Joseph Henrich: University of British Columbia Departments of Psychology and EconomicsThis talk will first develop an evolutionarily-informed, cognitively-grounded approach to culture, and then apply this approach to explain patterns of food taboos for pregnant and lactating women on Yasawa Island, Fiji. Within a broader cognitive framework, I focus on (1) understanding our capacities for cultural […]

Naomi Eisenberger: UCLA Department of PsychologyNumerous languages characterize ‘social pain,’ the feelings resulting from social rejection or loss, with words typically reserved for describing physical pain (“broken hearts,” “hurt feelings”) and perhaps for good reason. It has been suggested that, in mammalian species, the social attachment system borrowed the computations of the physical pain system […]

Barbara König: University of Zurich Institute of ZoologyIn addition to sexual selection, selection resulting from social interactions in contexts other than mating can be a potent evolutionary force. Such social selection processes are facilitated whenever individual fitness varies as a result of any form of social interactions. The choice of social partners for communal care […]

Edouard Machery: University of Pittsburgh Department of History and Philosophy of ScienceThat morality evolved is a commonplace among evolutionary biologists, psychologists, and anthropologists. In this talk, I will however argue that biologists, psychologists, and anthropologists have failed to pay enough attention to the differences between three distinct interpretations of the hypothesis that morality evolved: (1) […]

Jenessa Shapiro: UCLA Department of PsychologyConformity to a perceived norm is a common strategy used to gain the approval of one's interaction partners. Identifying a group norm is ordinarily relatively simple. However, this task may be especially difficult when the norm is held by a group to which one does not belong, as is the […]

Paul Mellars: University of Cambridge Department of ArchaeologyResearch over the past ten years in both DNA studies and archaeology has provided some remarkable new insights into the origins of biologically and behaviourally modern human populations, and their widespread dispersal from Africa to the rest of the world around 60,000 years ago. The combination of DNA […]

Scott Johnson: UCLA Department of PsychologyMental rotation (MR) is the process by which people imagine how an object would look when rotated into a different orientation in space; it may be related to performance on tasks like perspective-taking and navigation. Men typically perform faster and more accurately than women on MR tasks. Known influences on […]

Joseph Manson: UCLA Department of AnthropologySeveral studies have shown that, following brief interactions among strangers, subjects perform better than chance at predicting whether their co-subjects will defect in a one-shot Prisoner’s Dilemma Game (PDG). However, previous work did not explore how such predictive accuracy was possible. Theoretical work suggests that adherence to “arbitrary” norms serves […]

Daniel Geschwind: UCLA Departments of Human Genetics, Neurology, and PsychiatryWe are interested in understanding how genes influence human cognition and behavior, leading to unique human cognitive specializations, such as language. Advances in molecular and statistical genetics now allow us to identify genes that may be responsible for the emergence of some of these human cognitive […]

Nina Jablonski: Penn State Department of AnthropologyHumans are distinguished from other primates by being functionally hairless over most of their bodies. This condition evolved because hairlessness facilitated cooling of the body by sweating. The evaporative cooling made possible by sweating results in whole-body cooling of blood flowing in superficial vessels, and the maintenance of constant […]