Human Behavior and Cultures - Class 4

Human Behavior, Cultures, and Societies - Class 4

• Cognitive science focuses on how individuals process information, regardless of the ultimate goal.
• Key processes include detecting stimuli, analyzing signals (e.g., language), and making decisions.
• Social science examines how individuals interact and the aggregate consequences of those interactions.
• Understanding goals like safety, food, friendship, love, and status is crucial.
• Evolutionary theory is essential because goals are products of natural selection. A good understanding of natural selection is required.

Key Notions

• Life history trade-offs
• Adaptive (phenotypic) plasticity
• Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA)
• Ultimate and proximate causes
• Conflict of interest
• Evolutionary Stable Strategy (ESS)
• Intrinsic and extrinsic motivation

Rate of Evolutionary Change

• Rate of evolutionary change primarily depends on generation time.
• Species with shorter generation times evolve faster.
• Phenotypic plasticity evolves in species with a longer generation time compared to environmental change rates.
• Phenotypic plasticity is less useful for species that can adapt genetically quickly.

Why is that after all?

• Phenotypic plasticity is not favored when generation time is fast compared to environmental change.
• There are enough generations during stable environmental periods to favor specialized genotypes.
• Specialized genotypes outperform plastic genotypes because they are well-suited to current conditions, but plasticity comes with costs.
• Selection favors specialized genotypes in each environmental phase.

Evolutionarily Stable Strategies (ESS)

• No single "optimal" strategy can be defined in scenarios involving multiple interacting individuals.
• Game theory was introduced to biology to deal with such situations.
• Nash equilibrium describes a situation where no alternative strategy is strictly better against the resident strategy and, in turn, is unbeatable.
• A strategy is an ESS if there is no rare mutant able to increase in frequency by natural selection when fixed in the population.

Examples

• Feeding or checking for predators (with others): The optimal individual strategy depends on what others are doing (e.g., if everyone else is vigilant, I can afford to eat).
• Prisoner's dilemma: A classic game theory study that shows how individual self-interest can lead to suboptimal outcomes for the group, even under cooperation. Average payoff under ESS is less when cooperating.
• Snowdrift game: Similar to the prisoner's dilemma, cooperation is not always the best and is not always an ESS.

Negative Frequency-Dependence

• In some cases, the relative dominance of a strategy shifts based on how many individuals adopt a particular strategy.
• Cooperators are favored when they are rare, defectors are favored when they are rare. Intermediate frequency at equilibrium.

Proximate versus Ultimate Explanations

• Proximate explanations focus on immediate mechanisms (neural, hormonal) producing behaviors.
• Examples include feelings of satisfaction or motivations for cooperation.
• Ultimate explanations look at evolutionary functions and adaptive benefits of behaviors (e.g., reproduction, survival of kin).

Real Altruism

• How do we explain anonymous donations?
• Real altruism exists outside of simple reputation management, such as in buddhist philosophy.
• Intrinsic motivation to be altruistic exists and can be separate from reputation gains. Building an altruistic robot requires programming it to care genuinely about others, even when there is no immediate benefit or reputational reward.

Acts of Altruism Between Species

• Evolutionary mismatch may account for altruistic acts. Behaviors evolved to solve ancestral problems may be maladaptive now.
• The concept of evolutionary mismatch applies to species showing altruistic behaviors to each other which did not co-evolve.
• Whales and dolphins protecting humans demonstrate potential evolutionary mismatch issues.

Cooperation

• Three mechanisms for cooperation:
  • Kin selection (genetics)
  • Byproduct benefits (interest in cooperation)
  • Conditional cooperation (reputation)
• Cooperation is often highly conditional on specific situations and may not be instinctive in humans or simple.

Additional Study Topics

• "Toxic" relationships
• Religious rituals as cooperation filters

This quiz explores cognitive science and social science concepts focusing on human behavior, decision-making, and evolutionary theory. Key notions like adaptive plasticity and motivations are discussed, along with the impact of generation time on evolutionary change. Test your understanding of these fundamental principles in human behavior and societies.