evolution-based guidance on the topic of moving forward after setbacks and developing a resilient approach to life.

Taking the High Road in Life

This chapter addresses “strategic pluralism,” or the fact that multiple behavioral strategies exist in most life domains. Dark strategies, which focus on selfish approaches to advancing one’s own goals, are described from an evolutionary perspective. Costs and benefits of such strategies are presented. Other-oriented strategies to life are also presented, so that a side-by-side comparison can be made by the reader. Bad-mouthing others in one’s social sphere is used as an example of a dark strategy. Alternative strategies for dealing with others, focusing on mutual respect and “taking the high road,” are also discussed in detail. This chapter is about taking the high road in life; taking the high road is seen as consistent with the goals of positive psychology.

Happiness, Gratitude, and Love

This chapter focuses on three of the core topics that are studied by positive psychologists: happiness, gratitude, and love. Each of these concepts has been the target of extensive research conducted by evolutionary psychologists. As such, we can now understand the ultimate factors that underlie these topics quite well. Happiness can be understood as an emotion that evolved largely to motivate people to move toward stimuli that facilitate survival or reproductive success. Gratitude evolved in connection with our strong tendencies toward reciprocal altruism, helping people keep positively connected to others in small social groups. And love evolved largely because human infants are quite helpless and thus benefit strongly from biparental care. The evolutionary analyses in this chapter are detailed and help shed light on the inner workings of each of these concepts.

The Political Ape

This chapter describes social-coercion theory as conceptualized by Paul Bingham and Joanne Souza. This theory, which pertains to the evolution of human uniqueness, helps us understand how humans evolved to coordinate social activities in small non–kin-based groups. The tendency of humans to form such coordinated alliances is a foundational part of our evolutionary history that sets us apart from other apes in important ways. Further, this theory can help us understand the emergence of democracy and egalitarianism as basic aspects of the human social world. Understanding the principles that underlie this theory can help us understand factors associated with positive functioning in human communities.

Ape Out of Water

A core concept in the discipline of positive evolutionary psychology pertains to evolutionary mismatch. Evolutionary mismatch exists when the current environment of an organism is somehow inconsistent with the ancestral conditions that existed during the evolutionary history of that organism. Modern human environments differ dramatically from the conditions that surrounded our nomadic ancestors, who spent thousands of generations in the African savanna in small social groups. This chapter describes the issue of evolutionary mismatch in detail and then provides several examples of mismatch that adversely affect life for so many of us on a daily basis. Such issues include mismatches regarding diet, exercise, and the nature of our modern social worlds.

Examples of Positive Evolutionary Psychology

To introduce the approach that positive evolutionary psychology takes and to demonstrate how multifaceted it is, this chapter introduces several clear examples. Each example addresses some aspect of living that could be improved, and then it uses evolutionary principles to shed light on the issue. Specifically, this chapter focuses on better understanding love, reciprocity in relationships, and gratitude—each of which has been the subject of work in the field of positive psychology. In this chapter, each of these concepts is dissected through an evolutionary lens, providing insights into the ultimate factors that underlie each of these critical substrates of human happiness.