Ultimate causation in evolved human political psychology: Implications for public policy.

Abstract

Evolutionary psychology has made enormous progress in understanding how individual and kin selection shape our sexual and family behaviors. In striking contrast, our understanding of the evolution of our uniquely massive scale of social cooperation (kinship-independent; subjectively, the "public" sphere) has been seriously incomplete. We briefly critique theories of human social evolution to identify specific limitations. We then review and expand a specific theory of the evolution of the uniquely human public domain. This theory is coherent and well-supported empirically. Moreover, this theory has the broad predictive fecundity not displayed by earlier, less complete theories. For example, we can predict/account for both individual human novelties (speech, cognitive virtuosity, etc.) and the salient features of the human historical record through the present. We argue that our discipline can now catalyze the long-sought unification of the social and natural sciences. Further, this new theoretical power allows us to understand and address diverse elements of contemporary human welfare with substantially improved clarity. We argue that evolutionary psychology is now robustly positioned to contribute to formulation of potent local and global public policies that can build and sustain a very substantially improved human future. We explore specific examples of such policy implications.

Threat is in the Sex of the Beholder: Men Find Weapons Faster than do Women

“…The ultimate roots of attention to weapons are less certain. Social coercion theory ( Bingham and Souza, 2009 , 2012 ) proposes that projectile weapons, in particular, played a crucial role in the evolution of human sociality. If correct, this would make weapons—wielded weapons in particular—extremely salient social stimuli.…”

“…If attention is driven by salience and relevance, in the absence of a specific benefit afforded by fast detection, then social coercion theory may predict the observed sex difference if men bear the majority of the responsibility for using violence, or the threat of violence, to enforce pro-social behavior. Additionally, if the attention bias for weapons is intimately linked to said weapon's coercive potential, we may expect a systematic difference in responses to weapons that can be launched from a distance (central to the low-cost of weapons-enforced social coercion; Bingham and Souza, 2012) such as guns, and those that must be used in direct combat such as knives. According to social coercion theory, the fastest response times and highest caution would be predicted in response to distal rather than direct weapons.…”

“…Social coercion theory ( Bingham and Souza, 2009 , 2012 ) postulates a pivotal role for weapons in the evolution of human sociality and, ultimately, in the emergence of many uniquely human behaviors ( Okada and Bingham, 2008 ). The capacity to wield and launch (manually) projectile weapons facilitated a uniquely low risk method of violent social coercion: the credible threat of co-operative attack by many, from a distance, on a lone social offender.…”

Disciplinary unification of the Natural Sciences, the Humanities, and the Social Sciences: Adapted minds and strategic approaches to consiliences

“…In developing what has come to be called social coercion theory, the authors have argued that all the human properties considered unique to us emerge as adaptations to a single adaptive novelty, our unprecedented vast expansion of kinship-independent social cooperation. Moreover, this novel social adaptation, in turn, has a single, simple cause: The ancient evolution in our lineage (for the first time on Earth) of the capacity to costeffectively manage individual conflicts of interest through access to inexpensive coercion (Bingham & Souza, 2009;Bingham & Souza, 2012;Bingham, Souza & Blitz, 2013;and references therein). It follows that the human knowledge enterprise lives at the interface between our conflicting individual interests and the management of those conflicts allowing our social groups to form and function.…”

Evolutionary awareness: Darwin among the organizational sciences

“…Evolutionary medicine (Nesse, 2001;Stearns and Koella, 2007), for example, now recognizes that many frailties of human body are due to "mismatch diseases," referring to "diseases that result from our Paleolithic bodies being poorly or inadequately adapted to certain modern behaviors and conditions" (Lieberman, D.E., 2013, p. 168). Other fields that have more or less embraced the Darwinian view of the human species include education (Wilson et al, 2011;Aldrich, 2013), economics (Seabright, 2010;Reuter and Montag, 2016), history (Smail, 2008), linguistics (Christiansen and Chater, 2016), literature (Carroll, 2004), sports science (Apostolou, 2015), political science (Thayer, 2004, Lustick, 2005 and public policy (Manner and Gowdy, 2010;Bingham and Souza, 2012). Commensurate benefits are long overdue in the organizational sciences.…”