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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Kang Lee: UC San Diego Department of PsychologyIn this talk, I will present three sets of studies that examined children’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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
Brian Lickel: University of Southern California Department of PsychologyIn this talk, I’ll present data examining how people think about and react to the wrong-doing of ingroup members. In particular, I’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 […]
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 […]
