For some evolutionary psychology is merely a field of inquiry, but for others it is a robust paradigm involving specific theories about the nature and evolution of the human mind. Proponents of this paradigm claim to have made several important discoveries regarding the evolved architecture of the mind. Highly publicized discoveries include a cheater-detection module, a psychological sex differ...

An important research tradition in the cognitive psychology of reasoning-called the heuristics and biases approach-has firmly established that people's responses often deviate from the performance considered normative on many reasoning tasks. For example, people assess probabilities incorrectly, they display confirmation bias, they test hypotheses inefficiently, they violate the axioms of utili...

Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/psychstevens Part of the Animal Sciences Commons, Animal Studies Commons, Applied Behavior Analysis Commons, Behavior and Ethology Commons, Biological Psychology Commons, Cognition and Perception Commons, Cognitive Psychology Commons, Communication Commons, Evolution Commons, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Commons, and t...

Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/psychstevens Part of the Animal Sciences Commons, Animal Studies Commons, Applied Behavior Analysis Commons, Behavior and Ethology Commons, Biological Psychology Commons, Cognition and Perception Commons, Cognitive Psychology Commons, Communication Commons, Evolution Commons, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Commons, and t...

I discuss two types of evidential problems with the most widely touted experiments in evolutionary psychology, those performed by Leda Cosmides and interpreted by Cosmides and John Tooby. First, and despite Cosmides and Tooby’s claims to the contrary, these experiments don’t fulfil the standards of evidence of evolutionary biology. Second Cosmides and Tooby claim to have performed a crucial exp...