Adam C Davis

Canadore College · Department of Social Sciences

Personality traits can coalesce with other characteristics to guide the use of tactics to increase fitness, termed life history strategies (LHSs). A “fast” LHS broadly refers to a strategy of maturing and reproducing early, favoring offspring quantity over quality, and immediate over delayed benefits. A “slow” strategy describes the opposite patter...

Jealousy is argued to be an adaptive emotion that coordinates the use of mate retention acts, denoting behavior intended to guard a relationship from rivals, to prevent infidelity, and to hinder defection from the mateship. Nevertheless, few researchers have examined these relations. We sampled 144 women and men in romantic relationships and found...

Adolescent girls’ and women’s penchant for indirect aggression has led to the prediction that gossip may be their preferred tactic of choice when competing against intrasexual rivals. Consequently, girls and women are predicted to initiate and engage in gossip more frequently than boys and men.

From an evolutionary perspective, gossip has been considered a putative intrasexual competition strategy that is used to vie for mates and resources linked to reproductive success. To date, no study has directly examined the relations between intrasexual competitiveness, reported tendency to gossip, and attitudes toward gossiping. Limited empirical...

Anthropocentrism refers to a collection of beliefs where humankind is regarded as exceptional and superior to all other lifeforms. Amid varying definitions and measurement instruments for the construct, individual differences in anthropocentric beliefs have been linked to religious fundamentalism and an anti-environmental orientation.

Introduction Facial attractiveness has recently been considered an indicator of underlying immunocompetence. However, studies examining this relationship have yielded mixed findings. Previous research suggested that these discrepant findings could be due to the common influence of lifestyle factors upon both rated facial attractiveness and health....

The behavioral and neural responses to social exclusion were examined in women randomized to four conditions, varying in levels of attractiveness and friendliness. Informed by evolutionary theory, we predicted that being socially excluded by attractive unfriendly women would be more distressing than being excluded by unattractive women, irrespectiv...

The mating effort questionnaire (MEQ) is a multi-dimensional self-report instrument that captures factors reflecting individual effort in upgrading from a current partner, investment in a current partner, and mate seeking when not romantically paired. In the current studies, we sought to revise the MEQ so that it distinguishes among two facets of m...

A new measure to assess friendship jealousy in the context of social media was developed. This one-factor, seven-item measure was psychometrically sound, showing evidence of validity and reliability in three samples of North American adults (Study 1, n = 491; Study 2, n = 494; Study 3, n = 415) and one-, two-, and three-year stability (Study 3). Wo...

Recently, Judd et al. (2022) reported that, contrary to Arnocky et al. (2017), there is no link between altruism and indices of mating success. However, a reanalysis of the open-source data revealed coding and analytical errors which, when corrected, provided consistent support for the initial findings of Arnocky et al. that altruism positively pre...

Introduction Previous research has highlighted the putative role of intrasexual competition (IC) in predicting women’s body dissatisfaction, weight loss effort, and, at its extreme, eating disorders. However, extant research reporting on these links is limited by its exclusion of potential confounds, including psychopathologies such as depression....

Immunocompetence can influence an organism’s reproductive fitness, and thus presumably their desirability as a mate (i.e., mate value). In humans, the link between immunocompetence and mate value has found circumstantial support by way of both expressed mate preferences for healthy partners, and via preferences for attractive phenotypes that are os...

With the surge of social media use in contemporary society, scholars have focused on how feelings of apprehension that one is missing out on important social activities (i.e., fear of missing out [FoMO]) might influence mental health. However, worry surrounding social inclusion is not a contemporary problem, and successfully participating in social...

This article provides support for the argument that horror media “works” by activating evolved cognitive and affective systems that are flexibly tailored to local socio-ecological contexts. Guided by previous work using evolutionary theory to study horror literature (e.g., Clasen 2012, 2018, 2019), I investigate horror manga’s popularity and intern...

Researchers studying non-human females have highlighted the role of intrasexual resource competition. Here, we considered women’s intrasexual competitive attitudes toward rival derogation and self-promotion as a function of resource availability. Further, we tested the overarching hypothesis that both trait and state envy are complicit in the motiv...

Infidelity is one of the greatest adaptive challenges of our reproductive lives. A partner’s infidelity can lead to their defection from the relationship and offspring, loss of important resources, and for men, cuckoldry. It is unsurprising, then, that humans have evolved adaptations meant to prevent, curtail, and punish a partner’s infidelity. Amo...

The constellation of co-adapted traits that facilitate short-term mating promote the use of riskier and interpersonally antagonistic intrasexual competition tactics. Aggressive behavior can be used to vie against rivals for mates and resources that facilitate reproductive success; however, there is limited research regarding whether individual diff...

Despite a tendency to form socially monogamous pair-bonds that carry expectations of sexual exclusivity, infidelity has been a recurrent feature of human mating across societies. The attitudes, social cognition, affect, and behavior associated with infidelity vary in patterned ways between women and men. In the current chapter, we use an evolutiona...

Relative to other species, human females invest considerable effort in attracting and retaining mates. Stroll the aisles of any bookstore and you may come across titles such as “Get the guy: Learn secrets of the male mind to find the man you want and the love you deserve” (Hussey, 2014), and “Texts so good he can't ignore: Sassy texting secrets for...

In ecological commons dilemma research, environmental values tend to be treated as a monolith. However, environmental values vary and they do not equally predict proenvironmental behavior. In this study, we investigated the impact of three kinds of proenvironmental values (egoistic, altruistic, and biospheric) on competitive and cooperative behavio...

Dominant theorizing and research surrounding the operation of intersexual selection in evolutionary psychology tends to be guided by an adaptationist framework and aligned with models of sexual selection involving direct benefits (e.g., parental care) and indirect “good gene” and condition-dependent benefits. In this way, evolutionary psychologists...

Despite recent empirical interest, the links between optimism and pessimism with pro-environmental behavior (PEB) remain equivocal. This research is characterized by a reliance on cross-sectional data, a focus on trait-level at the neglect of state-level optimism-pessimism, and assessments of retrospective self-reported ecological behavior that are...

Few have studied the longitudinal associations between the Dark Triad and bullying in youth and none have examined these relations using analytic techniques that permit separating between- from within-person variability. Random intercept cross-lagged panel modeling was used with three waves of data from a randomly selected sample of 514 Canadian ad...

Many have examined the desirability and mate competition tactics of adults higher on psychopathy using cross-sectional data, but few have studied the longitudinal associations between the lower-order factors of psychopathy (e.g., primary and secondary psychopathy) with indices of mating behavior in adolescents. More work is also needed to unravel h...

Evolutionary scholars have highlighted how there are two normative approaches to enhancing one's status: dominance and prestige. Several individual differences have been found to differentially predict dominance and prestige status-seeking. The four socially aversive personality dimensions embodied within the Dark Tetrad (narcissism, Machiavelliani...

Researchers have highlighted numerous sociocultural factors that have been shown to underpin human appearance enhancement practices, including the influence of peers, family, the media, and sexual objectification. Fewer scholars have approached appearance enhancement from an evolutionary perspective or considered how sociocultural factors interact...

Individual variation in the age of pubertal onset is linked to physical and mental health, yet the factors underlying this variation are poorly understood. Life history theory predicts that individuals at higher risk of mortality due to extrinsic causes such as infectious disease should sexually mature and reproduce earlier, whereas those at lower...

In their policy brief on the impact of COVID-19 on children and youth, the United Nations identified the need for “a rapid accumulation of data on the scale and nature of impacts among children.”1(p14) Although an important goal, this call to action defies how research typically unfolds. Science is a slow, methodical process that requires careful c...

Many scholars have investigated the attitudes, beliefs, motives, and behavior of male clients of female sex workers. However, few have examined individual differences in major dimensions of personality expressed by men who purchase prostitution compared to those who do not. Although several evolutionary psychologists have studied prostitution and t...

From an evolutionary perspective, aggression is viewed as a flexible context-specific adaption that was selected for because it enhanced the survival and reproductive success of ancestral humans. Evolutionary pressures have impinged differentially on the sexes, leading to the hypothesis that sex differences should be manifest in aggressive behavior...

Feminist epistemologies have been instrumental in drawing attention to androcentric biases in knowledge production, the shortcomings of representational epistemologies like postpositivism that guide research in evolutionary psychology, in addition to the socially, politically, and historically situated nature of women’s subjective experiences. None...

Physical health has been argued to provide a range of reproductive advantages such as being preferentially chosen as a mate, having more disease-resistant children, and possessing a higher capacity to invest in mates, offspring, allies, and kin. Few researchers have, however, examined how self-perceptions of physical health status may correspond to...

The HEXACO model and life history theory have been used to examine the adaptive trade-offs of personality traits that combine to guide life history strategies (LHSs). A "fast" LHS embodies a preference for early mating along with limited parental investment, whereas a "slow" strategy denotes the opposite pattern. Clarity is currently needed regardi...

In the evolutionary sciences, gossip is argued to constitute an adaptation that enabled human beings to disseminate information about and to keep track of others within a vast and expansive social network. Although gossip can effectively encourage in-group cooper­ation, it can also be used as a low-cost and covert aggressive tactic to compete with...

Reputations can make or break citizens, communities, or companies. Reputations matter for individual careers, for one’s chances of finding a partner, for a profession’s credibility, or for the value of a firm’s stock options – to name but a few. The key mechanism for the creation, maintenance, and destruction of reputations in everyday life is goss...

Luteinizing hormone (LH) is secreted by the anterior pituitary and plays a role in reproductive functions such as ovulation in females and synthesis of androgens in males.

Human overpopulation continues to be a pressing problem for the health and viability of the environment, which impacts the survival and well-being of human populations. Limiting the number of offspring one produces or deciding to remain child-free may be viewed as a proenvironmental behavior (PEB) that can significantly reduce one's carbon footprin...

In Table 1 of the published article, the mean and standard deviation values for women and men on the Tendency to Gossip Questionnaire (TGQ) are in the incorrect columns. Women had a M = 67.09 (SD = 19.47), whereas men had a M = 60.20 (SD = 17.91) on the TGQ.

Using the lens of complex adaptive systems theory , we review the emergence of the local food movement within the broader systems of the industrial approach to food and in the unique context of northern Ontario. We argue that this systems thinking perspective reveals potential pathways to supporting transformative change and food system resilience....

Men’s sexual jealousy is an evolved emotional response to a real or perceived threat of a partner’s sexual infidelity. It is a functionally flexible response that serves to motivate men to engage in mate-guarding behavior designed to deter intrasexual rivals and to maintain valued relationships.

Social cognitive processes and culture have evolved over time in human beings because they conferred adaptive value within the environments that they were selected for; the environment of evolutionary adapt-edness. the present article briefly reviews several points of intersection between social cognition, culture , and evolution in humans to demon...

The goal of the present research was to examine the relationship between the cogni-tive paradigm systems thinking and an ecologically informed worldview, specifically the New Ecological Paradigm. One hundred and fifteen psychology undergraduate students completed an online questionnaire assessing systems thinking, ecological worldview, environmenta...

A substantial amount of research has employed Stern and Dietz's (1994) value-belief-norm theory in examining environmental concern. As useful as this model has been, it fails to take into account important personal and social factors, such as self-perception and culture, relevant to understanding environmental concern. The objective of the present...