Mindreading, mindshaping, and evolution

I present and apply some powerful tools for studying human evolution and th e impact of cultural resources on it. The tools in question are a theory of niche construction and a theory about the evolutionary significance of ext ragenetic (and, in particular, of psychological and social) inheritance. Th ese tools are used to show how culturally transmitted resources can be recr uited by development and become generatively entrenched. The case study is constituted by those culturally transmitted items that social psychologists call `expectancies'. Expectancy effects are mindshaping effects of our min dreading dispositions. I show how expectancies may have been recruited by i mportant human developmental processes (like those involved in language acq uisition and those responsible for gender differences) and how they may hav e become entrenched. If the hypothesis is correct, the relation between min dreading and human evolution is more intricate than usually thought.