Evolutionary Forensic Psychology

The field of forensic psychology explores the intersection of psychology and the law. The purpose of this book is to examine topics in the field using the powerful, multidisciplinary, conceptually integrated approach that the natural sciences have embraced for decades with great success. Evolutionary Forensic Psychology is a necessary step toward a unified and complete understanding of psychology and the law. It recognizes that crime such as murder, non-lethal violence, rape and theft are manifestations of evolutionarily recurrent conflicts between individuals. The cost-inflicting strategies that we recognize as crimes may have been favored by natural selection when they gave individuals an advantage in competition for resources. Each of the chapters that comprise this volume has been selected to provide the first unified examination of important research contributions and future directions of Evolutionary Forensic Psychology.