The Neutralization Theory of Hatred

We argue herein that, while often conceptualized as an extreme form of anger, hatred is a human emotion distinct from anger, with unique triggers, conceptual orientations, and terminating conditions. An examination of the social conditions of our species’ evolutionary history reveals that hatred evolved to address its own distinct adaptive problem: individuals whose existence was -- on balance -- costly to the hater. Because a well-designed system for solving this problem would have been tailored toward neutralizing those costs, we call this hypothesis ‘the neutralization theory of hatred.’ This theory places the features of hatred within a functional framework. Specifically, we argue that hatred is triggered by cues that an individual’s existence causes fitness decrements for the hater. Cognitively, hatred orients the mind so as to view costs heaped onto the hated person as benefits to the hater -- thus motivating spiteful behavior -- and can be characterized as maintaining a negative intrinsic welfare tradeoff parameter toward the hated person. Behaviorally, hatred can motivate either avoidance or a predatory style cost infliction strategy that is designed to weaken, incapacitate, or terminate the target. Hatred can be a dangerous emotion, and we believe a more thorough understanding of its evolved function is crucial for developing strategies that help mitigate its costs to society at large.

18-month-olds use different cues to categorize plants and artifacts

One key adaptive problem that humans had to solve was to identify safe plants while avoiding dangerous ones. The ability to reliably categorize plants was likely critical to accomplishing this task and avoid confusing non-toxic plants with similar-looking toxic ones. Here, we investigated which cues 18-month-old infants (Study 1, N = 40) from Germany, and adults (Study 2, N = 145) recruited online use to categorize plants and manmade artifacts. To this end, in Study 1, we presented infants with plants with different leaf shapes in brightly colored pots and feature-matched artifacts that had the same variation in shape and color as the plants. The results of the categorization task indicate that infants relied on variation in leaf shape to categorize plants more than they relied on similar variation in shape to categorize artifacts. In Study 2, using a modified version of the task from Study 1, we found that adults were less willing to categorize plants using features other than leaf shape, while they were more willing to do so for artifacts. We conclude that infants use different features to categorize plants and artifacts and that aspects of this categorization strategy persist into adulthood. The features infants use to categorize plants would have reliably differentiated between plant types over ancestral time and thus reliance on these features may be based on their conceptual relevance to plants.

Knowledge songs as an evolutionary adaptation to facilitate information transmission through music

I propose an adjunct to the two models presented in the target articles, a function of music that is ubiquitous and would have solved a clear adaptive problem, that of transmitting important survival information among pre-literate humans. This class of knowledge songs uniquely preserved cultural, botanical, medical, safety, and practical information that increased the adaptive fitness of societies.

General Collective Intelligence as Biomimicry of Nature’s Design and Manufacturing Processes

This paper explores the current limits to the complexity of design and manufacturing processes that can be reliably created or executed by humans, as well as exploring the general categories of products that can’t currently can’t reliably be manufactured as a consequence. This paper also explores how nature removes those barriers to complexity in its design and manufacturing, as well as how nature removes the barriers to the complex cooperation through which this complex design and manufacturing become sustainably viable, and how General Collective Intelligence replicates the adaptive problem solving processes by which nature does so. Finally, this paper explores why the type of products that can’t currently be manufactured, and why the patterns of complex cooperation that can’t currently be reliably executed, are both critically important, and therefore why General Collective Intelligence is critically important to the future of manufacturing.