Trent Smith: University of OtagoWhy have obesity rates risen sharply around the world since 1980? In biological perspective, humans and other animals are thought to have evolved the ability—and the propensity—to store energy as body fat in order to survive periods of starvation. While food may be more abundant than ever today, it is becoming […]

Joshua Greene: Harvard UniversityIn this talk I'll present some of the main themes in my book of the same title. First, there are two general kinds of moral problems: The original moral problem is the problem of cooperation, the “Tragedy of the Commons”—Me vs. Us. Distinctively modern moral problems are different. They involve what I […]

Carl T. Bergstrom: Washington UniversityOver the past 3.5 billion years, living organisms have evolved to acquire, store, analyze, and transmit information. This information processing capacity has allowed organisms to build up increasingly complex social organizations predicated on the effective coordination and cooperation. Coordination and cooperation in turn require honest communication among the participants in a […]

Scott Wiltermuth: USCFive studies demonstrated that highly guilt-prone people may avoid forming interdependent partnerships with others whom they perceive to be more competent than themselves, as benefitting a partner less than the partner benefits one’s self could trigger feelings of guilt.  Highly guilt-prone people who lacked expertise in a domain were less willing than were those […]

Leda Cosmides: UC Santa BarbaraAccording to the alliance detection hypothesis, racial categorization is a (reversible) byproduct of cognitive mechanisms that evolved for detecting social alliances (Kurzban, Tooby & Cosmides, 2001; Pietraszewski, Cosmides & Tooby, 2014). In southern California, showing subjects a single social interaction in which race is uncorrelated with alliance patterns produces a sharp […]