Evolutionary educational psychology is the study of how children's evolved learning and motivational biases influences their ability and motivation to learn in school. Evolved learning and motivational biases are organized around the domains of folk psychology, folk biology, and folk physics. There are also domain-general systems that comprise attentional control, working memory, and problem-so...

Adopting an evolutionary approach to the psychology of race bias, we posit that intergroup conflict perpetrated by male aggressors throughout human evolutionary history has shaped the psychology of modern forms of intergroup bias and that this psychology reflects the unique adaptive problems that differ between men and women in coping with male aggressors from groups other than one's own. Here ...

Dick Byrne is Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. He studies the evolution of cognition, and has investigated a wide range of animal capacities — vocal and gestural communication, deception, social comprehension, mental mapping, causal knowledge and the acquisition of novel manual skills. After training in cognitive psychology, he turned to primate f...

Sociobiology and its descendant evolutionary psychology (EP) have struggled to gain ground within the social sciences over the past 30 years. While some have heralded the Triumph of Sociobiology (Alcock, 2001), others have critiqued it as a poor approach to understanding human behavior and would prefer that a Darwinian perspective remain outside the domain of human social sciences. We attempt t...

The following reviews recent developments in the cognitive and evolutionary psychology of religion, and argues for an adaptationist stance.

ion chosen to escape the locally and historically particular and thus to describe human (or other species') "nature." In other words, the entities and processes of central interest to psychologists are hypothesized biological adaptations. As Buss aptly stresses, evolution by selection is the only known process capable of producing such adaptations. It follows that keeping abreast of conceptual ...

Cognitive neuroscience, the study of brain-behavior relationships, has long attempted to map the brain. The discipline is flourishing, with an increasing number of functional neuroimaging studies appearing in the scientific literature daily. Unlike biology and even psychology, the cognitive neurosciences have only recently begun to apply evolutionary meta-theory and methodological guidance. App...

A comparative evolutionary psychological perspective predicts that species that recurrently faced similar adaptive problems may have evolved similar psychological mechanisms to solve these problems. Sperm competition provides an arena in which to assess the heuristic value of such a comparative evolutionary perspective. The sperm competition that results from female infidelity and polyandry pre...

Evolutionary psychology is an emerging paradigm in psychological science. The current article introduces this framework to marketing scholars and presents evidence for its increasing acceptance within the social science community. As a result, a case is made for the application of evolutionary psychology to marketing, and especially consumer behavior. Application of the evolutionary framework i...