Andy Sih: UC Davis Department of Environmental Science and Policy Over the past decade, a rapidly growing number of studies have shown that animals often exhibit personalities; e.g., where some individuals are consistently more aggressive, bold, active, exploratory or social than others. Here, I present theory, data and ideas on three ‘frontiers’ in the study […]

Jay Belsky: UC Davis Department of Human Ecology, Human Development and Family Studies Program An evolutionary biological perspective on the effects of the extra-familial and familial environment on multiple psychological, behavioral and even somatic features of children’s development challenges prevailing thinking about human development which regards some contextual conditions and their sequelae as “good” and […]

Pamela Smith: UC San Diego Rady School of Management, Professor of Management and Strategy I propose that individuals with higher power should view the world in a more high-level, abstract fashion than individuals with lower power (Magee & Smith, 2013). As having power makes individuals less dependent on others (relative to lacking power), it increases […]

Paul Rozin: University of Pennsylvania, Department of Psychology None Available

Robert Watson: UCLA Department of English Creative arts and humanistic learning allow us to vary, evaluate, and regulate the evolving cultural systems that we empower, at some cost and risk, to protect us from the unique openness of human consciousness. Culture takes over the conservative tasks (performed biochemically in most non-human creatures) of giving shape […]

Dario Maestripieri: University of Chicago, Department of Comparative Human Development; Institute for Mind and BiologySeveral lines of evidence suggest that eveningness is associated with traits that favor short-term mating such as higher extraversion, novelty-seeking, risk-taking, and short-term relationship orientation in both males and females. Night owl men also report a higher number of sexual partners […]

Thomas Plummer: Queens College Department of Anthropology, member of CUNY graduate faculty and New York Consortium in Evolutionary PrimatologyHumans are odd primates. We have unusually large brains, a diet rich in hard-to-acquire, nutrient dense foods, we practice extensive food sharing, and we can adapt to a broad panorama of environments through cultural practices and social […]

Jacinta Beehner: University of Michigan Department of Anthropology The arrival of a new dominant male can be a tumultuous time for females in a primate social group – particularly when this male is likely to be infanticidal. Females of many taxa where infanticide occurs have developed counterstrategies to this threat. In sharp contrast with the […]

Kirk Lohmueller: UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary BiologyIt is commonly quoted that any two humans are identical at 99.9% of their three billion DNA letters. However, this statement also means that there are roughly three million positions where any two genomes are different. Many such variants have been accumulating throughout hundreds of thousands of […]

Morteza Dehghani: USC Brain and Creativity Institute, ARTIS Research FellowThe availability of vast and seemingly insurmountable volumes of human-related data has provided an unprecedented opportunity to study human cognition with range and detail previously not imaginable. An enormous amount of such data, however, is in the form of human generated text, and cannot be analyzed […]