Читать книгу Social Psychology - Daniel W. Barrett - Страница 104

One of the threads woven throughout this text is the evolutionary basis of social behavior. According to evolutionary theory, universal social behavior either is or must have been adaptive; otherwise, it would likely have been dropped from our behavioral repertoire by virtue of selection pressures on the gene pool. Social neuroscience—based in biology—falls under the evolutionary approach. Yet, as discussed in Chapter 1, social behavior is influenced by a number of other factors, such as culture, individual learning, and how people construe their world. Researchers used to think that the brain stopped developing relatively early in life and that the organization of neurons and the brain regions involved in specific activities were largely fixed. However, we know now that many neurons can regenerate and reorganize throughout the life cycle. Moreover, some changes in the brain (and even the genes) occur as a result of a person’s experience (Francis, 2011). That is, the brain exhibits plasticity or flexibility, which means that it is sensitive to external social, cultural, and environmental influences (Duffy & Kitayama, 2010). Evidence has been accumulating with regard to the coevolution of genes and culture, demonstrating that culture and genes have affected each other over the course of human evolution (Chiao, 2011; Donald, 2000; Richerson & Boyd, 2005). These and related findings bring home the lesson that a comprehensive understanding of social behavior requires examining it from multiple levels of explanation, including but not limited to social neuroscience.