Robert C. Bolles and Evolutionary Psychology

1. Ninth Edition 15 Robert C. Bolles and Evolutionary Psychology

2. Darwin's Theory and Evolutionary Psychology • Natural Selection and Adaptations • First, there is natural variability within a species. • Second, only some individual differences are heritable. • Third (Buss et al., 1988):”Organisms with particular heritable attributes produce more offspring, on average, than those lacking these attributes.”

3. Darwin's Theory and Evolutionary Psychology • Adaptations • Defined as a physiological or anatomical structure, a biological process, or a behavior pattern that, historically, contributed to the ability to survive and reproduce.

4. Darwin's Theory and Evolutionary Psychology • Misconceptions about Adaptations • Evolutionary fitness, defined in terms of reproductive success, often does not depend on an individual’s physical fitness as we commonly think of the term. • It is also important to dispel the common notion that evolution has some ultimate goal toward which it is headed.

5. Darwin's Theory and Evolutionary Psychology • Misconceptions about Adaptations • Natural selection means that organisms possessing adaptive traits in a given environment will tend to survive and reproduce, period. • The current use of a biological structure for a specific purpose does not necessarily mean that the structure evolved for that purpose.

6. Robert C. Bolles (1928—1994)

7. Major Theoretical Concepts • Bolles on Reinforcement • Learning involves the development of expectancies. • Seeing lightning and expecting thunder exemplifies a S-S, expectancy. • Expecting to hear the sound of a bell when a doorbell is pressed exemplifies a R-S expectancy.

8. Major Theoretical Concepts • Innate Predispositions • Innate S-S relationship is when a young infant displays fear of a loud noise, suggesting that the infant expects a dangerous event to follow. • Innate R-S expectancies are exemplified by the stereotyped behavior many species of animals show in the presence of food, water, danger….

9. Major Theoretical Concepts • Contrast Bolles with the empirical principle of equipotentiality • Implies that laws of learning apply equally to any type of stimulus and any type of response. • Ignores the evolutionary history of a species.

10. Major Theoretical Concepts • Motivation Restricts Response Flexibility • Bolles placed great importance on the motivational state of the organism. • R-S expectancies are more limited because motivation produces response bias.

11. Major Theoretical Concepts • The Niche Argument • Bolles (1988): “animals have an obligation, an imperative, to learn this and to not learn that depending on their niche and how they fit into the overall scheme of things…. A learning task which capitalizes on an animal’s a priori predisposition to behave in certain ways is likely to be a glowing success. That is the niche argument.” (pp. 12–13)

12. The Biological Boundaries of Learning • Petrinovich and Bolles (1954): one group of rats turned left and a second group turned right in a T-maze. • Half of the rats in each group were deprived of water and were reinforced with water; the remaining rats were deprived of food and earned food reinforcement.

13. The Biological Boundaries of Learning • Petrinovich and Bolles (1954) • Results: Thirsty rats earning water reinforcers learned the task faster. • Why would the kind of reinforcer (food versus water) influence learning efficiency?

14. The Biological Boundaries of Learning • Petrinovich and Bolles (1954) • Second Experiment • Rats were again deprived of either water or food. They were reinforced with water or food, respectively, for whatever choice they initially made. • On the second trial, they were reinforced only for making the opposite response.

15. The Biological Boundaries of Learning • Petrinovich and Bolles (1954) • Second Experiment • Third trial, they were reinforced only for making a response opposite to the choice on the second trial, and so on.

16. The Biological Boundaries of Learning • Petrinovich and Bolles (1954) • Second Experiment Results • Hungry rats reinforced with food performed better at the task. • Why was water the better reinforcer in Experiment 1 and food the better reinforcer in Experiment 2?

17. The Biological Boundaries of Learning • Bolles explanation: The niche argument • Rats are foragers. • Their evolutionary history prepared them to look for water in the same place it was previously. Water is a stable resource. • Their evolutionary history prepared them to look for food in different locations. Food is a variable resource.

18. Petrinovich and Bolles (1954)

19. The Biological Boundaries of Learning • Escape and Avoidance • Species-specific defensive reactions (SSDRs) include freezing, fleeing, screaming, leaping up, and aggressing. • The closer the response required of an animal in an experiment is to what that animal would do naturally in that situation, the more readily the response will be learned.

20. The Biological Boundaries of Learning • Escape and Avoidance • Rats are not likely to learn lever press response to escape from shock.

21. The Biological Boundaries of Learning • Operant Conditioning and the Misbehavior of Organisms • Animal Behavior Enterprises. By using operant techniques, the Brelands were able to train a wide variety of animals to perform many different tricks

22. Misbehavior of Organisms • Brelands (1961) concluded, “It seems obvious that these animals are trapped by strong instinctive behaviors, and clearly we have here a demonstration of the prepotency of such behavior patterns over those which have been conditioned” (p. 684).

23. Misbehavior of Organisms • The Brelands called the tendency for innate behavior patterns gradually to displace learned behavior instinctual drift.

24. The Biological Boundaries of Learning • Autoshaping • Pigeon was reinforced at certain intervals, regardless of what it was doing, and if a disk was illuminated just prior to the presentation of the reinforcer, the pigeon learned to peck at the disk. • The question is, Why did the pigeon learn to peck at the disk when it had never been reinforced for doing so?

25. The Biological Boundaries of Learning • Conditioned Taste Aversion: Garcia and Koelling (1966) • Group 1: Bright, noisy water ->shock: Developed an aversion to the water • Group 2: Bright, noisy water -> nausea: No aversion to the water

26. The Biological Boundaries of Learning • Conditioned Taste Aversion: Garcia and Koelling (1966) • Group 3: Saccharin solution -> shock: No aversion to saccharin • Group 4: Saccharin solution ->nausea: Developed an aversion to saccharin

27. John Garcia—Discovered the Garcia Effect

28. Biological Behaviorism • Timberlake asserts that laboratory research in learning already makes accommodations for the natural propensities of species • Much lab behavior is over-determined. • Timberlake’s overdetermination principle is not a condemnation of instrumental and operant procedures. It is an important caution.

29. William Timberlake

30. Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior • We are still the product of thousands of years of evolution. • We sometimes display innate predispositions to attend to some stimuli rather than to others and to learn some kinds of expectancies more readily than others.

31. Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior • The Development of Phobias • Öhman and Mineka (2001, 2003) argue that some phobias are acquired rapidly because they are mediated by nonconscious, automatic learning processes. • We may learn fears about spiders and snakes differently than we learn fears about guns or identity theft.

32. Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior • Mate Selection • Buss and colleagues surveyed more than ten thousand people from thirty-seven diverse cultures to determine if there are universal features that are valued in potential mates.

33. David M. Buss

34. Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior • Characteristics Valued in a Mate • MALES AND FEMALES VALUE MOST HIGHLY • Kindness–Understanding Intelligence

35. Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior • Characteristics Valued in a Mate • MALES VALUE MORE THAN DO FEMALES • Good looks • Youth • FEMALES VALUE MORE THAN DO MALES • Good Earning Capacity • Industriousness

36. Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior • Mate Selection • Perhaps we find some people attractive just because they smell good to us. • (MHC) is a combination of genes that mediates many aspects of our immune responses–reflected in our body odor. • We prefer the scents of people with MHCs that are different from our own.

37. Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior • Language • Natural development of Creole languages from rudimentary Pidgin… without instruction. • Specific Language Impairment.