Positive Evolutionary Psychology - Glenn Geher

Once you start thinking from an evolutionary perspective, if there is some feature of the organism that is species typical, if humans across the world have tendencies toward anxiety, especially under the same kinds of conditions, then instead of just saying, "Oh, anxiety feels bad, let's get rid of it," well, why don't we step back and say, "What is this? What's the function of it? What is the evolutionary function? Why is this part of our evolved psychology?" And then in treating it, you have a different perspective.

(wind blowing) Glen Gare, welcome to the show.

Hey, thanks so much for having me, Chris.

Something that I think is really interesting is that there's been a paleo movement around food and training, but there hasn't really seemed to be an equivalent around psychology. There's no sort of paleo psychologists or at least people that have taken that and tried to apply it to their own lives. I haven't seen many people walking around doing paleo psychology yet.

Mm. Paleo psychology, that's a great phrase. I wish I would've come up with that myself. Um, it's, it's a really good question. So, when we talk about the paleo lifestyle or the paleo movement, um, most people are familiar with the, the dietary component of it, and honestly as someone who teaches about evolution and the human experience, that is the most vivid and easiest example to get across to people. Um, it makes sense, it matches data, people can sort of see their own behavior and, and think about it, and just the idea of eating too much processed food leading to health problems is, you know, kinda something that we all know, and then this really puts sort of a, a scientific framework around it. So, the, the paleo, um, the paleo diet and the paleo solution related to exercise and nutrition, tons of sense and, and it's definitely a, a reasonably well-established movement at this point. Um, but as, as you're talking about, um, this broader concept of paleo psychology, which really is, I think, a, a, uh, an interesting way of framing what I'm calling positive evolutionary psychology, um, using evolutionary psychology to help us lead better lives, to understand ourselves better, to lead better, um, community lives and to help advance the goals of our communities and so forth in positive kinds of ways. It turns out that the same reasoning that you can apply to the paleo diet movement really can be applied to many issues regarding our emotional, social functioning as well, and I think that, um, that's really very much untapped at this point, and I'm, I'm hoping to be part of, you know, maybe even just a small part, but part of the solution to sort of get, get people in a broader sense to think about, um, how broadly applicable this evo- evolutionary perspective is with all aspects of our lives.

Is there something that's missing from positive psychology which evolutionary psychology adds in? I know that for a long time psychology was focused on all of the malignant parts and biases and how we mess up-