Alexandra Wormley

• Master of Arts
• PostDoc Position at University of Michigan

A substantial body of research has linked ecological features to human cultural variation. Some recent work suggests that environments with more biological niches necessitate greater variation in biological and cultural adaptations. In the present work, we assess linkages between species biodiversity and indicators of human cultural diversity to te...

Moral foundations theory proposes five domains of morality-harm, fairness, loyalty, purity, and authority. Endorsement of these moral domains is assessed by the Moral Foundations Questionnaire (MFQ), a 30-item scale that has undergone intense measurement scrutiny. Across five samples (N = 464,229), we show greatly improved model fit using a Bifacto...

How much cultural variation is explained by the physical and social ecologies people inhabit? Here, we provide an answer using nine ecological variables and 66 cultural variables (including personality traits, values, and norms) drawn from the EcoCultural Dataset. We generate a range of estimates by using different statistical metrics (e.g., curren...

Many animal species exhibit seasonal changes in their physiology and behavior. Yet, despite ample evidence that humans are also responsive to seasons, the impact of seasonal changes on human psychology is underappreciated relative to other sources of variation (e.g., personality, culture, development). This is unfortunate, because seasonal variatio...

Many animal species exhibit seasonal changes in their physiology and behavior. Yet, despite ample evidence that humans are also responsive to seasons, the impact of seasonal changes on human psychology is underappreciated relative to other sources of variation (e.g., personality, culture, development). This is unfortunate, because seasonal variatio...

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, psychological scientists frequently made on-the-record predictions in public media about how individuals and society would change. Such predictions were often made outside these scientists’ areas of expertise, with justifications based on intuition, heuristics, and analogical reasoning (Study 1; N = 719 statem...

Infectious diseases present serious threats to our fitness. The biological immune system provides several mechanisms for dealing with these threats. So too does another system: the behavioral immune system. This second system is proposed to consist of a set of evolved cognitive, affective, and behavioral strategies for reducing the likelihood of in...

Wordle is a daily, online brainteaser. The widespread popularity of the game in the early months of 2022 has also led to widespread cheating. Here, we use data from Google Trends and Twitter to explore correlates of cheating on Wordle. We find that cheating behavior is negatively related to religiosity and cultural tightness. Although this is a ben...

Scholars interested in cultural diversity have long suggested that similarities and differences across human populations might be understood, at least in part, as stemming from differences in the social and physical ecologies individuals inhabit. Here, we describe the EcoCultural Dataset (ECD), the most comprehensive compilation to date of country-...

The COVID-19 pandemic caused drastic social changes for many people, including separation from friends and coworkers, enforced close contact with family, and reductions in mobility. Here we assess the extent to which people's evolutionarily-relevant basic motivations and goals—fundamental social motives such as Affiliation and Kin Care—might have b...

How strong is the association between ecological conditions and cultural variation? The present work provides a systematic test of associations between nine key ecological variables and 72 cultural variables (including values, personality traits, norms, behaviors, and societal practices and features) across 220 countries. This approach enables us t...

How does psychology vary across human societies? The fundamental social motives framework adopts an evolutionary approach to capture the broad range of human social goals within a taxonomy of ancestrally recurring threats and opportunities. These motives—self-protection, disease avoidance, affiliation, status, mate acquisition, mate retention, and...

Deciding what to eat is a choice we make many times per day, and each time it is crucial to our survival. Religion and culture are two guiding structures for what we may and may not eat. Food taboos exist in many cultures and religions though they vary in content. Some theorists propose food taboos may have evolved to protect us from pathogens, amo...

Infectious diseases present serious threats to our fitness. The biological immune system provides several mechanisms for dealing with these threats. So too does another system: the behavioral immune system. This second system is proposed to consist of a set of evolved cognitive, affective, and behavioral strategies for reducing the likelihood of in...

Classifying moral values in user-generated text from social media is critical in understanding community cultures and interpreting user behaviors of social movements. Moral values and language usage can change across the social movements; however, text classifiers are usually trained in source domains of existing social movements and tested in targ...

The influence of the COVID-19 pandemic on mental health is of mounting concern to population-health researchers. While early reports indicated increases in mental health problems, noticeably absent from these studies is how mental health has changed in 2020 compared to previous years (2013–2019) and whether such trends vary by race/ethnicity. The p...

New analyses related to Varnum, M. E. W., Krems, J. A., Morris, C., Wormley, A., & Grossmann, I. (2021). Why are song lyrics becoming simpler? a time series analysis of lyrical complexity in six decades of American popular music. PLOS ONE, 16(1), e0244576.

To date, the study of cultural tightness has been largely limited to exploring the strictness of social norms and the severity of punishments at the level of nations or regions. However, cultural psychologists concur that humans gather cultural information from more than just their nationality. Gender is a cultural identity that confers its own soc...

Cultural neuroscience research has provided substantial evidence that culture shapes the brain by providing systematically different sets of experiences. However, cultures are ever-changing in response to the physical and social environment. In the present paper, we integrate theories and methods from cultural neuroscience with the emerging body of...

How have people’s fundamental social motives changed during the COVID-19 pandemic? In data collected from 32 countries before the onset of the pandemic, we saw that a) people prioritized family-related motives (romantic relationship maintenance and kin care) over mate-acquisition motives (mate-seeking and breakup concern), and b) family-related mot...

Effective management of global crises relies on expert judgment of their societal effects. How accurate are such judgments? In the spring of 2020, we asked social scientists (N = 717) and lay Americans (N = 394) to make predictions about COVID-19 pandemic-related societal change across social and psychological domains. Six months later we obtained...

Song lyrics are rich in meaning. In recent years, the lyrical content of popular songs has been used as an index of culture’s shifting norms, affect, and values. One particular, newly uncovered, trend is that lyrics of popular songs have become increasingly simple over time. Why might this be? Here, we test the idea that increasing lyrical simplici...

Cultural neuroscience research has provided substantial evidence that culture shapes the brain by providing systematically different sets of experiences. However, cultures are ever-changing in response to the physical and social environment. In the present paper, we integrate theories and methods from cultural neuroscience with the emerging body of...

Song lyrics are rich in meaning. In recent years, the lyrical content of popular songs has been used as an index of culture’s shifting norms, affect, and values. One particular, newly uncovered, trend is that lyrics of popular songs have become increasingly simple over time. Why might this be? Here, we test the idea that increasing lyrical simplici...