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Introduction
I am rather eclectic, but my current interests are signaling, masculinity, and cultural production.
Publications
Publications (69)
Researchers have theorized that manhood is a precarious social status that requires effort to achieve. Because of this, men whose manhood is threatened react with a variety of compensatory behaviors and cognitions such as aggression, support for hierarchy, low tolerance for homosexuality, and support for war. In the following article, we argue that...
Many evolutionary psychologists have asserted
that there is a panhuman nature, a species typical psychological
structure that is invariant across human populations.
Although many social scientists dispute the basic assumptions
of evolutionary psychology, they seem widely to agree with
this hypothesis. Psychological differences among human populatio...
Many intellectuals enthusiastically denounce those who argue that genes play some role in cognitive differences between human populations. However, such proposals are perfectly reasonable and are, in fact, consistent with the Darwinian research tradition in which most modern social scientists profess to operate. We argue that population-based cogni...
Many people greet evidence of biologically based race and sex differences with extreme skepticism, even hostility. We argue that some of the vehemence with which many intellectuals in the West resist claims about group differences is rooted in the tacit assumption that accepting evidence for group differences in socially valued traits would undermi...
Humans evolved in the context of intense intergroup competition, and groups comprised of loyal members more often succeeded than those that were not. Therefore, selective pressures have consistently sculpted human minds to be "tribal," and group loyalty and concomitant cognitive biases likely exist in all groups. Modern politics is one of the most...
Recent scholarship has challenged the long-held assumption in the social sciences that Conservatives are more biased than Liberals, yet little work deliberately explores domains of liberal bias. Here, we demonstrate that Liberals (some might call them Progressives) are particularly prone to bias about victims’ groups (e.g. women, Black people) and...
The Blame Efficiency Hypothesis (Clark, 2022) contends that moral agency and blame deservingness are reserved for agents that are deterred by blame and moral condemnation. Some philosophers and moral psychologists would contend that certain cognitive capacities, such as the abilities to change and control one's behavior or the capacity for "free ac...
Many evolutionary psychologists have asserted that there is a panhuman nature, a species typical psychological structure that is invariant across human populations. Although many social scientists dispute the basic assumptions of evolutionary psychology, they seem widely to agree with this hypothesis. Psychological differences among human populatio...
We are in the middle of a great social experiment. The sex ratios of many important institutions in the West are changing, and few institutions more dramatically illustrate this shift than academia. For centuries, academia was primarily a male-led institution. Although many universities in the United States began admitting women in the 1800s, other...
His eldest son assassinated and his second son dimwitted and gullible, Vito’s top priority was to save his youngest and most promising son, Michael. In a meeting with the heads of the Five Families, Vito announced he would retaliate if any injury should befall Michael, even if the misfortunate were apparently as random as a strike of lightning. Few...
Clark and colleagues (2014) proposed a theory of motivated free will beliefs, according to which at least part of free will beliefs and attributions are caused by a desire to hold moral transgressors responsible. Recently, this theory has been challenged. In the following article, we examine the evidence and conclude that, although not dispositive,...
In the following article, we forward the coalitional value theory (CVT) and apply it to several puzzles about human behavior. The CVT contends that humans evolved unique mental mechanisms for assessing each other’s marginal value to a coalition (i.e., each other’s coalitional value). They defer to those with higher coalitional value, and they asser...
Modern Western societies conceive universities as places for free thought, open discourse, and the relentless pursuit of truth. Yet in recent years, many scholars have expressed concerns about increasing censoriousness on college campuses, suggesting that social justice goals have taken priority over open inquiry and truth-seeking goals. In the pre...
Many feminists and progressives argue that the West is plagued by pervasive misogyny. In fact, this claim is made with such frequency, and is so rarely challenged, that it has become part of the Left's catechism of victimhood, repeated by rote without a second thought. The only real question is how powerful and pernicious the misogyny is. Real-worl...
We argue that because of a long history of intergroup conflict and competition, humans evolved to be tribal creatures. Tribalism is not inherently bad, but it can lead to ideological thinking and sacred values that distort cognitive processing of putatively objective information in ways that affirm and strengthen the views and well-being of one’s i...
Do desires to punish lead people to attribute more free will to individual actors (motivated free will attributions) and to stronger beliefs in human free will (motivated free will beliefs) as suggested by prior research? Results of 14 new (7 preregistered) studies (n=4,014) demonstrated consistent support for both of these. These findings consiste...
Humans evolved in the context of intense intergroup competition, and groups comprised of loyal members more often succeeded than those that were not. Therefore, selective pressures have consistently sculpted human minds to be "tribal," and group loyalty and concomitant cognitive biases likely exist in all groups. Modern politics is one of the most...
Moral cognition, by its very nature, stems from intuitions about what is good and bad, and these intuitions influence moral assessments outside of conscious awareness. However, because humans evolved a shared set of moral intuitions, and are compelled to justify their moral assessments as good and rational (even erroneously) to others, moral virtue...
Science Trends article: https://sciencetrends.com/an-evolutionary-perspective-on-free-will-belief/
This is a data report for a scale that is in development called the Equalitarianism Scale, which measures perceptions of group differences. The data reported here are from 8 studies (n=3274) that tested other hypotheses, but that also included the Equalitarianism Scale. This scale contains 18 items measuring five highly related assumptions about gr...
Recent scholarship has challenged the long-held assumption in the social sciences that Conservatives are more biased than Liberals, contending that predominantly liberal social scientists overlooked liberal bias. Here, we demonstrate that Liberals are prone to bias about relatively low-status groups (e.g. Blacks, women), and specifically are biased...
For years, experimental philosophers have attempted to discern whether laypeople find free will compatible with a scientifically deterministic understanding of the universe, yet no consensus has emerged. The present work provides one potential explanation for these discrepant findings: People are strongly motivated to preserve free will and moral r...
Humans create many apparently functionless artifacts such as paintings, novels, poems, films, and decorative blankets. From an evolutionary perspective, such creations appear somewhat puzzling. Why create artifacts that do not appear to contribute to survival? One recent explanation, the cultural courtship model, argued that such creations are used...
Humans create many apparently functionless artifacts such as paintings, novels, poems, films, and decorative blankets. From an evolutionary perspective, such creations appear somewhat puzzling. Why create artifacts that do not appear to contribute to survival? One recent explanation, the cultural courtship model, argued that such creations are used...
Humans create many apparently functionless artifacts such as paintings, novels, poems, films, and decorative blankets. From an evolutionary perspective, such creations appear somewhat puzzling. Why create artifacts that do not appear to contribute to survival? One recent explanation, the cultural courtship model, argued that such creations are used...
See updated version here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325033477_Equalitarianism_A_source_of_liberal_bias
Four studies tested the hypotheses that (1) romantic partners function as hard-to-fake signals of status and (2) men are concerned about signaling their status to both other men and to other women. In study 1, participants rated the status of an individual (gender remained neutral) who was described as attending a party with either a high-quality g...
A large body of social science research is devoted to understanding the causes and correlates of discrimination. Comparatively less effort has been aimed at providing a general prevalence estimate of discrimination using a nationally representative sample. The current study is intended to offer such an estimate using a large sample of American resp...
Spoken English has a stress-alternating rhythm that is not marked in its orthography. In two experiments, the authors evaluated whether stylistic alterations to print that marked stress pulses fostered the rendering of rhythm (experiment 1) and stress (experiment 2) during silent reading. In experiment 1, silent readers rated the helpfulness of the...
In this chapter, we follow up on the work of other scholars who have recently cautioned about the dangers of ideological uniformity in the social sciences. We forward the paranoid egalitarian meliorist (PEM) model to help account for bias in the social sciences. Paranoid is not a pejorative term, but describes a sensitivity to perceived threats to...
Predicated on the notion that people’s survival depends greatly on participation in cooperative society, and that reputation damage may preclude such participation, four studies with diverse methods tested the hypothesis that people would make substantial sacrifices to protect their reputations. A “big data” study found that maintaining a moral rep...
Sexual economics theory analyzes the onset of heterosexual sex as a marketplace deal in which the woman is the seller and the man is the buyer, with the price paid in nonsexual resources. We extend that theory to analyze same-gender contests in that marketplace, and to elaborate the idea that what the woman sells is not just sex but exclusive acces...
Many evolutionary psychologists have asserted
that there is a panhuman nature, a species typical psychological
structure that is invariant across human populations.
Although many social scientists dispute the basic assumptions
of evolutionary psychology, they seem widely to agree with
this hypothesis. Psychological differences among human populatio...
See updated full text here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/319944911_Forget_the_Folk_Moral_Responsibility_Preservation_Motives_and_Other_Conditions_for_Compatibilism
The CLASH model is not convincing for two reasons. First, it ignores prior research proposing very similar ideas in a more compelling fashion. Second, it dismisses the role of genetic factors in shaping criminal propensities across population groups, opting for a facultative view of life history evolution that does not seem to square with current
e...
Research indicates that antigay bias follows a specific pattern (and probably has throughout written history, at least in the West): (a) men evince more antigay bias than women; (b) men who belong to traditionally male coalitions evince more antigay bias than those who do not; © antigay bias is targeted more at gay men than at lesbians; and (d) ant...
An essay about political bias in the social sciences; a working draft.
We agree with Duarte et al. that bias in social psychology is a serious problem that researchers should confront. However, we are skeptical that most social psychologists adhere to a liberal progress narrative. We suggest, instead, that most social psychologists are paranoid egalitarian meliorists (PEMs). We explain the term and suggest possible re...
The human grief response has perplexed researchers. Grief is costly, leading to painful and potentially deleterious symptoms. Yet, it is a human universal. We argue that grief functions as a hard-to-fake signal of underlying capacities to form strong social bonds. If so, those who grieve more intensively than others should be perceived as higher qu...
Evolutionary psychology has provoked controversy, especially when applied to human sex differences. We hypothesize that this is partly due to misunderstandings of evolutionary psychology that are perpetuated by undergraduate sex and gender textbooks. As an initial test of this hypothesis, we develop a catalog of eight types of errors and document t...
Background
Two important influences on students' evaluations of teaching are relationship and professor effects. Relationship effects reflect unique matches between students and professors such that some professors are unusually effective for some students, but not for others. Professor effects reflect inter-rater agreement that some professors are...
The selfish goal, at some point in evolution, gave rise to a selfish self. In humans, this selfish self might exert influence over goals, deciding upon which to execute and which to inhibit. This, in fact, may be one of the chief functions of the self.
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Grief is a puzzling phenomenon. It is often costly and prolonged, potentially increasing mortality rates, drug abuse, withdrawal from social life, and susceptibility to illness. These costs cannot be repaid by the deceased and therefore might appear wasted. In the following article, we propose a possible solution. Using the principles of social sel...
Darwin’s (1871) sexual selection, in particular male–male competition over mates and female choice of mating partners, has successfully guided research on sex differences across hundreds of species, including our own. One consequence of the success of sexual selection has been a relative indifference to other pressures that can result in the evolut...
We review Nicholas Wade's courageous and entertaining but flawed book, "A troublesome inheritance: Genes, race, and human history."
Abstract English speakers and expressive readers emphasize new content in an ongoing discourse. Do silent readers emphasize new content in their inner voice? Because the inner voice cannot be directly observed, we borrowed the cap-emphasis technique (e.g., "toMAYto") from the pronunciation guides of dictionaries to elicit prosodic emphasis. Extrapo...
Mating decisions are influenced by conspecifics' mate choices in many species including humans. Recent research has shown that women are more attracted to men with attractive putative partners than those with less attractive partners. We integrate these findings with traditional accounts of social signaling and test five hypotheses derived from it....
Main supporting information packet with demographic and other data.
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Flaunting and concealing as a function of religious affiliation.
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Flaunting and concealing as a function of relationship status.
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Pamphlet 1 (given to experimental group).
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Means, standard deviations, and correlations among all major measured variables.
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Pamphlet 2 (given to control group).
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Much evidence indicates that men experienced an evolutionary history of physical competition, both one-on-one and in coalitions. We thus hypothesized that, compared to girls and women, boys and men will possess a greater motivational predisposition to be interested in sports, especially team sports. According to most scholars, advocacy groups, and...
Participation rates for sports and exercise for males and females across racial/ethnic groups and education levels, American Time Use Survey 2003–2010.
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Multivariate logistic regressions predicting participation in team and individual sports, American Time Use Survey 2003–2010.
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The relative impact of genetic and social influences on disordered eating behaviors (DEB) including binging, purging, excessive dieting and negative self-evaluations about weight remain an issue of debate. The current study sought to examine the relative influence of genetic and social influences on DEB. A 7-year prospective analysis of 580 monozyg...
Much attention has focused on the influence of media images of thin women on body dissatisfaction among female viewers. Disagreement exists regarding the nature of media influences, with meta-analytic results suggesting only small effect sizes. Fewer researchers have focused on the role of peer influences and peer competition on female body dissati...