Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture

Robbie Burger - Metabolic scaling, brain size, pace of life history, and the rise of hyper-dense cities
2020-03-16 00:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
Robbie Burger: University of ArizonaMetabolic scaling provides a universal theoretical framework to evaluate the life history trade-offs and population consequences across the tree of life. In this talk I will present new research applying metabolic scaling theory to brain size and the pace of living in birds and mammals. I will then present new extensions of metabolic scaling to understand the non-linear trade-offs in growth and mortality and size and number of offspring across animals. I will end by applying metabolic scaling to understanding the unique exta-metabolic energy use of modern humans that has led to the unprecedented rise in human hyper-density with implications for cultural evolution and rapid global change.

Heidi Lyn - Dogs, Apes, Dolphins, and Environment Effects on Communication and Cognition
2020-04-06 00:00
Heidi Lyn: University of South AlabamaThe study of animal communication and cognition has a long history, and one that frequently focuses on the human lineage (looking for homologous traits). In recent years, true comparative cognition has become more frequently reported in the literature. However, these studies can often be flawed, with many researchers failing to account for methodological changes that accompany a change in species. In addition, there is a strong tendency to assume that all differences in evidence between species are biological in nature. I will describe examples of these problematic studies and interpretation with special emphasis on how human environments can change cognitive and communicative capabilities in dolphins, dogs, and apes.

Ryan Nichols - Evaluating the Labor Market Explanation of Footbinding: Theoretical, Methodological, and Statistical Problems
2020-04-13 00:00
Ryan Nichols: Cal State University FullertonFootbinding refers to a historical practice of the Han Chinese involving, typically, the repeated ritual wrapping of the feet of young girls, often involving the breaking of toes, in an effort to create small. This presentation presents and discusses the Labor Market theory of footbinding (Brown et al. 2012; Bossen et al. 2011; Gates & Bossen, 2017; etc.). According to the Labor Market theory, footbinding’s maintenance over 1,000 years is explained as the product of a profit motive on the part of parents with daughters, whose sewing and weaving labor was possible only if their feet were bound. This theory asserts that footbinding’s origins and cessation are also explained due to forces regulating the market price of girls’ handicraft labor. The neo-Marxist Labor Market theory reigns as the most popular interdisciplinary explanation of footbinding. Despite this, a close study of its key findings reveals poor theoretical motivation, methodological problems, and repeated irregularities in use of accompanying data. Normally retesting a dataset would resolve many of these issues. However, Labor Market theory team members Melissa Brown, Hill Gates, and Laurel Bossen continue to decline requests by several scholars for access to their data.

Barry Bogin - Stunting is not a synonym of malnutrition
2020-04-20 00:00
Barry Bogin: Loughborough University & University of Michigan-DearbornThe World Health Organization defines stunting as, “…impaired growth and development that children experience from poor nutrition, repeated infection, and inadequate psychosocial stimulation.” Most of the recent research literature equates stunting with malnutrition, less with infection, and rarely with psychosocial issues. In contrast, most of the historic literature indicates that growth in height is largely independent of the extent and nature of the diet. We are sceptical that the estimated global prevalence of 150 million stunted infants and children is due to under-feeding. Systematic reviews of modern nutrition interventions find no impact on linear growth. We hypothesise that the majority of stunted infants and children are suffering from the social-emotional stresses of poverty – stresses that antagonize skeletal growth hormones.

Colin Allen - 40 Years On: The Quest for a Scientific Philosophy of Animal Minds
2020-04-27 00:00
Colin Allen: University of Pittsburgh2020 marks the 40th anniversary* of the publication of the pioneering work on vervet monkey alarm calls by Robert Seyfarth, Dorothy Cheney, and Peter Marler, as well as the 30th anniversary of the publication of Cheney & Seyfarth’s book How Monkeys See the World. Although not everyone was as willing as they were to embrace the label of “cognitive ethology” — coined by Donald Griffin in 1978 — the shift from Griffin’s anecdotal approach to seemingly fuzzy ideas about animal consciousness to a broader, more experimental approach to animal cognition over the past four decades is, by a variety of measures, a story of scientific success. New societies, new journals, new experiments, a big increase in the range of taxa studied, and even some new university departments, all contribute to the sense that the field of comparative animal cognition a progressive one. There is also a new generation of philosophers of animal mind who are collaborating closely with scientists. Despite all this, comparative cognition remains in what Thomas Kuhn would have called a “pre-paradigmatic” state. It lacks unifying theories and methods, and there is little consensus even about the right questions to ask. In this talk I will consider a range of explanations for this state of affairs, and address the question of what, if anything, should be done differently.

Alison Gopnik - Life history and learning: Childhood as a solution to explore-exploit tensions
2020-05-04 00:00
Alison Gopnik: University of California BerkeleyI argue that the evolution of our life history, with its distinctively long, protected human childhood allows an early period of broad hypothesis search and exploration, before the demands of goal-directed exploitation set in. This cognitive profile is also found in other animals and is associated with early behaviours such as neophilia and play. I relate this developmental pattern to computational ideas about explore-exploit trade-offs, search and sampling, and to neuroscience findings. I also present several very new studies from our lab and others suggesting that young human learners are highly exploratory, both in terms of their search for external information and their search through hypothesis spaces. In fact, they are sometimes more exploratory than older learners and adults.

Gordon Burghardt - The Origins, Evolution, and Functions of Play
2020-05-18 00:00
Gordon Burghardt: University of TennesseeOur understanding of the evolution, phylogeny, and functions of playfulness in animals is surprisingly minimal, largely because the function of play in both human and nonhuman animals remains controversial. Consequently, biologists have typically ignored play. After all, something frivolous and fun cannot be too important as compared to feeding, mating, fighting, and rearing young. In recent years, however, much research has advanced our understanding of play. This includes identifying play and its diversity, the neuroscience of play, the ontogeny and functions of play, and theoretical and modeling contributions. This talk will explore some of this recent work and where play research may be heading.

Matt Cartmill -
2020-06-01 00:00
Matt Cartmill: Boston University

L. Ian Reed - The communicative functions of facial expressions
2020-10-05 12:00 - 13:30
The communicative functions of facial expressions
L. Ian Reed
Clinical Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, NYU
Previous research suggests that some facial expressions of emotion serve a communicative function by signaling private feelings and action tendencies. Further, some expressions such as smiles and scowls affect receivers by increasing the credibility of accompanying verbal and/or written statements. Here, I will discuss the credible signaling hypothesis and the evidence in support of it. This will include a discussion of experiments using economic games to create strategic situations in which facial expressions of emotion might benefit signalers and receivers. These experiments test whether a signaler’s emotional expressions increase the credibility of promises, threats, claims of danger, and assurances of trustworthiness. The results speak to the hidden strategies behind spontaneous and deliberate expressions and their effects on receiver’s behavior.

Heidi Colleran - Rethinking reproduction in human evolutionary research
2020-10-12 12:00 - 13:30
Rethinking reproduction in human evolutionary research
Heidi Colleran
BirthRites Independent Research Group, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
Department of Human Behavior, Ecology and Culture, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Germany
In this talk I would like to critique and try to reframe the way that evolutionary researchers approach human reproductive behavior. Master narratives of human evolution have long promoted a naturalized, eco- logically determinist account of reproductive decision-making: these are usually narrowly tied to resource acquisition and to the energetics of re- production. Concepts like ‘natural fertility’ raise more problems than they address. Problematic dichotomies between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’ so- cieties are often based on the number of children people have, or on how individually ‘calculated’ reproductive decisions are, or on the use of so- called ‘modern’ contraceptives, all of which obscure how central cultural dynamics are to reproduction. Tacitly assuming reproduction is a private or a domestic activity, generally limited to women, also neglects the fact that it is often a public and a political domain. These conceptual slip- pages and shorthands can make the cultural influences on reproduction invisible, in both the past and the present. Drawing on my own research on the dynamics of fertility decline as well as on broader work in cul- tural evolution, cultural anthropology and anthropological demography, I would like to reframe reproduction as a central activity around which culture and demography co-evolve.

Nadya Vasilyeva - Structural thinking about social categories
2020-10-19 12:00 - 13:30
Structural thinking about social categories
Nadya Vasilyeva
Postdoctoral Scholar, Geography of Philosophy Project, UCLA Department of Anthropology
Categorical reasoning is one of the cornerstones of psychological functioning, supporting explanation, induction, and learning in virtually every domain of knowledge, including reasoning about social categories. Dominant theories of social cognition focus on the role of internal/essential characteristics in representations of social kinds. Drawing upon an emerging literature in philosophy, I introduce an alternative to internalist thinking, called “structural thinking”, in which observed correlations between social categories and their properties are explained through stable external constraints, rather than derived from the inherent nature of the categories. For example, a structural explanation of why girls wear pink might appeal to the socio-cultural pressures that affect choices and their social consequences, as opposed to inherent color preferences. I will present a series of studies which trace the developmental trajectory of structural thinking from age three through adulthood, and establish it as a distinct, early-emerging mode of thought with a unique cognitive, linguistic and behavioral profile. Recognizing structural reasoning invites us to rethink theories of categorical representation both within and beyond the social domain.

Tyler Marghetis - A history of our times
2020-10-26 12:00 - 13:30
A history of our times
Tyler Marghetis
Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced & Omidyar Fellow, The Santa Fe Institute
This is a talk about Time. I start with the tension between, on the one hand, the global diversity in how people conceive of time, and on the other, the sense of stability—even necessity—that we often assign to our own idiosyncratic conceptions. I then argue as follows. First, conceptualizations of time are best understood, not as concepts within individual brains, but as heterogeneous systems distributed across brains, bodies, material artifacts, and cultural practices—that is, as “cognitive ecologies.” Second, within a cognitive ecology, mutual dependence is the rule rather than the exception. Third, since cognitive ecologies consist of such varied components as neural circuits and Twitter timelines, these ecologies exhibit change on multiple, nested timescales—timescales that range from the slow evolution by natural selection of innate biases in our brains and bodies, to the cultural evolution of language and other artifacts, to the rapid pace of situated interaction. Fourth, these considerations explain the patterns in cross-cultural diversity, the stability of conceptions within communities, and the ways in which conceptions do, and do not, change over time. This argument is intended to be generic and to apply equally to our conceptions of other domains. I conclude that our conceptions of time—and number, and space—only make sense in light of their histories.

Zaneta Thayer - How social inequities create health inequities: An integration of social and biological mechanisms
2020-11-02 12:00 - 13:30
How social inequities create health inequities: An integration of social and biological mechanisms
Zaneta Thayer
Department of Anthropology and Ecology, Evolution, Environment & Society Program, Dartmouth College
A remarkably consistent pattern of human variation is the social gradient in health. This is the observation that, both within and between societies, individuals who are socially disadvantaged tend to have poorer health outcomes and shorter life expectancy than individuals who are more socially advantaged. In this talk I will use data from Aotearoa New Zealand and the United States to discuss how exposure to early life stressors in particular can shape disparities in health across the life course. I will also discuss why environmental sensitivity to early life stress may have evolved in the first place. Finally, I will discuss the potential role of historical trauma in shaping contemporary inequities in health. The results of this work have implications for our understanding of how and why the social gradient in health has emerged.

[note: there is no video recording available for this presentation]

Samuel Mehr - Representation and understanding in music across cultures
2020-11-09 12:00 - 13:30
Representation and understanding in music across cultures
Samuel Mehr
The Music Lab and Department of Psychology, Harvard University
Discovering the universal features of human musicality is a prerequisite for explaining the biological and cultural evolution of music. What is universal about our psychology of music, and what varies? In this talk I will present analyses of the Natural History of Song Discography, which includes songs recorded in 86 mostly small-scale societies, and experiments using these songs. We find that acoustical forms of songs are predictive of their primary behavioral functions across cultures. Adult listeners worldwide are sensitive to this fact, in that they accurately infer behavioral functions even when the songs are from unfamiliar cultures and sung in unfamiliar languages. Such effects are not, however, merely a result of musical or cultural experience: both young children and infants show comparable effects, with little evidence for increases in sensitivity across ages. Moreover, high-level representations of musical behaviors are apparently enabled by lower-level processing of pitch and duration information into tonal and metrical representations. These cognitive phenomena may form a foundation for a universal psychology of music underlying culturally varying phenomena, such as musical aesthetics.

Pascal Boyer - Why divination? A salient cultural attractor, an explanatory model, and some lessons for how to understand the generation of culture
2020-11-16 12:00 - 13:30
Why divination? A salient cultural attractor, an explanatory model, and some lessons for how to understand the generation of culture
Pascal Boyer
Professor of Sociocultural Anthropology and Psychology​ and Henry Luce Professor of Collective and Individual Memory, Washington University in St. Louis
Divination is a good example of a cultural attractor – almost all human societies have some documented form of divination, a procedure that supposedly guarantees the truth of the statements it produces. I propose a model of the strategic interactions around divination that may explain why the practice is so widespread, with some unexpected commonalities. This is an opportunity to think about cultural evolution, which so far has produced good models of cultural consumption, leaving aside why people produce the kind of material that become culturally widespread.

Willem Frankenhuis - Hidden talents in harsh conditions
2020-11-23 12:00 - 13:30
Hidden talents in harsh conditions
Willem Frankenhuis
Department of Psychology, Utrecht University, the Netherlands
It is well established that people living in adverse conditions tend to score lower on a variety of social and cognitive tests. However, recent research shows that people may also develop ‘hidden talents’, that is, mental abilities that are enhanced through adversity. The hidden talents program sets out to document these abilities, their development, and their manifestations in different contexts. In this talk, I present studies of cognitive adaptations to harsh and unpredictable environments. These studies have been conducted among individuals with different levels of exposure to adversity in the Netherlands and the United States.
No video is available for this talk.

Hugo Mercier - Impression management as signaling
2020-11-30 12:00 - 13:30
Impression management as signaling
Hugo Mercier
Evolution and Social Cognition and Collective Intelligence Teams, Institut Jean Nicod, CNRS, Paris
I claim that impression management can be usefully understood as signaling. One consequence is that impression management should be mostly honest, that is, it should benefit on average both senders (i.e. those who are managing the impression they give), and receivers (i.e. those who are evaluating others). This contrasts with the view that self impression is largely deceptive (and thus requires self-deception). I highlight two main mechanisms through which impression management can remain mostly honest. First, people who attempt to create misleading impressions (e.g. that they are more confident, smart, etc. than warranted) are reputationally punished once they are found out. Second, some impression signals entail inherent tradeoffs that make them costly, and thus honest (e.g. signaling that one is nice can entail signaling that one is not dominant). I will present experimental evidence demonstrating both mechanisms.

Rebecca Saxe - What is theory of mind? Implications for mind, brain and culture
2020-12-07 12:00 - 13:30
What is theory of mind? Implications for mind, brain and culture
Rebecca Saxe
McGovern Institute and Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT
Nearly all research on “theory of mind” has focussed on three kinds of inference: (i) explaining observed behaviour in terms of inferred mental states (given she did that, what did she want?); (ii) morally evaluating observed behaviour in terms of mental states (how much blame does she deserve for causing that harm, given what she believed and wanted?); or (ii) predicting future behaviour from mental states (given she believes that, what will she do next?). My own work on the neural basis of theory of mind likewise mostly focusses on these inferences. We have characterized a domain-specific representation of other people’s beliefs, desires and intentions and studied its cortical implementation. However, these days I think that the scientific concept of theory of mind has been seriously impoverished, and the focus on a narrow set of operationalizations of this important cognitive capacity is limiting scientific progress. In particular, I think we need to focus more on theory of mind: (iv) about the causes of emotions, and (v) as a causal model that supports intentional intervention. For future work, I will argue that we should focus on how people reason about other minds in order to try to change them.

Aaron Panofsky - Citizen scientific racism: White nationalist appropriations of genetic research
2021-01-04 12:00 - 13:30
Citizen scientific racism: White nationalist appropriations of genetic research
Aaron Panofsky
UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics, Public Policy, and Sociology
This talk presents research from a study about white nationalists and their efforts to appropriate genetics research for their own ideological and identity projects. Using historical sources and online data and interpretive methods, I show that ideas from genetics have been prominent in public pronouncements and in online discussions among white nationalists. For example, they discuss genetic ancestry tests to demonstrate pure European/white ancestry, population genetics to “prove” the biological reality of race, genetic anthropology to argue for the preservation of white “biodiversity,” and behavior genetics to claim the intellectual and behavioral superiority of whites. Through the 20th century there was a cadre of professional scientists eager to promulgate racist interpretations of genetics research, but facing effective scientific and ethical opposition by other researchers, their ranks and authority greatly attenuated in the 21st. White nationalists have relied on these scientists for scientific racist ideas, but with their decline, white nationalists have crafted themselves into a loose citizen science movement. I show that their activities include gathering and promulgating the claims of academic scientific racists, reinterpreting ostensibly non-racist genetics in racist ways, and using publicly available statistics and data to generate novel racist analyses, and exploiting the affordances of “open science” to mimic the institutional form of disciplinary science. This movement’s bid for authority is based on their claim that they represent the true spirit of scientific objectivity and a willingness to pursue data and arguments that have been suppressed by the academy, which has been overcome by political correctness.

Evelina Fedorenko - The human language system in the mind and brain
2021-01-11 12:00 - 13:30
The human language system in the mind and brain
Evelina Fedorenko
McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, MIT
The goal of my research program is to understand the computations and representations that enable us to share complex thoughts with one another via language, and their neural implementation. A decade ago, I developed a robust new approach to the study of language in the brain based on identifying language-responsive cortex functionally in individual participants. Originally developed for fMRI, we have since extended this approach to other modalities, like MEG and electrocorticography. Using this functional-localization approach, I identified and characterized a set of frontal and temporal brain areas that i) support language comprehension and production (spoken and written); ii) are robustly separable from the lower-level perceptual (e.g., speech processing) and motor (e.g., articulation) brain areas; iii) are spatially and functionally similar across diverse languages (>40 languages from 11 language families); and iv) form a functionally integrated system with substantial redundancy across different components. I will highlight three key findings from our work. First, I will show that the language brain regions are highly selective for language over diverse non-linguistic processes—from math and music, to executive processes, to non-verbal semantic cognition, and even processing computer code—while also showing a deep and intriguing link with a system that supports social cognition. Second, I will show that, contra many leading accounts, the language regions support both understanding of word meanings and sentence-structure building, with no part of the language network being selective for syntactic processing. Further, the ‘temporal integration window’ of the language system is only a few words long—in line with the fact that most dependencies among words are local across the world’s languages—and appears to be relatively insensitive to word order. Finally, I will present recent evidence of predictive coding in the language network during naturalistic comprehension, and show that state-of-the-art artificial neural network language models—optimized for predictive processing—accurately capture neural responses during language comprehension. The latter line of work is a critical first step to developing mechanistic accounts of language comprehension.

Quayshawn Spencer - A metaphysical mapping problem for race theorists and human population geneticists
2021-01-25 12:00 - 13:30
A metaphysical mapping problem for race theorists and human population geneticists
Quayshawn Spencer
Robert S. Blank Presidential Associate Professor of Philosophy and Race, Science, & Society Working Group, University of Pennsylvania
In this talk, I identify and clarify a metaphysical mapping phenomenon that’s almost twenty years old. The phenomenon is that the populations at a fivefold subdivision of humans into biological populations—the so-called human continental populations—correspond one-to-one with the five official races of the Office of Management and Budget in the US government. After introducing and defending a four-step deductive argument that involves a key premise justified with extensive abductive reasoning, I conclude that the metaphysical relation that’s exemplified by the aforementioned one-to-one correspondence is identity. I end by exploring interesting implications of this identity thesis for metaphysicians of race and NIH-funded medical scientists.

Note: no recording is available for this talk.

Michael Tomasello - Becoming human: A theory of ontogeny
2021-02-01 12:00 - 13:30
Becoming human: A theory of ontogeny
Michael Tomasello
Duke University and the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
Humans are biologically adapted for cultural life in ways that other primates are not. Humans have unique motivations and cognitive skills for sharing emotions, experience, and collaborative actions (shared intentionality). These motivations and skills first emerge in human ontogeny at around one year of age, as infants begin to participate with other persons in various kinds of collaborative and joint attentional activities, including linguistic communication. Our nearest primate relatives understand important aspects of intentional action – especially in competitive situations – but they do not seem to have the motivations and cognitive skills necessary to engage in activities involving collaboration, shared intentionality, and, in general, things cultural.

Dorsa Amir - The development of decision-making across diverse cultural contexts
2021-02-08 12:00 - 13:30
The development of decision-making across diverse cultural contexts
Dorsa Amir
Boston College Department of Psychology
The human behavioral repertoire is uniquely diverse, with an unmatched flexibility that has allowed our species to flourish in every ecology on the planet. Despite its importance, the roots of this behavioral diversity — and how it manifests across development and contexts — remain largely unexplored. I argue that a full account of human behavior requires a cross-cultural, developmental approach that systematically examines how environmental variability shapes behavioral processes. In this talk, I use the development of decision-making across diverse contexts as a window into the relationship between the socioecological environment and behavior. First, I present the results of a cross-cultural investigation of risk and time preferences among children in India, Argentina, the United States, and the Ecuadorian Amazon, suggesting that market integration and related socioecological shifts lead to the development of more risk-seeking and future-oriented preferences. Second, I present the early results of a five-culture investigation into the ontogeny of social preferences — namely, trustworthiness, forgiveness, and fairness. Taken together, these studies help elucidate the developmental origins of behavioral diversity across cultural contexts, and underscore the utility of interdisciplinary research for explaining human behavior.

Note: video of this presentation is not available.

Paul Smaldino - The evolution of covert signaling in diverse societies
2021-02-22 12:00 - 13:30
The evolution of covert signaling in diverse societies
Paul Smaldino
Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences, University of California, Merced
Identity signals are common components of communication transmissions that inform receivers of the signaler’s membership (or non-membership) in a subset of individuals. Signals can be overt, broadcast to all possible receivers, or covert, encrypted so that only similar receivers are likely to perceive their identity-relevant meaning. I’ll present an instrumental theory of identity signaling as a mechanism for social assortment, formalized with both analytical and agent-based models. Covert signaling is favored when signalers are generous toward strangers, when costs of being discovered as dissimilar are high, and when the ability to assort only with preferred partners is restricted. Covert signaling should be more common among members of “invisible” minorities, who are less likely to encounter similar individuals by chance. I’ll also discuss empirical projects underway to test and extend this theoretical framework using online political communication. This work has implications for theories of signaling and cooperation, social identity, pragmatics, politics, and the maintenance of diversity.

Manvir Singh - The nature and origins of religious super-attractors
2021-03-01 12:00 - 13:30
The nature and origins of religious super-attractors
Manvir Singh
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse
Human societies reliably develop “cultural super-attractors”, or complex practices and beliefs that exhibit striking similarities. In this talk, I will present research on the nature and origins of three religious super-attractors: shamanism, religious self-denial, and beliefs in supernatural punishment. These cultural practices appeared in the vast majority of human societies, predated doctrinal religions, and persist even when doctrinal religious authorities try to quash them. Drawing variously on cultural evolutionary theory, cross-cultural comparative projects, and studies conducted among the Mentawai people of Indonesia, I will characterize these practices, present hypotheses for why they recur, and test those hypotheses against anthropological data. The findings of these projects suggest that religious super-attractors develop as people selectively retain cultural practices evaluated as best satisfying subjective goals.

Sophie Scott - It's funny: the evolution and science of laughter
2021-03-08 12:00 - 13:30
It’s funny: the evolution and science of laughter
Sophie Scott
Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, UCL
Laughter is a nonverbal emotional expression associated with play and joyful emotions. In this talk I will explore the evolutionary roots of laughter, it’s role in human development, social interactions and communication, and some evidence about the neural systems recruited by the perception and production of laughter.

Britt Florkiewicz - At Face Value: The Role of Chimpanzee Facial Expressivity in the Evolution of Gestural Communication and Social Bonding
2021-03-29 12:00 - 13:30
At Face Value: The Role of Chimpanzee Facial Expressivity in the Evolution of Gestural Communication and Social Bonding
Britt Florkiewicz
UCLA Department of Anthropology
Primates make frequent use of visual signals when communicating with conspecifics, which includes facial expressions and gestures. These two forms of visual communication are thought to be different from one another: facial expressions are perceived as being spontaneous and inflexible, whereas gestures are perceived as being intentional and flexible. As a result, facial expressions are seldom incorporated in gesture research and theories regarding the evolution of human language. The ability to gesture with the face may be useful for non-human primates who rely extensively on their limbs for locomotion. In this talk, I will present data on whether chimpanzee facial expressions are capable of being used as gestures. In addition, I will also present some preliminary work exploring the relationship between facial mobility and facial expressivity in chimpanzees and gibbons. Primates exhibit high facial variability: they can produce a wide variety of facial muscle movements during bouts of communication. High facial variability is thought to be the result of sociality: being able to produce a greater variety of facial signals may help with the establishment and maintenance of social bonds. However, it is unclear if having greater facial variability results in a greater facial repertoire. In this talk, I will compare facial variability and facial repertoires in two distantly related ape species who differ in their social systems.

Nadia Chernyak - Socio-cognitive mechanisms of fairness
2021-04-05 12:00 - 13:30
Socio-cognitive mechanisms of fairness
Nadia Chernyak
UC Irvine Department of Cognitive Sciences
One of the most critical societal issues is our perpetuation of inequality. One important quandary, however, is that humans agree that equality is important, but continue to endorse and perpetuate existing inequalities. This talk presents some developmental evidence for why this may be the case. In particular, this talk presents data suggesting that our understanding equality and inequality follow distinct developmental trajectories and are underpinned by separate underlying cognitive mechanisms. The first part of the talk discusses how developing counting skills help enable children’s abilities to engage in equal resource distribution. The second part of the talk shows that at the same time, counting skills do not help children appreciate and resolve outstanding inequalities. Overall, the talk points to how cognitive and social influences may jointly impact our abilities to reason about inequality.

Oliver Sng - Rethinking stereotypes: Social perceivers as lay adaptationists
2021-04-12 12:00 - 13:30
Rethinking stereotypes: Social perceivers as lay adaptationists
Oliver Sng
Department of Psychological Science, UC Irvine
Individuals have evolved to adaptively allocate energy across different life tasks, such as mating effort, parenting effort, and building embodied capital. From various theoretical perspectives (e.g., parental investment theory, life history theory), an individual’s biological sex, current life stage, and ecological conditions interact to influence how energy is allocated across different tasks. I propose that social perceivers are in fact “lay adaptationists,” generating predictions about the behavior of others based on another’s sex, age, and home ecology. This idea has several implications for thinking about the origin and content of social stereotypes: first, perceivers hold ecology stereotypes—beliefs about individuals living in more harsh and unpredictable environments as having faster life history strategies. Ecology stereotypes are held by perceivers across societies and demographic groups, and also underpin certain race stereotypes. Second, perceivers hold stereotypes of how men and women at different ages are oriented towards mating and parenting goals. Such goal stereotypes may in turn underpin certain gender stereotypes. Finally, stereotypes exist not just as beliefs about a group’s general traits, but as beliefs about how a group is likely to behave towards specific others. I introduce this idea of “directed” stereotypes and present relevant evidence. Broadly, the lay adaptationist perspective provides novel insights to thinking about the nature of social stereotypes and highlights the strategic nature of our stereotypes.

Celeste Kidd - How to know
2021-04-19 12:00 - 13:30
How to Know
Celeste Kidd
Department of Psychology, UC Berkeley
This talk will discuss Kidd’s research about how people come to know what they know. The world is a sea of information too vast for any one person to acquire entirely. How then do people navigate the information overload, and how do their decisions shape their knowledge and beliefs? In this talk, Kidd will discuss research from her lab about the core cognitive systems people use to guide their learning about the world—including attention, curiosity, and metacognition (thinking about thinking). The talk will discuss the evidence that people play an active role in their own learning, starting in infancy and continuing through adulthood. Kidd will explain why we are curious about some things but not others, and how our past experiences and existing knowledge shape our future interests. She will also discuss why people sometimes hold beliefs that are inconsistent with evidence available in the world, and how we might leverage our knowledge of human curiosity and learning to design systems that better support access to truth and reality.
