Beyond Anthropomorphism by Design: A Study-First Bridge for Evolutionary Psychology and Comparative Cognition

Abstract

Evolutionary psychology and comparative cognition both pursue evolutionary accounts of cognition and behavior, yet they meet recurring interface problems that blunt strong inference: anthropomorphic projection, unvalidated human baselines, weak hypothesis construction, and conflation of proximate with ultimate explanations. I recast “comparative evolutionary psychology” as a study-first, field-scaling bridge rather than a disciplinary merger and propose a practical toolkit: design tasks calibrated to each species’ sensory and motor capacities, establish constraint-matched human baselines, and present a priori predictions that pit specific adaptationist predictions against specified domain-general process models where they make divergent predictions. These predictions are adjudicated with diagnostic probes such as transfer to novel situations. Treating analysis as explicit model competition can raise the evidential bar, help reduce anthropomorphic bias, and better connect functional and mechanistic levels. These practices provide a principled path toward discovering genuine evolutionary continuities, convergences and divergences of cognition and behavior.