Is evolutionary psychology underappreciated? 

A recent bibliometric analysis conducted by Andrea Zagaria (2024) compared the prevalence of evolutionary psychology and the Standard Social Science Model (SSSM) concluding that SSSM is more prominent and growing at a faster rate than evolutionary psychology, casting doubt on the field’s revolutionary status in psychology. In a commentary published in Adaptive Human Behavior and Physiology, William Costello and Andrew G. Thomas reevaluated Zagaria’s conclusion, arriving at a more optimistic view of evolutionary psychology’s current status and trajectory.

“Our article was a commentary on an original analysis by Zagaria which found that evolutionary psychology was being outpaced by the SSSM in terms of publications and pace of growth,” said Costello (@CostelloWilliam), a doctoral researcher of Individual Differences and Evolutionary Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin.

“A cursory look at these findings makes for dispiriting reading for an evolutionary psychologist. Initially I accepted these findings at face value and began to shape our commentary around 1) the idea that the replication crisis that psychology finds itself mired in is no surprise if most scholars pursue an explicitly non evolutionary psychology framework, and 2) that some metrics should be weighted more heavily than just volume of publications, e.g., universality, magnitude and replicability of findings.”

“However, a closer look at the analysis led us to believe that the extent to which evolutionary psychology was being outpaced by the SSSM was overstated and our own analysis suggests that the two are growing at a similar pace in psychology.”

Costello and Thomas revised the search terms and scope of the bibliometric analysis conducted by Zagaria, refining the search syntax for both evolutionary psychology and SSSM. They replaced the SSSM term “cultur*” with “cultural” to exclude biomedical contexts that are unrelated to psychological research, with a goal of eliminating papers irrelevant to SSSM (e.g., tissue cultures in a biomedical context). When conducting literature searches, using an asterisks captures various forms and spellings of a word (for example, cultur* would capture culture, cultures, cultural, culturally).

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For the evolutionary psychology search terms, the researchers added previously excluded terms, including “inclusive fitness,” “parental investment” and “psychological adaptation” which they argue to be fundamental to evolutionary psychology and capturing the extent of research in the field. They further removed “animal behavior” to avoid disciplines that do not align with evolutionary psychology principles.

The researchers sourced data between 1975-2023, analyzing data on a year-by-year basis and 5- and 10-year rolling averages to account for annual fluctuations and highlight long-term trends.

The final dataset was restricted to empirical papers published in high-impact psychology journals to focus on the most influential and scientifically rigorous publications, thereby eliminating the bias introduced by including non-scientific and interdisciplinary journals captured in Zagaria’s original study.

The reanalysis revealed several findings that contrast with Zagaria’s conclusions. Here, between 1975 to 2023, the average annual growth rate for evolutionary psychology was 8.1%, while SSSM showed a slightly higher growth rate of 9.8%, indicating comparable growth. The high correlation between evolutionary psychology and SSSM growth rates (r = .93) suggest that both paradigms are expanding in tandem.

The reanalysis further showed that the ratio of SSSM to evolutionary psychology papers was overstated by approximately 23% in Zagaria’s analysis, revealing a ratio of 1.78 (vs. 2.31 previously reported). The researchers also observed variability in publication trends over the years, with occasional spikes and declines in both EP and SSSM research. However, the ratio of EP to SSSM papers showed a consistent pattern, indicating that EP is not lagging behind as much as presumed.

“We outline a number of reasons to be optimistic about the position and direction of travel for evolutionary psychology. Since its inception in the late 1980s, evolutionary psychology has seen enormous growth in terms of scholars, courses, topics investigated, conferences, societies, theories, findings, journals and much more. We tried to show that in our paper.”

“Also, psychological science now finds itself mired in what has colloquially become known as the ‘replication crisis’, which arises from the inability to replicate many well-known ‘classic’ findings in the field. Evolutionary psychology, however, has remained relatively unaffected by this replication crisis.”

“Evolutionary psychology differs from the SSSM in providing consilient meta-theory, which links a wide range of concepts, including a universal criteria for social status and morality and the adaptive nature of depression and anxiety. The extraordinary predictive power of the evolutionary psychology paradigm could be a solution to the replication crisis.”

“Ultimately, the scientific revolution proposed by my supervisor David Buss in 2020 is still well underway and we think our paper shows that.”

“What still needs to be addressed is why much of the scientific community is still resistant to the evolutionary psychology paradigm given it consistently proves to be explanatorily powerful,” Costello told PsyPost.

“We propose some potential reasons, such as ideological resistance, misperceptions of evolutionary psychology, and poor training about evolutionary theory among social scientists. We intend to explore these reasons in future work.”

The paper, “The Scientific Revolution of Evolutionary Psychology: Current Status and Future Directions. A Commentary on Zagaria (2024)” was authored by William Costello and Andrew G. Thomas.