Positive evolutionary psychology uses evolutionary principles to shed light on living the good life.

Three lessons from positive evolutionary psychology are this: Be kind, believe in love, and be trustworthy.

If you're looking to improve your life at any level, pay close attention to positive evolutionary psychology.

The evolutionary perspective on the human experience is rich and full of guiding light if you take a minute to look for it. The basic idea of evolutionary psychology is that human behavior—and all that goes with it (emotions, thoughts, attitudes, to name a few)—was shaped by eons of natural selection, leading to the special kind of ape that you see in the mirror each day. Evolutionary psychology is, briefly, an approach to understanding behavior by applying principles of evolutionary science. For instance, evolutionary psychology asks how some common behaviors (such as smiling when something goes well) would have helped our ancestors to survive and, ultimately, reproduce (see Evolutionary Psychology 101 for a detailed introduction).

While I have co-written book-length treatments (Positive Evolutionary Psychology and An Introduction to Positive Evolutionary Psychology) regarding how the ideas from evolutionary psychology can help us lead richer lives, here are three that are useful to keep at our mind's forefront:

Be kind. While people often think of evolution as a set of forces that set organisms in some competitive and nasty competition with one another, that's really only part of the story. Humans (as is true with many mammals, in fact) evolved to seek out others who display genuine indices of kindness (see Buss, 2017). This is partly because we are a deeply social species, and humans are interdependent on one another in so many ways. This point is easily explicated. Imagine that you have a choice to date someone who is described as "extremely kind" versus "not kind at all." Or you can choose a partner to work on a project who is either known to be kind or nasty. Or you get to elect a supervisor for your team who is either very kind or very........

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