Paul Heggarty: 4:00 PM Cotsen Institute Room A222From the Tower of Babel to the tales of the Aboriginal Dreamtime, we have long sought to account for our baffling multiplicity of tongues. Linguistic science itself was born out of this curiosity — and by now can look to our language diversity no longer as just an […]
Jennifer Hahn-Holbrook: University of California, Los AngelesPostpartum depression poses an evolutionary puzzle: it is extremely common, yet significantly reduces the reproductive fitness of both mothers and children. Why has natural selection failed to remove this trait? I will consider the hypothesis that postpartum depression represents a “disease of modern civilization” – that is, a byproduct […]
Bailey House: University of California, Los AngelesOne explanation for the diversity in cooperative behavior across human social groups is that our prosociality is motivated in part by learned cultural beliefs that vary substantially across societies, and which extend adaptations for cooperation between genetic kin and reciprocal partners. Reframing this idea as a developmental question about […]
Claire White : California State University, NorthridgeGrief is a universal reaction to the loss of a valued relationship partner. Two main evolutionary accounts of grief have been proposed. The first views grief as a by-product of an adaptive separation reaction that functions to aid unification in the temporary loss of a valued relationship partner. The […]
Steven Stroessner: Barnard College, Columbia UniversityMotivations are generally concerned with maintaining safety (prevention) or ensuring advancement (promotion) (Regulatory focus theory; Higgins, 1997). Four experiments examined whether information implying imminent threat would interact with regulatory focus to affect endorsement of stereotypes and stereotype-based policies. Because threatening information is more relevant to the safety goals of prevention-focused […]
Monique Borgerhoff-Mulder: University of California, DavisWhile the causes, transmission and consequences of material and social inequality are well studied in the social sciences, the ways in which people respond to inequality are less clear. As evolutionary social scientists we know that humans show a strong aversion to inequality, but we have little understanding of how […]
Matthew Gervais: The University of California, Los AngelesExperimental economic games have shed significant light on human population variation in social behavior. However, most of these games have involved anonymous dyadic recipients, limiting their external validity beyond fleeting pairwise interactions. Yet enduring relationships within large social networks are arguably the cradle of human uniqueness and remain […]
Lee Cronk: Rutgers University Department of AnthropologyAnthropologists are rarely able to predict when a culture trait will influence behavior and when it will not. The theory of gene-culture coevolution leads to the prediction that we should have something akin to an immune system for culture that helps us make adaptive decisions regarding which culture traits […]
Richard McElreath: UC Davis Department of AnthropologyIt's common for evolutionary psychologists to invoke evolutionary mismatch as an explanation for maladaptive human behavior. For example, people eat themselves to death, because our food preferences evolved in a past environment with scarcity. Mismatch has also been invoked to explain the tendency for humans to cooperate with strangers […]
David Nolin: Boise State University Department of AnthropologyGeneralized (indirect) reciprocity is characterized by giving to other group members without regard to direct reciprocation from those same recipients, with the costs of the donor’s generosity instead offset by transfers from other group members. This pattern has long been noted by anthropologists as a common feature of […]
