Laura Baker: USC Dept. of PsychologyHuman aggression and antisocial behavior are known to be the product of both social and biological risk factors. What is not yet understood is how environment and genetic factors may mediate the interrelationships among these risk factors and antisocial outcomes. A study of twins and their families provides the ideal […]
David Funder: UC Riverside Dept. of PsychologyThe Realistic Accuracy Model (RAM) describes the four stage, social-behavioral process necessary for the achievement of accuracy in personality judgment. A judgmental target must emit (1) relevant information in a context where it is (2) available to the judge, who must then (3) detect and correctly (4) utilize this […]
Martie Haselton: UCLA Department of Communication StudiesOvulatory cycle research reveals a hidden side of female desire. Near ovulation, women feel increased attraction to extra-pair mates, and they place a premium on "sexy" characteristics in men. Their primary mates respond with increased jealousy. Ovulatory shifts in women's desires are expressed conditionally--for example, they are stronger in […]
Ted Bergstrom: UCSB Department of EconomicsAbout 80% of all societies recorded by anthropologists are polygynous (men have many wives). Even our own society is less monogamous than claimed. This paper attempts to explain such mysteries as why bride prices and dowries are not ``opposites'', why polygamous societies are usually characterized by positive bride prices and […]
Andrew Shaner: David Geffen UCLA School of MedicineSchizophrenia should not exist. It crushes sexual relationships and reproductive success and thus should have been eliminated long ago by selection. Yet it persists at a global prevalence far too high to be due to new mutations at a few loci. This has convinced scientists that many loci […]
Yaniv Hanoch: UCLA School of Public Health, Department of Health ServicesHerbert Simon has warned us that an explanatory account of human rationality must identify the significance of emotions for choice behavior. Customarily emphasizing the cognitive dimensions of decision making, relatively few researchers have paid close attention to specifying the complex ways in which emotion may […]
Alan Grafen: University of Oxford Department of ZoologyMost fieldworkers and empirical biologists studying whole organisms use as a working hypothesis that organisms have been designed by natural selection to maximise their inclusive fitness. They have used this approach to great effect since the work of Hamilton (1964) became widely known in the 1970s. On the […]
Fiona Cowie: California Institute of Technology Division of the Humanities and Social SciencesThe recent identification of the so-called 'grammar gene,' FOXP2, as well as recent advances in our understanding of the numerous psychological mechanisms involved in language acquisition, raise a number of conceptual and empirical issues that are vital to our understanding of language evolution. […]
Francis Steen: UCLA Department of Communication StudiesI argued in Steen & Owens (2001) that play is a behavioral and cognitive simulation whose biological function is learning. In this presentation, I address the question of how such learning takes place, focusing on the role of consciousness. I present some preliminary data from an experiment on strategy-learning […]
William Rice: UCSB Department of Ecology, Evolution & Marine BiologyThe empirical foundation for sexual conflict theory is the unequivocal data from many different taxa demonstrating that females are harmed while interacting with males. But the interpretation of this keystone evidence has been challenged because females may more than compensate the direct costs of interacting with […]
