Ben Trumble: UCSBIn February 2014, catastrophic flooding impacted the Tsimane forager-horticulturalists of lowland Bolivia. Flooding decimated the subsistence lifestyle and more than two-thirds of villages were flooded (completely destroying crops and washing away most possessions); thousands fled to the nearby market town of San Borja. Widespread food insecurity and disease followed. This project examines the […]

Eduardo Fernandez-Duque: Yale UniversityI will discuss published and new data from a population of monogamous owl monkeys in the Argentinean Chaco that we have been studying for almost 20 years to examine the hypothesis that social monogamy is a default social system imposed upon males because the spatial and/or temporal distribution of resources and females […]

John Tooby: UCSBDon’t shoot! Rodney King. Remember the Maine. The Reichstag Fire. Guernica. The War of Jenkins Ear. The murder of Emmet Till. Events in which one or more members of one group injure the welfare of one or more members of another group (“outrages”) typically provoke extraordinarily strong and frequently violent responses directed more […]

Robert Provine: University of MarylandAfter an introduction to the nature and use of laughter in daily life, discussion turns to the evolution of laughter and its implications for the emergence of speech. Contrasts between human and chimpanzee laughter reveal that laughter is the ritualized signal of labored breathing of rough-and-tumble, with the vocalization representing the […]

No BEC This Week:

Meg Crofoot: UC DavisAnimals living in stable social groups may often disagree about where to go, but must reconcile their differences to maintain cohesion and thus the benefits of group living. Although theory predicts that shared (democratic) decision-making should be widespread in nature, in species that form long-term social bonds, considerable asymmetries in dominance and […]

Rick Dale: UC MercedHuman language is a flexible behavioral repertoire that may be finely tuned to our cognitive processes and social circumstances. I present evidence from three timescales that language may be shaped by a number of social and cognitive variables. These timescales include (i) how language is used in real-time human interaction, (ii) how […]

Emma Cohen: University of OxfordIn this talk, I'll present some ideas and preliminary data on the links between exercise and social bonding. Exercise, broadly construed, is a cultural universal - from ceremonial rituals to team sports, people everywhere get together to move together. Our research investigates whether and how such activities serve a social bonding […]

Lera Boroditsky: UCSDHow do the languages we speak shape the ways we think? Do speakers of different languages think differently? Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do bilinguals think differently when speaking different languages? Does language shape our thinking only when we’re speaking or does it shape our attentional and cognitive patterns […]

Laurie Santos: Yale UniversityI will explore the evolutionary roots of some of our species' irrational decisions. I will start by reviewing some classic biases in the field of judgment and decision-making and will then turn to the question of how these biases came about in the first place by exploring some recent experiments in exploring […]