Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify human psychological adaptations with regards to the ancestral problems they evolved to solve. In this framework, psychological traits and mechanisms are either functional products of natural and sexual selection or non-adaptive by-products of other adaptive traits.

Adaptationist thinking about physiological mechanisms, such as the heart, lungs, and the liver, is common in evolutionary biology. Evolutionary psychologists apply the same thinking in psychology, arguing that just as the heart evolved to pump blood, the liver evolved to detoxify poisons, and the kidneys evolved to filter turbid fluids there is modularity of mind in that different psychological mechanisms evolved to solve different adaptive problems. These evolutionary psychologists argue that much of human behavior is the output of psychological adaptations that evolved to solve recurrent problems in human ancestral environments. (Full article...)

• "Rationalization may be defined as self-deception by reasoning." — Karen Horney

Pinker in 2023

Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954) is a Canadian-American cognitive psychologist, psycholinguist, popular science author, and public intellectual. He is an advocate of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.

Pinker is the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. He specializes in visual cognition and developmental linguistics, and his experimental topics include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, regularity and irregularity in language, the neural basis of words and grammar, and childhood language development. Other experimental topics he works on are the psychology of cooperation and of communication, including emotional expression, euphemism, innuendo, and how people use "common knowledge", a term of art meaning the shared understanding in which two or more people know something, know that the other one knows, know the other one knows that they know, and so on. (Full article...)

• ... that food psychology research has found that the COVID-19 pandemic led to both reduced and increased consumption of junk food among different geographical populations and educational backgrounds?
• ... that bereavement support groups are one of the most common services offered for grief but have little evidence of improving psychological outcomes?
• ... that a study of people who reported experiences of alien abduction found that many exhibited characteristics consistent with fantasy-prone personality?
• ... that Fortnite's Tilted Towers was described by critics as the equivalent of "psychological torture" and being "dropped into a meat grinder"?
• ... that the reactions to food depicted in the manga series Food Wars!: Shokugeki no Soma were decided on through free association games?
• ... that although Andrzej Żuławski's film Possession is referred to as a psychological drama and horror, its genre is still a matter of controversy?