I think evolutionary psychology includes a lot of guesswork.
Your distinction between rumination and thinking is excellent.
As for your specific example, I don’t think evolutionary psychology is needed to realize that concern about status is a common preoccupation, and that there aren’t many people (if any) who don’t care about it at all, and that therefore, it doesn’t make sense to expect oneself to be free of it.
I’m interested in why such an inhuman standard is so popular. I’ve got two possible angles. I’ve heard that Wilhelm Reich thought having rules about sex that people can’t follow is a very convenient tool for controlling them. I’ve extended the theory to include the more modern issue of having morality and status very entangled with what people eat.
Karen Horney (an early psychoanalyst) thought that if a child is abused, neglected, or had early development much interfered with (I think being pushed to walk early would be an example), they conclude that being a human being isn’t good enough, and invent inhuman standards (always right, always virtuous, always victorious, etc.) and attempt to live by them. I don’t know whether she looked at the implications of cultures where such standards become dominant.
I don’t really believe that superhuman standards have anything to do with a faulty upbringing. Let’s get back to the social status thing… there are people in this world who are perceived by many (if not most) as humans who do not worry or tend to their own status at all, which is but one component that makes up their irresistibly charismatic pull.
Think Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi, even Einstein- these people are generally not perceived as being concerned about lowly things like social status, but as hardliners for their high causes. Or just look at some gurus who are still alive and revered. Even self-help guys like Tony Robbins are widely perceived that way. For anyone with a streak of perfectionism or simply high standards it would only be natural to try to emulate the “best”. But of course such people do not actually exist and evolutionary psychology tells you exactly why they can’t. (Sure you don’t need Ev.Psy. to tell you that, but it’s one way of becoming aware of the kinds of tricks your mind and perception can play on you.)
There are still a lot of people out there who hold onto the ludicrous “blank slate” model of malleable personality, because they simply can’t bear the thought that life is severely impacted by our genetic make-up. They are stuck in what is called the “fair world fallacy”—the delusion that somehow we all have equal chances from birth and that life is somehow a fair race, and that you can become anything. It’s basically a complimentary model of psychology that plays into the fantasy of “The American Dream”. Some people invent karma or the afterlife to satisfy their deep need for a sense of fairness, and others simply deny that there is a problem to begin with and start believing in a highly delusional version of the American Dream. They think they can shape themselves into whatever person they desire.
In retrospect, my example was poorly chosen, because you are perfectly right when you say that being aware of our neediness for social status doesn’t require an understanding of EvPsy at all. A perhaps better example where an understanding of EvPsy is much more useful to make sense of our own thoughts may be the problem of rationality and being aware of our numerous psychological biases.
I think evolutionary psychology includes a lot of guesswork.
Your distinction between rumination and thinking is excellent.
As for your specific example, I don’t think evolutionary psychology is needed to realize that concern about status is a common preoccupation, and that there aren’t many people (if any) who don’t care about it at all, and that therefore, it doesn’t make sense to expect oneself to be free of it.
I’m interested in why such an inhuman standard is so popular. I’ve got two possible angles. I’ve heard that Wilhelm Reich thought having rules about sex that people can’t follow is a very convenient tool for controlling them. I’ve extended the theory to include the more modern issue of having morality and status very entangled with what people eat.
Karen Horney (an early psychoanalyst) thought that if a child is abused, neglected, or had early development much interfered with (I think being pushed to walk early would be an example), they conclude that being a human being isn’t good enough, and invent inhuman standards (always right, always virtuous, always victorious, etc.) and attempt to live by them. I don’t know whether she looked at the implications of cultures where such standards become dominant.
I don’t really believe that superhuman standards have anything to do with a faulty upbringing. Let’s get back to the social status thing… there are people in this world who are perceived by many (if not most) as humans who do not worry or tend to their own status at all, which is but one component that makes up their irresistibly charismatic pull.
Think Buddha, Jesus, Gandhi, even Einstein- these people are generally not perceived as being concerned about lowly things like social status, but as hardliners for their high causes. Or just look at some gurus who are still alive and revered. Even self-help guys like Tony Robbins are widely perceived that way. For anyone with a streak of perfectionism or simply high standards it would only be natural to try to emulate the “best”. But of course such people do not actually exist and evolutionary psychology tells you exactly why they can’t. (Sure you don’t need Ev.Psy. to tell you that, but it’s one way of becoming aware of the kinds of tricks your mind and perception can play on you.)
There are still a lot of people out there who hold onto the ludicrous “blank slate” model of malleable personality, because they simply can’t bear the thought that life is severely impacted by our genetic make-up. They are stuck in what is called the “fair world fallacy”—the delusion that somehow we all have equal chances from birth and that life is somehow a fair race, and that you can become anything. It’s basically a complimentary model of psychology that plays into the fantasy of “The American Dream”. Some people invent karma or the afterlife to satisfy their deep need for a sense of fairness, and others simply deny that there is a problem to begin with and start believing in a highly delusional version of the American Dream. They think they can shape themselves into whatever person they desire.
In retrospect, my example was poorly chosen, because you are perfectly right when you say that being aware of our neediness for social status doesn’t require an understanding of EvPsy at all. A perhaps better example where an understanding of EvPsy is much more useful to make sense of our own thoughts may be the problem of rationality and being aware of our numerous psychological biases.