suffer great distress. This distress is not just limited to those relatively rare
instances when we are literally rejected from a group or tossed out of a relation-ship. Rather, any information that suggests we might be excluded socially or
that we are no longer attractive to other people is threatening to our need
to belong.
As you thought about the situations that recently caused you to feel
anxious, you may have recognized that many were related to a fear of social
rejection. You may also have noticed that you didn ’t have to experience ac-
tual exclusion from a group or relationship to feel anxious. Rather, infor-
mation that even hints that someday you might be rejected by others is
often enough to bring on anxiety. Thinking about anxiety as fear of socialrejection helps us understand why people feel anxious when they have to
give a speech in front of an audience or when they discover that first gray
hair. The speaker is afraid the audience members will evaluate him or hernegatively, a form of social rejection. The 30-ish adult discovering a gray
hair worries about his or her attractiveness to others. Although outright so-
cial rejection is not common, fear of what others will think of us may be aneveryday experience.
This social exclusion explanation of anxiety fits nicely with evolutionary
personality theory. Primitive people who lived together in small groupswere more likely to survive and reproduce than those living alone. An iso-
lated person would be more susceptible to injury, illness, lack of shelter,
and limited resources and would be less able to mate and raise offspring
than individuals living in groups or tribes. Consequently, anything that moti-
vates people to avoid behaviors that might lead to their exclusion from the group
would help the species survive. Anxiety serves this purpose, and evolutionary
personality psychologists argue that anxiety evolved to meet the needs of the
species.
Proponents of this view point out that anxiety, although expressed in
different ways, is found in nearly al l cultures (Barlow, 1988). Moreover,
the kinds of behavior that lead to so cial exclusion are typically those
that impair the survival of the species (Buss, 1990; Sloman, 2008). These in-
clude adultery, aggression, and taking valuable resources away from others.
In this sense, evolutionary theory crosses paths with Sigmund Freud. Freud
also argued that primitive people came to live in groups and developedlaws against many sexual and aggressive behaviors so that the species might
survive. Although Freud was concerned with repressing unconscious im-
pulses, his analysis is in many ways similar to that of more recent evolution-ary theorists.
In short, what we call “human nature ”can be thought of as a large
number of psychological mechanisms that have allowed humankind to sur-vive as long as we have. Advocates of this approach do not argue that all
human characteristics are necessarily beneficial. It is even possible that
some of our psychological mechanisms could someday contribute to the ex-tinction of the species. Nonetheless, evolutionary personality psychology ap-
pears to provide a fruitful approach for understanding some basic features of
human personality.238 CHAPTER 9 The Biological Approach