Abstract While rational choice theorists have made great advances in their study of institutions and structures (and how they affect behavior), they have made less progress toward understanding the origins of values. I propose that the emerging field of evolutionary psychology complements rational choice theory by providing a theory of values, and that current explanations of values and preferences, such as learning, norms, and identities, are all compatible with evolutionary psychology, which provides more ultimate explanations for these proximate causes of behavior. The incorporation of evolutionary psychology into rational choice theory can also solve some of the persistent puzzles of rational choice theory: Why do so many players in Prisoner’s Dilemma games make the irrational choice to cooperate? Why do people participate in collective action? Why do people sometimes behave “irrationally” by acting on their emotions? Why does rational choice theory appear to be more applicable to men than to women?
Principles of evolutionary psychology
The THING: style of thinking, information processing procedure, decision rule
Evolved Pyschological Mechanism: one that natural selection has left humans with
BAD LANGUAGE : "in order to" — instead "because along the way it solved a particular survival/reproduction problem
Mostly pre-conscious
Nothing special about homo sapiens
Nothing special about the brain
Original Citaiton: Kanazawa, Satoshi. 2001. "De Gustibus Est Disputandum." Social Forces Vol. 79, No. 3 (Mar., 2001), pp. 1131-1162 JSTOR
Would you say that Kanazawa's theory about our motivations and decisions being evolutionary could be put into comparison with other theories about motivation like Weber or Fehr/Gintis?
Good question. There are lots of sociologists and anthropologists who would not take kindly to including evolutionary biology in a social theory course because they would see it as an attempt at "biological reductionism" - explaining it all as biology, thus denying the "social" and the "cultural."
But you can also see the piece as being a contribution to our theoretical logic. The EB perspective says there are traits (and practices) that evolve in one environment where they are advantageous but then they remain even when the environment changes. This could be for better or for worse. In other words, it could be that there is a trait or practice that is not good for us now, but is left over and hard to get rid of, OR the origins of a trait that turns out to be useful might be as an adaptation to an environment that's different from our own.
With that bit of logic, we could ask whether other authors are describing something that fits this pattern. You could, for example, ask whether Weber's traditional action could be interpreted in this framework. To make that thinking most productive we'd probably want to ask "how so?" AND "how not so?" For Fehr and Gintis you might ponder whether there is an evolutionary story to tell about conditional cooperators. I suspect you could also get some mileage out of coming up with similar questions with respect to Durkheim, Marx, et al.