Richting Miller's Costly signaling
Dit deel vraagt het heel consequent en vooral voor anderen inzichtelijk opbouwen van het betoog met daarin diverse concepten en (deel)theorieën, want dat zijn er nogal wat. Om het voor de lezer nog een beetje begrijpelijk te houden is het vooral van belang om de diverse deel- en minitheorietjes in een helder samenhangend geheel onder te brengen. Aan de orde komen nu:
- evolutieleer & seksuele selectie
- social contract theory
- theory of mind
- three different behavioural propensities
- costly signalling theory
- hyper systemising theory (Barry Cohen)
- Zahavi handicap principle
- Thorstein: The Theory of the Leisure Class’
- concept 'innate tendencies'
- White queen theory
- concept: 'reward seeking/punishment avoiding'
- concept 'empathic drive'
Bouwstenen voor betoog
- Evolutionary psychology is based on Charles Darwin’s legacy that the human brain and body have evolved by adaptive processes and by genetic drift. Evolutionary psychology holds that the human brain has many specialized mechanisms that evolved to solve the adaptive problems of our Pleistocene ancestors. Although much effort and time have been invested and sometimes even reputations were at stake, it was not until the recent rediscovery of in the 1970’s of Darwin’s views on natural and sexual selection to explain human behavior from an evolutionary perspective. Based on these findings we argue that a vision of the intricate workings of the human brain yielded a working hypothesis for predicting human behaviour in modern society.
- We support the evolutionary approach to human behaviour that behaviours of people today are present because in the evolutionary history of human species these behaviours were helpful and necessary for survival and reproduction. Therefore the evolutionary approach to explaining personality is to identify a common behaviour pattern and analyse how that pattern could have been adaptive (beneficial to survival and reproduction) during the development of the human species (Tooby & Cosmides, 1990).
- If we accept that our individual behaviour is partly genetically defined, then it is natural to extend these ideas to social areas. As the cell evolves in order to adapt to and control its world (evolutionary biology), and the mind does the same at a higher level (evolutionary psychology), so we can assume that society does so too (evolutionary sociology). Evolutionary sociology is the name given originally by Alexandra Maryanski (1992/ 2008) to encompass two kinds of evolutionary perspectives in the field of sociology: the application of such Darwinian approaches as sociobiology and evolutionary psychology to understand the biological foundations of human society, and the description and explanation of long-term social evolution. The first sociologists to take up the evolutionary challenge after Edward O. Wilson’s introduction of sociobiology (1975) were Pierre van den Berghe (1975) and Joseph Lopreato (1984), who concentrated on the role of biological predispositions interacting with social constraints. Both scholars situated these predispositions within the principle of inclusive fitness maximization, or the notion that much behavior can be understood as an organism's attempt to maximize its reproductive success.
- Millions of years shaped our behavior in the process of interacting with our natural and social environment, honing our ability to adapt to changing circumstances. We argue that he ability to understand and predict the behavior of others and being predictable, evolved over millions of years by natural and sexual selection and has become an innate human ability. Hence we searched for consistency in the predictability of human behavior and for scientific explanations of those patterns. Evolutionary psychology and sociology studies show that the basic emotions for survival and reproduction are the true foundation of our behaviour whilst reason only plays a minor part in our decisions and motivation. These findings deny the widely held belief in unique individual behaviour and support the arguments of our theory that predicting individual human behaviour is possible.
- The evolutionary Social Contract Theory (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992) outlined five possible cognitive capacities for forming social contracts and avoid the ever-present danger of cheating by friends and possible allies (Buss, 2004, p. 261). We agree with Cosmides & Tooby (1992) stating that the following unconscious abilities have become extremely important for humans during the early Holocene period: (1) The ability to recognise many different individual humans; (2) The ability to remember some aspects of the histories of interactions with different individuals; (3) The ability to communicate one’s values to others; (4) The ability to model the value of others and; (5) The ability to represent cost and benefits, independent of the particular items exchanged (Buss, 2004, p. 261-262). Supporting our argument is the current evidence that the detection cheaters and altruists points to the existence of distinct adaptations that facilitate the evolution of cooperation (Brown & Moore, 2000).
- ‘Esse est percipi’(To be is to be perceived), as the 18th century Bishop Berkeley once stated about ideas, is key to sexual selection. As extremely social primates humans continuously interact with their environment. Humans act in an intense social environment where social interaction is the paramount evolved psychological mechanism. Prediction of behaviour was fundamental to survival and procreation over millions of years and for that reason must have been hardwired in the brain. Consequently, predicting behaviour has become an innate mechanism in all individuals. Support for this view is the Theory of Mind Module (ToM) and the discovery of mirror neurons.
- Many of the most important adaptive problems that humans faced over the past several millions of years are inherently social in nature. The Theory of Mind (ToM) theory is of great social significance within the concept of understanding and predicting behaviour of oneself and others. ToM is a self-awareness and consciousness module that is a crucial adaptation in humans as part of a ‘social’ module.
- “Each person can look in his own mind, observe and analyze his own past and present mental states, and on that basis make inspired guesses about the minds of others” (Humphrey, 1987). ToM, as much as many more processing systems of the brain, evolved as a survival mechanism. For millions of years humans have been able to evaluate and predict the behaviour of other individuals.
- Predicting the behaviour of others is the innate ability to predict change. Following Baron-Cohen (2007: 499), change may be ‘agentive’ in nature or ‘non-agentive’. ‘Agentive’ is perceived in others by an individual to be self-generated or self-propelled (no apparent external cause) and the brain interprets this as agentive; another individual is acting as an individual with a goal. Humans have a high ability to ‘empathise’, understanding the detection of goal oriented behaviour of other humans. Baron-Cohen defines empathy as “the drive to identify emotions and thoughts in others and to respond to these appropriately (2002). It provides a way of making sense of the behaviour of others and a natural way of responding to others.
- Human behaviour is complex with a maximum variance, but the empathising system (ToM) has provided humans with inherited hardware, a toolbox for interpreting the complex social world without having to learn everything from scratch. Empathising and the neural circuitry have been extensively investigated (Baron-Cohen et al.,1999, Frith & Frith, 1999; Happé et al. 1996) and key areas include the amygdale, the orbito- and medial frontal cortex, and the superior temporal sulcus.
- Although other primates, especially the great apes, and cetaceans have found to possess the ability to empathise, human empathy is high relative to other animals. Goal detection (or intentionality detection, ID) is a fundamental aspect of how the human brain interprets and predicts the behaviour of others (Baron-Cohen et al. , 1994; Heider & Simmel, 1994; Perrett et al., 1985).
- Human beings have an innate drive to send messages about their main motivation telling other primates what to expect. We argue that analyzing non verbal communication is a reliable method for detecting unconscious motivation to be able to predict human behavior, that can be explained through the evolutionary principle of costly signaling of fitness indicators.