The concept of alternative strategies and its relevance to psychiatry and clinical psychology

The intent of this article is to introduce the evolutionary concept of alternative strategies into the fields of psychiatry and clinical psychology. In behavioral ecology, the term alternative strategies refers to the presence of two or more discrete behavioral variants among adults of one sex and one population when those variants serve the same functional end. Often discrete behavioral variants are associated with specific morphological, physiological, and life-history characters. The concept of alternative strategies has been applied to human behavior to explain the origin of some behavioral syndromes that are currently classified as mental disorders or emotional dysfunctions. Antisocial personality could represent a high-risk strategy of social defection associated with resource acquisition and reproduction. Insecure attachment could represent an evolved psychological mechanism that used the quality of parental care received during childhood as a cue for optimizing adult reproductive strategies. Since a major contribution of evolutionary theory is the insight that individual differences are core biological features of any animal species, including Homo sapiens, the application of the concept of alternative strategies to psychiatry and clinical psychology can be a powerful antidote to the growing tendency to medicalize human diversity.