ABSTRACT
Many causal factors can be invoked to understand or explain behaviour. Some will be very immediate or ‘proximal’ factors; these will include the immediate motivation for behaviour; for example, love of a grandchild, if we are trying to understand helping behaviour in grandparent-grandchild relations. Lying behind these may be factors due to learning and experience and, in the human case, societal norms and cultural tradition. Further levels of explanation still may lie in our evolutionary history, in the reasons why certain kinds of predispositions and learning mechanisms have been selected; for example, why we readily form attachments to people whom we know well. These can be called ‘distal’ factors.
