Zaneta Thayer - How social inequities create health inequities: An integration of social and biological mechanisms
2020-11-02 12:00 - 13:30 (America/Los_Angeles)
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.

Sheina Lew-Levy - Learning to forage in hunter-gatherer societies
2021-04-26 12:00 - 13:30
Learning to forage in hunter-gatherer societies
Sheina Lew-Levy
Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University & Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University
Studying how contemporary hunter-gatherer children learn to forage can help shed light on the evolution of human cognition, life history, and social organization. Still, our species’ developmental plasticity and socioecological diversity complicates the applicability of single-population findings to our understanding of human evolutionary processes. In this presentation, I draw upon systematic literature reviews and empirical research with Tanzanian Hadza and Congolese BaYaka hunter-gatherer children and adolescents to outline cross-cultural similarities and differences in contemporary hunter-gatherer children’s learning. I first show how play, teaching, participation, and imitation biases contribute to children’s acquisition of skill and cooperative norms. One striking cross-cultural similarity is the primacy of learning with and from peers in the mixed-sex multi-age playgroup. I argue that peer learning may contribute to more rapid, and potentially less costly, knowledge transfers in humans, and may also lead to the innovation of new social norms and subsistence practices. I discuss the implications of these findings to cumulative cultural evolution. Second, I outline how cultural beliefs, ecology, settlement structure, and subsistence opportunities contribute to cross-cultural variation in hunter-gatherer children’s economic work and learning. I argue that these contextual factors can help us understand the selection pressures which have shaped our long childhood and the age-graded division of labour.

Agustín Fuentes - Meaning-making, belief and world shaping as core processes in the human niche
2021-05-10 12:00 - 13:30
Meaning-making, belief and world shaping as core processes in the human niche
Agustín Fuentes
Department of Anthropology, Princeton University
Humans are not unique in the world. But we are quite idiosyncratic. Across the Pleistocene the genus Homo developed a distinctive suite of cognitive, behavioral, ecological, and technological processes and patterns; in short, a human niche. This niche eventually included a core role for meaning making, augmenting the capacity to engage with more than the “here and now” to develop novel ideas and concepts, share them, and convert them in material reality. Today humans represent an infinitesimally small percentage of all the life on this planet, yet despite being such a tiny part of the great diversity of living things, humans are among the most significant forces affecting ecosystems and all other life on this planet. Why and how this came to be are two of the most pressing questions one can ask about what it means to be human. I suggest that extensive and distinctive capacities for meaning-making, belief and world shaping (or better put, niche construction) are at the heart of the answers to these queries.

Kim TallBear - Indigenous STS, Governance, and Decolonization
2021-05-13 12:00 - 14:00
Indigenous STS, Governance, and Decolonization
Kim TallBear
Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience & Environment
Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation Fellow
Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta
Like traditional Science and Technology Studies, the new field of Indigenous STS studies the cultures, politics, and histories of non-Indigenous science and technology efforts. In addition, it studies Indigenous-led science and technology, including knowledges classified as “traditional.” Indigenous STS refuses the purported divide between scientific and Indigenous knowledges, yet it does not conflate knowledge traditions. It understands them as potentially sharing methods while deriving in practice from different worldviews. Indigenous STS—comprised of mostly Indigenous thinkers trained and working in a variety of disciplines and applied fields—also focuses on science and technology knowledge production for social change (since technoscience has long been integral to colonialism). Indigenous STS works with scientists and those in technology fields to change fields from within. Some Indigenous STS scholars are practicing scientists. After discussing Indigenous STS foundations and goals, this talk showcases the Summer internship for INdigenous peoples in Genomics (SING), a training program founded in 2011 in the US. SING has since expanded to Aotearoa/New Zealand, Canada, and Australia in conjunction with Indigenous STS efforts to support global Indigenous governance via science and technology.
Co-sponsored by BEC, The American Indian Studies Center, the Institute for Society and Genetics, and the Culture, Power, and Social Change Group
Note special day and time: Thursday, May 13, 12:15 to 1:45 PST
And special Zoom link: https://ucla.zoom.us/j/97160150930
TallBear Indigenous STS

Isabelle Laumer - Physical and social cognition in a parrot (Cacatua goffiniana) and ape model species (Pongo abelii)
2021-05-17 12:00 - 13:30
Physical and social cognition in a parrot (Cacatua goffiniana) and ape model species (Pongo abelii)
Isabelle Laumer
Department of Anthropology, UCLA
The comparative approach is a powerful tool to deepen our understanding of the adaptive value of complex information processing. Modern approaches of comparative cognition are interested in how cognitive outputs are influenced on the basis of convergence (distantly related species facing similar demands) or on the basis of divergence (closely related species facing different cognitive challenges). Birds diverged from mammals around 280 million years ago resulting in highly characteristic brain structures (nuclear avian brain versus laminar mammalian brain). Since large-brained birds, such as corvids and parrots, often show similar skills in cognitive tasks as primates, it was suggested that these similarities result from a convergent evolutionary trend to cope with similar environmental and social demands. Therefore, comparing the performance of primates and birds on standardized cognitive tasks promises to be particularly telling.
In a series of experiments, I investigated the cognitive abilities of Goffin´s cockatoos and orangutans in the physical domain by the use of decision-making paradigms, novel test designs and by using tests that have previously been conducted in children. My studies use carefully controlled comparative procedures that provide first insights into similarities in tool-related problem solving and innovation between these two distantly related species. As both species tested are important model species for physical cognition and tool-use, aside from the comparative perspective my studies additionally provide important information within the subject of tool-related cognition, as within-species designs. Furthermore, I will present my findings on tool manufacture, memory and social cognition, inequity aversion and prosociality, in the Goffin´s cockatoo in light of recent findings in primate research.

Chris Krupenye - The social minds of humans and other apes
2021-05-19 12:00 - 13:30
The social minds of humans and other apes
Chris Krupenye
Department of Psychology, Durham University and Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University
Few traits characterise humans more profoundly than the complexity of our social lives, and the depth of our insights into the social and mental lives of others. To predict behaviour and make decisions in a dynamic and uncertain social world, we track others’ social relationships, evaluate others based on their behaviour or identity, and even attempt to infer their thoughts and emotions. That our potential social partners possess these skills, too, is precisely what makes the social world so complex. In turn, we must manage our reputation and relationships, adhere to the norms of our group, and strategically navigate manifold cooperative and competitive interactions. Cognition is at the heart of what makes social life so demanding and thus, to characterize the origins of human social complexity, we must understand the origins of our social cognition. I will present a series of comparative experiments with humans and our closest phylogenetic relatives, chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and bonobos (Pan paniscus), aimed at identifying shared traits that were likely present 6-9 million years ago in our last common ancestor, as well as spotlighting unique features of the human mind. This work demonstrates that great apes, like humans, possess impressive knowledge of their social world: they remember social partners for decades, encode their dispositions and relationships, and even track their perspectives in surprisingly rich ways. Together, this body of research suggests that the roots of our social minds are discernible in the minds of our closest relatives, and extend deep into our evolutionary history.

Alyssa Crittenden - Microbiomania, rewilding, and the threat of bioprospecting: How anthropologists can help to set a more ethical research agenda in microbiome sciences
2021-05-24 12:00 - 13:30
Microbiomania, rewilding, and the threat of bioprospecting: How anthropologists can help to set a more ethical research agenda in microbiome sciences
Alyssa N. Crittenden
Department of Anthropology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas
Scientific knowledge and commercial interest in the human microbiome are growing exponentially. As our understanding of the vital role of microbes increases, so does “microbiomania” – the fervor in which microbes are lauded in popular media and scientific press as capable of revolutionizing human health in the Global North. This wholescale shift from viewing bacterial species as primarily threatening to critical and endangered symbionts, has led to a reconsideration of the mismatch hypothesis and the urge to repopulate the gut microbiome to its “natural” state. This has meant that cross-cultural research on the microbiomes of small-scale communities is increasingly pursued by microbiologists and commercial biotech companies in an attempt to sequence “traditional” or “lost” microbes, prized commodities extoled as a potential panacea for many common ailments. Using a framework grounded in the political ecology of the body (sensu Guthman and Mansfield), I interrogate the “rewilding” movement and propose that it is based on scientific inaccuracies and is rooted in dangerous colonial perspectives that identify which bodies such “ancestral species” can be found on and in. I argue that this movement is the noble savage paradigm reimagined, where outmoded and persistent ideas are finding renewed expression across scientific domains. I reflect on my past research failures, my current community-based and community-inclusive approaches to human biological research, and call for the implementation of data collection and management practices (e.g. power sharing, profit sharing) that will mitigate human rights infractions and make for stronger science in the arena of human microbiome research.

Herman Pontzer - Evolution, Activity, and Aging in Human Energy Expenditure
2021-09-27 12:00 - 13:30
Evolution, Activity, and Aging in Human Energy Expenditure
Herman Pontzer
Duke University
Metabolic energy expenditure, the combined activity of our 37 trillion cells, and shapes our daily energy requirements and affects our health. Conventional wisdom, born largely from clinical studies in industrialized populations, has held that daily energy expenditures are similar for closely related species, increase at a constant rate with body size through growth and development, and are strongly affected by physical activity levels. Recent work, including research with small-scale societies around the globe, has challenged each of these views. In this talk, I discuss these new insights and their implications for understanding human energy expenditure.

James Holland Jones -- Cultural Evolutionary Dynamics Under Structural Uncertainty and the Consequences for Coupled Diffusion Processes
2021-10-04 12:00 - 13:30
Cultural Evolutionary Dynamics Under Structural Uncertainty and the Consequences for Coupled Diffusion Processes
James Holland Jones
Earth Systems Science, Stanford University
The COVID-19 Pandemic has laid bare the social vulnerabilities that make epidemics larger, more deadly, and more difficult to control, both within the US and internationally. Differential vulnerability by social attributes (e.g., race, socioeconomic status, gender) leaves the overall population at greater risk for severe outbreaks than would be the case in less unequal populations. While health researchers have noted the societal vulnerability brought about by structural inequality for years, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed other surprising sources of structural vulnerability that exacerbate transmission and complicate control. In particular, socio-political polarization has proven to be a pernicious problem for epidemic control. I will present results from a simple model that show how two social processes, homophily and out-group aversion, in a polarized population, can produce complex transmission dynamics that qualitatively resemble the course of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. I will then present a cultural-evolutionary framework for understanding why such polarization arises in the context of a pandemic. At the outset of a pandemic of a novel pathogen, people are suffused with uncertainty about the nature of the threat, its origin, the severity of disease, the effectiveness of control, timelines, etc. We hypothesize that uncertainty is a key variable underlying increased socio-political polarization on the one hand, and the response to crises such as pandemics on the other. Uncertainty is a fundamental feature not just of epidemics but of any existential crisis facing humanity more generally. Understanding how people respond to uncertainty, and crucially, what the aggregate effects of these responses are is therefore a critical need for research into existential threats. Conventional wisdom tells us that people employ social heuristics when faced with uncertainty. This is important since aggregation itself becomes a major source of structural uncertainty, as the behavior of ensembles of decision-makers is characterized by substantial nonlinearity, feedback, and often surprising threshold effects. I will present new work on modeling decision-making under uncertainty and the aggregate effects for “coupled-contagion” processes of social learning and pathogen diffusion.

Damian Caillaud - Behavioral ecology: an important tool to protect threatened gorilla populations
2021-10-11 12:00 - 13:30
Behavioral ecology: an important tool to protect threatened gorilla populations.
Damian Caillaud, UC Davis
Conservation measures are often based on survey data and demographic projections, rather than behavior ecology studies. However, animal behavior research often provides key information explaining why some populations are threatened with extinction. For example, aspects of the ranging behavior and social structure of mountain gorillas strongly reduce population growth, even in the absence of feeding competition. In other studies, we found that home range persistence hinders the recovery of low-density gorilla populations. Lastly, the impact of infectious disease on gorilla populations cannot be explained without taking into account gorilla social organization and social behavior. We hope these examples (and others) contribute to make behavioral ecology a more systematic conservation tool.

Idan Blank - The relationship between language and executive functions
2021-10-18 12:00 - 13:30
Idan Blank
UCLA Department of Psychology
Two cognitive capacities that “make us human” are our ability to communicate via language and our executive functions (working memory, cognitive control, inhibition, etc.), both unparalleled in the animal kingdom. Language comprehension is mainly carried out by specialized mechanisms that are language-specific and are not engaged in other high-level cognitive functions; in contrast, executive functions constitute a general resource that is shared across diverse cognitive domains. Are these two capacities related to one another? On the one hand, much research has found that comprehension, in addition to its reliance on domain-specific mechanisms, is critically supported by executive functions. On the other hand, those studies are overwhelmingly based on cleverly designed artificial tasks, which effectively turn language into an “IQ test” and do not mimic real-world comprehension “in the wild”. In this talk, I will describe studies that instead employ naturalistic paradigms in fMRI to test how executive functions contribute to comprehension. Through a combination of data-driven analyses, psycholinguistic constructs, and brain-behavior correlations, the findings challenge two decades of research about the role of executive resources in comprehension.

Sarah Hill - Cytokines as a mediator of condition-dependent behavioral strategies
2021-10-25 12:00 - 13:30
Sarah E. Hill
Department of Psychology, Texas Christian University
A growing body of research finds that the activities of the immune system – in addition to protecting the body from infection and injury – also influence how we think, feel, and behave. Although research on the relationship between the immune system and psychological and behavioral outcomes has most commonly focused on the experiences of those who are acutely ill (i.e., sickness behavior), theory and research in the evolutionary sciences suggests that the immune system may also play a key role in modulating condition-dependent behavioral strategies. In this presentation, I will go over recent research that suggests that inflammation – a key component of the immune response to pathogens and stressors – may play an important modulatory role in shaping emotions, motivation, cognition, and behavior, even among those without symptoms of acute illness. I close by discussing potential opportunities for integrating psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) into evolutionary approaches to human behavior.

Cody Ross - Social networks, network-structured economic games, and a toolbox for fine-scale, comparative research
2021-11-01 12:00 - 13:30
In this talk, I review challenges of collecting and analyzing human social network data. I first discuss trade-offs between the use of roster-based and name-generator-based tools for studying cooperative networks, and highlight the potential of roster-based, network-structured economic games (e.g., the RICH economic games introduced by Gervais 2017) to address anthropological questions. I then introduce the DieTryin R package, and illustrate its improved scalability over roster-based methods. In cases where network data are collected via self-reports, rather than via experimental games, reported ties may be seriously biased. Individuals may, for example, report making cooperative transfers that did not really occur, or forget to mention real transfers. Many network-level properties are exquisitely sensitive to these biases, and there remains a dearth of easily deployed statistical tools that account for them. To address this issue, I introduce a latent network model, and associated R package, STRAND, that allows one to jointly estimate parameters measuring reporting biases and a latent, underlying true social network. Finally, I present a case study in the use of these tools in a study investigating how inequality and perceptions of inequality influence expression of parochialism versus magnanimity in two mutli-ethnic Colombian communities.
