Michael Shermer: Skeptic MagazineThere are a number of parallels between evolution and economics that we shall explore on two tiers—historical and theoretical: the parallels between natural selection and the invisible hand; the nature of evolution and the characteristics of a free market economy; the reluctance to accept the theory of evolution and free market economics; […]
Bruce Winterhalder: UC Davis Department of AnthropologyArchaeological research shows that many human populations continued to hunt-and-gather for thousands of years after beginning the use of plant domesticates. This kind of mixed economy is rare in the ethnographic literature on foragers and horticulturalists; its persistence for millennia in the early stages of agricultural origins is inexplicable […]
Robert Hoffmann: Department of Economics, Nottingham University Business School, The University of NottinghamHuntington's notion of a clash of cultures has attracted a great deal of attention in recent years. In particular, religious differences as well as religious fundamentalism have been identified as crucial dimension of present culture clashes. We conducted a study to explore to […]
Dacher Keltner: UC Berkeley Department of PsychologyIn this talk I will present recent work on the pro-social emotions. I will present studies of smiling, the relations between oxytocin and the nonverbal displays of love and desire, and recent evidence exploring the role of vagus nerve activity in compassion and pro-social dispositions. I will use these […]
Wendy Treynor: USC Institute for Creative TechnologiesIs one who believes that unethical activity is common unlikely to act ethically? To test the hypothesis that cynical beliefs predict unethical behaviors, actual unethical activity was examined by developing two laboratory techniques. In the American History Aptitude Test cheating technique, participants were told they would be rewarded with […]
Andreas Wilke: UCLA Department of AnthropologyWhen resources are distributed in patches animals must decide when to switch from a depleted patch. The optimal policy is given by the Marginal Value Theorem, which has successfully predicted animal behaviors, but as a mechanism it becomes problematic when each patch contains few discrete prey items. Biologists have proposed […]
Colin Camerer: CalTech Department of Business EconomicsWe conducted economic experiments to investigate interethnic discrimination with the members of three ethnic groups, i.e., Vietnamese, Khmer and Chinese, in southern Vietnam. Vietnamese are the major ethnic group, and Khmer and Chinese are main minority groups. Chinese are the richest and Khmer are the poorest among the three […]
Mark Changizi: CalTech Sloan-Swartz Center for Theoretical NeurobiologyReading pervades every aspect of our daily lives, so much so that one would be hardpressed to find a room in a modern house without words written somewhere inside. Many of us now read more sentences in a day than we listen to. Not only are we highly […]
Paul Bloom: Yale Department of PsychologyHow do we think about bodies and souls? Findings from developmental psychology suggest that both children and adults see physical entities such as objects (or bodies) as fundamentally distinct from psychological entities such as minds (or souls). We are natural-born dualists. Our dualism explains why we are so drawn to […]
Michael Cannon: CSU Long Beach Department of AnthropologySome archaeologists have used a model of optimal time allocation from human behavioral ecology to help explain variability over space and time in the importance of farming vs. foraging. I discuss a model that builds on this previous work in an effort to enable a more detailed understanding […]
