How Adaptive Is Memory for Cheaters?

Evolutionary psychology posits that the human mind comprises highly specialized cognitive modules, including a module that is thought to facilitate social cooperation by allowing for the detection of cheaters. Consistent with assumptions implied by models of reciprocal altruism, our research has revealed enhanced source memory for faces of cheaters (i.e., memory for the context in which the faces of cheaters were encountered). However, this finding should not be uncritically interpreted as evidence of a specialized cheater-detection mechanism. Here, we review evidence suggesting that human memory may be better characterized by more general mechanisms. A preference to attend to, and remember, threatening and unusual information may ensure that processing resources are focused on relevant information in a wide variety of situations, and may therefore constitute a more adaptive mechanism for remembering social information than focusing exclusively on cheating would.