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 […]
Joan Silk: UCLA Department of AnthropologyHumans differ from most other animals, and from virtually all other primates, in the extent of our dependence on cooperation. In humans, altruism seems to be at least partly based on empathy and genuine concern for the welfare of others (Batson and Powell 1998; Fehr and Fischbacher 2003). We may […]
Peter Richerson: UC Davis Department of Environmental Science and PolicyReligion is often held to play a large, even dominant, role in supporting human cooperation. Much variation in propensities to cooperate and treat others fairly exists within and between human societies. Previous work by social psychologists suggested that religion plays a small role in explaining this […]
Dario Maestripieri: University of Chicago Department of Comparative Human DevelopmentIn human and nonhuman primates, caregiver attachment is a motivational/ behavioral system that promotes the maintenance of proximity between a caregiver and an infant and facilitates the expression of caregiving behavior. Comparative data on female interest in infant and infant-directed behavior in nonhuman primates and humans […]
Rob Boyd: UCLA Department of AnthropologyRecent discussions of human cooperation assume that the theory reciprocal altruism provides an established explanation for human cooperation, and that therefore, alternative explanations invoking cultural group selection face a burden of proof. In this talk, I argue that this assumption is not justified. The theory of reciprocal altruism does predict […]
Wendy Saltzman: UC Riverside Department of BiologyCommon marmosets are cooperatively breeding monkeys that exhibit high female reproductive skew: typically only a single, dominant female breeds successfully in each social group. Laboratory studies have indicated that reproductive suppression in subordinate females is not aggressively imposed on them by dominant females and is not associated with stress; […]
