Beyond intuition and instinct blindness: toward an evolutionarily rigorous cognitive science

Cognitive psychology has an opportunity to turn itself into a theoretically rigorous discipline in which a powerful set of theories organize observations and suggest focused new hypotheses. This cannot happen, however, as long as intuition and folk psychology continue to set our research agenda. This is because intuition systematically blinds us to the full universe of problems our minds spontaneously solve, restricting our attention instead to a minute class of unrepresentative “high-level” problems. In contrast, evolutionarily rigorous theories of adaptive function are the logical foundation on which to build cognitive theories, because the architecture of the human mind acquired its functional organization through the evolutionary process. Theories of adaptive function specify what problems our cognitive mechanisms were designed by evolution to solve, thereby supplying critical information about what their design features are likely to be. This information can free cognitive scientists from the blinders of intuition and folk psychology, allowing them to construct experiments capable of detecting complex mechanisms they otherwise would not have thought to test for. The choice is not between no-nonsense empiricism and evolutionary theory; it is between folk theory and evolutionary theory.