Differences Between Evolutionary Psychology And Evolutionary Psychology
In the hallways of the Psychology faculties in Spain and Latin America you can see, every weekday, a series of people wandering completely disoriented through corridors and classrooms. They are mostly young students, but there is something in their eyes that has nothing to do with the expression of self-sufficiency and bravery that you would expect flashing on the face of any twenty-something.
What is the reason for this kind of inner tension? Very simple: your knowledge of psychology is based on something that is essentially WRONG; Hence there are certain ideas and concepts that they cannot understand no matter how hard they try. There’s something they’re missing. And these poor devils still don’t know that the evolutionary psychology and the Evolutionary Psychology they are not the same.
Thank goodness that sooner or later a saving teacher always arrives who ends up clarifying these concepts in what will be one of the short lessons from which you will get the most benefit during your degree. However, the difference between evolutionary and evolutionary psychology is better to know the sooner the better (and preferably before failing an exam for ignoring it), since the two deal with totally different things and, in fact, it is not clear that the Evolutionary psychology is a branch of psychology itself.
To understand well the relationship between the two, it is good delve a little into a concept that both appeal to: evolution
The concept of “evolution” is abstract enough to be used to explain a wide variety of processes, but basically defines a development through which different changes occur more or less gradually In the fields of study of Psychology, however, evolution usually refers to two essentially different processes: the changes that occur in the development of an organism and the changes that occur in the form and behavior of the species, from generation to generation.
When we talk about the first type of evolution, which refers to individual organisms that develop from their zygote form until they reach senescence, we talk about ontogeny while when we talk about processes of change between generations and species that succeed one another, we talk about their phylogeny
The basic idea that serves to distinguish evolutionary psychology from evolutionary psychology is the following: Evolutionary psychology studies the psychology of the human being in relation to its ontogenetic development while evolutionary psychology studies human behavior in light of the evolution of species, that is, in light of their phylogenetic development.
The object of study of evolutionary psychology is the patterns of behavior and subjectivation that are associated with each phase of the growth of a human being, while evolutionary psychology, more than offering a field of study, proposes an approach based on what is known about the evolutionary history of populations from which their lineage comes to obtain hypotheses about how people behave.
Where does the confusion come from?
This is a problem that has to do with the translation into Spanish of words used in the dominant academic environment, which uses English. What we know today as evolutionary psychology was originally called developmental psychologywhich means that there is practically no confusion in this language.
However, when the first researchers began to talk about evolutionary psychology, in Spanish there already existed a very similar term to designate the previous branch of psychology. Hence, in Spain and Latin America the word “evolutionary” is used to distinguish it from evolutionary without giving up its basic meaning, which is related to a process of change.
