Selectionist Models: Implications for Behavior
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Selectionist Models: Implications for Behavior W. Jake Jacobs1 and Paul R. Gladden2 1 Department of Psychology, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ, USA 2 Department of Psychology and Criminal Justice, Middle Georgia State University, Macon, GA, USA
Synonyms Action; Consequent; Context, Instrumental Behavior; Contextual Behavioral Science; Evolutionary Behavioral Psychology; Functional Behaviorism; Movement; Operant Behavior; Selection by Consequences
Definitions Instrumental Behavior
Coordinated movement of a whole living organism that, in the genetic and/or experiential history of the organism and the presence of cues correlated with the presence of a specific class of adaptive problem, caused
Behavior
systematic (predictable) environmental change. The “coordinated responses of whole living organisms to. . .stimuli” (Dugatkin 2014, p. 7).
Introduction “If you root yourself to the ground, you can afford to be stupid. But if you move, you must have mechanisms for moving, and mechanisms to ensure that the movement is not utterly arbitrary and independent of what is going on outside.” So opens Patricia Churchland’s classic (Churchland 1989) (p. 13) Neurophilosophy. Although the truth of this is obvious, all too often Psychologists forget it. In seeking the short-term gains of a science of the mind, the field pays long-term costs of isolating Psychology from the wellestablished natural and life sciences and from factors driving evolution both in phylogenetic and ontogenetic time. Consider the following exchange between Endel Tulving and Henry L. Roediger, III (Roediger III 2004), It is quite clear in 2004 that the term ‘psychology’ now designates at least two rather different sciences, one of behavior and the other of the mind. They both deal with living creatures, like a number of other behavioral sciences, but their overlap is slim, probably no greater than psychology or sociology used to be when the world was young. No one will ever put the two psychologies together again, because their subject matter is different, interests
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 T. K. Shackelford, V. A. Weekes-Shackelford (eds.), Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_317-1
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Selectionist Models: Implications for Behavior are different, and their understanding of the kind of science they deal with is different [We are aware that this is an argumentum ad ignorantiam]. Most telling is the fact that the two species have moved to occupy different territories, they do not talk to each other (any more), and the members do not interbreed. This is exactly as it should be. (Passage quoted in Roediger 2004)
The purpose of this chapter is to highlight a longterm cost Evolutionary Psychology pays by isolating itself from Behavioral Psychology and the long-term benefit obtained by embracing it. We can say, like primitive man, that the existence of the mind is to be inferred from human (or animal) activity; we can say, strange as it may appear to the Behaviorist, that mind is itself, a
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