Category: evolutionary psych

evolutionary psych December 20, 2021December 16, 2021

Fear Of Spiders May Have Its Evolutionary Roots In Aversion To Scorpions

“But they won’t hurt you! They eat bugs. They’re our friends!” I’ve tried telling my now-12-year-old all these things many times over the years, but his fear of spiders persists. It’s hardly a rare fear; an estimated 6% of the general population suffer from full-blown arachnophobia. The leading explanation is that our ancestors evolved to fear spiders, and this has been passed on to us. But there are a few problems with this, point out the authors of a new paper in Scientific Reports.

Firstly: only 0.5% of spider species are potentially dangerous to humans. Secondly: these species are mostly found not in Africa, where modern humans evolved, but rather Australia and South America, the two continents that have been most recently colonised by people. Given this, the idea of an evolved, generalised fear of spiders doesn’t seem that compelling. Daniel Frynta at Charles University, Prague, and colleagues had another idea: perhaps we evolved to fear not “essentially harmless” spiders but a dangerous close relative with a similar body body plan: scorpions — and our brains over-generalise, reacting to spiders in the same way. To investigate this, they ran a study that would have left my 12-year-old with nightmares for months…

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Comparative, evolutionary psych, Personality February 24, 2021

Dolphins’ Personality Traits Are Surprisingly Similar To Our Own

By Emma Young

We’re all familiar with the “Big Five” model of personality, which measures the traits of conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, neuroticism, and openness. But what drove the evolution of these personality domains? And how do animal personalities compare with ours? Answers to the second question can help to answer the first. And now a major new study of personality in bottlenose dolphins, published in the Journal of Comparative Psychology, has found that in some key ways, dolphin personality is like ours; in others, though, it is not.

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Dating, evolutionary psych, Sex March 3, 2020March 11, 2020

Men’s Tendency To Overestimate Women’s Sexual Interest May Not Have A Direct Evolutionary Basis After All

By Emma Young

Introduce a single man to a single woman and the odds are that he will over-estimate how sexually interested she is in him, while she will under-estimate his sexual interest in her. This sex difference in misperceptions has been found by researchers time and again. The conventional explanation is that these are evolved adaptions — that’s it’s more evolutionarily costly for a man to miss a chance to mate with an interested partner than it is for a woman, and more costly for a woman to engage in sex with an uncommitted man than vice versa. But now a new study, published in Psychological Science, challenges this notion, and provides some alternative explanations.

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Emotion, evolutionary psych, Mental health June 25, 2019April 16, 2020

Psychologists Have Identified The Creatures We Find Most Scary And Revolting

By Christian Jarrett

You may be best advised not to read this article late at night or before you eat. Psychologists at the National Institute of Mental Health and Charles University in the Czech Republic have surveyed a large sample of non-clinical volunteers to gauge their reaction to 24 creatures that are commonly the source of specific animal phobias.

The results, published in the British Journal of Psychology, not only contribute to our understanding of animal phobias, but could prove incredibly useful to horror writers. Among the key findings is that spiders were unique in being both intensely fear- and disgust-inducing in equal measure. The researchers said this may be due to their mix of disgusting properties – including their “quirky ‘too-many-legs’ body plan” – combined with the fact they are “…omnipresent in our homes, often lurking in the hidden dark places and capable of fast unpredictable movement.” In other words, the intense fear arises in part from the prospect of coming into physical contact with a creature perceived by many to be revolting.

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Dating, Developmental, evolutionary psych, Sex May 7, 2019June 3, 2019

Researchers Say Growing Up With A Troubled Or Harsh Father Can Influence Women’s Expectations Of Men, And, In Turn, Their Sexual Behaviour

By Emma Young

The power (or powerlessness) of parents to shape their children for good or ill continues to preoccupy psychologists and the public alike. Among evolutionary-minded developmental psychologists, one specific idea is that girls’ later attitudes to relationships is influenced by their fathers’ behaviour. For instance, US research has found that girls with disengaged, harsh, and often absent fathers are known to start having sex at a younger age, and to have more sexual partners. However many questions about these findings remain. For example: might other aspects of the girls’ childhoods be involved; what about genetic effects; and which aspects of poor-quality fathering are the most consequential?

A new study of pairs of sisters, published in Developmental Psychology, provides some specific answers, particularly that it is contact with a poor-quality father, not paternal absence, that affects their daughters’ later relationships, including their expectations of men, and, in turn, their sexual behaviour.

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Dating, evolutionary psych, Sex March 13, 2019April 4, 2019

A New Study Supports Evolutionary Psychology’s Explanation For Why Men And Women Want Different Attributes In Partners

By Jesse Singal

When it comes to the heated subject of differences between how men and women behave, debate in psychology has centered on mate preferences and general interests. The available research shows that when it comes to (heterosexual) mating preferences, men are relatively more interested in physical beauty, while women are relatively more interested in earning capacity. As for general interests, men are more interested in physical things, while women are more interested in people.

Even the staunchest evolutionary psychologists would acknowledge these are partially overlapping bell curves: There are plenty of men who are fascinated by other people, and plenty of women looking for physical beauty in a partner above all else. Yet the findings have been met with fierce resistance in some quarters. One of the more sophisticated rejoinders is known as social roles theory: The differences do exist, but they’re entirely or largely the result of gender roles imposed by society on individuals. However, a new study released as a preprint at PsyArXiv and involving participants from 36 countries has failed to replicate a key finding that’s previously been cited in support of social roles theory.

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