Free Psychology Books: Evolutionary Psychology and Information by Ned Kock

Evolutionary Psychology and Information by Ned Kock

The likelihood of obtaining fresh new insights is especially high in connection with fields that bring in notions yet unexplored in information systems theorizing. A field of inquiry that appears to hold much promise in this respect is evolutionary psychology (Barkow et al. 1992; Buss 1999). This field of inquiry builds on concepts and ideas related to human evolution, primarily human evolution during the period that goes from the emergence of the first hominids, the Australopithecines (Boaz and Almquist 2001), up to the present day. (The term “hominid” is used here as synonymous with “hominin.” In this sense, recent evidence supports the existence of even more ancient hominids, the Ardipithecines). Evolutionary psychologists generally believe that many of our modern brain functions evolved during the period that goes from the emergence of the first hominids around 3.5 million years ago until the emergence of modern humans about 100,000 years ago (Buss 1999; Cartwright 2000).

Evolutionary psychology has the potential to become one of the pillars on which information systems theorizing can take place. The explanatory power of evolutionary psychology comes from the fact that its underlying ideas relate to the basic design of our brain and thus can form the basis on which fundamental explanations of behavior can be developed (Barkow et al. 1992; Cosmides et al. 2003; Kock 2004; Tooby and Cosmides 1990). Evolutionary psychology also arguably holds the key to many counterintuitive predictions of behavior toward technology, because many of the evolved instincts that influence our behavior are below the level of conscious awareness (Barkow et al. 1992; Buss 1999; Cartwright 2000). Often those instincts lead to behavioral responses that are not self-evident to the individuals involved. One example of this is the recent evolutionary psychology-inspired study by Kock et al. (2008), which shows that including a Web page showing a large picture of a snake in attack position in between Web pages with text-based knowledge content leads to a significant improvement (of as much as 38%) in the absorption of the content on the Web pages adjacent to the snake page.

Past research has rarely employed evolutionary psychological explanations and predictions regarding human behavior for the understanding of information systems phenomena. There have been few studies building on human evolution ideas, and to some extent on evolutionary psychological ideas, in the areas of mobile technology use (Junglas et al. 2009), electronic consumer behavior (Hantula et al. 2008; Rajala and Hantula 2000; Smith and Hantula 2003), computer-mediated communication (Kock 2004, 2005; Kock et al. 2008), virtual team leadership (DeRosa et al. 2004), electronic user interface design (Hubona and Shirah 2006), online mate selection (Saad 2008), and information search and use behavior (Spink and Cole 2006). These few studies reflect the potential of evolutionary psychology to explain behavior toward technology. Nevertheless, with even fewer exceptions (Hantula et al. 2008; Hubona and Shirah 2006; Junglas et al. 2009; Kock 2004, 2005), these studies have been published in outlets or addressed topics that are generally considered outside the field of information systems.

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