Daniel SznycerArizona State University | ASU · Department of Psychology,
Daniel Sznycer
PhD
About
58
Publications
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2,720
Citations
Citations since 2017
Introduction
Daniel Sznycer is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of Montreal
Additional affiliations
January 2010 - January 2016
Publications
Publications (58)
How does the mind make moral judgments when the only way to satisfy one moral value is to neglect another? Moral dilemmas posed a recurrent adaptive problem for ancestral hominins, whose cooperative social life created multiple responsibilities to others. For many dilemmas, striking a balance between two conflicting values (a compromise judgment) w...
How does the mind make moral judgments when the only way to satisfy one moral value is to neglect another? Moral dilemmas posed a recurrent adaptive problem for ancestral hominins, whose cooperative social life created multiple responsibilities to others. For many dilemmas, striking a balance between two conflicting values (a compromise judgment) w...
The shame system appears to be natural selection's solution to the adaptive problem of information-triggered reputational damage. Over evolutionary time, this problem would have led to a coordinated set of adaptations—the shame system—designed to minimize the spread of negative information about the self and the likelihood and costs of being social...
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 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...
Things afford positive, neutral, or negative long-run effects on the replicative probability of the focal individual's genes. At the most general level, values are internal estimates of those effects. Value information steers physiology and behavior in the right direction: approach apple, avoid lion. Thus, value computation is of paramount biologic...
Social institutions make use of collective power to shape individual behavior. Attempts to modify these institutions to improve the welfare, fairness, or equity of a society will benefit from having an accurate view of how human nature works so they can design the interventions in ways that actually lead to the desired outcome. This means that the...
Status is a universal feature of human sociality. A lesser-studied adaptive problem surrounding status is assessing who has which levels of status in a given group (e.g., identifying which people possess high status). Here, we integrate theory and methods from evolutionary social science, animal behavior, and social psychology, and we use an emotio...
Aggression was a powerful selection pressure for our human ancestors. Aggressive contests would have selected not only for anatomical features (e.g., superior upper-body strength in adult males), but also for behavior-regulation adaptations for the conditional and cost-effective deployment of aggression. Here, we explore two concepts that appear to...
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...
Reliance on mutual aid is a distinctive characteristic of human biology. Consequently, a central adaptive problem for our ancestors was the potential or actual spread of reputationally damaging information about the self – information that would decrease the inclination of other group members to render assistance. The emotion of shame appears to be...
This chapter uses the adaptationist program (Williams, 1966) - to predict and explain the major features of anger. According to this approach, anger evolved by natural selection to bargain for better treatment. Thus, the major triggers of anger (e.g. cost impositions, cues of disrespect) all indicate an increased willingness (on the part of the off...
Anger appears to be a neurocognitive adaptation designed to bargain for better treatment, and is primarily triggered by indications that another individual values the focal individual insufficiently. Once activated, anger orchestrates cognitive, physiological, and behavioral responses geared to incentivize the target individual to place more weight...
Justice-making institutions rest on a vast network of rules, people, and artifacts. The federal criminal code of the United States, for example, has hundreds of sections with provisions for robbery and burglary, counterfeit bonds, chemical weapons, riots, expenditures to influence voting, and many others. This complexity can be traced to a handful...
The current research aimed to examine the reasons people are single, that is, not in an intimate relationship, across eight different countries-Brazil, China, Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary, India, Japan, and the UK. We asked a large cross-cultural sample of single participants (N = 6,822) to rate 92 different possible reasons for being single. Th...
In engineering, form follows function. It is therefore difficult to understand an engineered object if one does not examine it in light of its function. Just as understanding the structure of a lock requires understanding the desire to secure valuables, understanding structures engineered by natural selection, including emotion systems, requires hy...
The synchronized co-activation of multiple responses-motivational, behavioral, and physiological-has been taken as a defining feature of emotion. Such response coherence has been observed inconsistently however, and this has led some to view emotion programs as lacking biological reality. Yet, response coherence is not always expected or desirable...
The emotion of pride appears to be a neurocognitive guidance system to capitalize on opportunities to become more highly valued and respected by others. Whereas the inputs and the outputs of pride are relatively well understood, little is known about how the pride system matches inputs to outputs. How does pride work? Here we evaluate the hypothesi...
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...
Are pride and shame adaptations for promoting the benefits of being valued and limiting the costs of being devalued, respectively? Recent findings indicate that the intensities of anticipatory pride and shame regarding various potential acts and traits track the degree to which fellow community members value or disvalue those acts and traits. Thus,...
Fitness interdependence refers to the degree to which two or more organisms influence each other’s success in replicating their genes. We designed a new scale of perceived fitness interdependence that explicitly measures how individuals’ feelings and outcomes covary with the outcomes of specific partners (e.g., “When [target] succeeds, I feel good....
Laws against wrongdoing may originate in justice intuitions that are part of universal human nature, according to the adaptationist theory of the origins of criminal law. This theory proposes that laws can be traced to neurocognitive mechanisms and ancestral selection pressures. According to this theory, laypeople can intuitively recreate the laws...
Trust-based interactions with robots are increasingly common in the marketplace, workplace, on the road, and in the home. However, a looming concern is that people may not trust robots as they do humans. While trust in fellow humans has been studied extensively, little is known about how people extend trust to robots. Here we compare trust-based 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 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...
Pride, shame, and guilt color our highest and lowest personal moments. Recent
evidence suggests that these self-conscious emotions are neurocognitive
adaptations crafted by natural selection. Specifically, self-conscious emotions
solve adaptive problems of social valuation by promoting the achievement of
valued actions and characteristics to increa...
Significance
This set of experiments shows that in 15 traditional small-scale societies there is an extraordinarily close correspondence between ( i ) the intensity of shame felt if one exhibited specific acts or traits and ( ii ) the magnitude of devaluation expressed in response to those acts or traits by local audiences, and even foreign audienc...
Some questions, such as when a statistical distribution of incomes becomes too unequal, seem highly attention-grabbing, inferentially productive, and morally vexing. Yet many other questions that are crucial to the functioning of a modern economy seem uninteresting non-issues. An evolutionary–psychological framework to study folk-economic beliefs h...
Significance
It has been proposed that one key function of pride is to guide behavior in ways that would increase others’ valuation of the individual. To incline choice, the pride system must compute for a potential action an anticipated pride intensity that tracks the magnitude of the approval or deference that the action would generate among loca...
Some acts of human cooperation are not easily explained by traditional models of kinship or reciprocity. Fitness interdependence may provide a unifying conceptual framework, in which cooperation arises from the mutual dependence for survival or reproduction, as occurs among mates, risk-pooling partnerships and brothers-in-arms.
Why do humans help others? Many theories focus on dimensions like kinship or reciprocity. On their surface, these theories seem unable to explain help directed at fleeting strangers. In response to this puzzle, researchers have proposed that the mind has ecologically rational systems for providing aid. These systems respond to cues that predicted a...
What is the trigger of shame? The information threat theory holds that shame is an evolved adaptation that is designed to limit the likelihood and costs of others forming negative beliefs about the self. By contrast, attributional theories posit that concerns over others’ evaluations are irrelevant to shame. Instead, shame is triggered when a perso...
Trust-based interactions with robots are increasingly common in the marketplace, workplace, on the road, and in the home. However, a looming concern is that people may not trust robots as they do humans. While trust in fellow humans has been studied extensively, little is known about how people extend trust to robots. Here we compare trust-based in...
According to the recalibrational theory of anger, anger is a computationally complex cognitive system that evolved to bargain for better treatment. Anger coordinates facial expressions, vocal changes, verbal arguments, the withholding of benefits, the deployment of aggression, and a suite of other cognitive and physiological variables in the servic...
Significance
Markets have lifted millions out of poverty, but considerable inequality remains and there is a large worldwide demand for redistribution. Although economists, philosophers, and public policy analysts debate the merits and demerits of various redistributive programs, a parallel debate has focused on voters’ motives for supporting redis...
Significance
Cross-cultural tests from 16 nations were performed to evaluate the hypothesis that the emotion of pride evolved to guide behavior to elicit valuation and respect from others. Ancestrally, enhanced evaluations would have led to increased assistance and deference from others. To incline choice, the pride system must compute for a potent...
There is substantial evidence from archaeology, anthropology, primatology, and psychology indicating that humans have a long evolutionary history of war. Natural selection, therefore, should have designed mental adaptations for making decisions about war. These adaptations evolved in past environments, and so they may respond to variables that were...
Genetic relatedness is a fundamental determinant of social behavior across species. Over the last few decades, researchers have been investigating the proximate psychological mechanisms that enable humans to assess their genetic relatedness to others. Much of this work has focused on identifying cues that predicted relatedness in ancestral environm...
Significance
Prominent theories of shame hold that shame is inherently maladaptive. However, direct tests of the fit between shame and its probable target domain have not previously been conducted. Here we test the alternative hypothesis that shame, although unpleasant (like pain), serves the adaptive function of defending against the social devalu...
Prior to, or concurrent with, the encoding of concepts into speech, the individual faces decisions about whether, what, when, how, and with whom to communicate. Compared to the existing wealth of linguistic knowledge however, we know little of the mechanisms that govern the delivery and accrual of information. Here we focus on a fundamental issue o...
Over human evolutionary history, upper-body strength has been a major component of fighting ability. Evolutionary models of animal conflict predict that actors with greater fighting ability will more actively attempt to acquire or defend resources than less formidable contestants will. Here, we applied these models to political decision making abou...
In a natural experiment using trust games, we study how promises and messages are used to build new trust where it did not previously exist and to rebuild damaged trust. In these games, trustees made non-binding promises of investment-contingent returns, then investors decided whether to invest, and finally trustees decided how much to return. Afte...
Using trust games, we study how promises and messages are used to build new trust where it did not previously exist and to rebuild damaged trust. In these games, trustees made non-binding promises of investment-contingent returns, then investors decided whether to invest, and finally trustees decided how much to return. After an unexpected second g...
Evidence suggests that our foraging ancestors engaged in the small-scale equivalent of social insurance as an essential tool of survival and evolved a sophisticated psychology of social exchange (involving the social emotions of compassion and anger) to regulate mutual assistance. Here, we hypothesize that political support for modern welfare polic...
People vary in how easily they feel ashamed, that is, in their shame proneness. According to the information threat theory of shame, variation in shame proneness should, in part, be regulated by features of a person's social ecology. On this view, shame is an emotion program that evolved to mitigate the likelihood or costs of reputation-damaging in...
In an experiment using two consecutive trust games, we study how “cheap” signals such as promises and messages are used to restore damaged trust and encourage new trust where it did not previously exist. In these games, trustees made non-binding promises of investment-contingent returns, then investors decided whether to invest, and finally trustee...
Recent research has shown that humans, like many other animals, have a specialization for assessing fighting ability from visual cues. Because it is probable that the voice contains cues of strength and formidability that are not available visually, we predicted that selection has also equipped humans with the ability to estimate physical strength...
Selection in species with aggressive social interactions favours the evolution of cognitive mechanisms for assessing physical formidability (fighting ability or resource-holding potential). The ability to accurately assess formidability in conspecifics has been documented in a number of non-human species, but has not been demonstrated in humans. He...
Projects
Projects (6)
Human exchange likely evolved among ancient hominids as a survival strategy under conditions characterized by resource holding
asymmetries and asynchronous opportunities to control resource distribution (Kaplan et al. 2012). These conditions required that
successful exchange relationships rely on trust and trustworthiness (Cosmides and Tooby 1992; Isaac 1978). Relationships in modern economies continue to share in the gains and efficient transactions possible from trust-based asynchronous exchange: by relying on trust, the otherwise necessary costs of contracting and monitoring can
be reduced or eliminated (e.g., Fukuyama 1995). We study the conditions that facilitate trust extension and the behavioral propensity to trust others.
Communication is the act of conveying meanings from one entity or group to another through the use of mutually understood signs, symbols, and semiotic rules. Prior to, or concurrent with, the encoding of concepts into speech, the individual faces decisions about whether, what, when, how, and with whom to communicate. Compared to the existing wealth of linguistic knowledge however, we know little of the mechanisms that govern the delivery and accrual of information. This project involves various lines of research with the common goal of better understanding the regulatory mechanisms, dynamics, and ontogeny of human communication.
