Michele Gelfand: University of Maryland Over the past century, we have explored the solar system, split the atom, and wired the Earth, but somehow, despite all of our technical prowess, we have struggled to understand something far more important: our own cultural differences. Observing the wide variety of cultural permutations, people assumed for centuries that there […]
Simine Vazire: University of California, DavisA fundamental part of the scientific enterprise is for each field to engage in critical self-examination to detect errors in our theories and methods, and improve them. Psychology has recently been undergoing such a self-examination. Psychological scientists arguably tackle one of the hardest phenomena to understand and predict: human behavior. […]
Amy Boddy: University of California, Santa BarbaraLife history theory is a powerful approach to study human health and disease. However, there has been little work in applications of life history theory in cancer biology. Here I will discuss how cancer is fundamentally characterized by life history trade-offs, as cancer defense mechanisms are a major component […]
Zoe Liberman: University of California, Santa BarbaraSimilarity influences myriad social relationships. From group membership to friendship, to marriage, to mere proximity, people who are similar to one another tend to be closer than people who are dissimilar. Here, I present research indicating that infants understand the importance of homophily in determining social structure: they expect […]
Matthew Lieberman: University of California, Los AngelesOur social cognitive abilities can either be thought of like a piece of software that is written on top of existing general purpose hardware or as dedicated machinery of its own. I will present six lines of research from my lab that examine the ways in which our brain […]
Julie Miller: University of California, Los AngelesThe slave-making ants are social parasites that steal their workers in coordinated raids on other colonies. Their parasitic lifestyle has made these ants a model of host-parasite co-evolution, however their charismatic brood-raiding behavior is virtually unstudied. Here I explore how colonies make collective decisions when selecting a raiding site […]
Cristina Moya: University of California, DavisWhile many social species are group living, linguistically or symbolically marked social groups, characterized by large repertoires of shared cultural norms and behaviours, are uniquely human. However, the evolutionary relevance and psychological underpinnings of such ethnic groups remains debated. In this talk, I will examine the possibility that the way […]
Amy Non: University of California, San DiegoHispanic immigrants represent the largest and fastest growing ethnic minority in the US. Thus, an important research focus for the future health of the US is to determine factors that influence the declining health of immigrants with more time lived in the US, and across generations. Much research has […]
P.J. Lamberson: University of California, Los AngelesThe challenge of balancing between exploiting existing solutions and exploring for new ones spans problem domains from animals foraging for food to businesses searching for new revenue streams. In this talk I will discuss a simple version of this tradeoff: When tackling a complex problem, is it better for […]
Jim Sidanius: Harvard UniversityUsing Social Dominance and evolutionary theory as theoretical frameworks, we argue for a model entitled the Theory of Gendered Prejudice (TGP), which in broad terms, suggests that arbitrary-set discrimination must be understood as an inherently gendered phenomenon. Employing multiple methodologies, I argue that: 1) In general, males will display higher levels of […]
