Rethinking stereotypes: Social perceivers as lay adaptationists Oliver Sng Department of Psychological Science, UC Irvine Individuals have evolved to adaptively allocate energy across different life tasks, such as mating effort, parenting effort, and building embodied capital. From various theoretical perspectives (e.g., parental investment theory, life history theory), an individual’s biological sex, current life stage, and […]

How to Know Celeste Kidd Department of Psychology, UC Berkeley This talk will discuss Kidd’s research about how people come to know what they know. The world is a sea of information too vast for any one person to acquire entirely. How then do people navigate the information overload, and how do their decisions shape […]

Learning to forage in hunter-gatherer societies Sheina Lew-Levy Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University & Department of Archaeology and Heritage Studies, Aarhus University Studying how contemporary hunter-gatherer children learn to forage can help shed light on the evolution of human cognition, life history, and social organization. Still, our species’ developmental plasticity and socioecological diversity complicates […]

Meaning-making, belief and world shaping as core processes in the human niche Agustín Fuentes Department of Anthropology, Princeton University Humans are not unique in the world. But we are quite idiosyncratic. Across the Pleistocene the genus Homo developed a distinctive suite of cognitive, behavioral, ecological, and technological processes and patterns; in short, a human niche. […]

Indigenous STS, Governance, and Decolonization Kim TallBear Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience & Environment Pierre Elliot Trudeau Foundation Fellow Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta Like traditional Science and Technology Studies, the new field of Indigenous STS studies the cultures, politics, and histories of non-Indigenous science and technology efforts. In addition, it […]

Physical and social cognition in a parrot (Cacatua goffiniana) and ape model species (Pongo abelii) Isabelle Laumer Department of Anthropology, UCLA The comparative approach is a powerful tool to deepen our understanding of the adaptive value of complex information processing. Modern approaches of comparative cognition are interested in how cognitive outputs are influenced on the […]

The social minds of humans and other apes Chris Krupenye Department of Psychology, Durham University and Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins University Few traits characterise humans more profoundly than the complexity of our social lives, and the depth of our insights into the social and mental lives of others. To predict behaviour […]

Microbiomania, rewilding, and the threat of bioprospecting: How anthropologists can help to set a more ethical research agenda in microbiome sciences Alyssa N. Crittenden Department of Anthropology, University of Nevada, Las Vegas Scientific knowledge and commercial interest in the human microbiome are growing exponentially. As our understanding of the vital role of microbes increases, so […]