Blog posts tagged evolutionary psychology

Primative reward, computer brain models, evolutionary psychology, neurochemistry, mental health, and money.  In a "Hot Topics" paper from Sciencewatch, Wolfram Schultz talks (mp3 link) [great 10 minute audio file] about reward and behavior - some very interesting insights into a number of subjects not limited to happiness, economics, and utility theory.

There are no particular sensory receptors through which the brain is specifically informed about the occurrence of a reward event or object. Thus the brain cannot identify a reward from the activation of a neural "labeled reward line." The brain needs to extract the reward information through its own neural mechanisms.

To investigate this we need to define what a reward is, and this should be based on behavior. Ideally, the same definition would hold for vegetative rewards, like food, liquid, and sex, as well as for more elaborate rewards, like money that we use for daily decisions.

The paper describes some of the basic behavioral theories relating to reward, namely animal learning theory from experimental psychology, and utility theory from microeconomics. Through neuroscience it connects entirely different scientific disciplines.

If you are interested in a more digestable version of what Schultz's work touches on, Money magazine has a great article from 2002.

...Schultz studies the workings of dopamine, the brain chemical that gives you a "natural high." Dopamine is what makes you feel good when a stock you buy goes up, and neurons transmit that chemical to many parts of the brain, including the nucleus accumbens. The latest scientific discoveries about dopamine have huge implications for investing.

First, your brain loves long shots. The less likely or predictable a reward is, the more active your dopamine neurons become and the longer they fire--flooding your brain with a soft euphoria. "That positive reinforcement," says Schultz, "creates a special kind of attention dedicated to rewards. Rewards are what keep you coming back for more." That release of dopamine after an unexpected reward makes humans willing to take risks. Without it, explains Baylor's Read Montague, our early ancestors might have starved to death cowering in caves, and we modern investors would keep all our money under our mattresses.

The dopamine rush we get from long shots is why we play lotto, invest in IPOs, keep too much money in too few stocks and invest with active portfolio managers instead of index funds. It's why phrases like "the next Microsoft" or "the next Peter Lynch" make us whip out our wallets. Even if you've never experienced such a big score, you're wired to want them. Dopamine makes winning big feel vastly better than just winning--and the prospect of its euphoric effect prevents us from focusing on how small the odds of winning big actually are.

This week The Economist released a new story about a European collaboration of scientists who are trying to “explain religion.” The intersection of the religious experience and psychology takes many forms and has been a source of great interest, perhaps since humans developed language capabilities. William James, a seminal figure who spent a considerable amount of time analyzing the intersection of psychology and religion notes in his 1902 book, The Varieties of Religious Experience, that “Religion, whatever it is, is a man’s total reaction upon life.” For an excellent, albeit brief, NPR audio summary of Jame's life work, click here.

The Economist article does an excellent job framing a number of recent academic studies in this area, most of which are viewed from the lens of evolutionary psychology.

Explaining Religion is an ambitious attempt to do this. The experiments it will sponsor are designed to look at the mental mechanisms needed to represent an omniscient deity, whether (and how) belief in such a “surveillance-camera” God might improve reproductive success to an individual's Darwinian advantage, and whether religion enhances a person's reputation—for instance, do people think that those who believe in God are more trustworthy than those who do not? The researchers will also seek to establish whether different religions foster different levels of co-operation, for what reasons, and whether such co-operation brings collective benefits, both to the religious community and to those outside it.

The NY Times has an interesting article this week on the competitive advantage associated with anxiety and people who feel like a fraud. The theory of Evolutionary psychology is one theoretical approach to mental health which attempts to explain a number of psychological issues as the outcome of natural selection, where positive and negative traits are often mixed. In the article, Benedict Carey details how feeling like a fraud can compel you to perform better:

But the dread of being found out is hardly always paralyzing. Two Purdue psychologists, Shamala Kumar and Carolyn M. Jagacinski, gave 135 college students a series of questionnaires, measuring anxiety level, impostor feelings and approach to academic goals. They found that women who scored highly also reported a strong desire to show that they could do better than others. They competed harder.

By contrast, men who scored highly on the impostor scale showed more desire to avoid contests in areas where they felt vulnerable. “The motivation was to avoid doing poorly, looking weak,” Dr. Jagacinski said.

Yet if feelings of phoniness were all bad, it seems unlikely that they would be so familiar to so many emotionally well-adapted people.