Reading : How Hardwired is Human Behavior?
The article, written by Nigel Nicholson, is a very interesting read. The author talked about evolutionary psychology and how it affects the thinking and feeling as well the social living of human beings. It says that evolutionary psychology "offers a theory of how the human mind came to be constructed and that mind is hardwired in ways that govern most human behavior to this day". Human behavior is the way it is today according to evolutionary psychology because the same survival mentality of man's Stone Age ancestors have been genetically passed on throughout the generations. And since there has been no catastrophic incidents in the world that would stimulate further human evolution, evolutionary psychologists contend that human brains are still ingrained with that Stone Age "hunter-gatherers" behavior even in this present day. The author further writes that studying this psychology is useful to managers in today's world as it provides them with an understanding of why people act the way they do in organizational settings.
To some extent I can agree with the hypotheses offered by evolutionary psychology which can become useful for managers and how they can relate with the people in their organizations. Most people generally react to situations first with "emotion before reason". Knowing this enables managers to be sensitive specially when delivering bad news to employees. I can also agree to "classification before calculus". It is true that we have a tendency to stereotype people based on their physical appearance, mannerisms and the way they talk. You can say that humans like to "judge a book by its cover". This classifying mind also applies to our day-to-day activities and we mostly base our decisions by categorizing things. This mentality could assist managers when dealing with team issues within the organization as well as in formulating tasks for employees that stimulate their