Douglas T. Kenrick Books
Douglas T. Kenrick is an American psychologist and professor at Arizona State University.
Known for: Sex, Murder and the Meaning of Life: A Psychologist Investigates How Evolution, Cognition, and Emotion Shape Our Lives, The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think
Books by Douglas T. Kenrick
Sex, Murder and the Meaning of Life: A Psychologist Investigates How Evolution, Cognition, and Emotion Shape Our Lives
In this book, psychologist Douglas T. Kenrick explores how evolutionary psychology explains human behavior, from our attraction to danger and sex to our moral decisions and social interactions. Drawin...
The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think
This book explores how evolutionary psychology explains human decision-making and behavior. The authors argue that our seemingly irrational choices often make sense when viewed through the lens of evo...
Key Insights from Douglas T. Kenrick
The Evolutionary Roots of Attraction
Attraction is not random; it is the echo of ancestral logic. As an evolutionary psychologist, I’ve spent decades studying what kinds of faces, bodies, voices, and behaviors draw people together. The evidence is strikingly consistent across cultures and times: men tend to be drawn to indicators of yo...
From Sex, Murder and the Meaning of Life: A Psychologist Investigates How Evolution, Cognition, and Emotion Shape Our Lives
Aggression and Competition
The human story is not just one of tenderness—it is also one of rivalry. Competition is woven through our ancestry, especially among males who fought for mates, territory, and status. Violence, though repugnant, is not an evolutionary error; it is an ancient tool. In small hunter-gatherer bands, dom...
From Sex, Murder and the Meaning of Life: A Psychologist Investigates How Evolution, Cognition, and Emotion Shape Our Lives
The Rational Animal Framework
Our starting point challenges the classical notion of the rational agent. Traditional economics imagines people as calculating beings who use reason to maximize utility. But real people rarely behave that way. We fall prey to biases, ignore probabilities, and are swayed by social cues and emotions. ...
From The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think
The Seven Subselves
The human mind was not built as a single-purpose machine. It’s more like a Swiss Army knife containing specialized tools, each evolved to solve different problems faced by our ancestors. I call these internal guides our seven subselves: self-protection, status, affiliation, mate acquisition, mate re...
From The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think
About Douglas T. Kenrick
Douglas T. Kenrick is an American psychologist and professor at Arizona State University. His research focuses on evolutionary psychology, social cognition, and human motivation. He has published extensively on topics such as mating, aggression, and altruism, and is known for integrating evolutionar...
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Douglas T. Kenrick is an American psychologist and professor at Arizona State University. His research focuses on evolutionary psychology, social cognition, and human motivation. He has published extensively on topics such as mating, aggression, and altruism, and is known for integrating evolutionar...
Douglas T. Kenrick is an American psychologist and professor at Arizona State University. His research focuses on evolutionary psychology, social cognition, and human motivation. He has published extensively on topics such as mating, aggression, and altruism, and is known for integrating evolutionary theory with everyday human behavior.
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Douglas T. Kenrick is an American psychologist and professor at Arizona State University.
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