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Human Behavioral Ecology

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Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science

Synonyms

Human evolutionary ecology; Human sociobiology; Studies on adaptation of human behavior and behavioral outcomes

Definition

An evolutionary approach to human behavior, and its outcomes, that attempts to understand the adaptation at the phenotypic level in a current ecological and social environment.

Introduction

Human behavioral ecology (HBE) is one of the major approaches in evolutionary behavioral sciences. HBE investigates adaptation of human behavior, and its outcomes, in a current environment in terms of the theory of fitness maximization. HBE covers a variety of research topics (the whole of life history, for example: foraging, livelihood, mating, reproduction, parental care, health, cooperation, and sociality), study subjects (people in traditional small-scale, pre-industrial, historical, and modern developed societies), and methodologies (ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, questionnaires, experiments, statistical analyses of secondary datasets, and mathematical...

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Correspondence to Masahito Morita .

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© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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Morita, M. (2019). Human Behavioral Ecology. In: Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1380-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_1380-1

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-16999-6

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