by Roger Bourke White Jr., copyright September 2017
The assignment has been late appearing so this is my personal choice as a topic.
How Evolution mixes with Social Psychology
To support your response please provide an example from the media of a social problem that you believe is important. How might Social Psychology be applied to address this issue?
Length 2-3 pages
Start with premise that we are evolved.
If so, we are here, each of us, because we have a trillion ancestors who were winners -- winners in the sense that they had lots of grandchildren. They passed what I call The Grandchild Test.
There were many ways to pass this test, which is why we have so many species on Earth today. But, what each of those species have in common is they are well adapted for life on Earth today. Again, we are all here because we are all the grandchildren of winners.
Take this the next step: Not only are our bodies well adapted, our thinking is well adapted as well.
Now comes the "yes, but": evolution takes time. It takes roughly a thousand generations to produce a successful mutation and spread it through the species.
For the social psychology environment this means human thinking is well adapted to the Stone Age environments, not the modern technological ones we are currently living in. The result: there are times when our current thinking patterns produce head-scratching results when trying to cope with modern problems.
Thinking is computing. Complex computer networks have a hierarchy of activities and a hierarchy of communications systems to coordinate these activities. An example of this being the internet communication system with the TCP/IP protocol connecting the diverse elements.
I propose some protocols for the human thinking system.
o reflex -- this thinking handles the basic fundamentals such as letting muscle sensors talk to muscles so they can hold limbs steady. This level is simple and fast. This level can learn, an example of this is learning to digest new kinds of foods.
o habit -- this level controls activities which are well practiced and well understood. An example of this is how little we think about our motions when we take a shower. Instead of thinking about the cleaning activities we are thinking about the activities that will start after the shower ends.
o morality -- this controls complex activities that we have experienced and "made up our minds" about. This also includes "sports thinking" the thinking we use when we are playing sports we have mastered. This is complex thinking, but it practiced so it happens quickly.
o judgment -- this is the learning level. When we encounter new activities and new circumstances we use judgment level thinking to deal with the issues. Judgment thinking is slow and clumsy. It is learning thinking. We use a whole lot of it in childhood, and less and less as we grow up and our world becomes a familiar place. Judgment thinking is important because it is the part of thinking that deals with new and strange situations.
This is the "thinking stack" I work with when I try to explain how human thinking adapts to the various environments we encounter. Next comes an example.
Judgment thinking is slow and produces clumsy results. But it handles novelty. Now... suppose a novel situation comes up, but it is both very scary and requires a fast response? The classic example of this is: you're in a school room and you smell smoke! There's a fire!
This is novel so Judgment has to handle this, but it does so by trying to imitate Morality layer speed. It does this by focusing down and ignoring everything that doesn't seem essential to solving the crisis.
Two common solutions to the room filling with smoke situation are to sit there and wait (nothing better comes to mind) or get up and run for the nearest door. Some action! Yeah! ...but what if that is the door to the closet? Both of these solutions are "blunder" solutions. They seem good to the person doing them at the time, but to the cool-headed viewer with time to think about the situation they look like crazy solutions.
Avoiding this particular panic situation is why schools conduct fire drills. Once this has been practiced a bit, it is no longer novel, and Morality layer can take over and things will happen more rationally. This becomes sport thinking rather than novel thinking.
This basing human thinking on a foundation that is a combination of evolution and computer science can produce some interesting explanations of why we think the way we do. And it can produce some interesting forecasting of how we will think and act in future situations.
It makes for some satisfying social psychology.
--The End--