Aggression, Creativity, Play, Sociability & Empathy Penelope Hale

Robert Trivers 1917 Sociobiology: the evolutionary theory to social behavior Many social behaviors have been shaped by natural selection for reproductive success Feelings and emotions part of the normal repertoire of human responses evoked in predictable situations Conflict: genetic determinism; the view that many social behaviors are genetically fixed. We rely on genetic determinism, especially of human behavior

Play Play offers opportunities for expressive language, decision-making and problem solving Young children learn through “hands-on” experiences of play Make-believe play has been related to increases in empathy, impulse control, cooperation and reduced aggression To be considered play… The activity must be pleasurable and enjoyable Spontaneous and voluntary The player has to be engaged in play Has to contain an aspect of make believe Must have no intended goals

John Maynard Smith 1982 Developed game-theoretic models which let fitness optima vary according to the other individuals (evolutionary game theory) EGT: the application of game theory to interaction dependent strategy evolution in populations. It is useful as it defines a framework of strategies in which adaptive features can be modeled Darwin Conceived of evolution as a game of organisms against their conditions of life In the metaphor of game theory, a player is an organism, an act is a behavior, a strategy is a lifestyle, a tactic is a behavioral problem and the payoff of a strategy is the net effect of using the strategy of fitness (genes passed into subsequent generations)

Aggression If male aggression is genetically fixed and reproductively advantageous, critics argue, then male aggression seems to be a biological reality about which we have little control Dangerous + scientifically plausible To make the system of reciprocal altruism work, feelings and emotions are part of the normal repertoire of human responses and are evoked in predictable situations We feel morally justified in aggression toward those who impose fitness costs on ourselves

Empathy The intellectual identification with experiencing of feelings, thoughts or attitudes of another Theodor Lipps (1851-1914) Concept: empathy should be understood as the primary means for our perception of other people as minded creatures Critique: Mill – analogy Describes the steps that enable us to attribute mental states to other people based on the observation of their physical behavior and our direct experience of mental states from the first person perspective Lipps does not argue against analyogy For Lipps, analogical reasoning requires the contradictory undertaking of inferring another person’s anger and sadness on the basis of one’s own feelings Problem: he still concieves of empathy within the context of a Cartesian conception of the mind tying our understanding of mental affairs and mental concepts essentially to the first person perspective