Handbook of Theories of Social Psychology

Collection: Volumes 1 & 2

Paul A M Van Lange,Arie W Kruglanski,E Tory Higgins

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781473971370
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Social Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Providing a comprehensive exploration of the major developments of social psychological theories that have taken place over the past half century, this innovative two-volume handbook is a state of the art overview of the primary theories and models that have been developed in this vast and fascinating field.

Authored by leading international experts, each chapter represents a personal and historical narrative of the theory?s development including the inspirations, critical junctures, and problem-solving efforts that effected theoretical choices and determined the theory?s impact and its evolution. Unique to this handbook, these narratives provide a rich background for understanding how theories are created, nurtured, and shaped over time, and examining their unique contribution to the field as a whole. To examine its societal impact, each theory is evaluated in terms of its applicability to better understanding and solving critical social issues and problems.

PART I

Biological/Evolutionary Level of Analysis

1

Evolutionary Theory and Human Social Behavior

Douglas T. Kenrick

ABSTRACT

From an evolutionary perspective, all the reactions people typically have to one another reflect the influence of psychological predispositions that helped our ancestors survive and reproduce. Any behavior can be understood at several levels of analysis, involving immediate triggers in the environment and the person’s current biochemistry, developmental experiences, and evolutionary analyses of the adaptive function of certain choices over others. The evolutionary approach is thus not an alternative to other approaches discussed in this book. Instead, researchers adopting this perspective attempt to integrate research findings on ongoing social cognition and interpersonal relationships with theory and research from evolutionary biology, anthropology, and cognitive neuroscience. This chapter reviews research applying evolutionary models to: (1) biases in information processing (such as outgroup stereotypes), (2) the influence of affect and motivation on the decisions we make about other people, and (3) how simple, evolved decision-biases contribute to social dynamics and the emergence of culture. From this perspective, the mind is a coloring book, rather than either a blank slate or an unfolding blueprint. The approach has implications for important everyday behaviors and social problems, and the chapter concludes with a discussion of some of those implications for research on prejudice and economic decision-making.

INTRODUCTION

Evolutionary social psychology begins with a simple assumption, namely that people’s interactions with one another are influenced by mental and emotional mechanisms shaped by natural selection. From this perspective, the way individual people think about one another, the way families, friends, and enemies feel about one another, and even the societies human beings construct, can be better understood by considering local social interactions in the broader context of other societies, and by considering all human societies in the still-broader context of other animal species. In a classic example of this approach, Charles Darwin suggested in 1872 that emotional expressions served an adaptive function – communicating one person’s motivations and intentions to others (e.g., overt expressions of anger reduce the odds of costly physical conflict; smiles increase the odds of cooperation). Along with physical features such as upright stance and opposable thumbs, evolutionary theorists assume humans inherit brains equipped with mechanisms for managing our movement through the physical world (e.g., seeing in color, discriminating sugars from poisonous alkaloids) and the social world (e.g., speaking languages, bonding between mother and infant).

Although the central assumption at the heart of the evolutionary approach may not sound controversial, there has been debate about the extent to which evolved mechanisms are involved in human social behavior (see Alcock and Crawford, 2008; Kenrick, 2006; Tybur et al., 2008). Psychologists have wondered about questions such as: how can researchers sort out the influence of evolved mechanisms from effects of culture or learning? Consider the difficulties involved in trying to determine why women in North America are less likely to commit homicides than men. That difference could be a product of evolved mechanisms, or a product of the fact that American women grow up seeing movies and reading books in which men are depicted as more violent, or seeing boys, but not girls, encouraged to fight. If one assumes that culture, learning, and evolved mechanisms interact with one another, such questions become rather complex, requiring inputs from many different fields of research. In fact, modern evolutionary theory involves the integration of a broad network of ideas and evidence from different disciplines, including evolutionary biology, anthropology, and cognitive science.

Despite their complexity, the questions raised by an evolutionary perspective involve profoundly important issues about human nature and society. An evolutionary perspective has implications for every domain of human social behavior, from altruism, friendship, and love, to aggression, prejudice, and stereotyping. Evolutionary social psychology involves questions that are not only theoretically interesting, but also immensely important in a practical sense, with implications for law, business, medicine, and political science.

ON BECOMING AN EVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGIST

My initial interest in the evolutionary perspective could be attributed either to a broad-ranging curiosity about nature, or, less nobly, to an inability to decide what I wanted to be when I grew up. As an undergraduate I started off in biology, switched to psychology, and then considered switching to anthropology. I started graduate school in clinical psychology, but in my second year of graduate school I got to teach a lecture class in general psychology. I discovered that, if I were to become a research psychologist, I could study artistic creativity and mindless conformity, parental love and homicidal violence, sexual attraction and racial bigotry, or any other topic that involves thought, feeling, or behavior. This array of choices didn’t require any premature foreclosures on my life options, so I decided to switch from clinical psychology to a research track in social psychology.

My conversion to an evolutionary perspective came two years later, as I was preparing for comprehensive examinations in social psychology. I should have been holed up in the library, reading all I could about experiments on dissonance theory, attributional processes, and objective self-awareness. But whenever I have a daunting amount of work to do, I develop intense interests in anything unrelated to the task at hand. In this spirit, I drifted into the campus bookstore and picked up a copy of Primate Behavior and the Emergence of Human Culture, by anthropologist Jane Lancaster (1975). This particular volume seemed comfortably outside the domain of experimental social psychology, so in my work-avoidance mode I felt compelled to buy it, bring it home, and read it. Lancaster’s book indeed had little to do with the questions my social psychology professors asked during my comprehensive examination. But I came to believe it raised many questions they should have asked.

Despite the fascinating range of research topics in social psychology, the scope of theory in the field was rather narrow at the time. Preparing for my comprehensive examination, I encountered a scattered disarray of unconnected small range theories, each independently advanced to explain a particular facet of social behavior. One mini-theory addressed frustration-induced aggression, another covered interpersonal attraction between people with similar attitudes, another addressed responses to one-sided versus two-sided arguments, and on and on. I missed the grand theories of personality and behavior I’d been exposed to during my clinical training, but when I mentioned this to the social faculty, they wagged their fingers and proudly informed me that social psychology was a “mini-theory” discipline.

Social psychologists at the time prided themselves not only on being theoretically constricted, but on being empirically narrow as well – studying anorexically thin slices of thought and behavior. Social psychologists in 1975 rejected the study of stable “traits” and focused mainly on people’s thoughts and behavior in response to the “immediate situation,” or at least those situations that could be captured within the half-hour duration of a typical psychology experiment. There were reasons for these strictures – experimental studies were designed to maximize control, and theoretical restraint was intended to cut down on rampant speculation about unobservable events inside the head or body – things scientists couldn’t easily observe and count. But to a curious young student interested in the roots of human behavior, those constraints seemed excessive. I was not alone in being troubled by these limitations. Indeed, social psychology was undergoing an “identity crisis” at that time, with several of the field’s leaders calling for an expansion of our theories and our research methods.

In this context, I took an almost guilty delight in glimpsing the very broad theoretical perspective suggested in Lancaster’s book on primate social behavior. Instead of a narrow focus on one or another aspect of the social behavior of the members of our particular culture under specific laboratory conditions, Lancaster’s evolutionary perspective offered a tantalizing suggestion – that we ought to erase the lines between psychology, biology, and anthropology, and consider how all these vast subjects fit together.

I began raving about Lancaster’s book to anyone who would listen. Some of my fellow graduate students and faculty advisors just gave me an uncomfortable smile, as if I was earnestly explaining why I had just joined a cult. But a new assistant professor named Ed Sadalla had just picked up a copy of a recent book titled Sociobiology (Wilson, 1975), which considered common evolutionary principles underlying the social behavior of animals from ants to humans. Sadalla suggested that the evolutionary approach had great promise for generating testable hypotheses about human behavior, and he already had one he thought we should test. As part of a process Darwin called “sexual selection,” females in many species choose males who have proven their dominance over other males, whereas males, with less to lose from an ill-chosen mating, tend to be less selective. Along with Beth Vershure, Sadalla and I began a series of studies suggesting analogous processes in humans. Although our results were clear and reliable across several experiments, it took us over a decade to publish them (Sadalla et al., 1987). As it turns out, we had unintentionally walked into an intellectual firestorm. There was an academic tumult surrounding sociobiology, which became the subject of a fascinating chapter in the history of science (Segerstrale, 2000).

The various controversies surrounding evolutionary social psychology were discouraging to many young researchers, but they have not been fruitless. Controversy often contributes to empirical and theoretical progress, as a theory’s proponents search for new findings to address critics’ skepticism. The evolutionary approach has generated many new findings and ideas, and the field’s top journals have since published hundreds of social psychological studies testing evolutionarily informed hypotheses about the whole range of social behaviors, from altruism to xenophobia (e.g., Griskevicius et al., 2007; Navarette et al., 2009; Schaller and Murray, 2008). Many of today’s prominent social psychologists, including several contributors to this volume, have incorporated evolutionary perspectives into their research (e.g., Brewer and Caporael, 2006; Cialdini et al., 1997; Deci and Ryan, 2000; Fiske et al. 2007; Higgins and Pittman, 2008; Huang and Bargh, 2008; Leary and Baumeister, 2000; Mikulincer and Shaver, 2006; Sedikides and Skowronski, 1997; Taylor et al., 2000; Van Knippenberg and Van Baaren, 2006; Van Vugt and Van Lange, 2006). At the same time, the approach continues to generate new empirical questions, and new theoretical puzzles to solve.

WHAT IS EVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY?

From an evolutionary perspective, all recurrent human social behaviors reflect the influence of physical and psychological predispositions that helped our ancestors survive and reproduce. This does not mean every individual social behavior is successful in promoting survival and reproduction, and it does not mean people (or other social animals) consciously think about survival and reproduction all, most, or even much of the time. It does imply that any social animal’s brain is composed, in part, of mechanisms that helped its ancestors succeed in interactions with other members of its species. Thus, humans’ reactions to other humans are presumed to reflect the influence of mechanisms shaped to solve the kinds of problems and opportunities our ancestors regularly encountered. I emphasize “reflect the influence” because an evolutionary approach does not imply that human behaviors are robotically determined by instinctive mechanisms over which we have no conscious control, or which are impervious to environmental inputs. People can and often do exercise control over powerful and fundamental emotional and motivational inclinations, including anger, fear, and sexual arousal. Furthermore, most mental mechanisms reflect the operation of flexible trade-offs, determined in interaction with current environmental conditions and past learning experiences (e.g., Ohman and Mineka, 2001). Although flexible, the influences of evolved predispositions (like hunger, thirst, sexual arousal, and anger) are nevertheless powerful vectors in our decision-making.

To understand the importance of evolved mental mechanisms, it helps to step back from our own species, and consider the interaction between other animals’ bodily features and their environments. Killer whales, for example, though related to cows, would not do well with a cow’s brain, since a killer whale’s brain must control a body that tracks prey in the ocean rather than eating grass in a meadow. Likewise, bats, though also mammals, need brains designed to run tiny bodies that fly around catching insects at high speeds in the dark. Because all organisms’ brains are composed of mechanisms evolved to deal with recurrent environmental threats and opportunities, evolutionary theorists ask: what are the implications of human evolutionary history (e.g., living in omnivorous and hierarchical primate groups populated by kin) for the design of the human mind? Evolutionary social psychologists focus on the subset of questions dealing with recurrent social conditions of human life, and their hypotheses reflect anthropological data about social interactions common in societies around the world (e.g., close relationships with family, dominance hierarchies, long-term bonds between parents, common dangers from other groups competing for resources and territory, etc.), as well as general principles derived from placing humans in the context of other species confronting diverse adaptive problems (e.g., Allen-Arave et al., 2008; Lummaa, 2007).

WHAT ARE THE ROOTS OF EVOLUTIONARY SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY?

Around the time I was studying for my comprehensive examinations in 1975, there was an explosion of interest in, and controversy surrounding, the evolutionary approach to human behavior, centered around E.O. Wilson’s book Sociobiology. But the perspective had been developing for some time, and represented the convergence of several streams of influence. A major contribution came from the field of ethology – the study of the behavior of animals in their natural habitats. In 1973, three European ethologists received the Nobel Prize for work on the adaptive significance of animal behaviors. One of them, Niko Tinbergen, experimentally studied how stickleback fish respond with complex behavioral displays to other sticklebacks (e.g., males demonstrate an aggressive display on seeing a red underbelly on another male, and the mechanism can be tricked by using “supernormal stimuli” – fishlike shapes with bright red paint on the underside). The second, Karl Von Frisch, demonstrated that bees engage in complex communications – informing other colony members about the location of nectar-bearing flowers. The third Nobel Prize-winning ethologist, Konrad Lorenz, conducted research on imprinting, the process by which young geese became attached to their mothers. Each of these lines of research demonstra...