Amusing ourselves to death? Superstimuli and the evolutionary social sciences

Abstract

Some evolutionary psychologists claim that humans are good at creating superstimuli, and that many pleasure technologies are detrimental to our reproductive fitness. Most of the evolutionary psychology literature makes use of some version of Lorenz and Tinbergen's largely embryonic conceptual framework to make sense of supernormal stimulation and bias exploitation in humans. However, the early ethological concept “superstimulus” was intimately connected to other erstwhile core ethological notions, such as the innate releasing mechanism, sign stimuli and the fixed action pattern, notions that nowadays have, for the most part, been discarded by ethologists. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we will reconnect the discussion of superstimuli in humans with more recent theoretical ethological literature on stimulus selection and supernormal stimulation. This will allow for a re-conceptualization of evolutionary psychology's formulation of (supernormal) stimulus selection in terms of domain-specificity and modularity. Second, we will argue that bias exploitation in a cultural species differs substantially from bias exploitation in non-cultural animals. We will explore several of those differences, and explicate why they put important constraints on the use of the superstimulus concept in the evolutionary social sciences.

Keywords:

• Bias Exploitation
• Cultural Evolution
• Evolutionary Psychology
• Superstimulus
• Theoretical Ethology

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Arnold Burms, Wouter D'Hooghe, Stefano Ghirlanda, Darian Meacham, and two anonymous referees for their helpful and inspiring comments. As regards the second author, this work was supported by the Research Foundation–Flanders (FWO).

Notes

[1] Human behavioral ecologists tend to be very skeptical about the three sub-models, but are especially critical about the claim that humans are unable to solve new problems because they are prisoners of their evolved adaptations to past environment (Irons, 1998).

[2] We would like to acknowledge here that the case of modern day humans over-eating sugary or fatty foods is not necessarily the best example of supernormal stimulation in action. The reason for over-eating these foods may very well lie in the mechanisms that control appetite, rather than in them being preferred because they are sweeter or fatter. Nevertheless, given its prevalence in the literature, we have chosen to retain this example.

[3] This is obviously not to state that memory as such serves no function; it only means that such function is not, or at the very least not necessarily, related to, for example, the adaptive significance of humor. Put differently, ‘non-functional’ refers to the specific problem under scrutiny, not to the absence of any function at all.

[4] It is interesting to note that Lorenz apparently disliked the theory of sexual selection, and saw his concept of the releaser as a valid alternative. Or, in Burkhardt's wording: “Finding the idea of sexual selection repugnant, he was happy to account for the majority of secondary sexual characters in other terms. As he saw it, the majority of conspicuous structures, colors, sounds, and behavior patterns in animals served as releasers of social reactions in fellow members of the species and had furthermore evolved for this purpose” (2005, p. 169). We will not, however, further pursue this particular aspect of early ethological theorizing here.

[5] This is followed somewhat further on by the observation that “it is perfectly conceivable that there might be releasers, or stimulus-emitting organizations, the signals of which are not addressed to an IRM but are received by learned perceptions, as are the color patterns of our flags. The functions of perception can certainly cause the production of signals catering to the properties just described. While there is an abundance of man-made signals whose properties are clearly dictated by the Prägnanztendenz of human gestalt perception, we know only a few examples of phylogenetically programmed stimulus emitters without a corresponding IRM, in other words, a releaser the response to which must be learned” (Lorenz, 1981, p. 172).