From Evolved Motives to Everyday Mentation: Evolution, Goals, and Cognition

Abstract

introductionWalking across a crowding shopping mall, you may see a group of people who vary in their race, gender, attractiveness, clothing style, and demeanor. A similarly complex array of social stimuli confronts us at conferences, airports, farmer's markets, and college campuses. Rarely do we attend equally to all individuals in such complex social environments or to all characteristics of any given individual. Rather, we selectively direct our attention toward a smaller subset of individuals and characteristics. This selective direction of attention often occurs automatically, without conscious intent, and can have important consequences for subsequent thoughts and actions.Who do we attend to, think about, and later remember? And how are the answers to this question linked to our goals at the moment? We recently embarked on a program of research to explore the processes that influence the selective and automatic direction of perceptual and cognitive resources. In this chapter, we present a conceptual framework that begins to articulate the role that fundamental social goals play in governing these processes. We focus, in particular, on the ways in which self-protection and mating goals selectively facilitate attention toward people who have characteristics relevant to those goals. Integrating theory and research on selective attention processes, the influence of goals on social cognition and behavior, and ecological theories of motivation and social cognition, our

What have we been priming all these years? On the development, mechanisms, and ecology of nonconscious social behavior

“…Although research in this area is just starting, one would expect that selective attention would serve to reduce the number of potential priming influences at any given moment, with priming influences more likely to occur among selected than nonselected information. And it appears that not only one's temporary, current goal can have this influence on attention: Neuberg, Maner, and their colleagues (Maner et al, 2005;Neuberg, Kenrick, Maner, & Schaller, 2004) have extended Bruner's (1957) original insight from current goals to chronic, evolved motives (e.g., avoid germs and disease, sexual attraction); in an innovative and important line of research, they are showing that these fundamental, evolved motivations do drive selective attention and thus likely reduce for the individual the set of potential priming influences. (For other recent analyses of fundamental social motivations, see Fiske, 2004;Haidt, 2001;Tetlock, 2002).…”

“…A confederate in the elevator dropped some pens, and helping-primed participants were more likely than a control group to pick up the pens for the confederate-unless the pens were leaky and messy. Helping behavior in that case would conflict with a stronger goal to avoid dirt and contamination (see Neuberg et al, 2004).…”

On the Borders of Harmful and Helpful Beauty Biases

“…Neuberg, Kenrick, Maner, & Schaller, 2004;Kenrick, Delton, Robertson, Becker, & Neuberg, 2007) are relatively universal across cultures and ethnicities (Buss, 1989): Despite cultural differences in the importance of attractiveness (Anderson, Adams, & Plaut, 2008), persons from different cultures still regard attractiveness as a valuable criterion for mate choice (Buss, 1989;Chang, Wang, Shackelford, & Buss, 2011;Kamble, Shackelford, Pham, & Buss, 2014), so that across cultures, attractive opposite-sex persons tend to receive favorable social evaluations (Langlois et al, 2000).…”

The Individual ↔ Context Nexus in Developmental Intergroup Theory: Within and Beyond the Ivory Tower

“…Thus, one important question is how and why children come to view some rather than other human characteristics as bases for grouping individuals. We have argued that dimensions used for social-group categorization cannot be accounted for by evolutionary processes that hardwire people to distinguish humans along a few predetermined dimensions (e.g., biological sex or skin color) assumed to be relevant for reproduction and survival of one's kin group (e.g., see Neuberg, Kenrick, Maner, & Schaller, 2004;Schaller, Park, & Faulkner, 2003). Instead, we argue that humans have evolved to have a general and flexible cognitive system that seeks and processes information available in the environment to discover which human characteristics carry weight within their particular ecology.…”