Tom Griffiths: UC Berkeley Department of Psychology and Group Major in Cognitive ScienceLearning a language, a concept, or a social norm all require making an inductive inference, going beyond the data provided by the behavior of other people. Such inferences are underdetermined by the available data, allowing people's biases to influence the conclusion that they […]
Justin Wood: USC Department of PsychologyAs social creatures, we wake up every morning to a dizzying array of actions from allies and competitors, in contexts that include cooperation, resource competition and parental care. Some actions are intentional, motivated by either distal or proximal goals; some are accidental, but nonetheless result in similar consequences. How do […]
Dario Maestripieri: University of Chicago Professor of Comparative Human Development, Evolutionary Biology, Neurobiology, and PsychiatryPost-copulatory sexual selection operates through two main mechanisms: sperm competition and post-copulatory female choice. Little is known about the role of female behavior in inciting sperm competition or in the expression of post-copulatory choice. Little is also known about signals that […]
Edward Slingerland: University of British Columbia Department of Asian Studies, Canada Research Chair in Chinese Thought and Embodied CognitionCalls to "vertically integrate" (Tooby & Cosmides) or achieve "consilience" (E.O. Wilson) between the sciences and the humanities have, for the most part, been received with a great deal of hostility by humanists. This talk explores some […]
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 […]
