Tag: evolutionary psychology

You Have No Idea How Much Your Brain Is Ignoring

The eye-opening science behind ‘inattentional blindness’ In an iconic study from 1999, Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris, researchers at Harvard University, used a gorilla costume as a prop to explore visual perception. Subjects were asked to watch a video and count the number of times players passed a basketball between a small, continually moving group of students. Partway…
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Is our psychology adapted for endurance?

According to evolutionary psychologists, at birth the human mind is neither a blank slate, nor a general-purpose computer, but is instead a set of highly specific, and evolved adaptive programmes (Cosmides & Tooby, 2013). Each mechanism within the brain has been shaped through natural, and sexual, selection, to solve the problems encountered within the environment…
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Endurance – are we just born with it?

The evolution of human running is  the evolution of humans… Evidence from evolutionary biology, physiology, and anthropology, has suggested that endurance running has been key, throughout human history, in the pursuit of prey. Key physiological adaptions have evolved over millions of years to benefit long distance running, from early hominins through to modern homo sapiens. Bramble and Lieberman…
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Darwin and the sports psychologist

In Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, Block and Dewitte (2008) discuss sport from an evolutionary perspective. They suggest that participation in sport, underpinned by social learning, has arisen out of signaling attractiveness for the purposes of courtship and that human sports are cultural and therefore learned rather than innate. Using the dual-inheritance theory (for others theories…
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Challenges for Evolutionary Psychology

Evolutionary psychology is nothing more than psychology viewed through the lens provided by evolutionary biology, based on the fact that psychological systems are part of the brain and therefore both physical and biological. According to Johnson (2017) adopting an evolutionary approach to understanding human psychology has been extremely fruitful in answering the ‘why’ questions, and…
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Does Evolutionary Psychology help us understand Endurance?

Evolutionary biology suggests that endurance running was important in the pursuit of prey, and instrumental in the evolution of hominins. According to fossil evidence, key physiological adaptions may have evolved approximately two million years ago to benefit long distance running. The relatively new field of evolutionary psychology, like cognitive science, identifies the human mind as…
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