Huang &Bargh (H&B) draw an analogy between selfish genes and selfish goals. Just as genes “selfishly” build organisms to promote their own replication (and not necessarily in the best interests of the organism within whom these genes reside), goals “selfishly” shape cognition and behavior to promote their own attainment (even though this may retard progress toward other goals that individuals might hold dear). The analogy is both clever and useful, and underscores important insights such as the reconfiguration principle (the idea that an activated goal constrains individual's information processing in predictably goal-centric ways). But the connection between selfish genes and selfish goals is not merely metaphorical. An evolutionary perspective on human motivation implies deep connections between the selfish replication of genes and the selfish impact of goals on human psychology. Key principles of goal-directed cognition can be understood more completely, and their implications predicted more thoroughly, when located within an evolutionary perspective.

The human mind has the capacity to generate a nearly unlimited number of goals. Many of these goals have no obvious implications for, or connection to, genetic reproduction (e.g., the goal of reading, and indeed writing, this commentary). But a great many other goals are linked to specific motivational systems that evolved because, in ancestral populations, they promoted affective, cognitive, and behavioral outcomes that facilitated replication of the genes that built these systems. These fundamental motivational systems – which include motives governing food intake, self-protection, disease-avoidance, social affiliation, mate seeking, mate retention, and child-rearing – reflect a relatively small set of specific fitness-relevant challenges recurrent across our evolutionary history (Aunger & Curtis Reference Aunger and Curtis2013; Bernard et al. Reference Bernard, Mills, Swenson and Walsh2005; Kenrick et al. Reference Kenrick, Griskevicius, Neuberg and Schaller2010).

These fitness-relevant challenges are qualitatively distinct and require distinct kinds of behavioral responses in order to be successfully met. (As many of us are painfully aware, behavioral strategies that facilitate the initial attraction of a mate may be useless when it comes to maintaining a long-term relationship with that mate.) Indeed, behaviors that facilitate progress toward meeting some fitness-relevant challenges may actually retard progress toward others. The context-contingent activation of goal states plays a vital role in promoting adaptive behavior, and it does so by constraining the perceptual, cognitive, and decision-making processes that govern behavioral responses. It does this not just by facilitating specific goal-consistent perceptual attunements and cognitive biases, but also by inhibiting other attunements and biases that might otherwise energize behavioral progress toward other (less immediately pertinent) goals instead. The reconfiguration principle is rooted in the soil of these evolved motivational systems.

The evolutionary perspective is useful not merely because it provides an ultimate rationale for goal-directed constraints on cognition; it is useful because it provides a deductive framework within which hypotheses can be generated (and empirical discoveries made) about exactly how specific goal states constrain specific aspects of cognition. There is an enormous body of empirical literature that documents numerous ways in which the activation of evolutionary fundamental goal states adaptively constrains a wide range of cognitive phenomena, especially in the realm of social cognition (Neuberg et al. Reference Neuberg, Becker, Kenrick and Carlston2013; Neuberg & Schaller, in press).

To illustrate, consider the results of several research projects that have proceeded from observations about the specific ways in which specific categories of people have, in ancestral ecologies, posed threats to individuals' fitness. For example, male members of tribal out-groups historically posed a predatory threat to physical safety. In most contemporary human ecologies, this threat is small, yet the self-protection motivational system that responds to predatory threats remains attuned to perceptual cues connoting out-group status, with consequences for social cognition. For example, when a self-protection goal becomes active (even if by incidental events irrelevant to intergroup interactions, such as watching a frightening movie or being in a darkened room), non-black perceivers are especially likely to have danger-connoting stereotypes of African Americans implicitly activated into working memory (Schaller et al. Reference Schaller, Park and Mueller2003), to misperceive anger in the objectively neutral facial expressions of black men (Maner et al. Reference Maner, Kenrick, Becker, Robertson, Hofer, Neuberg, Delton, Butner and Schaller2005), and to identify racially ambiguous angry male faces as black (Miller et al. Reference Miller, Maner and Becker2010).

These perceptual and cognitive biases are functionally distinct from the perceptual and cognitive biases that emerge when a person becomes concerned with disease. For example, when a disease-avoidant goal is active, individuals are more visually attentive to disfigured faces (Ackerman et al. Reference Ackerman, Becker, Mortensen, Sasaki, Neuberg and Kenrick2009). They also become more likely to implicitly associate disease-connoting semantic concepts with categories of people who appear superficially to deviate from a subjectively “normal” appearance – including people who are old, physically disabled, or obese (Schaller & Neuberg Reference Schaller, Neuberg, Olson and Zanna2012). There are additional cognitive consequences of a disease-avoidant goal state, which follow from the fact that, historically, many cultural norms and traditions served as buffers against disease transmission (Fabrega Reference Fabrega1997). Consequently, when a disease-avoidance goal is active, individuals are more attracted to conformists, judge norm violations to be more morally wrong, and endorse more conservative (i.e., more tradition-preserving) sociopolitical attitudes (Helzer & Pizarro Reference Helzer and Pizarro2011; Murray & Schaller Reference Murray and Schaller2012).

Those last results highlight an important point: active goals (such as disease-avoidance) can constrain aspects of cognition that are transparently pertinent to the goal (e.g., attitudinal aversion to people who appear unhealthy), but they can also constrain aspects of cognition that, at first glance, may not seem so pertinent (e.g., conformist attitudes) – except when located within an evolutionary framework.

It is true that many goals are responsive just to the fleeting incentives of the here and now, and may have only minimal connection to evolutionary fundamental motives of the sorts we identified above. But it is also true that many goals are products of these evolved, fundamental motivational systems. These goals are not merely analogous to selfish genes. They are, instead, phenotypic manifestations of motivational systems encoded within and built by selfish genes. By carefully considering the implications of the causal connection between selfish genes and selfish goals, we can more expertly predict the consequences that these goals can have on human cognition and behavior.