Psychology and Security Resource Page
Ross Anderson has put together a great resource page on security and psychology:
At a deeper level, the psychology of security touches on fundamental scientific and philosophical problems. The ‘Machiavellian Brain’ hypothesis states that we evolved high intelligence not to make better tools, but to use other monkeys better as tools: primates who were better at deception, or at detecting deception in others, left more descendants. Conflict is also deeply tied up with social psychology and anthropology, while evolutionary explanations for the human religious impulse involve both trust and conflict. The dialogue between researchers in security and in psychology has thus been widening, bringing in people from usability engineering, protocol design, privacy, and policy on the one hand, and from social psychology, evolutionary biology, and behavioral economics on the other. We believe that this new discipline will increasingly become one of the active contact points between computing and psychology—an exchange that has hugely benefited both disciplines for over a generation.
B. Real • October 28, 2009 7:48 AM
Not only left more descendants, but were able to get others to raise their children for them, thus being able to “spread their seed” further than would otherwise be possible on their own labours. A fascinating read that discusses this (going back to pre-man) is “Beyond Choice” by Alexander Sanger.