Carl T. Bergstrom: Washington UniversityOver the past 3.5 billion years, living organisms have evolved to acquire, store, analyze, and transmit information. This information processing capacity has allowed organisms to build up increasingly complex social organizations predicated on the effective coordination and cooperation. Coordination and cooperation in turn require honest communication among the participants in a […]
Scott Wiltermuth: USCFive studies demonstrated that highly guilt-prone people may avoid forming interdependent partnerships with others whom they perceive to be more competent than themselves, as benefitting a partner less than the partner benefits one’s self could trigger feelings of guilt. Highly guilt-prone people who lacked expertise in a domain were less willing than were those […]
Leda Cosmides: UC Santa BarbaraAccording to the alliance detection hypothesis, racial categorization is a (reversible) byproduct of cognitive mechanisms that evolved for detecting social alliances (Kurzban, Tooby & Cosmides, 2001; Pietraszewski, Cosmides & Tooby, 2014). In southern California, showing subjects a single social interaction in which race is uncorrelated with alliance patterns produces a sharp […]
Katarzyna (Kasia) Pisanski: UCLABody size can have an immense impact on the biology, ecology, and social status of an animal, but so too can ones ability to advertise or assess body size. Many species communicate their size vocally. Research investigating vocal communication of physical size in mammals, including humans, has focused on two salient and […]
Kiley Hamlin: University of British ColumbiaHow do humans come to have a “moral sense”? Are adults’ conceptions of which actions are right and which are wrong, of who is good and who is bad, who deserves praise and who deserves blame wholly the result of experiences like observing and interacting with others in one’s cultural […]
Hanna Kokko: Australian National UniversityA lot of evolutionary theory involves the concept of populations climbing towards peaks of higher fitness. Such theory has been written without taking into account that in most species there are two distinct classes of individuals — males and females — that influence the evolutionary process in a distinctly different way. […]
Nancy Dess: Occidental CollegeIn a 2002 BEC talk, I described the working hypothesis that bittersweet taste is a marker for sensitivity to metabolic equanimity, manifested in ways ranging from responsiveness to energy balance to emotional reactivity and stress vulnerability; data from rats selectively bred on a saccharin phenotype and, to a lesser extent, humans, were […]
Larry Cahill: UC IrvineAbstract: Historically, neuroscience paid little if any attention to sex influences outside a limited area of reproductive functions. But all that is changing, and ever rapidly, with a flurry of discoveries the past 10 years in particular about sex influences on brain function down to the molecular level. My area of emotional […]
Simone Schnall: University of CambridgeTraditional theories of perception have assumed that visual processing is not influenced by top-down cognitive processes and is thus driven entirely by physical properties of the environment (Pylyshyn, 1984). For example, how a person sees stimuli such as a cup of coffee or a steep hill was thought to be only […]
Thom Scott-Phillips: Durham UniversityLanguage is arguably humanity's most distinctive characteristic. What, exactly, is language, and why are we the only species that has it? In this talk, based upon my recent book*, I will argue that the differences between human communication and the communication systems of all other species is probably not a difference of […]
