Biocultural Psychology

This course will present human psychology and behavior as viewed by cultural psychologists on the one hand, and by evolutionary psychologists on the other. The presuppositions of each approach will be deeply examined in order to separate tendentious disciplinary controversy from useful contributions that each side makes to an understanding of human behavior. Students will be challenged to construct a synthetic view of human behavior that causally articulates---rather than merely meshes---these two approaches in order to achieve a better understanding of the causes of human behavior, the distribution of ideas in social systems, and their historical trajectories.