Psychology 1000 Lecture 8: PSYCH first year chapter 4 part 4 continued notes

• School: Western University
• Department: Psychology
• Course: Psychology 1000
• Professor: John Campbell

Document Summary

Quick summary - what men and women want. Cooperation - situations in which one individual helps another and in so doing also gains some. Adaptive advantage clear - groups could accomplish more together than they could alone. Altruism: when one individual helps another, but in doing so he or she accrues some sort of cost. Explanations: behaviours that help genetic relatives may be favoured by natural selection. Having offspring isn"t the only way to ensure your genes are passed to future generations. Help relatives - who share some of your genes - produce offspring a helpful action is repaid at a later date by observers of the helpful individual. Small cost to the donor, no obvious gain to the donor, big gains to the recipient. Maybe the donor is repaid by his/her everyday companions. Our psychological mechanisms have evolved in ways that make us feel good when we do conspicuous good deeds.