Trait Social Anxiety as a Conditional Adaptation: A Developmental and Evolutionary Framework
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Individuals with trait social anxiety are disposed to be wary of others. Although feeling social anxiety is unpleasant, evolutionary psychologists consider it to be an adaptation. In current models, social anxiety is described as functioning to have helped our prehistoric ancestors avoid social threat by warning individuals when their interactions with other group members were likely to be negative and motivating them to act in ways to prevent conflict or limit its damage. Thus, trait social anxiety is thought to have evolved in our species because it allowed our ancestors to preserve their relationships and maintain their positions in social hierarchies. While we agree with this conclusion drawn by existing evolutionary models, we believe that there is an important element missing in these explanations: the role that individual development has played in the evolution of trait social anxiety. We propose a new model, which argues for trait social anxiety to be considered a conditional adaptation; that is, the trait should develop as a response to cues in the early childhood environment in order to prepare individuals to face social threat in adulthood. Our evolutionary model can provide new insights into how trait social anxiety has persisted in our species and how it functions in the modern world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".