Jeffrey Schloss: Westmont College Department of Biology A prominent evolutionary account of “religious cognition” is that it emerged as a byproduct of agency detection mechanisms biased toward false positives, which were exapted as cultural innovations of moralizing gods helped stabilize cooperation by controlling defection in large-scale interactions. Although there is some empirical evidence for this […]

Sam Diaz-Munoz: UC Berkeley Department of Plant and Microbial Biology and Integrative Biology Tamarins (Saguinus sp) are small Neotropical monkeys that, with other callitrichines, exhibit the most extensive cooperative breeding system of any non-human primate. In this presentation, I will draw on recent studies of tamarins and other callitrichines to underscore the importance of cooperative […]

Kelly Gildersleeve: UCLA Department of Psychology, Center for Behavior, Evolution and Culture For nearly all mammals, the high-fertility period of the ovulatory cycle is the only time when sex can lead to conception. In nonhuman species, this period is often marked by dramatic changes in females' social interactions. I'll present two meta-analyses and several lab […]

Stacy Rosenbaum: UCLA Department of Anthropology, Center for Behavior, Evolution and Culture Social relationships between adult male mountain gorillas and the infants in their groups are quite remarkable, characterized by extreme tolerance, grooming, playing, and many hours of male “babysitting.” This is true even in the 40% of groups that contain multiple adult males, where […]

Greg Bryant: UCLA Department of Communication Studies, Center for Behavior, Evolution and Culture Laughter is a universal vocal signal ubiquitous in human social interaction and homologous to play vocalizations across several primate species. In this talk I will describe two different lines of research on the production and perception of laughter. One series of experiments […]

Trent Smith: University of OtagoWhy have obesity rates risen sharply around the world since 1980? In biological perspective, humans and other animals are thought to have evolved the ability—and the propensity—to store energy as body fat in order to survive periods of starvation. While food may be more abundant than ever today, it is becoming […]

Joshua Greene: Harvard UniversityIn this talk I'll present some of the main themes in my book of the same title. First, there are two general kinds of moral problems: The original moral problem is the problem of cooperation, the “Tragedy of the Commons”—Me vs. Us. Distinctively modern moral problems are different. They involve what I […]

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 […]