PSY BEH 11C Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Human Accomplishment, Psychological Adaptation, Cultural Learning
22 Feb 2018
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
The power of the situation: april 4th, 1945 - us troops discover the first german concentration camp (ohrdruf, april 16th, 1945 - eisenhower forces nearby townsfolk to view the camps (ohrdruf & Why: the standard evolutionary psych answer, flintstones answer: stone age minds trapped in the modern world (mismatch hypothesis, yogi bear answer: we"re smarter than the average bear. Instead, genetic adaptations that allowed us to flexibly figure out how to deal with new environments were useful. In other words, the environment we became adapted to was change itself. Inuit flourished where explorers died: key: adaptive, culturally transmitted information, subsistence skills, specialized technology, extensive knowledge of arctic, social organization, culturally evolved adaptations, not just intelligence, allowed the inuit to flourish. The ability to transmit culture is our greatest psychological adaptation: requires: intelligence, theory of mind, but also: specific psychological mechanisms for learning and imitation.
