Aaron Lukaszewski

California State University, Fullerton | CSUF · Department of Psychology

Mate choice lies close to differential reproduction, the engine of evolution. Patterns of mate choice consequently have power to direct the course of evolution. Here we provide evidence suggesting one pattern of human mate choice—the tendency for mates to be similar in overall desirability—caused the evolution of a structure of correlations that we...

The covariance structure of personality traits derived from statistical models (for example, Big Five) is often assumed to be a human universal. Cross-cultural studies have challenged this view, finding that less-complex societies exhibit stronger covariation among behavioural characteristics, resulting in fewer derived personality factors. To expl...

The field of personality psychology aspires to construct an overarching theory of human nature and individual differences: one that specifies the psychological mechanisms that underpin both universal and variable aspects of thought, emotion, and behaviour. Here, we argue that the adaptationist toolkit of evolutionary psychology provides a powerful...

Significance Social status is a universal and consequential dimension of variation within human groups. Multiple prominent theories have been proposed to explain how status is allocated, but extant evidence is insufficient to adjudicate between their conflicting predictions. Here we show that distinctions between each theory hinge on the relative i...

Previous research has supported adaptationist hypotheses pertaining to the functional coordination of personality strategies with phenotypic determinants of bargaining power, such as physical strength and attractiveness. However, prior studies have focused primarily on explaining variation in Extraversion and Emotionality/Neuroticism as broadband t...

Status hierarchies are ubiquitous across cultures and have been over deep time. Position in hierarchies shows important links with fitness outcomes. Consequently, humans should possess psychological adaptations for navigating the adaptive challenges posed by living in hierarchically organized groups. One hypothesized adaptation functions to assess,...

How well can social scientists predict societal change, and what processes underlie their predictions? To answer these questions, we ran two forecasting tournaments testing the accuracy of predictions of societal change in domains commonly studied in the social sciences: ideological preferences, political polarization, life satisfaction, sentiment...

Across cultures, women reliably exhibit higher levels of Neuroticism than men. Recent work shows that this sex difference, particularly in Neuroticism’s anxiety facet, is partly mediated by the sex difference in physical strength. We build on this finding by testing pre-registered predictions of mediation by physical strength of the sex differences...

The niche-diversity hypothesis proposes that personality structure arises from the affordances of unique trait combinations within a society. It predicts that personality traits will be both more variable and differentiated in populations with more distinct social and ecological niches. Prior tests of this hypothesis in 55 nations suffered from pot...

Social emotions appear to be behavior-regulating programs built by natural selection to solve adaptive problems in the domain of social valuation-the disposition to attend to, associate with, defer to, and aid target individuals based on their probable contributions to the fitness of the valuer. For example, shame functions to prevent and mitigate...

Objective The controversial General Factor of Personality (GFP) has been proposed as an indicator of social effectiveness and a slower life history strategy. An alternative hypothesis holds that only meta-trait alpha , comprising agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability, is a slow life history indicator. This study tested whether t...

This extended reply addresses comments on our paper examining the role of cost infliction and benefit generation in status allocations across 14 nations (Durkee et al., 2020). Specifically, Cheng et al. (2021) identified multicollinearity among our predictors as cause for concern and reviewed existing evidence that purportedly challenges our conclu...

Evolutionary theory is the organizing framework for the life sciences because of its unique value in deriving falsifiable predictions about the causal structure of organisms. This chapter outlines the relationships of evolutionary principles to the study of phenotypic variation and defines two distinct paradigms for personality science. The first o...

In pursuit of a more systematic and comprehensive framework for personality assessment, we introduce procedures for assessing personality traits at the lowest level: nuances. We argue that constructing a personality taxonomy from the bottom up addresses some of the limitations of extant top-down assessment frameworks (e.g., the Big Five), including...

We argue that it is useful to distinguish between three key goals of personality science – description, prediction and explanation – and that attaining them often requires different priorities and methodological approaches. We put forward specific recommendations such as publishing findings with minimum a priori aggregation and exploring the limits...

We argue that it is useful to distinguish between three key goals of personality science – description, prediction and explanation – and that attaining them often requires different priorities and methodological approaches. We put forward specific recommendations such as publishing findings with minimum a priori aggregation and exploring the limits...

We argue that it is useful to distinguish between three key goals of personality science—description, prediction and explanation—and that attaining them often requires different priorities and methodological approaches. We put forward specific recommendations such as publishing findings with minimum a priori aggregation and exploring the limits of...

Objectives Life History (LH) Theory explains how organisms allocate energy among the competing demands of growth and maintenance (i.e., investment in future reproduction), mating effort, and parenting effort. LH profile is thought to be influenced by cues of extrinsic mortality and morbidity. Human LH strategies have been conceptualized on a fast-s...

Previous research demonstrates positive associations between physical formidability and endorsement of conservative social policies entailing aggressive competition and hierarchical inequality. Similar ideological differences are associated with coalitional status. The current research extended findings by testing associations of formidability and...

The niche diversity hypothesis proposes that personality structure arises from the affordances of unique trait-combinations within a society. Prior tests of the hypothesis in 55 nations suffer from potential confounds associated with differences in the measurement properties of personality scales across groups. Using recently developed psychometric...

Life history theory is a fruitful source of testable hypotheses about human individual differences. However, this field of study is beset by unresolved debates about basic concepts and methods. One of these controversies concerns the usefulness of instruments that purport to tap a unidimensional life history (LH) factor based on a set of self-repor...

We respond to Gallup’s (2020) opinion piece by indicating that psychologists have yet to agree on an operationalized definition of “intelligence.” We offer our understanding of the literature that a decline of human intelligence is mixed; additionally, if a decline in human intelligence was supported, evolutionary scholars are not in a position to...

In pursuit of a more systematic and comprehensive framework for personality assessment, we introduce procedures for assessing personality traits at the lowest level: nuances. We argue that constructing a personality taxonomy from the bottom up addresses some of the limitations of extant top-down assessment frameworks (e.g., the Big Five), including...

The hypothesis of a human-universal personality structure is undermined by cross-cultural studies in small-scale societies. To explain cross-population differences in patterns of behavioral covariance, we proposed the niche diversity hypothesis, which holds that the degree of behavioral covariation within a population is inversely related to the nu...

We apply recent adaptationist theories about the emotions “pride” and “shame” to the domain of hierarchical status and test the hypothesis that pride and shame are distinct components of a culturally universal statusmanagement system. Using an international dataset containing ratings of the status impacts of 240 personal characteristics within 14 n...

Social emotions are hypothesized to be adaptations designed by selection to solve adaptive problems pertaining to social valuation—the disposition to attend to, associate with, and aid a target individual based on her probable contributions to the fitness of the valuer. To steer between effectiveness and economy, social emotions need to activate in...

Social emotions are hypothesized to be adaptations designed by selection to solve adaptive problems pertaining to social valuation—the disposition to attend to, associate with, and aid a target individual based on her probable contributions to the fitness of the valuer. To steer between effectiveness and economy, social emotions must activate in pr...

Evolutionary theory is the organizing framework for the life sciences because of its unique value in deriving falsifiable predictions about the causal structure of organisms. This paper outlines the relationships of evolutionary principles to the study of phenotypic variation and defines two distinct paradigms for personality science. The first of...

Evolutionary theory is the organizing framework for the life sciences because of its unique value in deriving falsifiable predictions about the causal structure of organisms. This paper outlines the relationships of evolutionary principles to the study of phenotypic variation and defines two distinct paradigms for personality science. The first of...

The structure of personality refers to the covariation among specific behavioral patterns in a population. Statistically derived models of personality-such as the Big Five or HEXACO models-usually assume that the covariance structure of personality characteristics is a human universal. Cross-cultural studies, however, have challenged this view, fin...

Recent research has linked men’s facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) to perceptions of aggressiveness, dominance and untrustworthiness, as well aggressive and exploitative behavior, leading to speculation that a wide face may be an indicator of an intrasexually-competitive behavioral strategy. Not understood, however, are the physiological mechanis...

Evolution equips sexually reproducing species with mate choice mechanisms that function to evaluate the reproductive consequences of mating with different individuals. Indeed, evolutionary psychologists have shown that women's mate choice mechanisms track many cues of men's genetic quality and ability to invest resources in the woman and her offspr...

Throughout vertebrate evolution, asymmetries in the ability to inflict costs on others (i.e., formidability) have determined the outcomes of contests over limited resources. Therefore, natural selection would have favored mechanisms designed to efficiently and accurately estimate the formidability of conspecifics. Although previous research has pro...

Correlations among distinct behaviors are foundational to personality science, but the field remains far from a consensus regarding the causes of such covariation. We advance a novel explanation for personality covariation, which views trait covariance as being shaped within a particular socioecology. We hypothesize that the degree of personality c...

Women's body attractiveness is influenced by specific anthropometric cues, including body mass index (BMI), waist-to-hip ratio (WHR), waist-to-stature ratio (WSR), and shoulder-to-waist ratio (SWR). Despite the existence of multiple functional hypotheses to explain these preferences, it remains unclear which cue-based inferences are most influentia...

Human life history (LH) strategies are theoretically regulated by developmental exposure to environmental cues that ancestrally predicted LH-relevant world states (e.g., risk of morbidity–mortality). Recent modeling work has raised the question of whether the association of childhood family factors with adult LH variation arises via (i) direct samp...

An account of the “beauty premium” based only on mating motivations overlooks adaptationist models of social valuation that have broader explanatory power. We suggest a broader approach based on evolved preferences for attractive partners in multiple cooperative domains (not just mating), which accounts for many observations of attractiveness-based...

The roles of sex and life history (LH) strategy in predicting romantic attachment style were examined. Women had higher preoccupied scores and, for women, slower LH strategy was negatively correlated with preoccupied attachment style. For men, slower LH strategy was positively associated with secure attachment and negatively associated with fearful...

Why are physically formidable men willingly allocated higher social status by others in cooperative groups? Ancestrally, physically formidable males would have been differentially equipped to generate benefits for groups by providing leadership services of within-group enforcement (e.g., implementing punishment of free riders) and between-group rep...

Adaptationist theories of development posit the existence of facultative mechanisms designed to calibrate individual differences in life history strategy to cues available in childhood. Such theories have led to the discovery of links between parenting-related cues and multiple life history phenotypes in offspring (e.g., reproductive timing), but l...

Havlíček et al. (2015) argue that cycle-phase shifts in women’s attractiveness and mate preferences are by-products of hormonal mechanisms that calibrate these variables to between-women differences in reproductive potential. Here, we focus on the mate preference component of their position and argue that their between-women theory is seriously fla...

Extant research supports the hypothesis that bio-metric indicators of life history (LH) strategy, such as the timing of sexual debut, are calibrated in response to cues sampled early in development (before age 7). Herein, we theorize that the experience of sexual debut itself may further calibrate women's LH-related behavioral phenotypes across ado...

Evolutionary theories of personality origins have stimulated much empirical research in recent years, but pertinent data from small-scale human societies have been in short supply. We investigate adaptively patterned personality variation among Tsimane’ forager-horticulturalists. Based on a consideration of cost-benefit tradeoffs that likely mainta...

Researchers have puzzled over the " missing heritability " problem for quantitative traits, including personality dimensions such as the Big Five. Specifically, although all human personality traits exhibit substantial additive genetic variance, large gene association studies with immense statistical power have failed to discover specific genes tha...

We review research on the ultimate and proximate origins of variation along the extraversion continuum. After describing the cost-benefit tradeoffs that may have maintained variation in extraversion over human evolution, we consider the evidence bearing on multiple distinct evolutionary hypotheses regarding the causal underpinnings of such variatio...

Physical strength and physical attractiveness are both hypothesized as indicators of overall phenotypic condition in humans. Strategic Pluralism Theory (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000) predicts that men’s orientation toward uncommitted mating is facultatively calibrated (i.e. contingently adjusted over ontogeny) in response to condition-dependent physic...

Does women’s body attractiveness predict indices of reproductive capacity? Prior research has provided evidence that large breast size and low waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) are positively associated with women’s estrogen and progesterone concentrations, but no previous studies appear to have directly tested whether ratings of women's body attractiveness...

Psychometric surveys suggest that sex differences in personality are minimal. Herein, we argue that (a) the mind is likely biased toward assessing oneself relative to same-sex others, and (b) this bias may affect the measurement of sex differences in personality. In support of this, an experiment demonstrates modulation of sex differences on the HE...

This article provides the first test of an adaptationist ‘common calibration’ theory to explain the origins of trait covariation, which holds that (i) personality traits are often facultatively calibrated in response to cues that ancestrally predicted the reproductive payoffs of different trait levels and (ii) distinct traits that are calibrated on...

Johnson, Penke, and Spinath (2011) provide many productive insights regarding the study of gene–environment transactions and go further than most others in questioning the basic premise that specific genotype–personality linkages exist at all. The current commentary elaborates upon these issues in relation to the concept of ‘reactive heritability’,...

The origins of variation in extraversion are largely mysterious. Recent theories and some findings suggest that personality variation can be orchestrated by specific genetic polymorphisms. Few studies, however, have examined an alternative hypothesis that personality traits are facultatively calibrated to variations in other phenotypic features, an...

Previous mate preference studies indicate that people prefer partners whose personalities are extremely kind and trustworthy, but relatively nondominant. This conclusion, however, is based on research that leaves unclear whether these traits describe the behavior a partner directs toward oneself, toward other classes of people or both. Because the...

Exposure to potential mates triggers rapid elevations of testosterone and glucocorticoid concentrations in males of many non-human species, and preliminary studies support similar effects in human males. The human studies have all reported large individual differences in these responses, however, and the present study tested whether specific biolog...

Recent studies have reported that women exhibit elevated preferences for behavioral dominance in potential mates on higher fertility days of the menstrual cycle. This study was designed to test which hormonal signals may be associated with such cycle phase shifts in dominance preferences. Women indicated their mate preferences for dominant personal...

It is well-established that males of many nonhuman vertebrate species exhibit hormonal reactions to stimuli from potential mates. The present studies were designed to test replication of preliminary findings suggesting that human males may exhibit such reactions as well. In Experiment 1, young men (n=115) provided saliva samples before and after ei...