Abstract"Hardwired" is a term commonly used to describe the properties of certain behaviors or brain regions. As its usage has increased exponentially in the past 50 years, both in popular media and the scholarly literature, the concept appears to have gained a cloak of respectability in scientific discourse. However, its specific meaning is difficult to pinpoint. In this paper, I examine how "hardwired" has been used in the psychological and neuroscientific literature. The analysis reveals two major themes: one centers on certain purported characteristics of behaviors or brain regions, such as fixedness; the other places these and other characteristics within an evolutionary framework.Overall, the analysis reveals a degree of overlap between "hardwiring" and the folk biology concept of innateness. Various complications arise from such overlap, casting doubts on the usefulness and legitimacy of "hardwired" in scientific discourse.Running head: "Hardwired" as innate 3 Introduction "Insofar as "biological bases" have replaced innate knowledge and structure in the vocabularies of many, they have inherited, so to speak, the implications of the earlier terms while legitimating them with the aura of methodological sanctity." (Oyama, 2000a, p. 6) It is a common refrain that human beings are "hardwired" for some types of behavior. References to "hardwiring" are found frequently in a variety of contexts and texts, not only magazines or popular books about psychology, but also plays and literary essays, typically within the overarching narrative of "human nature" (e.g., Stoppard, 2015;Wallace, 2005). For example, humans are said to be "hardwired" for prejudice (Wartik, 2004), morality (Tancredi, 2005), ripeness (Herbert, 2010), and relationships (Jap, 2016). The term has enjoyed a wide and enduring popularity in reference to sex (2002) remarked on the ambiguity of its meaning:"If "hardwired" means "a behavior that depends on brain wiring," then we need to ask, "As opposed to what? So far as is known, all behavior depends on brain wiring. If "hardwired" means "caused by genes," we have already seen unqualified versions of this idea wrecked on the shoals of developmental complexity. Sometimes "hardwired" is used to refer to a circuit that is not modifiable postnatally. Typically, this usage too is Running head: "Hardwired" as innate 4 problematic, since virtually all of a brain's functions are modifiable in one way or another … Perhaps there exists in some subculture a consistent, useful, and unambiguous role for the expression of "hardwired," but because it is so heavily encrusted with misconception and misdirection, it is preferable to see more precise terminology." (pp. 327-328; italics in the original).
INSERT FIGURES 1 AND 2 APPROXIMATELY HEREMore recently, Lilienfeld et al. (2015) too contended that its use should be dismissed, as "… growing data on neural plasticity suggest that, with the possible exception of inborn reflexes, remarkably few psychological capacities in humans are genuinely hard-wired, that is, in...