Final Project

During this semester I have learned a great deal about the many factors that motivate people. Many of these things seem obvious now, but I never really put all of the pieces together to form one generalized idea about what motivates people. This course has given me a better understanding about what motivates my own thoughts, and behaviors, as well as others. It has been informative to examine the interactions between evolutionary instincts, experiences, emotions, desires, needs, and all of the other factors that coalesce to make us do the things we do. Some of the most interesting and informative things that I learned from this class came from the link to the Center for Evolutionary Psychology in the chapter 3 slides. It was fascinating to read about some our innate evolutionary adaptations that occur without us even knowing it. Some of these traits sound as if they are more animal than human. In particular, there was one research article that explores how humans, women in particular, have a navigational gathering adaptation that encodes the location of gatherable foods into memory. This is an evolutionary link to our hunter gatherer past or perhaps farther back in our evolution. Another was an article called, “Adaptations in humans for assessing physical strength from the voice” showed that we may be able to pick up on cues from the sound of each other’s voice as to strength and fighting ability. Another one has to do with being able to judge strength and fighting ability from facial cues alone. These adaptations appear to be instinctual, which we humans seem to feel that we have evolved beyond acting on pure instinct, using reasoning instead. Perhaps we run on instinct a lot more than we are really aware of....