Psychology's Influence on Culture
Bridge Paper & Research
Hannah Staats
December, 2014

Biological evolution is a response to adaptive problems, sets of environmental conditions an organism must overcome to reproduce. This is an idea that goes back to Darwin and his lizards, and has provided structure for study in fields of science from bacteriology to astronomy. Psychology is not excluded from this influence. While it has been slower than other disciplines to adopt this new theory and leave behind centuries of more philosophical theorizing, studying the environmental conditions that shaped the evolution of the human mind is essential to understanding the mind itself. As Cosmides, Tooby, and Barkow write in their introduction to The Adapted Mind, “by understanding the selection pressures that our hominid ancestors face...one should be able to gain some insight into the design of the information processing mechanisms that evolved to solve these problems. In doing so, one can begin to understand the processes that underlie cultural phenomena as well” (9).  

Perhaps a definition of “culture” itself is due. Humans, along with many other species, have evolved to rely on a support system for survival-- having a community to go to for resources rather than fending entirely for yourself is certainly advantageous not only to the individual organism but to the species as a whole. The community serves as a safety net to fall back on, granting the freedom to pursue matters beyond basic needs to science, art, and philosophy. Eventually, by dedicating resources to matters beyond our basic needs, we design more sophisticated means to meet them in the first place. At that point, it is not only the biological mechanisms of the brain that are evolving, but the cultural creations of the mechanisms themselves. One could argue that it is this sophistication that sets humans apart from other animals, and that this is what constitutes culture. If this is true, then in the terms of an evolutionary psychologist, culture is constructed by the evolved processing mechanisms of our minds working as a system; it is a collective response to adaptive problems. This course of thought, according to Henry Plotkin, should be the discipline of evolutionary psychology’s next pursuit (271).

However, the study of our psychology is often constrained by culture. Historically, philosophy was the all-encompassing pursuit of knowledge, but eventually science and religion branched off and became their own fields of study. There has always been resistance to the connecting the subjects of the humanities and the sciences, and this continues as psychology branched off from philosophy. In this way, a construct of our minds sets the parameters for our understanding of our minds. It can be further proven that this effect comes full circle: understanding of our minds contributes to the evolution of this construct of culture.

Our mental functions are dual: unconscious and conscious. Our conscious addresses the abnormal, the breaks in the pattern of our day to day experiences, while the unconscious takes over things we have established as routine. This uses much less energy than it would take to be consciously focused on every detail, every task, every specific function. The interesting thing, though, is the seemingly obvious: our unconscious, by definition, is not noticeable to us. As Shankar Vedantam writes in his book The Hidden Brain, “No matter how much you learn about the hidden brain, you will never feel it manipulating you... that is the way your brain is designed. To become otherwise does not mean liberation. It is to become something other than human.” So despite centuries of study, despite all effort towards total understanding of our psychology, it would seem the biological evolution of our psychology itself prevents us from ever completing this understanding, that this constraint is in fact definitive of the human nature. In fact, delusions are fundamental: unrealistic optimism, overly positive views of self, and exaggerated perceptions of control are major illusions that define whether or not a person is normally functioning (Taylor and Brown).

This duality of the mind provides other obstacles as well. Revisiting the concept of mental functions evolving to address adaptive problems, we see that once these functions become familiar and new adaptive problems are introduced and gain priority, the old functions continue but lose our attention and happen unconsciously, in order for us to focus on the unfamiliar. Consequently, unconscious functions would seem to map our evolution and our ability to give attention to higher issues. However, as we evolve as a species and adapt to new problems, many of the old disappear or become irrelevant in the context of modern cultural adaptations. Despite the fact that their corresponding mental functions are no longer applicable, these remain, because they had long been unconscious and instinctive. This can lead to some gross misjudgements.

On March 13, 2002, a Indonesian tramp tanker called the Insiko 1907 caught fire to its diesel cargo and drifted toward Hawaii. By April 2, a cruise ship spotted the ship, diverted course and rescued the crew. However, as the ship steered back toward Hawaii, the crew realized they had left the captain’s puppy behind. A crew member called the Hawaiian Humane Society, who called the U.S. Coast Guard, who determined they could not use sixty to eighty thousand taxpayer dollars to save a dog from international waters. Word got out to the press, and all at once checks were sent to the Humane Society from all over the U.S. After what seemed to be a prolonged struggle to the anxious American people, the rescue mission was completed on May 2. While Pamela Burns, president of the Hawaiian Humane Society, remarked the dog’s rescue was purely altruistic and a reminder of the extraordinary empathy of the human nature, shortly afterwards, genocide in Darfur was met with no such remarkable generosity (Vendantam, 248). Vendantam claims the cause to be what he calls the “telescope effect”: evolution has shaped us to be biased toward our kith and kin. We are programmed to focus on the good of the few and not the good of the many. However, the evolution of our culture has brought us to a point where we are now aware of suffering on mass scales around the world, even as our moral telescopes have not evolved to these staggering numbers, this global perspective.  These sort of miscalculations happen not only on personal level, but are built into our cultural institutions as well.

We design aspects of our culture to reflect the functions of our minds. Instead evolving our psychology to address the adaptive problems of an environment, when we have control over our environment, we tailor it to fit to the mold of our brains, or map it (Carrol, 2). This is one major reason why the evolution of the human species reached a standstill since our hunter-gatherer stage (Atkinson, 239), being the dawn of culture, through which we design of our surroundings. While cultural media is the product of representational mapping, cultural institutions tend to be more deliberately designed and constitute functional mapping, otherwise, they would not succeed. As Cosmides and Tooby write, “The component parts of the populations are individual humans, so any social dynamics must be anchored in the models of the human psychological architecture” (Carrol, 152).

But even when this design is deliberate, it is flawed. In designing a cultural institution to reflect the workings of the mind, we are missing the working of the mind we are unaware of, the ones we do not control: our unconscious bias. “Many of the institutions in our society...are premised on the notion that deliberate and conscious thinking are all the matter” writes Shankar Vendantam (66). Judicial systems rely on the infallibility of a witness’s memory and a cop’s judgement, disaster plans on the calm rationale of an endangered crowd, anti-racial discrimination projects on the impartiality of a class of preschoolers. Our options are dual: We can consciously design institutions based on what we innately know about ourselves-- conscious cognitive functions. Or we can consciously design institutions based on our innate knowledge along with what we don’t know without psychological study, what we are conscious of along with what we are unconscious of. While more difficult, it is essential: by consciously mapping our culture based in a complete understanding of our psychology, we can nurture and not constrain this understanding, and consequently, our biological and cultural evolution as well.

Works Cited

Barkow, Jerome H., Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby. The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary

Psychology and the Generation of Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Print.

Buss, David M. The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2005. Print.

Carroll, Joseph. Evolution and Literary Theory. Columbia: U of Missouri, 1995. Print.

Plotkin, Henry. "Evolution and the Human Mind: How Far Can We Go?" Naturalism, Evolution, and Mind. By D. M. Walsh. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 2001. N. pag. Print.

Robinson, Daniel N. An Intellectual History of Psychology. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin, 1995. Print.

Vedantam, Shankar. The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and save Our Lives. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010. Print.

Wheeler, Michael, and Anthony Atkinson. "Domains, Brains, and Evolution." Naturalism, Evolution, and Mind. By D. M. Walsh. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 2001. N. pag. Print.

 

Annotated Bibliography 

Barkow, Jerome H., Leda Cosmides, and John Tooby. The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. New York: Oxford UP, 1995. Print.

This book is a collection of original essays discussing the connections between evolutionary psychology and culture. Essayers were asked three questions: What selection pressures are most relevant to understanding the adaptive problem under consideration? What psychological mechanisms have evolved to solve that adaptive problem? What is the relationship between the structure of the psychological mechanisms and human culture? These essays are arranged in sections according to the cultural response to adaptive problem addressed, such as "Perception and Language as Adaptations".

Blanton, H., D. Axsom, K. P. Mcclive, and S. Price. "Pessimistic Bias in Comparative Evaluations: A Case of Perceived Vulnerability to the Effects of Negative Life Events." Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 27.12 (2001): 1627-636. Web.

Buss, David M. The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2005. Print.

Carroll, Joseph. Evolution and Literary Theory. Columbia: U of Missouri, 1995. Print.

Kurman, J. "Self-Enhancement: Is It Restricted to Individualistic Cultures?" Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 27.12 (2001): 1705-716. Web.

Plotkin, Henry. "Evolution and the Human Mind: How Far Can We Go?" Naturalism, Evolution, and Mind. By D. M. Walsh. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 2001. N. pag. Print.

One of 13 essays on the intersections of philosophy, psychology, evolutionary biology, and philosophy of science, this essay is a transcript of a presentation Henry Plotkin intended for a more general public. Plotkin discusses, in comprehensive terms, the origins of psychology and evolutionary theory, their eventual cooperation, and the implications of this new marriage for further study: how should evolutionary theory constrain or guide the study of psychology? What paths for study are opened to us now? Giving diverse examples of research approaches, including a study on birth-order effects and another on the origins of human culture, Plotkin shines light on these questions.

Robinson, Daniel N. An Intellectual History of Psychology. Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin, 1995. Print.

Daniel N. Robinson, philosopher, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Georgetown University and a Fellow of the Faculty of Philosophy, Oxford University, describes the history of the study of psychology. Chronologically, with chapters on each major period of psychological study, he discusses the progression of the subject in the context of the culture of the era.

Sedikides, Constantine, Lowell Gaertner, and Yoshiyasu Toguchi. "Pancultural Self-enhancement." Journal of Personality & Social Psychology 84.1 (2003): 60-79. Web.

Vedantam, Shankar. The Hidden Brain: How Our Unconscious Minds Elect Presidents, Control Markets, Wage Wars, and save Our Lives. New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2010. Print.

Wheeler, Michael, and Anthony Atkinson. "Domains, Brains, and Evolution." Naturalism, Evolution, and Mind. By D. M. Walsh. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge UP, 2001. N. pag. Print.

One of 13 essays on the intersections of philosophy, psychology, evolutionary biology, and philosophy of science, this essay discusses