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 […]

Andrew Gersick: University of Pennsylvania Department of Animal BehaviorSexual selection is widely understood through the lens of the peacock’s tail – as the evolutionary driver shaping elaborate courtship displays and signals. Less studied is the influence of sexual selection on cognitive abilities or behaviors that allow individuals to regulate how they use those signals. Prevailing […]

Eli Berman: UCSD Department of Economics This paper explores the relationship between investment and political violence through several possible mechanisms. Investment as a predictor of future violence implies that low private sector investment today provides a robust indicator of high violence tomorrow. “Rent-capture” or predation asserts that investment increases violence by motivating extortion by insurgents. […]

Karen Kramer: University of Utah Department of Human Evolutionary Biology Human life histories differ from those of other closely related species in ways that significantly affect parental care and childhood. Most explanations for the hominization of life histories incorporate ideas about social interdependence and cooperative breeding. While cooperation for the purposes of raising children is […]

C. Randy Gallistel: Rutgers University Department of Cognitive Psychology I present a computational model to explain the results from experiments in which subjects estimate the hidden probability parameter of a stepwise non-stationary Bernoulli process outcome by outcome. The model captures the following results qualitatively and quantitatively, with only two free parameters: 1) Subjects do not […]

Dwight Read: UCLA Department of AnthropologyThe theme of my talk centers on the evolutionary changes that distinguish human social systems from those of our non-human primate ancestors---are we simply the next step in the phylogenetic sequence that leads to our evolutionary development as a species, or did the innovation that we refer to as culture […]

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 […]