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Evolution and
the Social Mind
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The Evolution of Culturally
Diverse Social Psychologies
A Presentation by Alan Page Fiske
Department of Anthropology
University of California at Los Angeles
May 15, 1998 at 12:30 - 2:00pm
Anthropology Department, HSSB 2001A
Abstract
The Evolution of Culturally Diverse Social Psychologies
All evolved adaptations are environmentally contingent, consisting
of adaptively differentiated responses to different environments. The most
distinctive, powerful human adaptation is the capacity for complex, varied
social coordination. Human fitness depends on close coordination of social
action with people in the communities and networks in which the person
interacts. These communities differ substantially in their social organization,
a fact which requires humans to be capable of participating effectively
in a wide variety of forms of sociality. The capacity to create and coordinate
these diverse social arrangements depends on, and in turn requires, a set
of evolved, highly structured psychological potentials. These structured,
motivated potentials I call "mods" because they are the modifiable, often
modular, motivated, generative mediators of human sociality. These mods
require and depend on cultural complements; they have evolved in conjunction
with a range of cultural complements, which they in turn enable. (Mods
hence constitute the environment for cultural selection.) Mods permit culturally
diverse yet highly motivated, closely coordinated social interaction. Indeed,
mods have been selected to do this: the diversity of socialities that mods
enable is the major factor which has made them so adaptive. I illustrate
and support this theory with evidence regarding (1) language; (2) the four
elementary relational models; and (3) major sex and food taboos that are
linked to the strongest forms of Communal Sharing relationships.
For further background, see An
introduction to relational models theory and a summary of related research.
Alan
Page Fiske
Alan Fiske received his Ph.D. from the Committee on Human Development
at the University of Chicago, was in the Peace Corps in the Upper Volta,
has been a professor in the Psychology Dept. of the University of Pennsylvania,
and is presently an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology
at UCLA.
Selected
Publications:
A. P. Fiske. Relativity within Moose ("Mossi") culture: Four incommensurable
models for social relationships. Ethos 18:180-204, 1990.
A. P. Fiske. Structures of Social Life: The Four Elementary Forms
of Human Relations. New York: Free Press (Macmillan), 1991.
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Evolution and
the Social Mind
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