Instrumentos para la recolección de datos

As we saw in section 4.1, SEP posits innate psychological processes that cause females to empathize more frequently and more accurately than males. It claims females possess these processes because the consequences of empathy—its functions—were mostly caused by females in the environment of the Pleistocene. As mentioned earlier, these functions include: 1)

“mothering”; 2) “gossip”; 3) “social mobility”; 4) “reading your partner”. The empirical findings of SEP support the claims that, in today’s environment, females are on universal average more sensitive than males to the needs of their children; that females are more likely to gossip amongst themselves than males; that females usually have to adapt to living with the extended family of their male partners; and that females are better at becoming aware of the needs of their male partners. According to SEP, these are some of the contemporary functions of empathy, and they explain essential differences in the occurrence of empathy because these functions contributed to the reproductive success of a population over a long period in the distant past.

In accordance with step (2) of EEP’s explanatory method, we can accept these four current functions of empathy. However, in step (3), it is possible to infer from these current functions that empathy would have been equally important to the reproductive success of males as it was to that of females. As I have argued in my first paper, empathy is more likely to occur in a

cooperative motivational orientation. Hunting is a paradigmatic example of such a behaviour which is often assumed to have been performed mostly by males. It is a reasonable then to generate the following hypothesis: that one of the functions of empathy in the Pleistocene was to favour cooperation (reading one’s partner) and helping behaviour while hunting. Males may have benefited from becoming aware of the concerns of their hunting associates. These empathic hunters would have been keenly motivated to pay attention to and help their injured associates

and been able to solicit help in dangerous circumstances once injured. When we compare the current functions of empathy with its possible historical functions (step 4), we notice that not all of the plausible historical functions of empathy are supported by current empirical findings in SEP. To see why this is the case, we must proceed to step (5).

In this step we attempt to track the similarities and difference between the current functions and historical functions of empathy. And then we attempt to correlate these with significant

environmental changes or biological levers. So far, we can see that the items in the set of current functions of empathy that we have posited are very similar to those in the set of historical

functions. Mothering, gossip, social mobility, and reading your partner are both current

functions and distant historical functions. This does not mean that the set of current functions is full. There are likely to be many other functions of empathy in the contemporary environment. For example, one of the current functions of empathy is motivating people to give money to charities. And there are likely to be many additional distant historical functions that we have not yet discovered. But let us stay with our current addition to the previous four distant historical functions, namely hunting.

Can a change in empathy’s hunting function be correlated with an evolutionarily significant environmental change or biological lever? One such change is the development of agriculture, approximately 520 generations ago. Agriculture can be considered a form of niche-construction that possibly evolved from forest gardening—the practice of identifying and protecting certain desirable and useful plants. As populations increasingly modified their environment in order to regulate consumable plant and animal growth, males shifted away from hunting. Whereas hunting required people to quickly become aware of their associates’ concerns and to respond rapidly with helping behaviour when appropriate, agriculture was a much slower and safer activity. However, a psychological effect of increased agriculture may have been decreased male empathy. As hunting decreased, so too did the hunting function of empathy. This correlation between a change in empathy’s function and a significant environmental change due to niche- construction could serve as evidence that agriculture resulted in population-wide psychological changes that we have hitherto not discovered. For example, it may be that empathy is more frequent and accurate among populations that still practice hunting and gathering regularly and

that this is partially caused by a difference in psychological processes. This is a question that cannot be answered at the moment for lack of empirical evidence. But the weaker claim that agriculture led to a decrease in the degree of male empathy can be defended on historical grounds.

This claim can be supported by correlating the decrease of empathy’s role in male hunting with a biological lever. Agriculture had many effects on organism relationships, including a change in the relationships between males and females. Prinz notes that early farming equipment was hefty and operated mostly by males (Prinz 2007, p 298). He argues that this led to male control of wealth, commerce, and later literacy, and political power (Ibid). This account of how agriculture affected the dynamic interactions of males and females is plausible, but I think lacking in some key details. Even if we provisionally accept Prinz’ account, it seems unlikely that the control of resources, education, and political power by one subgrouping of the population was acquired while the rest of the population acquiesced. After agriculture, resources and social arrangements took on new dimensions of contestation. To gain and maintain control of these resources in this new environment, males may have acted so as to cause females to be more sensitive to the concerns of males. One way that this may have been achieved is by a change in the regulated indicator of who to empathize most often with, namely to adult males. In biological terms, let us assume that females possessed evolved psychological processes whose functional goal was regulate empathy with other organisms (Barker 2008, p 10). The indicator value which was used to sense whether and with whom empathy was occurring may have been, as SEP suggests, one which favoured certain organisms rather others. For instance, females may have up to that point evolved to regulate empathy by checking whether they were empathizing with young humans more often (and perhaps more accurately) than with older humans. The indicator in this evolved psychological process would have been open to both co-operative and exploitive co-optation (Barker 2008, p22). In this evolutionary scenario, certain males may have succeeded in

modifying the behavioural indicators of females through teaching, modeling, aggression, or other means. Accordingly, modifying the psychological process of empathy may have been a

biological lever. This small change in the evolved structure female empathic psychological processing would have led to much larger effects. Once the indicator change was effected, not empathizing with males more often or more accurately would have been taken by females to be

an error. In this way, the concerns of males and female motivation to help males with their concerns would become more evolutionarily significant. This small indicator change alone would have affected the dynamic behavioural interactions of males and females, their social roles, the types of institutions and environmental structures they created, the distribution of resources, system of laws etc. The scope of these possible causal feedback loops are beyond the scope of the present analysis. It remains an important and complex question whether in

populations which regularly hunt, gather, and forest garden, females are more, less, or equally empathic as compared to males. But if a biological lever leading to increased female empathy for the concerns of males can be correlated with the development of agriculture (an environmental change), then according to EEP, this is a place to look for psychological modifications (and self- modifications) that may have had large-scale effects and that may now be part of our innate human psychology.

This brings us to the final step of EEP’s method: justify the existence of psychological processes in females causing more frequent and accurate empathy in a specific population by appeal to contemporary empirical findings in support of the functions of empathy in the current

environment, and two significant evolutionary changes—namely, the niche-constructing activity of agriculture, and the biological leverage of the indicator value of empathy determining

potential targets of empathy. The former may have had the effect of decreased empathy in males, and the latter increased empathy by female agents for male targets. We can also predict that these differences between male and female empathy will not be as great as they could be because, as we have seen, many of the current functions of empathy have remained the same since the Pleistocene. However, it is important to note that these functions have also undergone significant evolutionary changes during certain times.

The implication of this for Baron-Cohen and Pinker’s accounts of empathy is that their relatively restricted meta-theory results in a method that is potentially inductively weaker than it purports to be. There are variables that can more precisely explain the evolution of empathy that have not been justifiably eliminated. As I have sketched above, these variables (e.g. niche construction, psychological self-adaptation, biological levers) can be applied. But to know whether doing so will yield empirical results that will support my sketch, we must await experimentation. In the

meantime, however, I believe that future experimentation on the evolutionary psychology of empathy should adopt the enlarged perspective that I have argued for if only to determine whether SEP, as it has been practiced up now, is as inductively strong as it purports to be. Empathy’s psychological functions of childcare, education, communication, social organization, and awareness of the concerns of others could all possibly be better explained by the

comparative method of EEP. I hope to have shown that by enlarging the theoretical framework and revising the method of standard evolutionary psychology, we will be able to more precisely identify the evolved psychological traits of contemporary human beings while more accurately explaining why, when, and how they evolved.

4.10

Concluding remarks

The most influential accounts of how and why empathy evolved come from standard evolutionary psychology. These accounts have yielded impressive results and have gained widespread acceptance because they are supported by a coherent evolutionary meta-theory and an established methodology. This methodology leads SEP researchers seeking to explain contemporary behaviour to posit the existence of psychological processes that have remained functionally fixed since Pleistocene. But doing so excludes the possibility of more recent

evolutionary changes for which there is increasing theoretical support. Moreover, SEP presents a view of the mind according to which it is adapted to a specific environment in the distant past. The implications for the evolution of empathy are clear. Its current functions have remained fixed, and its implementation is aimed at conforming to historical imperatives of an environment in which there were recurrentadaptive problems and fixedsocial roles.

In this paper I have argued for an alternative explanation of empathy’s evolution. This

explanation is informed by an enlarged evolutionary meta-theory and a revised methodology, which together I have called enlarged evolutionary psychology. EEP integrates the recent theoretical developments of niche construction theory and mutualism, self-adaptive software, feminist evolutionary theory, and biological leverage. This enlargement allowed me develop a new comparative method for EEP. According to this comparative method, a researcher seeking to explain contemporary behaviour must first develop a hypothesis about the contemporary functions of the psychological processes that the behaviour is partially caused by. The researcher

can then compare these possible contemporary functions to the possible distant historical functions and attempt to track changes in the operation of an evolved psychological process by correlating relevant environmental changes and modifications with biological levers and other possible means of psychological self-adaptation. Then I sketched how EEP can be used to provide an alternative explanation of empathy’s evolution according to which there may have been significant evolutionary changes in our psychological processes that have occurred since the development of agriculture. This alternative evolutionary explanation of empathy is consistent with the care account of empathy presented in my first two papers. The explanatory role of changes in environmental contexts is supported by the inclusion of niche construction theory. And the self-modification and co-regulation of values and motivations is supported by the inclusion of self-adaptive software, feminist evolutionary theory, and biological levers. In this way, the care account better fits the theoretical framework of EEP. However, the alternative explanation here sketched supports but does not establish the truth of the care account. Nor does it establish the truth of EEP in opposition to SEP. However, the framework and method of EEP is at odds with that of SEP because it posits that human minds modify themselves by modifying their environment and by using their self-adaptive capacities, which in turn can result in large- scale functional changes to those processes over short time periods. It is a significant

consequence of this that SEP may, to the peril of its objectives, be neglecting significant evolutionary changes in our psychological processes and much of the complexity of how and why empathy evolved.