5/12/2010
Doug Kenrick - Arizona State University Department of Psychology
"How the Mind Warps: Evolution and Social Cognition"

The human mind processes information in a famously selective and shockingly biased way. Who and what do we select for attention, encoding, and retrieval, and how, why, and when do we distort certain kinds of information in certain ways and not others? My colleagues and I have been studying how basic cognitive processes are influenced by activating fundamental human motivations such as self-protection or mating goals. We've found several domain-specific cognitive enhancements, decrements, and distortions: we stare at, but fail to remember, certain people in certain circumstances, we look away from, yet remember, other people in other conditions, and sometimes we differentiate members of out-groups who are normally blurred together in our memories. These motivated biases are anything but random and senseless. Instead they predispose adaptive context-sensitive decisions about whether to conform or show off, whether to fight or flirt, whether to take financial risks, and so on. At a deeper level, these biases make functional sense when considered in light of broader theoretical developments at the interface of evolutionary biology, comparative anthropology, and cognitive science.