Evolutionary Psychology and Digital Games

Digital Hunter-Gatherers

Johannes Breuer, Daniel Pietschmann, Benny Liebold, Benjamin P. Lange

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351663564
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Sozialpsychologie

Evolutionary Psychology and Digital Games: Digital Hunter-Gatherers is the first edited volume that systematically applies evolutionary psychology to the study of the use and effects of digital games. The book is divided into four parts:

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• Theories and Methods

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• Emotion and Morality

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• Social Interaction

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• Learning and Motivation

These topics reflect the main areas of digital games research as well as some of the basic categories of psychological research. The book is meant as a resource for researchers and graduate students in psychology, anthropology, media studies and communication as well as video game designers who are interested in learning more about the evolutionary roots of player behaviors and experiences.

1 Why an Evolutionary Psychological Approach to Digital Games?

Benjamin P. Lange, Johannes Breuer, Benny Liebold, and Daniel Pietschmann

Introduction

With their growing popularity and the diversification of their audience, the question of what is so appealing about digital games¹ and what motivates players to invest substantial amounts of time and money has become ever more important. The vast majority of social science research on the reasons why people play (specific) games has focused on proximal causes (Tinbergen, 1952, 1963), such as emotional states or momentary motivations (for an overview, see De Grove, Cauberghe, & Van Looy, 2014; Scharkow, Festl, Vogelgesang, & Quandt, 2015). These approaches, however, have not yet delivered sufficient answers to some of the key questions including why men and women play different games; why violent games are so generally appealing; and why adults play digital games, although playing behavior is typically considered to be endemic only to childhood and adolescence. This also extends to research into the effects of digital games. While much of the research on the effects of digital games focuses on short-term processes and proximal causes, taking ultimate causes (and thus, human nature) into account can not only help in understanding why digital games have certain effects on their players (e.g., regarding emotions, attitudes, and behavior) but also what limitations there are to these effects.

A field that can provide some more compelling explanations for the ultimate underlying causes (Tinbergen, 1952, 1963) of the appeal and effects of digital games is evolutionary psychology (Buss, 2016). This branch of psychology has gained a lot of attention in academia in recent years as it can explain some of the basic mechanisms and roots of human experience and behavior by taking into account biological factors and their phylogenetic origins.

Studying digital games through an evolutionary psychology lens expands the scope beyond the limited perspective of what has been called the standard social science model (SSSM; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992) that ignores innate differences as reasons for traits and behaviors in favor of social learning as the primary or even sole mechanism to explain intraindividual change and interindividual differences. More specifically, an evolutionary psychology approach and an integrated causal model (ICM; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992) that considers both proximal and ultimate causes can aid in uncovering why so many people are fascinated by digital games, and why some play and are affected differently by them than others.

Evolutionary Psychology: A Short Primer²

The basic compelling logic of evolutionary psychology (for an overview, see Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992; Buss, 2016; Confer et al., 2010; Cosmides & Tooby, 1987, 1997; Pinker, 1997; Tooby & Cosmides, 2005) can be summarized as follows: None of our direct ancestors remained childless. All of them survived long enough to reproduce at least once. Otherwise, we would not exist. All traits (e.g., behavioral patterns, emotions, and the like) that facilitated their survival and reproduction must, hence, to a certain degree be part of our physical and cognitive equipment as well—at least, if some sort of mechanism of genetic transmission is involved in creating those traits, which, however, is evident (e.g., Plomin, DeFries, McClearn, & Rutter, 2001). By acknowledging this fundamental feature of human nature, evolutionary psychology helps to overcome some of the limitations of the SSSM (Tooby & Cosmides, 1992): Human behavior and experience are not just the result of social learning and other proximal causes, but originate from a brain that is, first of all, a biological organ (like any other organ), and the result of the evolution of our species.

The Selection of Traits

Evolutionary psychology aims to explain the very existence as well as the specific characteristics of psychological traits (e.g., cognitive mechanisms) as the result of our ancestors’ survival (Natural selection; Darwin, 1859) and reproduction (Sexual selection; Darwin, 1871). Accordingly, such traits are the result of an evolutionary selection process: They exist because they were beneficial to our ancestors’ survival and reproduction in the past. Human beings with less-beneficial traits (phenotype) tended not to survive long enough to reproduce, which, over time, led to the underlying gene variants (i.e., their alleles) that code for the respective traits (genotype) to be eliminated from the gene pool. Hence, from an evolutionary perspective, specific traits exist because they evolved to solve recurrent problems of survival and reproduction during human phylogeny (hominization). They enabled those individuals who possessed a respective trait (i.e., a beneficial phenotype) to have children who, in turn, inherited the alleles (genotype) of the associated phenotype. This principle, first of all, does apply to the human body. Perspiration, for instance, evolved for regulating body temperature. But it does also apply to the human mind. Fear of heights, for instance, protected our ancestors from carelessly playing around on high rocks in danger of collapsing. Feeling butterflies in their stomachs motivated our ancestors to approach the person who caused those feelings, and to start some form of relationship with him or her. Such evolved psychological mechanisms (i.e., evolved sets of behavior; EPMs) can, therefore, be considered special modules for solving specific evolutionary problems dealing with survival and reproduction (Buss, 2016; Confer et al., 2010; Pinker, 1997; Tooby & Cosmides, 2005).

Proximate vs. Ultimate Explanations

Evolutionary psychology adds a specific functional level of analysis to the behavioral and cognitive sciences by providing answers to a set of fundamental questions: What is the function of a trait? For what functional reason did it come to be during hominization? Here, one crucial distinction comes into play, namely the one between proximate and ultimate mechanisms. The proximate level of explanation is the most common one in most social sciences that asks how a certain trait works on an organismic level. It is concerned with mechanisms, for instance, motivational, cognitive, or biological ones (e.g., genetical, hormonal/endocrinological, or neurophysiological; see Buss, 2016; Confer et al., 2010; Tinbergen, 1952, 1963). The ultimate level of explanation, by contrast, is concerned with the question, why these proximate mechanisms exist in the first place, that is, what their function is (Buss, 2016; Confer et al., 2010; Tinbergen, 1952, 1963). This ultimate ‘why’ perspective can, therefore, be considered the evolutionary perspective itself (Buss, 2016). Dutch biologist and Nobel Prize winner Nikolaas Tinbergen (1963) proposed four questions that represent four levels of analysis within this proximate-ultimate dualism:

Proximate

1 How: How does it work?

2 Ontogeny: How does it develop?

Ultimate

3 Why: What is its function? What was (and is) its benefit for survival and reproduction (compared to other possible traits/mechanisms)?

4 Phylogeny: How did it evolve? How did it come to be in the long course of evolution?

These four questions do not exclude one another—instead, all four need to be answered together for a thorough understanding of human behavior. Hence, social scientists might want to incorporate ultimate reasoning into their considerations, if they have not done so already. On the other hand, evolutionary psychologists, while focusing on ultimate reasons, must consider proximate causation as well: Each trait that possesses evolutionary functionality needs a (biological) mechanism that generates the trait to start with (and triggers it later on).

Adaptation and Fitness

Evolution works based on three core principles: (1) variation, (2) selection, and (3) inheritance (i.e., genetic transmission).

There are interindividual differences in practically all traits (1). A substantial portion of this variance is attributable to genetic (i.e., allelic) variance (3), which is called heritability (Plomin et al., 2001). Such interindividual differences in the respective heritable traits cause differential chances of survival; features that help individuals to survive become more common in the next generation of a population and will, thus, accumulate over successive generations. This is what evolutionary scientists refer to as selection (2). This selection of traits will then result in adaptations to the evolutionary challenges which generated the selection pressure under which the individuals with beneficial traits were evolutionarily favored (Mayr, 2001). An adaptation that is part of the human mind is called an EPM, as already explained in the above paragraph. Apart from adaptations, there are by-products of adaptations as well (Buss, 2016). For instance, the umbilical cord is an adaptation in mammalian species. It does serve an evolutionary purpose. The navel, however, is only a by-product of this adaptation. For psychological or cognitive traits, an appropriate example might be the following: Children are able to acquire their respective mother tongue without any formal instruction simply based on their innate language faculty (Pinker, 1994). The ability to read and write, however, could be considered a by-product of these innate abilities.

A trait that qualifies for an adaption is fit—or more precisely, alleles are more or less fit and are selected via the trait they are coding for. “Fit” does not refer to physical fitness (although physical fitness might be evolutionarily fit), but to fitness in the sense of adapted or being adaptive. The question always is, whether a trait or a configuration of traits (via the respective alleles or allele configuration) promoted survival and reproduction. Hence, fitness can be defined as the ability of an individual to pass his or her genes on to the next generation, and could be measured by relative reproductive success among individuals (e.g., Dawkins, 1976; Fisher, 1915; Miller, 2000a; Williams, 1966; Zahavi & Zahavi, 1997).

What is fit and what is not depends on the respective environment. In an environment offering high-quality eyeglasses and contact lenses, defective vision is not particularly unfit, but it is easy to envision how unfit it must have been in a long-time-ago hunter-gatherer environment without visual aids. Also, in an environment with an abundance of high caloric nutrition (i.e., in most developed countries today), possessing an efficient assimilative metabolism might cause overweight and, thus, result in negative health effects, which might lower fitness. In an environment of lack or uncertain food supply, as might have been common in the hunter-gatherer past, such a disposition, by contrast, might have been extremely fit. These examples point to another key concept of evolutionary psychology, namely mismatch. If environments change and if they do so faster than adaptations are able to change accordingly, our adaptations might cause behavior that seems inappropriate. One example for a media-related mismatch is the so-called Media equation, that is, the tendency to treat media as if they were real people (Reeves & Nass, 1996). It seems, hence, to be a worthwhile enterprise to take a closer look at the conditions under which the human mind is considered to have evolved.

In general, it is assumed that our cognitive adaptations that create appropriate behavior and experience have evolved over the last few hundred thousand years in the so-called Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness (EEA).³ This is not a specific environment but rather a set of environmental (in a broad sense) conditions that constantly occurred during the last few hundred thousand years and presented specific challenges related to survival and reproduction that will be discussed further below.

Natural and Sexual Selection

There are two general evolutionary processes that create adaptations: Natural selection and sexual selection. Natural selection is the process describing the evolution of traits which promoted survival (Darwin, 1859). This means that individuals—or to be precise their allele configuration and corresponding phenotypes—were not only selected by environmental conditions (e.g., climate), but also by factors related to members of their social group concerning survival (Darwin, 1859; Dunbar, 2007). For instance, cheating might be beneficial (gaining fitness advantages), but avoiding being cheated as well (preventing to suffer from fitness disadvantages), amounting in a tit-for-tat reciprocity or in reciprocal altruism, in which individuals support each other and return such favors on later occasions (Trivers, 1985; also see Velez, this volume). Such adaptations caused by natural selection are considered to be economical (not too costly), reliable (all members normally evolve the trait), and efficient (the trait solves an adaptive problem well; Williams, 1966). This is what, to some degree, distinguishes adaptations caused by natural selection from those caused by sexual selection.

Sexual selection (Darwin, 1871) can be subdivided into intersexual and intrasexual selection. The first refers to the actual mate choice. In almost all mammals, this is female choice, as females have higher obligatory costs (Trivers, 1972) in reproduction (e.g., due to pregnancy and postnatal lactation). For this reason, females evolved to be choosier than males in mate choice decisions. Males, on their side, compete with other males in order to gain access to females. This is referred to as intrasexual selection. It has to be noted that particularly in humans, where investment in children is particularly high (Buss & Schmitt, 1993), men might be choosy too, resulting in what has been termed “mutual mate choice” (e.g., Miller, 2000a). Also, intrasexual competition does not only occur in males, but in females too. Similar to natural selection, each trait that is beneficial for succeeding in intrasexual competition, and, subsequently, intersexual selection (i.e., in actual mate choice, as long as this results in reproduction), will be more frequent in the next generation (Andersson, 1994).

As teased above, there are a few differences between natural and sexual selection: While in the first process, the environment and one’s social group create the selection pressures, in the second process, selection pressures come from (potential) reproductive mates and same-sex rivals. Furthermore, although natural selection needs interindividual variance to act upon, it tends to reduce this variance, as it removes maladaptive forms of traits from the gene pool (e.g., Fisher, 1930). For sexual selection, variance seems to play a slightly different role: Without large variance among individuals, mate choice would not be a real choice. Therefore, scholars have proposed the idea that sexually selected traits should show larger variance among individuals than naturally selected ones. In line with this, sexually sel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Why an Evolutionary Psychological Approach to Digital Games?
• Part I Theories and Methods
• Part II Emotion and Morality
• Part III Social Interaction
• Part IV Learning and Motivation
• Glossary
• List of Contributors
• Index