136-287 Evolutionary Psychology and Cross-Cultural Explanations of Social Behaviour

Note

Available as 136-387 at 3rd-year level.

Credit Points

Prerequisites

This subject is intended to serve students in any of the social or other human sciences, including anthropology, psychology, cognitive science, criminology, social work, zoology, economics and sociology. Students should have completed a first year subject in at least one of those disciplines.

Semester

Contact

Subject Description

This subject examines whether the model of a multimodular mind proposed by evolutionary psychologists can help explain what people in different societies around the world do. Evolutionary psychologists argue that mind modules (neural circuits) solved recurrent problems that affected reproductive fitness in ancestral societies. The subject will briefly review the work of evolutionary psychologists, mentioning the main modules proposed to date, but concentrating on mate preference and cooperation modules. Using written and filmed examples of social behaviour from societies around the world (primarily small-scale societies in the Asia-Pacific region), the subject will discuss how, and if, an understanding of mind modules can be helpful in explaining social behaviour, and how anthropologists and other researchers in the human sciences can apply the work of evolutionary psychologists to help solve ethnological questions in culturally diverse societies. Students who complete this subject should: have a general familiarity with current research on the modular mind; have knowledge of relevant written and filmed ethnographic material; be able to critically assess evolutionary explanations of human social behaviour; be able to critically assess competing cultural explanations of social behaviour; be able to give testable explanations of what people do and why they do it.

Assessment

Essays totalling 3000 words and tests totalling 2 hours.

Prescribed Texts

• Axelrod R. 1990, The Evolution of Cooperation.
• Buss D. 1994, Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating.
• Daly & Wilson 1988, Homicide.