Foundations of Behavior

Foundations of Behavior 

One interesting perspective of psychology that ardently offers an explanation to the foundation of behavior is the evolutionary psychology. This idea gave an explanation to varying psychological traits as adaptation responses to natural selection. The perspective of evolutionary psychology has a merging point with evolutionary biology where both have a related view of physiological mechanisms such as the immune system and other aspects like perception or language (Crawford and Krebs 1998). Thus, evolved psychological mechanisms are based on the idea that cognition has a functional structure similar to that of immune systems, lungs and hearts which have by proximity evolved through the process of natural selection. The evolutionary psychology can be looked at in giving explanation to behavior on the level of a particular individual or particular specie level (Krill, 2007). The categories that play a major role in determination of the functional structure the individual or the specific species are: the adaptation which the behavior serves, the phylogeny which gave birth to the adaptation, the ontogeny or the development of the individual and lastly the proximate mechanism.

Evolutionary psychology sprouted from (among other disciplines) cognitive psychology in the sense that each of the two disciplines offer explanations to the cognition of the individual behavior. The insight of the evolutionary psychology is based on the very foundation of the evolution of behavior through cognition which interact to give explain the behavior of individuals or species (Krill, 2007). The cultural inputs that individuals or species use to produce specific behaviors through the cognitive psychology nevertheless lead us to an idea that does not concur with the notion that the human mental faculties are universal-purpose learning mechanisms.

Reference List:

Crawford, B. C., and Krebs D., L. (1998) “Evolutionary Psychology: Ideas, Issues, and Applications” Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum,

Krill, L., A., (2007). “Evolutionary Psychology” <http://www.epjournal.net/filestore/EP05232256.pdf.>