PsychTable.org: The Taxonomy of Human Evolved Psychological Adaptations

Abstract

We announce the launch of PsychTable.org, a collaborative web-based project devoted to classifying and evaluating evolved psychological adaptations (EPAs), geared toward researchers, educators, students, and the general public. The website works by aggregating citations which support or challenge the existence of each purported EPA, using a mathematical algorithm to assign an evidentiary strength score to each, and generating a table which represents the current but ever-changing state of the empirical evidence. Citations are added and assigned evaluative ratings by both general users and an international community of expert contributors; as such, the content of the site will represent the consensus of the scientific community and new research opportunities. PsychTable has features for achieving empirical meta-goals such as quality control, hypothesis testing, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and didactic utility. Additionally, PsychTable will help adjudicate arguments within the field by providing a one-stop resource to display which proposed EPAs have strong empirical support and which others are relatively lacking in evidence.