Evolutionary Psychology (Evolutionary Perspective)

According to the Center for Evolutionary Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology is "an approach to psychology, in which knowledge and principles from evolutionary biology are put to use in research on the structure of the human mind. It is not an area of study, like vision, reasoning, or social behavior. It is a way of thinking about psychology that can be applied to any topic within it. In this view, the mind is a set of information-processing machines that were designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors." As such, this field really examines natural selection and how it favors behaviors that help keep a species going from one generation to the next.