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RE: When will psychology finally be recognized as a pseudoscience?
May 14, 2021 at 8:45 am (This post was last modified: May 14, 2021 at 8:47 am by The Grand Nudger.)
Here's the conclusion of that review on human cooperation -
Quote:We began by introducing five key features of human cooperation that challenge any evolutionary
account. To address these, we presented an extended evolutionary synthesis, which considers both
genetic and cultural evolution as well as their interaction, and evaluated leading hypotheses in light
of the available evidence. Now, let’s return to our opening challenges.
(1) Ultrasociality: Genetic evolutionary mechanisms, such as kin-based altruism and direct
reciprocity, may be adequate to explain cooperation in other animals; but, to tackle human
ultrasociality requires understanding our second system of inheritance—culture—and the
ways that it has altered our psychology, suppressed our reactive aggression, enhanced our
capacity for internalizing norms and driven our genetic evolution in several ways. Culture is
what has domesticated our species.
(2) Differences in the domains of cooperation: The domains of cooperation vary across
societies because, at least in part, social norms vary (e.g., for raiding, food sharing, etc.). If a
population has no social norms prescribing recycling, tithing, or tipping, people don’t
generally engage in such costly behaviors.
(3) Differences in the scale and intensity of cooperation across populations: The scale and
intensity of human cooperation varies dramatically across societies because it’s heavily
influenced by cultural evolution, driven by the effect of intergroup competition on
institutions. The intensity of intergroup competition has varied dramatically across
populations for a variety of ecological, climatic, geographic and historical reasons (Turchin
2015). This competition has selected for more prosocial norms and institutions and in some
cases, such as the Catholic Church’s weakening of kin-bonds (Schulz et al. 2019), operated
by undermining the effectiveness of lower-scale mechanisms.
(4) Rapid rise in the scale of cooperation: Beginning about 12,000 years ago, the origins of
intensive food production and the stabilization of global climates dramatically increased the
intensity of intergroup competition and began driving cultural evolution to scale up
cooperation (Turchin 2015). This process continues to this day.
(5) Non-cooperative and maladaptive behaviors sustained by the same mechanisms as
cooperation: Because cultural evolutionary mechanisms related to punishment, signaling
and reputation can stabilize any costly norm, even norms that are costly for both the
individual and group (e.g., female infibulation), non-cooperative and maladaptive behavior
can persist for long periods. Intergroup competition provides a process that filters out
group-damaging norms, but it can be slow and incomplete, especially when many such
norms are tightly intertwined with other important cooperative norms
Understanding the origins and psychology of human cooperation is an exciting and rapidly
developing enterprise. Those interested in engaging with this grand question should consider three
elements of this endeavor: (1) theoretical frameworks, (2) diverse methods, and (3) history. To the
first, the extended evolutionary framework we described comes with a rich body of theories and
hypotheses as well as tools for developing new theories, about both human nature and cultural
psychology. We encourage psychologists to take the formal theory seriously and learn to read the
primary literature (McElreath & Boyd 2007). Second, the nature of human cooperation demands
cross-cultural, comparative and developmental approaches that integrate experiments, observation,
and ethnography. Haphazard cross-country cyber sampling is less efficient than systematic tests with
populations based on theoretical predictions. Finally, the evidence makes it clear that as norms
evolve over time, so does our psychology; historical differences can tell us a lot about contemporary
psychological patterns. This means that researchers need to think about psychology from a historical
perspective and begin to devise ways to bring history and psychology together
Here's a link to the pdf , if it would be helpful.
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