PROGRESS BOX 7:
EVOLUTION, PSYCHOLOGY,
SOCIAL MIND- Specific inference systems were tailored by
selection for their contribution to solving particular
problems in ancestral environments.
[128] - To describe them it is useful to combine
predictions from the evolutionary background and
independent experimental evidence. - Crucial to our species are mental adapta-
tions for social life, as information (notably that
provided by others) is our ecological niche.
coalitions seem such a simple and obvious thing to us does
not prove that their functioning is simple but rather that we
have the kinds of minds that compute all this without much
difficulty, which is different. Nobody in any human culture
needs much instruction to figure out how cooperation is
established between partners or how to detect potential
threats to cooperation. Also, note how coalitional behavior
is so easily developed by young children, in the absence of
much explicit instruction (and indeed very often against dis-
mayed parents' recommendations).
Incidentally, this discussion in terms of cost and benefit,
cooperation and defection, may seem very abstract. We tend
to think that we just have "feelings" about such situations.
This is true in a sense: Feelings are the most salient reactions
we are aware of. But feelings are the outcome of complex cal-
culations that specialized systems in our minds carry out in
precise terms. For instance, some of my recently arrived
African friends were baffled that people in Europe could get
so worked up by parking-space "theft." They could under-RELIGION EXPLAINED