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An "Eight Perspectives" framework to describe complex psychobehavioral phenomena
1Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, Australia.
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Tinbergen's Four Questions is a widely used organizing framework for describing animal behavior that has also been applied to complex human psychobehavioral phenomena. However, it can be extended in several useful ways, making it a more comprehensive framework for the human social and behavioral sciences. To this end, we propose an Eight Perspectives framework that extends Tinbergen's Four Questions by specifying the placement and roles of ecology, emotions, cognitions, and behavior in a broader framework. The framework is designed to be useful, simple, and flexible. We demonstrate its application using the example of physical appearance enhancement, and show that it organizes findings in an easily interpretable manner, identifies gaps in knowledge, and invites collaboration across biology, ecology, psychology, and behavioral science.
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