Social Psychology 6th Edition Kenrick Pdf 12
Crista Wilbers
Douglas T. Kenrick (born 1948) is professor of psychology at Arizona State University. His research and writing integrate three scientific syntheses of the last few decades: evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and dynamical systems theory.[1][2] He is author of over 170 scientific articles, books, and book chapters, the majority applying evolutionary ideas to human cognition and behavior.
He was born in Queens, New York, on June 3, 1948. His father and brother both spent several years in Sing Sing, but he broke the family tradition and went to graduate school to study psychology.[3] He studied social psychology under Robert B. Cialdini and received his Ph.D. from Arizona State University in 1976. He has edited several books on evolutionary psychology, contributed chapters to the Handbook of Social Psychology and the Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, and been an author of two multi-edition textbooks (Psychology, with John Seamon; and Social Psychology: Goals in Interaction, with Steven Neuberg and Robert B. Cialdini).[4] He writes a blog for Psychology Today magazine, titled Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life, and has published a book of the same title.
6. Research (conducted with Vladas Griskevicius, Robert Cialdini, Jill Sundie, Joshua Ackerman, Adam Cohen and other colleagues) has examined the effects of evolutionary significant motives for a number of complex social behaviors, including conformity, creative display, conspicuous consumption, aggression, and economic decision-making.[12][13][14]
Douglas Kenrick is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Arizona State University. His research interests include integrating models from evolutionary biology and cognitive science to study the effects of fundamental social motivations (e.g., self-protection, status, mate search) on basic cognitive processes (e.g., attention to, encoding of, memory for different people in a rapidly presented crowd). He has recently applied the same approach to economic decision-making, creativity, conformity, aggression, and religious behavior. Kenrick co-directs the Kenrick-Neuberg Social Cognition Laboratory.
Integrating models from evolutionary biology and cognitive science to study the effects of fundamental social motivations (e.g., self-protection, status, mate search) on basic cognitive processes (e.g., attention to, encoding of, memory for different people in a rapidly presented crowd), economic decision-making and various downstream social behaviors (including aggression, conformity, creative displays, prosocial behavior).
Professor Kenrick's current research interests focus mainly on questions related to evolutionary social cognition (e.g., how attention, encoding, and memory for other people is influenced by fundamental human goals), as well as exploring links between evolutionary psychology and dynamical systems perspectives (e.g., how cultural norms emerge from individuals acting on evolved decision-rules).
A unique integrated approach to social behavior: Rather than providing a laundry list of unconnected facts and theories, the authors organize each chapter around the two broad questions: (1) What are the goals that underlie the behavior in question? (2) What factors in the person and the situation connect to each goal? The book thus presents the discipline as a coherent framework for understanding human behavior. The new subtitle, "Goals in Interactions" underscores this integrated approach to understanding behavior.
Opening mysteries: Each chapter begins with a mystery of social behavior, designed not only to grab student interest, but also to organize the ensuing discussion of scientific research: Why would a poor black washerwoman give away her hard-earned life-savings? What psychological forces led the Dalai Lama, the most exalted personage in Tibet, to forge a lifelong friendship with a foreign vagabond openly scorned by Tibetan peasants? Why would a boy falsely confess to murdering his own mother?
Why do we think about and interact with other people in the particular ways that we do? Might these thoughts and actions be contemporary products of our long-ago evolutionary past? If so, how might this be, and what are the implications? Research generated by an evolutionary approach to social psychology issues profound insights into self-concept, impression formation, prejudice, group dynamics, helping, aggression, social influence, culture, and every other topic that is fundamental to social psychology.
Evolution and Social Psychology is the first book to review and discuss this broad range of social psychological phenomena from an evolutionary perspective. It does so with a critical and constructive eye. Readers will emerge with a clear sense of the intellectual challenges, as well as the scientific benefits, of an evolutionarily-informed social psychology.
What a pity it would have been if biologists had refused to accept Darwin's theory of natural selection, which has been essential in helping biologists understand a wide range of phenomena in many animal species. These days, to study any animal species while refusing to consider the evolved adaptive significance of their behavior would be considered pure folly--unless, of course, the species is homo sapiens. Graduate students training to study this particular primate species may never take a single course in evolutionary theory, although they may take two undergraduate and up to four graduate courses in statistics. These methodologically sophisticated students then embark on a career studying human aggression, cooperation, mating behavior, family relationships, or altruism with little or no understanding of the general evolutionary forces and principles that shaped the behaviors they are investigating. This book hopes to redress that wrong.
It is one of the first to apply evolutionary theories to mainstream problems in personality and social psychology that are relevant to a wide range of important social phenomena, many of which have been shaped and molded by natural selection during the course of human evolution. These phenomena include selective biases that people have concerning how and why a variety of activities occur. For example:
* information exchanged during social encounters is initially perceived and interpreted;
* people are romantically attracted to some potential mates but not others;
* people often guard, protect, and work hard at maintaining their closest relationships;
* people form shifting and highly complicated coalitions with kin and close friends; and
* people terminate close, long-standing relationships.
Evolutionary Social Psychology begins to disentangle the complex, interwoven patterns of interaction that define our social lives and relationships.
Douglas T. Kenrick is author of over 170 scientific articles, books, and book chapters, the majority applying evolutionary ideas to human behavior and thought processes. At a theoretical level, his work integrates three great syntheses of the last few decades: evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and dynamical systems theory. Much of that work has been funded by NIMH and NSF and has been reported in journals, including Behavioral and Brain Sciences, Psychological Review, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Evolution and Human Behavior. Kenrick has edited several books on evolutionary psychology, contributed chapters to the Handbook of Social Psychology and the Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology, and been an author of two multi-edition textbooks (Social Psychology: Goals in Interaction, with Steve Neuberg and Bob Cialdini, is now going into its 5th edition). His forthcoming Sex, Murder, and the Meaning of Life: A Personal Chronicle of 3 Scientific Revolutions will be published by Basic Books early in 2011.
We have argued that the evolutionary perspective to social psychology is not untestable, not reductionist, not a theory about rigid genetic determinism, not a justification for the status quo, and not incompatible with sociocultural or cognitive analyses. What it is, instead, is a set of ideas that have proved quite useful in generating novel hypotheses, and parsimoniously connecting findings from very different domains ranging from mate choice and family relationships to aggression and intergroup relations. Adopting an evolutionary perspective can help us appreciate not only the common threads that bind the people in our culture to those in other cultures, but also, beyond that, to the other species with which we share the earth. Taking this broad perspective, however, also makes us aware of the vast reaches of our own ignorance. As yet, we know very little about how evolved psychological mechanisnis inside individuals develop, or how they influence, and are influenced by, the complex cultures that humans construct. Bringing light to these questions will require a fuller integration of all the different theoretical perspectives on human social behavior.
How do economic recessions influence attitudes toward redistribution of wealth? From a traditional economic self-interest perspective, attitudes toward redistribution should be affected by one's financial standing. A functional evolutionary approach suggests another possible form of self-interest: That during periods of economic threat, attitudes toward redistribution should be influenced by one's mate-value- especially for men. Using both lab-based experiments and real-world data on voting behavior, we consistently find that economic threats lead low mate-value men to become more prosocial and supportive of redistribution policies, but that the same threats lead high mate-value men to do the opposite. Economic threats do not affect women's attitudes toward redistribution in the same way, and, across studies, financial standing is only weakly associated with attitudes toward redistribution. These findings suggest that during tough economic times, men's attitudes toward redistribution are influenced by something that has seemingly little to do with economic self-interest-their mating psychology.
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