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Grand Challenges of Evolutionary Psychology

Robert Kurzban

Published 2010 in Front. Psychology

ABSTRACT

SHARED CHALLENGES Researchers in evolutionary psychology face the same grand challenges as researchers who eschew the evolutionary approach in their own fi elds of study. Why, and when, do people behave altruistically? How do people make decisions, economic or otherwise, and what role do emotions play in decisionmaking? How do people choose their mates? How do people acquire information, from basic physical knowledge about objects and forces to important local knowledge about particular people and artifacts? How do these processes differ from – or resemble – learning processes among non-humans? How do the answers to all of these questions depend on properties of the individual, such as sex, life history phase, genetic endowment, developmental history, and context? And what are the physiological and neurophysiological substrates of the mechanisms that underlie all of these processes? Evolutionary psychologists share these challenges with researchers from other disciplines because the fi eld is not, of course, distinguished from others in terms of the domain of inquiry. Evolutionary psychologists study economic decision making (like economists), interpersonal and group dynamics (like social psychologists), cultural processes (like anthropologists), and endocrine effects (like physiologists). The questions evolutionary psychologists ask are not only our questions, and the methodological hurdles we must overcome are faced by our colleagues with nonevolutionary approaches because we share the same toolkit, from ethnography to behavioral lab studies to neuroimaging. What, then, are the challenges uniquely faced by evolutionary psychology?

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