Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture

John Patton - Coalitional Psychology and the Conundrum of Altruism: a case from the Ecuadorian Amazon
2006-02-13 00:00 (America/Los_Angeles)
John Patton: California State University Fullerton Department of AnthropologyThe search for solutions to the conundrum of altruism is a central focus of evolutionary approaches to the study of human behavior. The focus of this talk is to present data on cooperation collected among horticultural foragers in the Ecuadorian Amazon to argue that a better understanding of the conundrum of altruism, and its constraints, can be gained by examining human cooperation as an aspect of an evolved coalitional psychology. Coalitional psychology is that aspect of human nature designed to construct mental representations of coalitional structures, to triangulate oneself and others within coalitional structures, to reason about and pursue behavioral strategies within
coalitional contexts, and to evoke emotional states that led to actions that result from or create coalitional consequences. Apart from
explicit or implicit attempts to detect group boundaries (ethnic, spatial, or political) and the collection of basic demographic data,
evolutionary ethnographers do not routinely collect data on coalitional structures. Without such data it is difficult to assess the influences
of coalitional thinking on cooperation which predicts that people will weigh the costs and benefits of cooperating differently depending on
their position within their coalitional. Even in egalitarian societies some people are more equal than others. In this talk I will integrate
data on coalitional structure derived from network analysis techniques, with data on behavior within three separate domains of cooperation
(status allocation, meat sharing, and experimental economic games) to illustrate influences of an evolved coalitional psychology on patterns of human cooperation.

Gail Heyman - Children's Reasoning about People as Source of Information
2006-02-06 00:00
Gail Heyman: UCSD Department of PsychologyThe human capacity to acquire knowledge from others, rather than only relying upon what can be observed or experienced directly, opens vast opportunities for learning. As a result of this capacity, humans are highly adaptable across many contexts. However, the use of such
information can also pose difficulties. For example, sources may provide incorrect or misleading information, either intentionally or unintentionally. In this talk, I will focus on children’s evaluation of others as sources of information within one particular context: when
people talk about themselves. The findings I will present, which include data collected in the U.S. and in China, address how children’s reasoning is affected by the content of the message, and by the social context in which the communication occurs.

Rafael NuÃ±ez - Embodied Cognition, Objectivity, and Truth: Lessons from Mathematics and Spatial Construals of Time in Aymara
2006-01-30 00:00
Rafael NuÃ±ez: UCSD Department of Cognitive ScienceHow can we “objectively” share abstract entities with others, in a stable and consistent way? How can we evaluate “Truth” when purely imaginary entities are concerned? Mathematics provides a very intriguing case for studying these questions. Indeed, mathematics, on the one hand deals with purely imaginary entities (e.g., a Euclidean point has only location, but no extension! … And there is no such “real” thing in the entire universe!), and on the other hand, it provides extremely stable patterns of true-valued inferences (i.e., theorems) that once proved, stayed proved for ever (e.g., the Pythagorean Theorem). In this talk I will analyze these issues by looking at (1) my own work on the Cognitive Science of Mathematics (with George Lakoff) taking examples from set and hyperset theory, and (2) my field work in the Andes’ highlands studying–with convergent linguistic-gestural-ethnographic methods–a very peculiar form of spatial construal of time in the Aymara culture. I’ll address the question of the role of axiom systems in generating and sustaining truth, and will show that the nature of truth and objectivity in abstract conceptual systems lie on the intricacies of the underlying bodily-grounded human cognitive mechanisms (e.g., conceptual metaphors, metonymies, analogies, blends) that make them possible.

Steven Gaulin - A Real-World Foraging Task Yields a Female Advantage and Significant Content Effects.
2006-01-23 00:00
Steven Gaulin: UCSB Department of AnthropologyThough Silverman and Eals division-of-foraging-labor hypothesis cannot explain the cross-species distribution of sex differences in spatial ability, it does make a novel prediction: women will more accurately remember the location of stationary resources. Unfortunately, Silverman and Ealsâ€™ own tests of this hypothesis have yielded weak and inconsistent support, possibly because the tasks used to assess the hypothesized female advantage lack ecological validity. I will present results of a controlled field study carried out at a large farmers market. Women performed significantly better than men at remembering the location of food items they had tasted, but not at remembering the location of non-food landmarks. In addition, accuracy was significantly correlated with the caloric content of food items, suggesting specialization of this particular cognitive system.

Dan Posner - Ethnic Diversity and Public Goods Provision in Kampala, Uganda: An Experimental Approach
2006-01-09 00:00
Dan Posner: UCLA Department of Political Science

Craig McKenzie - Framing Effects and Rationality
2005-12-05 00:00
Craig McKenzie: UC San Diego Department of PsychologyFraming effects are said to occur when “equivalent” redescriptions of objects or outcomes lead to different preferences or judgments. For example, a medical treatment is seen more favorably when described as resulting in “90% survival” rather than “10% mortality.” Such effects are widely considered to be classic violations of rationality. However, if framing effects are to be considered irrational, it is not sufficient that the frames in question be logically equivalent. Instead, they must be information equivalent, which means that no choice-relevant inferences can be drawn from the speaker’s choice of frame. However, logically equivalent frames used by researchers are often information non-equivalent. For example, we have shown that a speaker’s choice of attribute frame “leaks” information about relative abundance, and that listeners “absorb” the information. Information leakage provides a natural (and rational) explanation of attribute framing effects. Extensions of the information leakage approach to framing effects in risky choice, inference tasks, consumer behavior, and policy defaults will also be discussed.

Gregory F. Grether - Environmental Change, Phenotypic Plasticity and Genetic Compensation
2005-11-28 00:00
Gregory F. Grether: UCLA Department of Ecology and Evolutionary BiologyNormal development depends on specific environmental inputs. Consequently, when a species encounters novel environmental conditions, some traits may develop abnormally. Changes in the environment can occur, for example, because of climate change or habitat degradation. Like genetic mutations, most environmental perturbations of development are detrimental, and thus natural selection would usually be expected to favor genetic changes that gradually restore the ancestral form of the trait in the new environment. I recently coined the term “genetic compensation” to describe this form of adaptive evolution. When genetic compensation occurs along a spatial environmental gradient, it partially or completely masks the effects of the gradient on trait development. This means that populations of a species that look the same in the wild may develop quite differently if placed in a common environment. In addition, genetic compensation may lead to a cryptic form of reproductive isolation between populations, explain some puzzling cases in which heritable traits exposed to strong directional selection fail to show the expected evolutionary response, and complicate efforts to monitor populations for signs of environmental deterioration. In this talk, I will explain how genetic compensation differs from related phenomena, such as genetic assimilation and canalization, and review putative examples to illustrate the above points.

Shinobu Kitayama - Voluntary Settlement and the Spirit of Independence
2005-11-21 00:00
Shinobu Kitayama: University of Michigan Department of PsychologyThere is a general consensus that the history of voluntary settlement in the western frontier constitutes a major element of American individualism. Yet, if voluntary settlement is a causal factor that promoted tacit beliefs and practices of independent agency, there should be similar beliefs and practices among a group of people even in the midst of an entirely different cultural ethos of interdependence as long as the group had undergone voluntary settlement in the recent past. We thus examined residents of Japanâ€™s northern island (Hokkaido). Hokkaido was extensively settled by ethnic Japanese from the 1870â€™s for several decades. Many of the current residents of Hokkaido are the descendents of the original settlers from this period. As predicted, Japanese socialized and/or immersed in Hokkaido were nearly as likely as European Americans in North America to commit a dispositional bias in causal attribution, to associate happiness with personal achievement, and to show a personal dissonance effect wherein self-justification is motivated by a threat to personal self-images. In contrast, these marker effects of independent agency were largely absent for non-Hokkaido residents in Japan. Implications for theories of cultural change are discussed.

Jeffrey Brantingham - Gone in 6 Seconds: the Foraging Behavior of Los Angeles Car Thieves
2005-11-14 00:00
Jeffrey Brantingham: UCLA Department of Anthropology How specialized is your average Los Angeles “auto boost”? This talk draws on both new and classic foraging models to examine the search strategies deployed by Los Angeles car thieves and evaluates the decision making process underlying how they select individual cars to steal. It seems plausible that many of the foraging behaviors deployed by car thieves are linked to psychological and behavioral capacities that evolved among our hunter-gatherer ancestors. It is less likely that there is specialized (or broken) cognitive module linked to “deviant behavior”. A dash of both trial-and-error and social learning mixed with generalized psychological and behavioral capacities is sufficient to generate very effective car thieves.

Margo Wilson & Martin Daly - Carpe diem: adaptation and devaluing the future
2005-11-07 00:00
Margo Wilson & Martin Daly: McMaster University Department of PsychologyThe future is almost always worth less to organisms than the present, and evolved psychologies and physiologies ‘discount’ it accordingly. However, exactly how they do so, how they should do so, and whether real discount functions match theoretical expectations, are unresolved and/or controversial in various details, which will be the focus of discussion.

Paul Zak - Oxytocin Increases Trust in Humans
2005-10-31 00:00
Paul Zak: Claremont Graduate University Neuroendocrine Foundations of Trust Department of EconomicsThe traditional view in economics is that individuals respond to incentives, but absent strong incentives to the contrary selfishness prevails. Moreover, this â€œgreed is goodâ€ approach is deemed â€œrationalâ€ behavior. Nevertheless, in daily interactions and in numerous laboratory studies, a high degree of cooperative behavior prevailsâ€”even among strangers. A possible explanation for the substantial amount of â€œirrationalâ€ behavior observed in markets (and elsewhere) is that humans are a highly social species and to an extent value what other humans think of them. This behavior can be termed trustworthinessâ€”cooperating when someone places trust in us. A number of recent experiments from my lab have demonstrated that the neuroactive hormone oxytocin facilitates trust between strangers, and appears to induce trustworthiness. In rodents, oxytocin has been associated with maternal bonding, pro-social behaviors, and in some species long-term pair bonds, but prior to the work reviewed here, the behavioral effects of oxytocin in humans had not been studied. This presentation discusses the neurobiology of positive social behaviors and how these are facilitated by oxytocin. My experiments show that positive social signals cause oxytocin to be released by the brain, producing an unconscious attachment to a stranger.

Francisco J. Ayala - Darwin's Greatest Discovery: Natural Selection versus Intelligent Design
2005-10-24 00:00
Francisco J. Ayala: UCI Departments of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and PhilosophyDarwin is deservedly given credit for the theory of biological evolution. He accumulated evidence demonstrating that organisms evolve and diversify through time. Most important, however, is that he discovered natural selection, the process that accounts for the adaptive organization of organisms and their features; that is, their “design.” But the design of organisms is not intelligent, as it would be expected from an engineer, but imperfect and worse: the defects, dysfunctions, oddities, waste-and even cruelty and sadism if judged by human values-that pervade the living world are incompatible with their being the outcome of an intelligent designer, unless this designer would also be intentionally deceitful and malevolent.

Susan Perry - Social learning in wild capuchin monkeys
2005-10-17 00:00
Susan Perry: UCLA Department of AnthropologyRecently, discoveries of site-specific behavioral patterns such as the use of hammers and anvils or stick tools in extractive foraging have been documented in wild ape populations. Such discoveries have given rise to much speculation regarding the evolution of cultural capacities in humans, and claims have been made that chimpanzees have a greater capacity for â€œcultureâ€ than any other nonhuman animal. However, theoretical models used to predict the circumstances under which social learning is expected to become important would not predict unusually high reliance on social learning to be unique to apes. Capuchin monkeys, for example, by virtue of their gregarious, tolerant nature, omnivory, extreme dependence on alliance partners, and extractive foraging niche, would be predicted to be highly reliant on social learning.
In this talk, I present the findings of a cross-site investigation (4 study sites, 13 social groups, 10 researchers, 19,000 hrs of data) documenting behavioral variation in social conventions and foraging techniques in white-faced capuchin monkeys. Whereas the ape â€œcultureâ€ researchers stopped at cross-site comparisons and declared the observed variation to be cultural by process of elimination, I continued to investigate the source of the variation by conducting cross-sectional and developmental studies in my data base from Lomas Barbudal (5 social groups, roughly 30,000 hrs of data dating from 1990). In this talk I present data on social conventions and also data on the acquisition of foraging techniques in young capuchins. Social influence is most important between the ages of 2-4 years, and by age 5, capuchins have conformed to the technique they observed most. This conformity takes place over a very slow time scale, contrary to theoretical expectations about the speed of social learning.

Antoine Bechara - Decision-Making and Impulse Control After Frontal Lobe Injuries
2005-10-10 00:00
Antoine Bechara: USC Department of PsychologyFor a long time, the prefrontal cortex has been considered a â€œnon-functionalâ€ brain area, and understanding its function has lagged behind nearly all other areas. This is no longer true since appreciation of the vital role that this brain region plays in adaptive behaviors, and especially decision-making, is now evident more than ever. I will highlight the recent progress that has been made in this area of research. Decision-making is a term often referred to in the psychological literature as one of the â€œexecutive functionsâ€, which play a role in managing (like an executive) other cognitive functions, such as memory, attention, and language. Considerable research efforts have been directed towards differentiating various processes of executive functions, but much of this effort in the past has focused on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPC) sector. I will focus on decision-making and its link to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPC), and highlights the role of evolution in shaping the function of this area of the brain.

Joseph Manson - Father-Daughter Inbreeding Avoidance Reduces Male Reproductive Skew in a Wild Primate Population
2005-10-03 00:00
Joseph Manson: UCLA Department of AnthropologyInbreeding reduces fitness in various taxa, and several behavioral and physiological mechanisms have evolved that inhibit fertile matings between close kin. Most commonly, members of one or both sexes disperse before breeding. In primates, males usually disperse and females often benefit from lifelong relationships with maternal kin within the group. Females thus risk breeding with their father if the tenure length of the dominant male, who usually sires most group offspring, exceeds the time it takes daughters to mature. Attempts to determine whether such co-resident father-daughter pairs systematically avoid inbreeding have produced equivocal results, and no published studies have addressed this question by genetically ascertaining paternity in a wild population. We determined paternity for 117 wild white-faced capuchins (Cebus capucinus) born into our study population. As expected, alpha males dominated reproduction. However, while siring the great majority (79%) of the offspring born to unrelated females, alphas sired only 6% (1 of 17) of the offspring conceived by their daughters during their tenures, providing evidence for effective inbreeding avoidance without female dispersal.

Morten Christiansen - The Evolution of Languages and Genes
2005-06-06 00:00
Morten Christiansen: Cornell University Department of Psychology Language is undoubtedly governed by innate constraints. Otherwise, it is difficult to account for the close match between the intricate structure of languages and the mechanisms involved in acquiring and processing them. Innate constraints are also needed to explain the existence of language universals; that is, why languages tend to be structured and used in certain ways and not others. Moreover, no other animal communication system appears to have the same kind of complex linguistic properties as found in human language. But does this necessarily mean that humans have evolved genes specifically to encode innate constraints on language? In this talk, I argue that such ‘language genes’ are an unlikely outcome of human evolution. Instead, corroborated by a series of language evolution simulations, I suggest that the exquisite fit between humans and language has arisen because languages themselves have evolved to fit human learning mechanisms existing prior to the emergence of linguistic communication. On this account, the apparently ‘idiosyncratic’ language universals derive from non-linguistic constraints on learning and processing in these mechanisms, many of which have evolved specifically to support complex human cognition.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Christiansen_6.6.05_1.pdf

Douglas Wallace - Human Origins, Genes and Myths: A Mitochondrial DNA Journey
2005-05-23 00:00
Douglas Wallace: UC Irvine Department of Ecology and Evolutionary BiologyThe investigation of human origins and migrations has been greatly advanced by the analysis of human genetic variation to determine the relationships between different human populations. Such studies have permitted demonstration of the recent African origin of humans, the reconstruction of ancient migrations, and the correlation of human genetic history with linguistic affiliations. The first component of the human genome to be used in these investigations was the maternally-inherited human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) which codes for key proteins involved in the conversion of dietary calories in into ATP to fuel work and heat to maintain our body temperature. Variation in the human mtDNA has been found to be encompassed in a single dichotomously branching tree with the different branches of the tree correlating dramatically with the geographic distribution of indigenous peoples from around the world. The mtDNA correlation with human populations is much greater than that seen for either the paternally-inherited Y chromosome or the biparentally inherited autosomes. We now believe that this correlation is because variation in the mtDNA permitted our ancestors to adapt to the increasingly cold environments that they encountered as they migrated out-of-Africa and into temperate Eurasia and arctic Siberia. Hence, selection has stabilized the geographic distribution of mtDNA variation such that mtDNA variation has sustained the distribution of the earliest human incursions around the world. This unique aspect of the mtDNA now makes mtDNA variation a particularly valuable tool for the analysis of deep cultural associations and origins. This is currently proving to be the case in studies on the origins and radiation of Native America languages and myths.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Wallace_23.5.05_1.pdf

Piotr Winkielman - Unconscious Emotion
2005-05-16 00:00
Piotr Winkielman: UC San Diego Department of PsychologyMy talk explores the relation between emotion and conscious experience. Conscious feelings are typically viewed as a central and necessary ingredient of emotion. In contrast, I will argue that emotion also can be genuinely unconscious (i.e., occur without the accompanying subjective experience). Theoretically, my argument is anchored in evolutionary considerations that systems underlying basic emotions originated prior to systems for supporting conscious awareness, and in functional considerations that consciousness is often unnecessary for emotions to do their job. These considerations are consistent with evidence from neuroscience and psychology. Neuroscience evidence suggests that subcortical brain systems, including the brain stem and the â€œlimbic systemâ€ underlie both basic â€˜â€˜liking/dislikingâ€™â€™ reactions and more complex reactions, such as fear, disgust, or desire. Further, psychological evidence suggests that positive and negative reactions can be elicited subliminally and remain inaccessible to introspection. Despite the absence of subjective feelings in such cases, subliminally induced affective reactions still influence peopleâ€™s preference judgments, monetary decision and even complex behavior, such as the amount of beverage they consume. Finally, I will discuss the interactions of conscious and unconscious components of emotion, and conditions under which these components become coupled and decoupled.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Winkielman_16.5.05_b.pdf

Jennie Pyers - Building belief: The relationship between language and theory of mind understanding in learners of an emerging sign language in Nicaragua
2005-05-09 00:00
Jennie Pyers: UC Berkeley Department of PsychologyFalse-belief understanding is the non-egocentric ability to recognize that one’s own thoughts and beliefs can be different from others’, and
different from real-world events (i.e., mistaken). Research on early child development suggests that false-belief understanding is contingent
upon language development. Recent findings from an emergent sign language in Nicaragua suggest that deaf individuals exposed to a less
complex version of the language show deficits in false-belief understanding, whereas those exposed to a more complex version of the
language develop normally. Without complex language, human interaction is insufficient to support the development of a mature social
understanding, specifically that of false belief.

Brian Lickel - Affective Mechanisms for Managing Intergroup Retribution
2005-05-02 00:00
Brian Lickel: University of Southern California Department of PsychologyIn this talk, Iâ€™ll present data examining how people think about and react to the wrong-doing of ingroup members. In particular, Iâ€™ll describe affective reactions of self-blame (shame, guilt, ingroup directed anger) that people sometimes experience when a member of their ingroup harms an outgroup. I argue that these affective reactions exist as a functional response to the problem of group-based or collective responsibility (e.g., blood revenge) and I will describe how the behavior that results from feelings of shame, guilt, or ingroup directed anger may reduce the extent to which a harmed outgroup engages in retaliation after a provocation.

Sang-Hee Lee - Old Is Young: Longevity in Human Evolution
2005-04-25 00:00
Sang-Hee Lee: UC Riverside Department of AnthropologyIncreased longevity, expressed as number of individuals surviving to older adulthood, represents one of the ways the human life history pattern differs from other primates. We assessed changes in longevity with the ratio of older to younger adults (OY ratio) in four hominin dental samples from successive time periods, and determining the significance of differences in these ratios. While there is significant increased longevity between all groups indicating a trend of increased adult survivorship over the course of human evolution, there is a dramatic increase in longevity in the modern humans of the Early Upper Paleolithic. We then addressed whether longevity increased as a result of cultural/adaptive change in Upper Paleolithic Europe or whether it was introduced to Europe as a part of modern human biology, comparing Western Asia and European samples. We find that the Upper Paleolithic OY ratio is more than double that of the Middle Paleolithic moderns; in contrast, the OY ratios of the two West Asian Middle Paleolithic groups are not significantly different from each other. However, the OY ratios of both West Asian Moderns and Neandertals are significantly higher than the European Neandertal ratio. Considering cultural versus taxonomic differences, we conclude that the increase in adult survivorship associated with the Upper Paleolithic may reflect an important cultural adaptation promoting the demographic and material representations of modernity. Further research is discussed.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Lee1_4.25.05.pdf

Raymond Gibbs - Embodied metaphor in language, thought, and culture
2005-04-18 00:00
Raymond Gibbs: UC Santa Cruz Department of PsychologyMetaphor is traditionally viewed as a special use of language. But recent research from cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics suggests that metaphor is ubiquitous in language and a fundamental part of human conceptual systems. I will argue in this talk that metaphor is also deeply rooted in recurring aspects of embodied experience that serves as the grounding for significant parts of language, thought, and culture. Particular attention is given to recent experimental evidence showing that metaphor use arises from embodied simulations that people engage in during in-the-moment reasoning, speaking, and understanding.

Daniel M.T. Fessler - Cringing before others' eyes: A cross-cultural investigation of the evolution of shame
2005-04-11 00:00
Daniel M.T. Fessler: UCLA Department of AnthropologyCross-cultural comparisons can a) illuminate the manner in which cultures differentially highlight, ignore, and group various facets of emotional experience, and b) shed light on our evolved species-typical emotional architecture. In many societies, concern with shame is one of the principal factors regulating social behavior. Three studies conducted in Bengkulu (Indonesia) and California explored the nature and experience of shame in two disparate cultures. Study 1, perceived term use frequency, indicated that shame is more prominent in Bengkulu, a collectivistic culture, than in California, an individualistic culture. Study 2, comparing naturally occurring shame events (Bengkulu) with reports thereof (California), revealed that shame is associated with guilt-like accounts in California but not in Bengkulu, and subordinance events in Bengkulu but not in California; published reports suggest that the latter pattern is prominent worldwide. Study 3 mapped the semantic domain of shame using a synonym task; again, guilt was prominent in California, subordinance in Bengkulu. Because shame is overshadowed by guilt in individualistic cultures, and because these cultures downplay aversive emotions associated with subordinance, a fuller understanding of shame is best arrived at through the study of collectivistic cultures such as Bengkulu. After reviewing evolutionary theories on the origins and functions of shame, I evaluate these perspectives in light of facets of this emotion evident in Bengkulu and elsewhere. The available data are consistent with the proposition that shame evolved from a rank-related emotion and, while motivating prestige competition, cooperation, and conformity, nevertheless continues to play this role in contemporary humans.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Fessler_4-11-05.pdf

Mark Kleiman - Dominance hierarchies and public policies
2005-04-04 00:00
Mark Kleiman: UCLA Department of Public Policy1. Dominance hierarchies help resolve conflicts over resources with a minimum of actual combat by giving the higher-ranking individual priority. To some extent, then, the hierarchy ranking is going to reflect who would come out on top if there were actual combat.
2. In complicated human societies, the structure of the dominance hierarchy(ies) is partly a matter of deliberate choice, including deliberate choice through public policy. As Aristotle pointed out, a democratic regime doesn’t just mean that public decisions get made by the many rather than by a few or by one; it means greater social equality as well.
3. In designing social institutions relating to dominance, there are two big questions:
a. How steep the gradient should be.
b. What behaviors should lead to dominant status.
4. Being on top of the dominance hierarchy means more access to resources. That makes it desirable, and worth fighting for. And in fact individuals in all dominance-hierarchy-forming species do fight for dominance.
5. But if access to resources were all that counted, then resource-rich environments would reduce the intensity of dominance conflict. Is that true?
6. Being lower on the hierarchy in a resource-rich environment can mean more access to resources than being higher up in a resource-poor environment. (We all eat better, sleep more comfortably, and have better medical care than Louis XIV did.)
7. Economists normally assume that people care about the resources available to themselves and not where they stand in dominance hierarchies. That’s what makes the Pareto Principle seem plausible.
8. But some resources are naturally scarce; not everyone can have preferential access to mating opportunities, for example.
9. It turns out empirically that, holding resource access constant, position in hierarchy is an important contributor to health and other measures of well-being. (Whitehall studies.)
10. That makes evolutionary sense.
11. It also turns out empirically that, while cross-sectionally within a society wealth correlates with happiness, that doesn’t hold longitudinally as a society gets richer or cross-sectionally among societies, above a national income of something like 1/3 of that currently enjoyed in the U.S. (Hedonics literature, e.g., Easterlin, Kahnemann)
12. Ideally, dominant status should accompany pro-social behaviors. One advantage of market-driven societies is that people gain status by accumulating wealth rather than by accumulating the means of violence.
13. On the other hand, awarding dominance to money can lead to an unhealthy concentration on money-making. As Keynes said, in a poor society getting the smartest people to concentrate on making money is a good way to expand total resources available. But now that we’re rich enough so that the benefits of getting richer are limited, maybe we ought to start rewarding more attractive human traits than diligent and well-directed greed. If you value art and science, you ought to be thinking about how to arrange things so that producing art and science is a good way to acquire dominant status.
14. Awarding dominance to money also promotes Veblenesque conspicuous-consumption behavior, and commodity fetishism. Conspicuous consumption is largely signaling behavior: spending is a market signal for wealth, so the more closely dominance runs with wealth, the greater the incentive for conspicuous waste. Marketing means convincing people that it’s important to have whatever it is you’re trying to sell. Being inundated with marketing (other than Citigroup ads) should make people value “stuff” more relative to, e.g., leisure or culture or virtue or happiness.
15. Increasing scale through rising population, cheap communication, e-commerce, and globalization tends to increase income inequality, at least at the top of the scale, because the greater the size of the potential market the greater the rewards for outstanding performance. (Cook and Frank’s “winner-takes-all” effect.
16. Given how unhealthy, and how bad for your children, it is to be at the bottom of the pecking order, we need to ask whether, and how, that problem can be allieviated.
— Gentler status gradients
— Multiple hierarchies
17. That would be worth doing even at some cost in economic efficiency, narrowly considered. But social exclusion has big external costs, so relieving the problems at the bottom of the pecking order might turn out to have big benefits, even in strictly economic terms.
18. It would seem logical that a more equal income distribution would make money less important in awarding status. But is that true?
19. If money gets less important in awarding status, does the total steepness of the hierarchy gradient decrease, or is money just replaced by something else with the gradient held constant or even increased?
20. Norms of informality, whether Quaker or hippie, seem designed to reduce status gradients. Do they work?http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V8F-3YGTSKK-T/2/964f8cb37c7ea0eb05ed82b7b18ae978

Kang Lee - Little Liars: Development of Verbal Deception in Different Social Contexts
2005-03-14 00:00
Kang Lee: UC San Diego Department of PsychologyIn this talk, I will present three sets of studies that examined childrenâ€™s lying: (a) to conceal their own transgression, (b) to be polite, and (c) to be modest. I will use the results of these studies to illustrate that (a) lying is a behavior that develops early and rapidly, (b) preschoolers are already capable of managing their nonverbal behaviors when lying, which makes their lies difficult to detect, and (3) cultural factors influence both childrenâ€™s moral understanding of lying and their actual behavior. However, there exists a complex relationship between childrenâ€™s moral understanding: One factor is whether both are consistently promoted and sanctioned in a culture. When they are not, there is no relationship between the two. When they are, there is a small to moderate correlation between the two.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Lee_3-14-05.pdf

Joanna Mountain - Deep common ancestry of African click-speaking populations
2005-03-07 00:00
Joanna Mountain: Stanford University Department of Anthropological SciencesIn the 1960’s linguist Joseph Greenberg classified all languages spoken primarily in Africa into four families. One of those families, Khoisan, includes not only the languages of the Khoe and San peoples of southern Africa, but also the languages of the Hadzabe and Sandawe peoples of Tanzania. Primary criteria for including languages in the Khoisan family were the presence of click-consonants and the absence of evidence of recent borrowing of such clicks. In 1998 we set out to compare the genetic variation of the Hadzabe with that of a San population of Namibia in order to better understand both the linguistic and population history of this broad region of Africa. Our analyses of mitochondrial DNA and Y chromosomal variation indicated deep genetic divergence between these click-speaking populations, with implications for the evolution of the click languages. More recently Sarah Tishkoff of the University of Maryland and I have teamed up to investigate how the Sandawe fit into the picture. Intriguingly, even the geographically proximate click-speaking populations, the Hadzabe and Sandawe, are relatively divergent in terms of genetic variation. Furthermore, the haplotypes of some Sandawe individuals indicate a deep but unique link with the San. The correspondence with the conclusions of linguist Bonny Sands is striking.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Mountain_3-7-05.pdf

Neil Tsutsui - Genetics and social organization of an invasive ant in its native and introduced ranges
2005-02-28 00:00
Neil Tsutsui: UC Irvine Department of Ecology and Evolutionary BiologyCultural evolution is driven in part by the strategies individuals employ to acquire behavior from others. These strategies themselves are partly products of natural selection, making the study of social learning an inherently Darwinian project. Formal models of the evolution of social learning suggest that reliance on social learning should increase with task difficulty and decrease with the probability of environmental change. These models also make predictions about how individuals integrate information from multiple peers. We present the results of micro-society experiments designed to evaluate these predictions. The first experiment measures baseline individual learning strategy in a two-armed bandit environment with variation in task difficulty and temporal fluctuation in the payoffs of the options. Our second experiment addresses how people in the same environment use minimal social information from a single peer. Our third experiment expands on the second by allowing access to the behavior of several other individuals, permitting frequency-dependent strategies like conformity. In each of these experiments, we vary task difficulty and environmental fluctuation. We present several candidate strategies and compute the expected payoffs to each in our experimental environment. We then fit to the data the different models of the use of social information, and identify the best-fitting model via model comparison techniques. We find substantial evidence of both conformist and non-conformist social learning and compare our results to theoretical expectations.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Tsutsui_2-28-05.pdf

Dwight Read - Where Does Culture Fit In?
2005-02-14 00:00
Dwight Read: UCLA Department of AnthropologyA long standing issue in human societies has been the relationship between culture and behavior. One extreme position views culture as arising primarily out of behavior structured by a variety of processes, ranging from external factors such as environmental conditions to internal factors such as behavioral consequences arising directly from interactions of individuals within groups. The other extreme sees behavior as a consequence of the roles and identities that individuals take on. Change in those roles and identities are seen as occurring over relatively long time scales, thereby giving primacy to viewing behavior as arising from the cultural context in which individuals are embedded. The sociologist James March has recently argued that neither position has successfully demonstrated the irrelevancy of the other position, but his argument leaves unanswered how these two positions might be integrated into a more encompassing view of the processes affecting and structuring human behavior, including the capacity of human systems for self-restructuring. I will address these two positions by considering two sharply contrasting hunting and gathering groups, the Netsilik Inuit of Hudson Bay in Canada the Tiwi on Melville and Bathurst Islands off of the NW coast of Australia.
I will use the Netsilik as an example amenable to the first position and argue that the Netsilik cultural framework of infant naming and sealing partners provided a cultural basis for implementing methods of resource procurement that were necessary for survival in their extreme, Arctic region. At the same time I will argue that the cultural framework is more complex than simply reflecting necessary patterns of behavior in that the cultural framework not only provides a cultural basis for implementing the required behaviors, but the cultural framework has its own dynamics and thereby adds another dimension that structured their particular behavioral means for coping with the environmental constraints to which they had to adapt.
The Tiwi, I argue, provide a stark contrast to the Netsilik and exemplify the way in which the cultural framework can have far reaching consequences for social organization and behavior that only makes sense by reference to the cultural system(s) in which the behavior is grounded, rather than by reference to behavior as the means to interact with their environment or as arising from the consequences of individual interaction, per se. In brief, the Tiwi had an extremely complex social system structured by a kinship framework that appears to bear little relevance to what was required to procure resources on Melville and Bathurst Islands.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Read_2-14-05_a.pdf

Richard McElreath - Applying evolutionary models to the laboratory study of social learning
2005-02-07 00:00
Richard McElreath: UC Davis Department of AnthropologyCultural evolution is driven in part by the strategies individuals employ to acquire behavior from others. These strategies themselves are partly products of natural selection, making the study of social learning an inherently Darwinian project. Formal models of the evolution of social learning suggest that reliance on social learning should increase with task difficulty and decrease with the probability of environmental change. These models also make predictions about how individuals integrate information from multiple peers. We present the results of micro-society experiments designed to evaluate these predictions. The first experiment measures baseline individual learning strategy in a two-armed bandit environment with variation in task difficulty and temporal fluctuation in the payoffs of the options. Our second experiment addresses how people in the same environment use minimal social information from a single peer. Our third experiment expands on the second by allowing access to the behavior of several other individuals, permitting frequency-dependent strategies like conformity. In each of these experiments, we vary task difficulty and environmental fluctuation. We present several candidate strategies and compute the expected payoffs to each in our experimental environment. We then fit to the data the different models of the use of social information, and identify the best-fitting model via model comparison techniques. We find substantial evidence of both conformist and non-conformist social learning and compare our results to theoretical expectations.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/McElreath_2-7-05.pdf

Jon Haidt - Intuitive ethics: How a few evolved intuitions give rise to culturally variable virtues
2005-01-31 00:00
Jon Haidt: University of Virginia Department of PsychologyMorality has long been thought to come from outside â€“ from God, society, or parents â€“ into children, who are empty vessels. In contrast, an â€œexternalizationâ€ model is presented in which four cognitive/affective modules generate intuitions about social events. The modules respond to issues of harm/suffering, reciprocity/fairness, hierarchy/duty, and purity/piety. (This theory draws heavily on the works of A. Fiske and R. Shweder.) The modules were created by natural selection, but they co-evolved with cultural learning. Cultures create variable sets of virtues that are grounded in and constrained by the four modules. The case of the purity module is worked out in detail, including experimental demonstrations that flashes of irrelevant disgust (triggered by hypnosis, or by working at a dirty desk) make moral judgments more severe.http://www.bec.ucla.edu/papers/Haidt_1-31-05.pdf
