Homicide: Foundations of Human Behavior

This book is an exercise in "evolutionary psychology": the attempt to understand normal social motives as products of the process of evolution by natural selection. There is simply no question that this is the process that created the human psyche, and yet psychologists seldom ask what implications this fact might have for their discipline. We think that the implications are many and profound, touching on such matters as parental affection and rejection, sibling rivalry, sex differences in interests and inclinations, social comparisons and achievement motives, our sense of justice, lifespan developmental changes in attitudes, and that phenomenology of the self.