Evolutionary Advantages of Being Social

• Humans are social beings that seek connections with others.

Evolutionary Advantages of Being Social

• Easier to find more food.
• Easier to mate and reproduce.
• Ability to alert each other to danger.
• Care for the sick and injured.
• Need for complex and powerful brains.

Social Brain Theory

• Animals with bigger brains tend to live in larger, more complex social groups.
• The human brain evolved to enable humans to have tight, rich, complex social lives.
• Social animals, including humans, accomplish things through interactions.

Social vs. Cultural Animals

• Social animals seek connections with others and prefer to live, work, and play with others.
• Cultural animals, specifically humans, possess rich and powerful cultural systems.
• Culture is the essence of what makes humans human.

Culture and Nature

• Focuses on nature, nurture, and social behavior.

Psyche

• Broad term encompasses mind, emotions, desires, perceptions, and other psychological processes.

Nature and Culture Shaping the Psyche

• Explores why people are the way they are.

Definition of Nature

• Physical world, including its laws and processes.
• Includes trees, animals, gravity, birth, and death.
• Helps explain human behavior patterns.

Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution

• Focuses on how people change in nature.
• Driven by the need to prolong life.
• Change from one generation to the next.
• Natural selection determines which traits will disappear and which will endure.

Key Concepts in Evolution

• Survival involves living long enough to reproduce.
• Reproduction involves producing babies that also produce.
• Mutation involves a new gene or combination of genes.

Definition of Culture

• Shared ideas create a strongly oriented brain toward shared ideas.
• Functions as a social system networking network, linking many different people.
• It is praxis, involving shared ways of doing things.
• Information, and meaning, involves using language to encode and share information.

Interaction of Nature and Culture

• Nature and culture interact to influence individuals.
• Many cultures require boys to prove themselves before they claim to be men.
• Girls grow up to be women.
• Loss of manhood is failing to provide for prefamily.
• Womanhood is regarded as a biological achievement.
• Manhood requires cultural achievement.
• People are different, both within and between cultures, though more similar in other aspects.
• Most people love their children, try to get enough to eat, and make distinctions between right and wrong.

The Duplex Mind: Two Systems

• Automatic System: Operates outside of consciousness, performs simple operations, and is always on, even in sleep.
• Deliberate System: Operates mainly in consciousness and turns off during sleep.

Purpose of Consciousness

• Increased focus on the automatic system.
• Ability to learn, think, choose, and respond.
• Has ideas and emotions and knows "self" and other people.
• Involves complex thought and logical reasoning.

Key Features of the Two Systems

• Deliberate: Slow, controllable, guided by intention, flexible, good at combining information, precise, can perform complex operations, and does one thing at a time with reasoning
• Automatic: Fast, outside of conscious control, unintentional, inflexible, poor at combining information, estimates, performs simple operations, can do many things at once, and relies on intuition.

Distinction in Processing

• Effortful vs. Effortless: Automatic System is effortless, while the other involves quick feelings of like and dislike.
• Dependence: Automatic System can be independent but the other depends on automatic processing.
• Problem-Solving: Involves figuring things out or going with a gut feeling.

How They Work Together

• The automatic system makes conscious thought possible.
• It may also signal to the deliberate system that something is wrong.
• The deliberate system can suppress automatic urges.
• Cultural norms, laws, and morals are essential.

Social Acceptance

• Gaining social acceptance is a basic job of the human self.
• People learn to work within cultural boundaries.
• Swearing and picking your nose were unacceptable in the Victorian era.
• Swearing is often accepted today, but picking your nose is not.

Nature vs. Culture

• Nature says go, while culture says stop.
• Nature includes impulses, wishes, and automatic responses.
• Culture teaches self-control and restraint.

Exceptions to the Rule

• Nature's disgust reactions result in no or stop.
• Cultural timetable exist for meals.
• Culture says go around lunchtime, but nature says stop when full.

Trade-Offs

• Occur when individuals cannot have it all.
• Involves a choice that is clearly the best in every respect.
• Includes time dimensions.
• Considering current benefits vs. future benefits.
• Studies of delayed gratification have been performed.
• Sacrificing the present for a future payoff.
• Animals like chimps typically don't do this and are fed once a day.
• Haven't learned to store food.

Putting People First

• Human senses vary from other animals.
• Dogs hear many things humans cannot, but they don't hear as precisely as humans do.
• Sense organs have a trade-off between detection.
• The artificial ones, such as cameras, can see and resolution.