Mind the gap: evolutionary psychological perspectives on human thriving

Abstract

The amount of psychological literature focusing on human thriving and flourishing has grown in recent years, but this topic is currently subject to much conceptual ambiguity. Evolutionary psychology, though often not included in discussions on optimal human development, provides a framework that benefits considerations of human thriving. Humans exhibit a high degree of niche construction by which they alter their environment, in turn affecting their offspring. Such niche construction is enabled by unique human capacities, but these same capacities are then required to ‘mind the gap’ between human nature and the altered environmental niche. As such, thriving may in part be understood as the ability of the individual to navigate difficulties resulting from a mismatch between their nature and niche. Three unique features of the human species that are used to both create and navigate this gap are considered as they relate to the existing literature on human thriving.

Keywords:

• Thriving
• flourishing
• evolutionary psychology
• niche construction

Acknowledgment

The authors thank Oliver Crisp and William Whitney for their invaluable support, time, and advice, and Kendall Cotton Bronk, Robert Emmons, Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Darcia Narvaez, and Jeffrey Schloss for their feedback on an earlier draft of the article.

Notes

1. We identified over 150 indicators of human thriving or flourishing, some of which overlapped considerably, from the frameworks in Table 1. We then sorted them into coherent categories that represented general domains of outcomes (e.g. purpose, identity, relationships, spirituality). Twenty-six categories emerged. Related categories were combined into a new set of more parsimonious categories reflecting a higher level of abstraction. This process resulted in the features of self-regulation, learning, and sociality. We did not account for the number of discrete or unique indicators because the intention of the paper was to distill the existing literature into coherent and useful features.

2. See previous footnote for information related to the correspondence between literature on human thriving and these three types of activities.