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 […]

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 […]

Jon Haidt: University of Virginia Department of PsychologyMorality has long been thought to come from outside – from God, society, or parents – into children, who are empty vessels. In contrast, an “externalization” 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, […]