Evolutionary Psychology: A Framework for Strategic Communication Research

ABSTRACT

Evolutionary psychology suggests that the human mind consists of evolved cognitive mechanisms that developed through evolution by means of natural selection. These mechanisms evolved to solve long standing problems in the human ancestral environment. Cooperation in small foraging tribal communities of hunters and gatherers, and its use to gain reproductive advantages, was one of the problems the human mind has adapted to. Thus, this article argues that adopting evolutionary psychology as a framework for strategic communication research can improve understanding of why strategic communication exists in human societies and how it works. The idea of the modularity of mind suggests that separate modules inside the mind evolved during our evolutionary history to solve ancestral challenges. Some of these modules embody human fundamental motives, which can by triggered by strategic communication. By tapping into fundamental motives such as the longing for status, affiliation, and kin-care, strategic communication is able to exploit ancestral stimuli in today’s information society. Thus, a research program based on evolutionary psychology could be a valuable contribution to the field’s growing body of knowledge.

In the last 25 years, evolutionary psychology has developed as a new approach for thinking about the human mind and its structure (Cosmides & Tooby, 1997). Evolutionary psychology’s understanding of the mind as “a set of information-processing machines that were designed by natural selection to solve adaptive problems faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors” (ibid., n.p.), has far reaching consequences for the study of strategic communication. The purpose of this article is best described in the, slightly altered, words of the evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson in the concluding paragraph of their seminal work, Homicide: “How can students of strategic communication use evolutionary psychological ideas to stimulate their research and improve their understanding?” (Daly & Wilson, 2014, p. 297, emphasis added).

Daly and Wilson, of course, had students of criminalistics and homicide in mind. However, concepts and theories from the field of evolutionary psychology offer novel ideas and insights for the field of strategic communication. Thus, how the capability for strategic communication emerges in the human mind is an important aspect that should be studied by scholars of strategic communication. Evolutionary psychology can be used as a heuristic concept that supplements the existing body of knowledge by focusing on the psychological makeup of human strategic communication.

Recently, Nothhaft called for a consilient synthesis in the field of strategic communication, i.e., “to reconnect strategic communication research to the rapidly progressing and highly relevant hybrid disciplines such as cognitive science and evolutionary psychology” (Nothhaft, 2016, p. 69). The term consilience was originally coined by the biologist Edward O. Wilson (1998), whose concept bears resemblances to what Cosmides, Tooby and Barkow have called conceptual or vertical integration (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992). Nothhaft’s call has been met with criticism. Christensen and Svensson (2017) deemed his “analysis misguided and highly problematic” (p. 180), and Sandhu (2017) compared it to a Mars Mission “without having reached the Moon yet” (p. 187). These critiques miss the point of what a conceptual consilient integration is. There is no doubt that it is necessary to combine insights from the mind sciences “with kernel concepts in sociology, including community, authority, status, power, the sacred, etc.” (Christensen & Svensson, 2017, p. 182). It is also true, that strategic communication is “an uncertain and constantly changing social endeavor,” wherein an immense complexity is at play (ibid., pp. 182–183). But the core argument behind conceptual integration is that the human mind predates modern human society, and it – the human mind – does not come in the form of a blank slate (Pinker, 2016) that is ultimately wired by society.

Thus, conceptual integration of strategic communication research means to ground research in a framework that is consistent with knowledge in other scientific fields. While it is easy to acknowledge that strategic communication is highly interconnected with, for example, sociology, the same cannot be said about psychology, let alone biology. The core effort of conceptual integration lies in consistency between these interrelated disciplines. Hence, any theory of strategic communication must be consistent with the principles of biology and psychology.

The present article follows Nothhaft’s call—it attempts to unify thinking on integration of knowledge of evolutionary psychology and strategic communication. The idea is to apply the causal process of evolution to the field of strategic communication, and thereby to offer an explanation of why and how strategic communication is grounded in human psychology, and why and how it works. Even though the principles of the theory of evolution have long been regarded as confined to the realm of biology, “there is now widespread recognition that they also provide powerful tools for explaining the origins of psychological, strategic, and behavioral adaptations … in humans” (Confer et al., 2010, p. 110). The article goes even further in arguing “that models of psychological mechanisms are essential constituents of social theories” (Tooby & Cosmides, 2015, p. 5) and, therefore, constituents of theories of strategic communication. The main argument this article brings forward is that the idea of a modularity of mind (Sperber & Hirschfeld, 2004) has profound consequences for research in strategic communication.

According to Sperber and Hirschfeld, “an evolved cognitive module … is an adaptation to a range of phenomena that presented problems or opportunities in the ancestral environment” (Sperber & Hirschfeld, 2004, p. 41). This implies that different modules in the human mind evolved to solve specific problems; it is those modules that strategic communication is triggering to exert influence on behalf of an agent. The Holtzhausen and Zerfass definition of strategic communication as the “practice of deliberate and purposive communication that a communication agent enacts in the public sphere on behalf of a communicative entity to reach set goals (Holtzhausen & Zerfass, 2013, p. 74) is used as a basis for this conceptual article, with the intention to add a criterion for strategic communication effectiveness. Strategic communication is more likely to be successful if fundamental human motives are triggered by communicative means, as compared to when this is not the case. Necessarily, the triggered motive must be in alignment with set goals the communicative entity wants to reach. Within this context, questions are addressed such as: Why does strategic communication exist? How does it work? What is its function in society? What distinguishes effective strategic communication from ineffective strategic communication?

Evolutionary psychology and strategic communication: definitions, basic assumptions and working hypotheses

In order to recognize the usefulness of evolutionary psychology to strategic communication research, it is necessary to understand evolutionary psychology as a discipline with its unique concepts, basic assumptions, and core terms. The first and most basic concept is the theory of evolution by natural selection, formulated by Charles Darwin in the Origin of Species (Darwin, 1859) and Alfred Russel Wallace (Darwin & Wallace, 1858). Natural selection can be defined as “a feedback process that is driven by the differential reproduction of alternative designs. If a change in an organism’s design allows it to outreproduce the alternative designs in the population, then that design change will become more common—it will be selected for” (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992, p. 167). The design natural selection works on is called an adaptation, “a feature of an organism’s phenotype … that performs a function that solved a problem of survival or reproduction in a species’ evolutionary history” (Kurzban, 2012, p. 118). When looking at strategic communication in that context, two questions are of particular interest: (1) How do the mechanisms work that underpin strategic communication and (2) how does strategic communication work in a social environment that was unanticipated by evolution, i.e., today?

There are two basic premises of evolutionary psychology. First, according to Cosmides, Tooby, and Barkow, “that there is a universal human nature,” with the limitation “that this universality exists primarily at the level of evolved psychological mechanisms, not of expressed cultural behaviors” (Cosmides, Tooby, & Barkow, 1992, p. 5). Thus, culture is generated with the help of universal psychological mechanisms. Human nature refers to the plausible assumption that the makeup of the human minds and the psychological mechanisms it consists of is universal (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992; Kurzban, 2010), but not the culture they produce.

Second, “these evolved psychological mechanisms are adaptations, constructed by natural selection over evolutionary time” (Cosmides et al., 1992, p. 5). So far, evolution by natural selection is “the single known natural causal principle that gives rise to increasing rather than decreasing order” (Kurzban, 2012, p. 118). In short, evolution by natural selection as described by Darwin produced and shaped the human mind (Buss, 1995).

Third, “the evolved structure of the human mind is adapted to the way of life of Pleistocene hunter-gatherers, and not necessarily to our modern circumstances” (Cosmides et al., 1992, p. 5). That finally leads to the most important premise—“that humans should have evolved a constellation of cognitive adaptations to social life” (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992, p. 163).

In summary, evolutionary psychology proposes that the human mind that deals with communication in today’s information society is the result of the evolution of the human brain in the social settings of the environment of evolutionary adaptedness (EEA). The problems humans face today are processed by cognitive mechanisms that were shaped in a very different past environment with regard to (sometimes) different problems than we encounter today.

We also need to understand what it is that got shaped by evolution: cognitive mechanisms/modules. Evolved cognitive mechanisms are defined as “information processing mechanisms shaped by natural selection over phylogeny to solve recurrent problems faced by our ancestors associated with reproduction and survival” (Bjorklund, 2015; p. 16; Buss, 1995). In the social life of our ancestors, communication must have played an important role (Sauvet, 2017; Tomasello, 2010). Therefore, an individual’s personal and reproductive success must have also been a function of her ability to use communication to that end, i.e., to deploy strategic communication in order to attain in-group status, to make friends, or to form alliances. Hallahan, Holtzhausen, van Ruler, Verčič, and Sriramesh’s renowned definition of strategic communication as “the purposeful use of communication by an organization to fulfill its mission” (Hallahan, Holtzhausen, van Ruler, Verčič, & Sriramesh, 2007; p. 3; see also Holtzhausen & Zerfass, 2013), reflects the same notion, just from an organizational point of view in today’s society. One should not forget, as Hallahan et al. (2007) have pointed out, that strategic communication always, in one way or another, involves people who communicate on behalf of organizational entities. Therefore, the individual psychological makeup of individuals is of relevance.

Before arriving at the core hypotheses of this article, another important concept has to be sketched briefly: the modularity of mind. Far from being an empirically proven concept, the idea of modularity suggests that the human mind is “an information-processing system [that] consists of specialized computational mechanisms” (Kurzban, 2012, p. 118). That means that there are some modules in the human mind that have the sole purpose of dealing with interpersonal communication. The term originates in Jerry Fodor’s homonymous work The Modularity of Mind (Fodor, 1983). Fodor – himself a vocal skeptic (Fodor, 1983) of evolutionary psychology and the hypothesis of massive modularity—suggested that “the structure of behavior stands to mental structure as an effect stands to its cause” (Fodor, 1983, p. 3). Furthermore, mental modules are domain-specific, i.e., they are designed by evolution to solve specific problems and they can “come online and go offline at different times, having more or less influence depending on the situation” (Kurzban, 2010; p. 65; see also Sperber & Hirschfeld, 2004). This is important because it suggests that there is no general module that deals with every form of communication.

Modules, shaped by evolution, are designed to implement strategies that are appropriate for the relevant problem. Because the details of the strategies that modules are using depend on what the module is for, modules have to be designed to become active when the problem they were designed for is being faced, and otherwise lie more or less inactive until their turn comes. (Kurzban, 2010, p. 65)

Thus, individuals who do strategic communication are governed by modules that were shaped by natural selection to solve long-standing problems; hence, they are adaptations—by-products or noise—produced by natural selection (Durante & Griskevicius, 2016, p. 27).

Having these assumptions and definitions in mind, two hypotheses seem promising for enriching strategic communication research against the background of an evolutionary psychology framework. The first hypothesis proposes the following:

H1:

The evolution of the human mind led to the emergence of mental modules, whose function was to cope with communication under the conditions in the human EEA.

To be more precise, communication was one factor (among many) that determined the reproductive success of individuals. Today’s information society, with phenomenon such as mass media and social media, is unanticipated by evolution (Barkow, 1992). In contrast, the human mind was designed by natural selection to work in settings of face-to-face communication (Kock, 2007). Because we are social animals, it is only logical to conclude, that human communicative behavior had (and still has) an impact on individual reproductive and social success. The second hypothesis proposes the following:

H2:

The mental modules in our mind respond to certain communicative cues, which bring these modules on- and offline.

Practitioners of strategic communication have learned to trigger these modules by emitting cues via (public) communication. These modules are best understood in terms of a fundamental motives framework (Griskevicius & Kenrick, 2013), comprising phenomena like the human longing for status, affiliation, or kin care. As Schaller and colleagues noted, the fundamental motives “are modular in a functional sense: They are attuned to different kinds of cues in the environment … which, in turn, trigger specific affective, cognitive, and behavioral responses” (Schaller, Kenrick, Neel, & Neuberg, 2017, p. 2). As such, human motivation is described “in terms of evolved behavior regulatory systems” (p. 2), i.e., human fundamental motives are cognitive modules.

Evolutionary thinking in public relations and strategic communication research

With the exception of Nothhaft (2016), to date only Greenwood (2010) has explicitly linked evolutionary theory with public relations theory. Although her final conclusion was grounded on Dobzhansky’s (1973) famous saying that “nothing in public relations makes sense except in the light of evolution” (Greenwood, 2010, p. 471), her contribution is rather to be read as a call for theoretical open-mindedness towards a unifying theory than as the development of a specific research program informed by evolutionary thinking. Nevertheless, Greenwood identified major adaptive mechanisms proposed by evolutionary psychology, such as cheater detection, cooperation, reciprocity, and reciprocal altruism, and she reflected on their importance for public relations. But then again, although it is true that “these concepts are directly applicable to the concept of relationships, as well as to the concepts of two-way symmetrical communication and Excellence theory” (Greenwood, 2010, p. 463), Greenwood only roughly sketches the potential of evolutionary theory for public relations research, let alone strategic communication.

An early article with clear connections to evolutionary thinking was arguably Murphy’s work The Limits of Symmetry (Murphy, 1991), which analyzed public relations through an adaptationist lens. Her conclusion that communication practice must realize the important role of self-interest and conflict (Murphy, 1991, p. 129), clearly incorporates the evolutionary thinking that is inherent in game theory. Besides Nothhaft, Greenwood, and Murphy, there are numerous other contributions in which evolutionary thinking is at least implicitly incorporated.

Arguably, one of the first works was Cutlip, Center and Broom’s Effective Public Relations (Cutlip, Center, & Broom, 1952/1985), who incorporated the concept of ecology into public relations for the first time. Like many later works of authors such as Grunig and Grunig (1991), or Long and Hazelton (1987), Cutlip, Center, and Broom modeled public relations along ecological lines, meaning that “the role of public relations is to monitor environmental conditions and to develop organizational and environmental change programs that facilitate a state of adaptation between the organization and its social environment” (Everett, 2001, p. 313). In this view, public relations is and acts as an author for a cognitive organizational mechanism—an equivalent to the individual psychological mechanisms defined here.

Where Kurzban, who is no scholar of public relations, deemed the conscious self the press secretary of the mind (Kurzban, 2010), theories of public relations as boundary spanners (Aldrich & Herker, 1977; J. Grunig & Hunt, 1984; Springston & Leichty, 1994) argue for a comparable case. Not all parts of an organization are aware of the public sphere and what is going on out there. Like the human mind, the organization is never fully aware of itself, and hence, of the communication strategies it uses. Adequately, then, J. Grunig and Hunt’s four models of public relations (Grunig & Hunt, 1984), when analyzed in the light of adaptive thinking, could be regarded as different strategies to solve problems in the organizational environment(s). Even though communicators might deliberately seek to deploy forms of symmetrical communication, other nonsymmetrical forms are applied simultaneously as well—an insight that is hardly news. From an evolutionary point of view, the distinction between deliberate understandings of strategic communication, as represented by Hallahan et al. (2007), and communication strategies as emergent phenomena (King, 2010) are just two sides of the same coin. The whole idea of public relations as a bridge towards various stakeholders (Ledingham, 2003), be it as community relations (Ledingham & Bruning, 2001), media relations Ledingham & Bruning, 1998), or crisis communication (Coombs, 2014), is just one way of expressing the organizational process of adaptation.

The theoretical development in the field, even though it did not have evolutionary thinking in mind, reflects this point of view. Many important aspects of strategic communication are explained and researched well with regard to society and culture. Nevertheless, it seems that there are still some pieces missing. It is, therefore, only logical to further explore how evolutionary psychology and adaptive thinking could help building a complementary research program in strategic communication.

Strategic communication research within an evolutionary psychological framework

The ability to use communication strategically is an essential feature of humans. Adapting to their social environment by communicative means was, for our ancestors, as important as adaptation to the natural environment (e.g., the color of skin is an adaptation to sunlight in the tropics). As Cosmides and Tooby point out:

Our ancestors have been members of social groups and engaging in social interactions for millions and probably tens of millions of years. To behave adaptively, they not only needed to construct a spatial map of the objects disclosed to them by their retinas, but a social map of the persons, relationships, motives, interactions, emotions, and intentions that made up their social world. (1992, p. 163)

Hence, many middle range theories in evolutionary psychology are essentially theories with far reaching social consequences. A comprehensive account of the state of the art in evolutionary psychology can be found elsewhere (Buss, 2015). By far, not all theories of evolutionary psychology are of immediate consequence for strategic communication research. However, some of them, like the theory of reciprocal altruism (Trivers, 1971), costly signaling theory (Zahavi, 1975), or kin selection theory (Hamilton, 1964), might very well be.

In essence, to do research in strategic communication with an evolutionary mindset, one has to assume that there are some modules in the human brain that are concerned—in the broadest sense—with communication in social settings. Kurzban even went so far as to hypothesize that there is one module in the brain that fulfills a public relations function, some form of a press secretary of the mind (Kurzban, 2010). Kurzban’s argument is basically that there are different modules active in the human mind and not all of them can necessarily be experienced consciously, and not all of them are active at the same time.

To better understand what modules in our daily reality mean, it is useful to turn to a theory developed by Griskevicius and colleagues—the fundamental motives framework (Griskevicius et al., 2006; Griskevicius & Kenrick, 2013). The framework has already proven its heuristic value in the field of consumer research (Durante & Griskevicius, 2016; Griskevicius & Durante, 2015; Griskevicius & Kenrick, 2013), and it is likely to enlighten research in strategic communication. As established by evolutionary psychology, the authors assume “that motivational systems have been shaped by natural selection to produce behaviors that increase reproductive fitness” (Kenrick, Neuberg, Griskevicius, Becker, & Schaller, p. 63). That means that each fundamental motivation addresses a different challenge that our ancestors faced. Griskevicius and Kenrick (2013) suggest these challenges include “(1) evading physical harm, (2) avoiding disease, (3) making friends, (4) attaining status, (5) acquiring a mate, (6) keeping that mate, and (7) caring for family” (Griskevicius & Kenrick, 2013, pp. 372–373).

Making friends as a challenge, to take one example, translates into the fundamental motive of affiliation. Based on key theories such as reciprocal altruism (Trivers, 1971), social contract theory (Cosmides, 1989), and indirect reciprocity (Nowak & Sigmund, 1998), the affiliation motive guides the formation and maintenance of alliances. According to Griskevicius and Kenrick, the “affiliation system is activated by cues of old friends, potential new friends, or being part of a group” (Griskevicius & Kenrick, 2013, p. 377). When we look at principles of relationship management (Ledingham, 2003), the similarity of core concepts is striking. Cutlip et al. (1952/1985) see mutually beneficial relationships at the center of organization-public relationships, and similarly Grunig, Grunig, and Ehling (1992) name mutuality, reciprocity, trust, and credibility as central concepts. It is no surprise that relationships are a core concept in the field and that the immense focus on dialogical principles (Kent & Taylor, 2002) is almost inevitable.

In the tribal societies of our ancestors, even leaders were only the primus inter pares, because all members of the communities shared common interests through their kin-based relationships. Tribal governing assemblies as the ting in Germanic tribes “constituted a peaceful deliberation of equals among equals” (Bentele & Nothhaft, 2010, p. 95). In communicating with stakeholders in today’s information society, any organization needs to, almost inevitably, present itself as par inter pares to trigger the cues that activate the individual affiliation motive. Accordingly, the display of cooperation “confers the image of a valuable community member” among individuals, as (Nowak & Sigmund, 1998, p. 573) pointed out.

Looking at the evolutionary challenge of attaining status, costly signaling theory provides another example of application of an evolutionary framework. Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR), for example, could be analyzed using costly signaling theory (Gintis, Smith, & Bowles, 2001; Zahavi, 1975). Ihlen, Bartlett, and May understand CSR as “the corporate attempt to negotiate its relationship to stakeholders and the public at large” (Ihlen, Bartlett, & May, 2011, p. 8). Evolutionary psychology would suggest to think of CSR as a costly signal, which “will be perceived as honest or unfakeable only when they are difficult or costly to produce” (Moratis, 2016, p. 41). In this view, however, CSR is not an attempt to build reputation; it is a signal that reputation and quality are already there (see Zahavi, 1975). Accordingly, Lys, Naughton, and Wang (2015) found support for the hypothesis that CSR is valuable because it signals future prospects rather than having a positive impact on return-on-investment. This is in line with an evolutionary view that proposes that handicaps nevertheless can be selected for if they “serve as marks of quality” (Zahavi, 1975, p. 205). This is observed in the plumage of peacocks and deer antlers.

Applying evolutionary psychology to the field of strategic communication is a difficult undertaking for many reasons. Evolutionary psychology itself contains a large variety of different middle-range theories that sometimes make different predictions regarding the same phenomena (Simpson & Campbell, 2015). One reason is that “we lack detailed knowledge of many selection pressures that humans faced of the millions of years of their evolution” (Confer et al., 2010, p. 122). Therefore, critics have repeatedly, and not without a point, voiced concerns that hypotheses based on evolutionary psychology might be untestable. Or as Cohen and Bernard have put it, that this “goal seems beyond the reach of today’s tool chest” (Cohen & Bernard, 2013, p. 397).

Hence, staunch critics of evolutionary psychology, such as Buller (2006), and their arguments need to be weighed carefully against the empirical results presented in favor of evolutionary psychology. When Buller argues “that much of evolutionary psychology is wrong, and … it is often wrong on evolutionary grounds” (Buller, 2006, p. 7), this has to be taken as seriously as his own confession that evolutionary psychology “is a bold and innovative approach to understanding human psychology, and its ideas deserve to be taken just as seriously as any other scientific ideas” (Buller, 2006, p. 7). After all, looking at strategic communication from an evolutionary psychological point of view might be just as bold, and it could turn out to be wrong. But as Table 1 suggests, it could also provide the field with a useful heuristic for research. Although these examples (CSR as costly signaling or reciprocity and public relations) are just brief sketches of how evolutionary psychology could be used as a framework to guide research, the following section will discuss an example in more detail and will provide a possible explanation for how strategic communication triggers fundamental motives, as proposed by Griskevicius and Kenrick (2013).

Table 1. Evolutionary motives and their potential application in strategic communication research (based upon Griskevicius & Kenrick, 2013).

Evolutionary motive	Cues triggering system	Example of behavioral communicative tendencies	Dominant motive in…	Key theories and ideas
Self-protection	Possibility of (physical) danger for the organization	- Increased tendency to conform to public expectations	Crisis communication	- Life history theory
		- Loss-aversive communication		- Error management theory
		- Decreased display of risk-seeking
		- Development of “bunker-mentality”
Disease avoidance	Potential presence of crisis “pathogen”	- Careful screening of environment for potential dangers	Issues management	- Behavioral immune system
		- (Over)sensitivity and obedience to public discourse		- Adaptations for disgust
Affiliation	Stakeholder-relationship threat or opportunity	- Display of in-group language to connect with stakeholder groups	Organization-public-relationships	- Reciprocal altruism
		- Susceptibility to word-of-mouth		- Social contract theory
		- Heightened reliance on stakeholder reviews
Status	Status threat or opportunity	- Communicative behavior to signal prestige	CSR; Public Relations	- Costly signaling
		- Increased prosocial organizational communication		- Social dominance theory
Mate acquisition	Desirable members of other groups with whom cooperation seems promising	- Increased display of organizational risk-taking	Impression management; Employer Branding	- Strategic pluralism
		- Display of conspicuous features		- Inter-sexual selection
		- Increased public altruism
		- Increased nonconformity and creativity
Mate retention	Relationship threat or celebration	- Seek communicative behavior to foster relationships	Public Relations, Organization-public-relationships	- Attachment theory
		- Attention to other organizations’ attractiveness
		- Attention to other organizations’ status		- Mate guarding
Kin care	In-group or vulnerable others	- Increased trust of stakeholders	Internal communication	- Kin selection/inclusive fitness
		- Increased nurturance
		- Increased giving without expectation of reciprocation		- Parent-offspring conflict

Strategic communication: triggering fundamental motives by emitting cues

It is obvious that our modern 21st century environment is very different from the environment in which our species evolved. Many modern-day communication phenomena can be regarded as mismatched psychological mechanisms that evolved in our EEA and now yield totally different results than what they were designed for by natural selection. As Barkow put it: “After all, much of post-Pleistocene society is evolutionary unanticipated, that is, many of its most prominent features could not have existed during the Pleistocene” (Barkow, 1992, p. 627). To a certain extent, communication professionals capitalize on such mismatches (Confer et al., 2010). Because humans have evolved psychological mechanisms that “can be exploited by evolutionary novel simulations of ancestral stimuli” (Buss, 1995, p. 10), media images can be used to “trigger, hijack, or exploit” these mechanisms (Confer et al., 2010, p. 119).

For example, activating the human sweet tooth through food commercials taps into a module that helped increase the inclusive fitness of its bearers in the EEA. Individuals who were able to taste sweetness had a higher chance to detect and consume foods of high nutritional value, which gave them an edge over individuals without the sweet tooth. In today’s industrialized society, the sweet tooth can be exploited, yielding an opposite effect than it did in the EEA. The huge surplus of refined sugar in a great many different products, causes obesity, diabetes, and other diseases of civilization. Just because the sweet tooth was advantageous for our ancestors in the EEA does not mean it is an advantage in the 21st century, at least not in the same way. To take another example, the sexualization of advertisements capitalizes on male and female mate preferences that developed during human evolution (Buss, 1995), which is not to say that they are morally right. However, professional advertisers tap into the individual psychological mechanism and simulate a situation in which personal preferences can be exploited and directed towards the underlying goal: consumption.

One of the most illustrating examples—and most informative for strategic communication research—is perhaps the question of why soldiers fight in modern wars. Violent conflicts have been a constant feature in human evolution (Pinker, 2011). No matter how technologized, managed, and complex fighting has become these days, “a recurrent feature across time is the role of small units ‘at the sharp end’ of any fighting” (Johnson, 2015, p. 729). Many scholars have, time and again, found the cohesion among soldiers to be of great importance (Moskos, 1975; Shils & Janowitz, 1948). The emotional bonds with fellow comrades helped soldiers to reconcile themselves with their life-threatening task. Thus, “strong emotional bonds between soldiers are critical to combat motivation and need to be nurtured by the military” (Wong, 2006, p. 662).

Wong’s reference to nurturing is of great interest for scholars of strategic communication. The familiarity among soldiers does not simply arise on its own; it is created and maintained by ongoing organizational efforts and the strategic use of communication. Forging bonds of familiarity among soldiers can be achieved by using evolutionary motives, such as kin care, during the in-group communication while on training and later in combat. Strategic communication creates a cue-triggering system that is modeled upon the human care for close kin. That is why, like in families, soldiers sleep and eat together, and they learn to perceive their comrades as kin. Soldiers fighting for other individuals they regard as brothers-in-arms would be one consequence of tapping into the fundamental motive of kin care (Griskevicius & Kenrick, 2013).

Because humans share 50% of their genes with siblings, sibling-survival is precious in terms of individual inclusive fitness. To put it in Hamilton’s terms of kin selection theory: “We expect to find that no one is prepared to sacrifice his life for any single person but that everyone will sacrifice it when he can thereby save more than two brothers, or four half-brothers, or eight first cousins” (1964, p. 16). It is, thus, no surprise what Wong and colleagues observed among soldiers of the disintegrating Iraqi Army in 2003. Where the nurturing lacks, soldiers have emotional ties “almost always with soldiers from their tribe or region” (Wong, Kolditz, Millen, & Potter, 2003, p. 15), because these are the people the soldiers are probably related to by familial ties.

Surely, military organizations such as armies are not the prime concern of strategic communication and public relations research. However, the question of how to foster cohesion and solidarity among members of an organization via communication very much is. One hypothesis informed of evolutionary thinking might propose that organizations try to tap into the kin care motive to create member commitment and motivation. More specifically, one could hypothesize that organizations that are more successful in accessing the kin care motive of their employees are also more successful economically. This may be due to members who are more willing to sacrifice their time for the good of the company, which they perceive as their family. This view would also explain why organizations in crises usually become closed entities that, against all conventional academic wisdom, refuse to be proactive when it comes to disclosing their role and acknowledging responsibility in the emergence of the crisis situation.

As Daly and Wilson argue: “Our foraging forebears lived in bands that were based largely upon kinship and the fundamental commonality of interest that kinship implies” (Daly & Wilson, 2014, p. 221). This suggests that in such relationships, problems notwithstanding, solidarity was a dominant force. From an evolutionary point of view, it is no surprise that corporate crises do result in public stonewalling rather than in employee-organization alienation (Arpan & Pompper, 2003). The same pattern reemerges time and again, be it the emission scandal of Volkswagen, the FIFA corruption scandal, or the Libor scandal. Like a family, the members of the organization usually stick together in times of crises. Evolutionary psychology offers an approach to understanding the ultimate causes behind these patterns. The question that now remains is: How does communication, in particular, feed into the activation and sustainment of these frameworks?

Adaptive mechanisms for strategic communication

So far, this article has argued for the existence of fundamental motives frameworks (Griskevicius & Kenrick, 2013) that are triggered by the strategic use of communication. In our EEA, these frameworks and the evolved psychological mechanisms that execute the underlying programs, have been, presumably, beneficial in terms of individual reproductive success, because they helped to increase and foster things like social status, affiliations, or family coherence. Hence, we are the descendants of individuals who, more or less successfully, used strategic communication within their communities to help their individual cause.

It has been a recurring theme in this article that today’s society is much different compared to the EEA. However, our psychological makeup is still more or less the same as it was before the dawn of civilization. Even at the beginning of the 19th century, the vast majority of humans lived in small rural communities (Malanima, 2009) where the social horizon did not encompass much more than a few hundred individuals. Therefore, the trait for the strategic use of communication that helped our (even most recent) ancestors to thrive and survive is still in play in modern society, albeit differently than anticipated by evolution. It would be impossible to discuss or describe all evolved psychological mechanisms and their implications for strategic communication in this article. A thorough overview is provided elsewhere (see Buss, 2015). Thus, the following discussion of evolved mechanisms that are of consequence for strategic communication is only exemplary.

For the above described examples to work, adaptive mechanisms need to be present in the human mind, which executes the implementation of the respective framework. Obviously, soldiers and employees know that their fellow soldiers and co-workers are not their kin. However, the active nurturing of identification can develop such strong bonds that these bonds feel as real as bonds towards kin, especially but not exclusively, in life-threatening situations. Mechanisms such as reciprocal altruism (Trivers, 1971), cheater detection (Cosmides & Tooby, 1992), and self-deception (Trivers, 2014) surely are useful in such processes. To develop a strong kin-like identification among nonrelated strangers, reciprocal altruism is certainly an important building block. As Jin and Lee noted in their study on enhancing community capacity, “people may conceive of PR-professionals as intermediary actors who help both residents and employees coexist by bonding and bridging them” (Jin, 2013, p. 292). This approach was heralded by Ledingham and Bruning more than 15 years ago (Ledingham & Bruning, 1998).

The individual ability of our evolved psychological mechanisms to form relationships based on reciprocal altruism is of consequence. There might not be a direct individual risk involved for the communicator when dealing with strangers, as was the case in the EEA. However, the mechanisms that evolved to solve the ancestral challenge of establishing trustful relationships with non-kin or strangers still work in our modern-day environment.

The same is true for deceptive or self-deceptive mechanisms. To deceive oneself seems to be an odd thing at first glance. However, “people inflate their perceptions of themselves …, exaggerate their level of control over events, and are overly optimistic about their future” all the time (Sedikides & Gregg, 2008, p. 104). This inflationary approach is deeply functional when it comes to organizational communication. “The idea that these positive illusions are really about public relations is bolstered by findings that people seem to be designed to portray the most positive defensible evaluation of their own abilities” (Kurzban, 2010, p. 119). After all, every organization also wants to publicly display the most positive defensible evaluation of itself.

In any case, the crucial crossroad is the boundary point between the communication practitioner as an individual and the organization as a communicating entity. Whatever the latter does, it is heavily influenced by the psychological makeup of the former. As Kahnemann and Tversky (1979) have shown in their landmark work on prospect theory, only a slight reframing of a decision situation can result in a completely different assessment of the very same problem. To study fundamental evolutionary motives and the psychological mechanisms that manage and execute communication and behavior according to the respective framework also helps to better understand the nature of strategic communication. A strategic communication research program built on an evolutionary psychological framework would have to examine communicative behavior of stakeholders and communicators in the context of adaptive thinking.

The shortcomings of current research in strategic communication

Ostensibly, psychology seems to be an important point of reference for strategic communication research. Ha and Boynton (2013) reported that of 99 analyzed articles in the field of crisis communication, 30 explicitly applied a theory from psychology, such as image restoration, framing, or attribution. This is reflected in the encompassment of psychological approaches in research, including diverse aspects such as the analysis of attributions (Schwarz, 2012), emotions (Jin, 2013), or influence (Werder, 2005). However, for the most part, psychology in strategic communication research is used to borrow measurable constructs, such as attitude, trust, and identification. Therefore, the bulk of research is not concerned with the study of the psychological underpinnings of strategic communication. But the argument brought forward by Nothhaft (2016) goes deeper, because his call for consilience aims at a consistent vertical integration of interdisciplinary knowledge. The message that authors like Fawkes (2015), Seiffert-Brockmann and Thummes (2017), or Trayner (2017) convey is that it is necessary to reconcile the understanding of the human mind with theories of strategic communication. If we do not understand the individual mind, we cannot hope to understand how it produces and facilitates strategic communication on an organizational level and beyond.

Nearly a decade ago, Broom observed that, as a field, we “have traditionally cited publications from communication, journalism, marketing, and other social sciences, but do not see our publications cited by scholars in other fields” (Broom, 2006, p. 149). As other disciplines like neuroscience and cognitive science progress, strategic communication is increasingly in danger of being overtaken and marginalized, becoming more isolated than it already is (Dühring, 2015). Other fields will eventually come up with better explanations for why strategic communication exists, how it works, and how to effectively apply it in practice. Applying evolutionary psychology to strategic communication research will not depose of that threat per se. But it will provide research with an anchor—the notion that we and our minds “are the product of tens of thousands of years of human and pre-human evolution, not merely programmed by the culture we happened to grow up in” (Nothhaft, 2016, p. 80).

When Kent and Taylor argue that there is “an assortment of theories needed to understand culture, organizational communication, interpersonal communication, persuasion, and public relations” (Kent & Taylor, 2007, p. 11), they have a valid point. But the argument is built on a shaky foundation when they state: “In physics, for example, Newton (theory of gravity), Einstein (theory of relativity), Heisenberg (Quantum Theory), Schrödinger (uncertainty theory), and others (chaos, string theory, etc.), are all necessary to explain various phenomena” (Kent & Taylor, 2007, p. 10).

The problem with this argument is that it implies that, for all sorts of phenomena, a suitable theory can provide an explanation. However, relativity completely integrates Newton’s theory of gravity, and furthermore, it works were Newton’s equation failed. Heisenberg and Schrödinger are both proponents of the same theory (quantum mechanics) who worked on different aspects of the same theory. String theory, finally, is the attempt to reconcile relativity with quantum mechanics, i.e., to provide a unified theory of all known fundamental forces in physics.

Public relations, strategic communication, and corporate communication, as three primary schools of thought (Dühring, 2015), are nowhere near such a unified state. On the contrary, the field, since its inauguration, has been constantly broadened and fragmented (Dühring, 2015). It is debatable whether a main theoretical paradigm is achievable, let alone desirable, and whether it would be better “for public relations to come to terms with itself as a multi-paradigmatic discipline” (Ihlen & Verhoeven, 2012, p. 160). The problem is not the diversity of theoretical approaches per se, it is that many of them are based on mutually exclusive conceptions of human nature, resulting in another shortcoming of the field: an apparent lack of empirical evidence. The dialogic framework, to give one example, suggests that,

The dialogic use of social media will yield more committed and stronger organization-public relationships, and shift the focus of public relations back to communication and relationships rather than marketing and advertising. The real benefit emerges when corporations make better decisions, act more ethically, and in general, improve the world they share with all of us. (Kent & Taylor, 2016, p. 66)

But time and again, as Kent and Taylor argue themselves, scholars have noted that organizations fall short of facilitating dialogic communication (Rybalko & Seltzer, 2010; Seltzer & Mitrook, 2007; Sommerfeldt, Kent, & Taylor, 2012; Taylor, Kent, & White, 2001; Waters, Burnett, Lamm, & Lucas, 2009). Kent and Taylor explain the lack of empirical evidence by arguing that “the infrastructure of the current social media sites does not facilitate relationship building” (Kent & Taylor, 2016, p. 66). Kent and Taylor justifiably criticize the dominance of approaches based on homo economicus. But shifting the emphasis to homo dialogicus (Kent & Taylor, 2016) and arguing that public relations practice just needs to adopt a new approach in order to make it work does not do the trick. An evolutionary psychology perspective would suggest that the problem does not vanish if one just changes the underlying concept, but rather the reality of human communication is the way it is for a reason.

Implications for practice and future research

Based on the argument presented, the interesting questions are now: Where should strategic communication as a field go, based on an evolutionary psychological framework? And furthermore, what are the implications of this theoretical agenda for existing and future research?

Applying evolutionary psychological thinking to strategic communication research is useful in the sense that it complements and enriches existing research. The fundamental motives framework suggests that there are modules in the human mind that are aligned to different communicative cues, emitted by different modes of communication. Some motives can be aligned to dialogic communication, while some are better aligned to persuasive communication. Some motives support relationship building, while others do not. Evolutionary psychology can inform strategic communication research by pointing to the boundary conditions of different modes of communication.

Evolutionary psychology as a framework is not so much about providing a roadmap on where to go from the current state of the art, but to acknowledge that “the study of strategic communication … can only begin with the human mind” (Nothhaft, 2016, p. 80). In order to research the implications and consequences of the cognitive modules for strategic communication, research needs to blend the knowledge and methods from diverse fields, such as cognitive science, psychology, anthropology, sociology, marketing, and communication science. Research teams should develop testable models based on further theory building. At the core of these efforts should be the modeling of the underlying mechanism—the emission of cues and signals that bring modules on- and offline. This needs to be grounded on a thorough analysis of how these cognitive modules are connected to the goals of strategic communication in organizations. In a second step, the modules themselves should be scrutinized to better understand how certain modules are aligned with certain goals (for example, how the activation of the kin care frame fosters cohesion within an organization).

Finally, research should strive to develop a complex model that encompasses all modules relevant to strategic communication. For theory building, extensive fieldwork in the form of ethnographic studies, qualitative interviews, and content analyses is necessary before the conceived model allows the formulation of testable predictions.

Naturally, it is hard to estimate what the benefit of this fundamental research is for the practice of communication. However, scholars in the field of marketing (Griskevicius, Tybur, & Van Den Bergh, 2010) have shown, that fundamental motives have consequences for consumer choices. It is reasonable to assume that the same is true for stakeholders and organizations making decisions to engage, trust, or commit themselves. Practitioners might be able to better use and evaluate their instruments when aligning them to certain fundamental motives.

Conclusion

A quarter century after the publication of the seminal book, The Adapted Mind (Barkow, Cosmides & Tooby, 1992), psychology has not yet fully come to terms with evolutionary psychology, and criticism ranges from calls for modification (Bolhuis, Brown, Richardson, & Laland, 2011) to broad rejection (Buller, 2006). Scholars of strategic communication might very well ask: Why should we embark on such a mission?

In light of Nothhaft’s understanding of strategic communication as “the study of how biases in (social) perception and (social) cognition are systematically exploited by subgroups of a community in order to regulate the others’ behavior to their advantage, i.e., in order to create and maintain privilege” (Nothhaft, 2016, p. 83), one can ascertain that evolutionary psychology has much to propose for how these mechanisms work and why they exist in the first place. And while these insights would be by no means exhaustive, as Nothhaft remarks himself (Nothhaft, 2016), they would constitute a missing building block of the ever-developing body of knowledge in public relations and strategic communication research.

In their seminal work Homicide, the psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson noted:

The prevalent ideology in the social sciences combines the premise that conflict is an evil and harmony a good—fair enough as a moral stance, although of dubious relevance to the scientific study of society—with a “sort of naturalistic fallacy” that makes goodness natural and evil artificial. The upshot is that conflict must be explained as the product of some modern, artificial nastiness (capitalism, say, or patriarchy), while the romantic ideal of the noble savage is retained, with nobility fantastically construed to mean an absence of all conflictual motives. (2014, p. 204)

One does not have to concur with this assessment completely. However, when looking at the field of strategic communication, especially the vast literature on the importance of dialogue, it is hard to deny that Daly and Wilson have a point. Of course, scholars of strategic communication in the 21st century are by no means shy to address the issue of conflict in organizational communication (Dimitriu, 2012; Holmström, Falkheimer, & Nielsen, 2010; Nothhaft & Schölzel, 2014). However, it seems that ideas based on symmetry (J. Grunig, 1992) and dialogue (Kent & Taylor, 2016) occupy the moral high ground.

The argument outlined in this article implies that strategic communication, in order to reach its goals, makes use of human nature by triggering fundamental motives that are wired into mental modules in the mind. Strategic communication can trigger different modes of communication, e.g., dialogue or a bunker mentality. Research in strategic communication informed by evolutionary thinking could help to reconcile the field with its theoretical and empirical shortcomings by providing a coherent framework with testable models and hypotheses. This might help to end the state of isolationism the field finds itself in.