Why Do Sex

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Why Do Sex Violence Sell?Evolutionary
Perspectives
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The Appeal of Sexually Explicit Media Why does
sex sell? explanations from

• Uses Gratifications Theory
• Evolutionary Psychology
• Arousal Attention to Sex Violence
• Parental Investment Theory
• Biosocial Perspective (SSSM)
• Feminist Studies

Message / Medium
Sender
Receiver
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Evolution Key Terms

• Natural Selection
• 1842 1844, Charles Darwin defined natural
  selection as the "principle by which each slight
  variation of a trait, if useful, is preserved".
  
• The process by which individual organisms with
  favorable traits are more likely to survive and
  reproduce. Selection forces can be ecological,
  mating preferences, or artificial, i.e. toy
  dogs.
• Evolution by means of Natural Selection
• Genetic variation results in different levels of
  fitness
  
• Individuals with greater fitness are more likely
  to contribute offspring to the next generation,
  while individuals with lesser fitness are more
  likely to die early or fail to reproduce.
• Genes which on average result in greater fitness
  become more abundant in the next generation,
  while genes which generally reduce fitness become
  rarer.
• If selection forces remain the same for many
  generations, beneficial genes become more and
  more abundant, until they dominate the
  population, while genes with a lesser fitness
  disappear.
• In every generation, new mutations and
  recombinations arise spontaneously, producing a
  new spectrum of phenotypes (physical
  manifestation of genotype).

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Two types of why questions

• Proximate cause the causes of behavior that
  exist within a persons lifetime. Describe how a
  process works.
  
• Example why can we see?

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Proximate Causes Why You Can See

• Light converges on the retina at the back of the
  eye.
  
• The retina is covered with rods and cones,
  light-receptors that send electrical impulses
  through optic nerve fibers and to the brain.

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Two types of why questions

• Ultimate cause What is the function of this
  behavior in evolutionary terms? What was the
  adaptive advantage that this behavior gave to our
  ancestors. Use reverse engineering to examine
  the characteristics producing a function.
• For example Why can you see?

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Adaptive Problems

• What was the adaptive advantage of seeing?
• Adaptive Problems
• Avoiding Predators
• Eating the right food
• Forming alliances and friendships
• Providing help to children and relatives
• Reading other peoples minds
• Communicating with people
• Selecting mates

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The Human Mind is also an Adaptation

• Just as selection has sculpted hearts, lungs, and
  livers for special functions, the human mind can
  too best be understood in light of what it was
  designed to do.
• The human mind just like the rest of the organs
  that make up the human body is an adaptation
  designed by natural selection to solve particular
  problems faced in ancestral environments.
• To what extent is it important for us to know
  about the evolution of the human mind in order to
  understand current behavior?

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The brain is like a swiss army knife

• Adapted to solve problems
• Composed of task specific or special-purpose
  programs that predispose human beings to solve
  problems that recurred in the ancestral
  environment
• The way we use these tools is by no means fixed,
  but they likely provide constraints on our
  thinking and behavior
  

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Monkeys show predisposition toward learning fear
from certain objects

• Is fear instinctive or learned?
• Wild-born monkeys are afraid of snakes. They're
  so scared of snakes that they will cower in the
  back of the cage screaming rather than reach
  across a plastic model snake to get at a peanut
  when they're very hungry. Captive-born monkeys
  are not afraid of snakes they happily reach
  across the model snake to get at a peanut.
• Susan Mineka videotaped a wild-born monkey
  reacting with fear to a snake, and then showed
  this video to a captive-born monkey, which
  immediately acquired a fear of snakes and was not
  then prepared to reach across even a model snake
  to get a peanut.
• Edits the video so that it has the same monkey
  reacting in the same way in the background, but
  the bottom half of the screen now has a flower
  instead of a snake
• Captive monkeys will not show fear of a flower,
  or imitate the fearful monkey no matter how many
  times the video is shown.
  
• Mineka argues there is a program for fear of
  snakes, an instinct if you like, but that that
  instinct needs to be socially triggeredin some
  sense triggered by a vicarious experience, by
  observing another monkey having a fear of snakes

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Environment of Evolutionary Adapativeness

• Current environments are not the same as the
  environments in which most of human evolution
  took place.
  
• For most of human existence (From 200,000 years
  ago up until about 10,000 years ago, or the
  Neolithic revolution) humans lived a
  hunter-gatherer (forager) lifestyle, small bands,
  mostly nomadic.
• No stored food, contraceptive devices,
  government, law, permanent, dwellings, social
  stratification, inequality of wealth, armies,
  written languageetc.

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Evolutionary Processes are Slow

• It takes a long time for evolutionary processes
  to cause changes
  
• If we could see the brain of a human who lived
  100,000 years ago, it would pretty much be the
  same as our own.
  
• Both would be adapted to the recurrent
  environments that existed during most of human
  evolution.

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Using the EEA to explain behavior

• Why are 21 of Americans obese?
• 100k years ago, fats/sweets were very rare and
  provided rich sources of energy.
  
• Those who craved fats/sweets sought them out, and
  enjoyed an adaptive advangtage.
  
• Today.fats/sweets are readily available, but
  cravings for these formerly precious resources
  have not changed

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Using the EEA to explain behavior

• Is morning sickness an adaptation?
• Cross culturally, about 89 92 of pregnant
  women experience nausea, vomiting, food
  aversions, hypersensitive smell.
  
• Hypothesis Prevents women from ingesting
  teratogens (which cause abnormalities)
  
• Avoided foods that are higher in toxins
  (vegetables, caffeine, etc)
  
• Onset of morning sickness coincides with
  structure-building, slow-growth of embryo, when
  toxins can have disastrous effects. Offset
  occurs with completion of structure, rapid growth
  of fetus.
• Negative correlation between pregnancy sickness
  and miscarriage pregnancy sickness and birth
  defects.

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Arousal

• Some people, sensation seekers especially, use
  sexual and violent media to for achieve arousal
  effects
  
• What adaptive purpose did these arousal effects
  serve and why do people like them ultimately?

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2-dimensional view of emotion

• Evolutionary function of Emotion
• directs attention and motivation in ways that
  promote survival
  
• Valence
• We feel positively towards and approach things
  that promote our survival (appetitive reaction)
  
• We feel negatively towards and avoid things
  that threaten our survival (defensive reaction)
  
• Arousal
• Arousal moderates the intensity of the emotion,
  or how strongly we respond with approach or
  avoidance.

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4 quadrants of emotion
High Arousal
Appetitive(Positive Valence)
Defensive(NegativeValence)
Low Arousal
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Gender Differences in Emotional Responses

• Erotica
• Men respond with more intense positive emotions.
• Violence
• Women respond with more intense negative
  emotions.
  
• To what extent are mens and womens emotional
  responses constrained by biological gender
  differences?

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Evolutionary Psychology

• What is it?
• A way of approaching psychology that focuses on
  how we evolved patterns of thinking, engrained or
  hardwired in our brains. We inherit these ways
  of thinking (interpreting or processing
  information) b because they were selected for in
  our DNA they were adaptive over the course of
  human evolution.
• Cross Cultural Research
• Do human universals exist?