Eric Alden Smith: University of Washington Department of AnthropologyCollective action with low relatedness (large-n, low-r cooperation) is a common feature of human societies, in marked contrast to patterns in other species. This is particularly puzzling for small-scale societies of foragers and horticulturalists, where formal social institutions to enforce collective action are weak or absent. There […]
Doug Kenrick: Arizona State University Department of PsychologyThe human mind processes information in a famously selective and shockingly biased way. Who and what do we select for attention, encoding, and retrieval, and how, why, and when do we distort certain kinds of information in certain ways and not others? My colleagues and I have been […]
Elizabeth Pillsworth: CSU Fullerton Department of AnthropologyDarwin's theory of sexual selection emphasizes the role of female mate choice in shaping male morphology and behavior. In evolutionary psychology, the model of female choice has served as one organizing feature of research on human mating. However, in many human societies women are reported to have very little […]
Carlos Navarrete: Michigan State University Department of Psychology & Evolution, Ecology, and Behavior ProgramIntergroup aggression perpetrated by men has been a persistent feature of human societies for centuries, and may have been common enough over evolutionary time to have allowed selection to shape the neural circuitry underlying the psychology of prejudice. Because intergroup aggression poses […]
Quentin Atkinson: University of Oxford Institute of Cognitive and Evolutionary AnthropologyLanguages, like species, evolve. Words and phrases compete for our favour in a struggle for existence that is analogous to natural selection. Words that survive are passed on from generation to generation in a process of descent with modification. This process has generated the thousands […]
Aaron Blackwell: UCSB Department of AnthropologyThe Shuar are a large and semi-autonomous indigenous group from the Amazonas region of Ecuador. Most Shuar subsist on a mixture of foraging and horticulture, but increasingly Shuar in many areas are becoming integrated with market economies. This talk presents fieldwork conducted amongst the Shuar between 2005 and 2009, with […]
Uri Gneezy: UCSD Rady School of Management Arthur Brody Endowed Chair in Management Leadership, Professor of Management and StrategyIn this talk I will discuss some recent findings regarding gender differences in economic experiments. The discussion will focus on gender differences in competitiveness, but will also touch on differences in risk preferences and social preferences. I […]
Erol Akcay: University of Tennessee National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS)There is extensive work on the evolutionary causes of social behaviors, but integration of this theory with the proximate mechanisms of behavior has lagged behind. Here, I will present a new modeling approach to achieve such integration. The model rests on goal-oriented motivations, […]
Thomas Flamson: Santa Monica College Department of Earth Science / UCLA Department of AnthropologyThe Encryption Theory of Humor proposes that humor evolved as a means of signaling similarity in locally variable personal features in order to facilitate assortment with the most compatible peers within the local group. It claims that a necessary component of humorous […]
Robert Wayne: UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary BiologyThe domestic dog is one of our most remarkable inventions. The behavioral and functional diversity of the dog far surpasses that of its wild progenitor, the gray wolf. Similarly, in size and proportion, dogs exceed the diversity of the entire carnivore order. The dog genome project and […]
