Dynamical Evolutionary Psychology: How Social Norms Emerge From Evolved Decision Rules

While revising a social psychology text, one of us received a pair of interesting criticisms. One regarded a deficit-failing to explain how social psychology differs from sociology. The other regarded an excess-too much space on the evolutionary perspective, which, the reviewer suggested, has had less historical impact than other perspectives. Both criticisms, although true, elicited more sadness than repentance in the transgressing author. Social psychologists have expended far too much effort building walls between our territory and sociology, on the “holistic” side, and biology, on the “reductionist” side. Those walls often block our view of the phenomena we hope to elucidate-mutual interactions between individual humans and their social context.