The Evolutionary Mismatch Hypothesis: Implications for Psychological Science

Li, Norman P.; Vugt, Mark van; Colarelli, Stephen M

doi:10.1177/0963721417731378

Cited by 215 publications

(204 citation statements)

References 32 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

185

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…There are suddenly many things that we simply cannot do or cannot do in the same way that we previously did; it is easy to become overwhelmed. This situation reflects what evolutionary psychologists call "evolutionary mismatch," in which the environmental conditions change so swiftly, and so dramatically, that we find that our old patterns of behavior no longer work (Li, van Vugt, & Colarelli, 2017). This is a rude awakening, not just for families, but also for practitioners scrambling to adapt their family interventions.…”

Section: Conclusion: Creating Small Changes That Grow Into New Patternsmentioning

confidence: 95%

First Things First: Parent Psychological Flexibility and Self-Compassion During COVID-19

Coyne

Gould

Grimaldi

et al. 2020

Behav Analysis Practice

227

185

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about significant stress and anxiety for many parents around the world. Psychological flexibility and self-care are fundamental aspects of psychological health. For parents, shaping these processes may help promote family nurturance, support children's prosocial behavior, and provide effective and consistent use of evidence-based parenting "kernels." The goal of this article is to provide practitioners with evidence-based tools that will support psychological flexibility, self-care, and positive parenting behaviors in caregivers during COVID-19 and beyond.

show abstract

Section: Conclusion: Creating Small Changes That Grow Into New Patternsmentioning

confidence: 95%

First Things First: Parent Psychological Flexibility and Self-Compassion During COVID-19

Coyne

Gould

Grimaldi

et al. 2020

Behav Analysis Practice

227

185

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Given existing evidence that CNM relationships are not shortlived (Mogilski et al, 2017;Séguin et al, 2017), can improve relationship satisfaction and functioning (Rodrigues et al, 2016;Levine et al, 2018;Stults, 2018;Fairbrother et al, 2019), and are no more likely to involve unsafe sexual practices than monogamous relationships (Conley et al, 2012(Conley et al, , 2013bLehmiller, 2015), we suspect that moral stigma toward CNM originates from an increasingly defunct intuitive association between sexually promiscuous mating and interpersonally deleterious fast life history traits (Moon et al, 2018). This mismatch (Li et al, 2018) may be driven by modern CNM ethical practices which reduce sources of interpersonal conflict within multi-partner mating systems (e.g., intrasexual competition, jealous anxiety, partner abandonment, child neglect, and disease transmission). Identifying which common CNM practices most effectively minimize these concerns will be the next step in this fruitful line of research.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…Natural selection has shaped psychological adaptations that protect against cuckoldry and partner abandonment Schmitt, 1993, 2019), interpersonal exploitation (Buss and Duntley, 2008;Duntley, 2015), and infection by disease (Al-Shawaf et al, 2015;Tybur and Lieberman, 2016). Although these adaptations may have enhanced reproductive success, they do not necessarily enhance well-being (Kováč, 2012), nor may they function optimally within a modern environment (Li et al, 2018). It is possible that the sexual ethics of CNM, paired with modern sexual health technologies, reduce the need for humans to rely on psychological mechanisms of disgust and moral condemnation to regulate sexual risk-taking and other features of a faster life history.…”

Section: Limitations and Future Directionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Life History and Multi-Partner Mating: A Novel Explanation for Moral Stigma Against Consensual Non-monogamy

et al. 2020

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Life history theory (LHT) predicts that individuals vary in their sexual, reproductive, parental, familial, and social behavior according to the physical and social challenges imposed upon them throughout development. LHT provides a framework for understanding why non-monogamy may be the target of significant moral condemnation: individuals who habitually form multiple romantic or sexual partnerships may pursue riskier, more competitive interpersonal strategies that strain social cooperation. We compared several indices of life history (i.e., the Mini-K, the High-K Strategy Scale, pubertal timing, sociosexuality, disease avoidance, and risk-taking) between individuals practicing monogamous and consensually non-monogamous (CNM) romantic relationships. Across several measures, CNM individuals reported a faster life history strategy than monogamous individuals, and women in CNM relationships reported earlier pubertal development. CNM individuals also reported more social and ethical risk-taking, less aversion to germs, and greater interest in shortterm mating (and less interest in long-term mating) than monogamous individuals. From these data, we discuss a model to explain how moral stigma toward non-monogamy evolved and how these attitudes may be mismatched to the modern environment. Specifically, we argue that the culture of sexual ethics that pervades contemporary CNM communities (e.g., polyamory, swinging) may attenuate risky interpersonal behaviors (e.g., violent intrasexual competition, retributive jealousy, partner/child abandonment, disease transmission) that are relatively more common among those who pursue multi-partner mating.

show abstract

“…For example, Sih (2013) use the term "human-induced rapid environmental change," or HIREC, to describe some of the mismatch-relevant changes. Insufficient time to adapt is treated as a major part of the explanation for mismatch in, e.g., Li et al (2018) discussed above. In the absence of fitness effects, however, there is no adaptation anyway.…”

Section: The Welfare Objectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Myopia may be another example of a 'mismatch' with respect to health, but which has no fitness effect in novel, contemporary environments. Li et al (2018) say that mismatch is "adaptive lag" such that adaptive psychological or physiological mechanisms have not had time to adapt to certain environmental changes, and they explicitly include cases where the adaptive lag affects health but not fitness. (Note the similarity of this view to that defended in Cofnas (2016), discussed above in section 3.2.)…”

Section: The Welfare Objectionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Stranger in a strange land: an optimal-environments account of evolutionary mismatch

Morris

2018

Synthese

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In evolutionary medicine, researchers characterize some outcomes as evolutionary mismatch. Mismatch problems arise as the result of organisms living in environments to which they are poorly adapted, typically as the result of some rapid environmental change. Depression, anxiety, obesity, myopia, insomnia, breast cancer, dental problems, and numerous other negative health outcomes have all been characterized as mismatch problems. The exact nature of evolutionary mismatch itself is unclear, however. This leads to a lack of clarity about the sorts of problems that evolutionary mismatch can actually explain. Resolving this challenge is important not only for the evolutionary health literature, but also because the notion of evolutionary mismatch involves central concepts in evolutionary biology: fitness, evolution in changing environments, and so forth.In this paper, I examine two characterizations of mismatch currently in the literature. I propose that we conceptualize mismatch as a relation between an optimal environment and an actual environment. Given an organism and its particular physiology, the optimal environment is the environment in which the organism's fitness is maximized: in other words, the optimal environment is that in which the organism's fitness is as high as it can possibly be. The actual environment is the environment in which the organism actually finds itself. To the extent that there is a discordance between the organism's actual and optimal environments, there is an evolutionary mismatch. In the paper, I show that this account of mismatch gives us the right result when other accounts fail, and provides useful targets for investigation.

show abstract

The Evolutionary Mismatch Hypothesis: Implications for Psychological Science

Cited by 215 publications

References 32 publications

First Things First: Parent Psychological Flexibility and Self-Compassion During COVID-19

First Things First: Parent Psychological Flexibility and Self-Compassion During COVID-19

Life History and Multi-Partner Mating: A Novel Explanation for Moral Stigma Against Consensual Non-monogamy

Stranger in a strange land: an optimal-environments account of evolutionary mismatch

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About