Unconscious Motivation(The Disease of Evolutionary

Psychology)

By Holly Herrick and Ryan Schmidt

Overview

Proposes that EPs want to exchange manifest images of motivations for latent ones

EPs believe that there is not a single unconscious drive with inclusive fitness as it’s direct goal; but rather groups of unconscious motivations have inclusive fitness as an indirect goal

Buller disagrees with evolutionary psychologists on how motivations influence the human psyche

Does not claim there are no hidden dynamics

“Why I think you do what you do”

Personal Psychology- “Explains behavior by appealing to the full range of thoughts, motives, knowledge and emotions that we attribute to persons in our daily lives”

Personal Unconscious - A persons beliefs of the motivation of another persons actions, even though denial of motives/actions

“How I think you do what you do”

Subpersonal Psychology- Explains the functioning of the other individual’s psychological mechanisms that compose the human mind

Subpersonal Unconscious- Physiological mechanisms that are used in these processes

Two Insights

Subpersonal Psychology- Increases in female sexual arousal around ovulation are due to higher levels of estrogen

Personal Psychology- Can explain the alleged drives that motivate behaviors; EPs adopt this theory of ideas

Components of fitness

Evolutionary psychologists use the EEA as a way to justify changing from manifest image to latent image

Adapted behaviors are components of fitness

Your conscious and unconscious goals presumably are linked to the kinds of activities that would have tended to enhance the fitness of your ancestors (evolutionary function of behavior)

“Mommy Dearest…”

Daly and Wilson believe EP is not a theory of evolution; however they also claim that Freud’s Oedipus Complex is based off of desire for secured resources rather than unconscious sexual desires

Exception

Infanticide does not always stem from reproductive fitness, but also come from desire for sexual stimulation

Darwinian Algorithm

For a Darwinian algorithm to produce an actual behavioral solution to an adaptive problem, an individual must possess some motivational state whose goal is (roughly) the solution for the adaptive problem

These algorithms tend to ignore motivational goals and focus on cognitive processes

Buller claims that you need both

X and Y

“If one has reliable information about how to obtain x, but lacks motivation to obtain x, having instead only motivation to obtain y, the information on how to obtain x will fail to cause x directed behavior”

“Unless one also believes obtaining x, will also result in obtaining y”

Case against Inclusive Fitness

Empirically inadequate

If men wanted to only maximize fitness, then why are modern reproductive behaviors/strategies practiced

This supports the Sociobiological Fallacy which views humans as “fitness maximizers”

Oops, I did it again…

“The man who slips out of the condom situation”

Due to humans advanced evolutionary stage, we should be better suited for achieving our unconscious goals

Baker and Bellis – Man who “accidentally” slips out of condom to leave it in the vagina

Psychological Mechanisms

-Two types of evolved psychological mechanisms,-Domain-specific and Domain-general

Evolutionary psychologists believe domain-specific module Buller believes these arguments demonstrate domain-specific

mechanisms are only a default assignment of problem solving

Consistent failures of domain-specific modules would result in a shift to domain-general modules

Simple Explanation

We possess no such unconscious motives

The manifest image we perceive, is the true motivation for our actions and behaviors

This avoids the sociobiological fallacy and inferring evolutionary latent motivations

This allows to accept Daly and Wilson’s claim: “Evolutionary psychology is not a theory of motivation”

Aspects of Evolutionary Psychology

Evolutionary psychology mistake one:EP views organisms as only striving to achieve adaptive goals determined by external standards of success for survival/reproduction without conscious awareness

Evolutionary psychology mistake two:“Views us, independently of evolutionary considerations, as having minds comprised of ‘goal directed mechanisms’”

Freudian Legacy

“If individuals are consciously aware only of their subordinate (motivational) goals, their superordinate (adaptive) goals must be unconscious; so their conscious goals are pursued only in order to achieve their unconscious goals”

“In order to…”

Goals involve the teleological expression in both psychological and adaptive contexts

Psychological/Motivational- “I went to the freezer in order to get the ice cream”

Adaptive/functional- “The male lion killed the cubs in order to bring their mother into estrus”

Psychological and Adaptive- “I went to the freezer in order to get the ice cream in order to satisfy my desire for something sweet”

Sociobiological Fallacy

The meaning of the phrase “in order to”, in the motivational context, differs from the meaning in the adaptive context

Motivational context- “x in order to y” means that a representation of y was a causal antecedent of x

Adaptive context- “x in order to y” is functional, meaning that y is an effect of x because of which x contributed to and ancestral reproductive success

Fallacy: “Conflating the adaptive function of a particular behavior with the motives that caused it”

The CureGeneral Level:

-Keep motivational goals and adaptive goals distinct-Motivational goals should be seen as evolved strategies that function to achieve adaptive goals

Motivational Strategy:-General motivational goals are seen in all humans, and are not merely used in accomplishing other goals, but are the results we wish to achieve through our actions

These motivational strategies are practiced in order to improve reproductive interests

Thus…

“The evolutionary part of evolutionary psychology does not lead us to replace our conception of human motivation with an alternative picture of what ‘truly’ motivates us to behave as we do; it simply informs us of how our manifest motives contributed to the fitness of our ancestors”

Evolutionary psychology concentrates on the external effects on the human psyche, and not the internal processes

Deflationary Picture of EP

“It brings evolutionary explanations of psychological traits into line with evolutionary explanations of non psychological traits”

“We should not attempt to explain some manifest psychological trait contributed to fitness by postulating additional, “hidden” psychological traits or processes; rather, we should explain it in terms of the operation of extrapsychological, ecological factors alone, just as we do in non psychological cases”

Deflationary Picture of EP (2)

It succeeds in avoiding the sociobiological fallacy

Distinguishes adaptive goals versus motivational goals

“This allows a motivational strategy a great deal of room for failure to achieve reproductive success in specific instances”

Deflationary Picture of EP (3)This picture,

well, this picture is just doodle, Hehe…

But really “this picture is fully compatible with all existing evolutionary psychological explanations”

Explanations involving unconscious motives will use the phrase “in order to” to link to a manifest motive. From there, one can functionalize the motivational “in order to” phrase

This results in a way that all references to unconscious motives can be purged from evolutionary psychological explanations, while still leaving these full explanations of psychological traits