Gordon P D Ingram

Los Andes University (Colombia) | UNIANDES · Department of Psychology

Language is a uniquely human behaviour, which has presented unique adaptive problems. Prominent among these is the transmission of information that may affect an individual’s reputation. The possibility of punishment of those with a low reputation by absent third parties has created a selective pressure on human beings that is not shared by any oth...

Adult humans are characterized by low rates of intra-group physical aggression. Since children tend to be more physically aggressive, an evolutionary developmental account shows promise for explaining how physical aggression is suppressed in adults. I argue that this is achieved partly through extended dominance hierarchies, based on indirect recip...

This article describes the use of evolutionary psychology to inform the design of a serious computer game aimed at improving 9-12-year-old children's conflict resolution skills. The design of the game will include dynamic narrative generation and emotional tagging, and there is a strong evolutionary rationale for the effect of both of these on conf...

Tattling, defined as the reporting to a second party of norm violations committed by a third party, is a frequent but little-studied activity among young children. Participant observation and quantitative sampling are used to provide a detailed characterization of tattling in 2 preschools (initial mean age = 4.08 years, N = 40). In these population...

Les filtres photo sont devenus une stratégie omniprésente pour obtenir l’approbation dans les médias sociaux et les applications de rencontre. Postulant que la sociosexualité est un prédicteur majeur des réactions aux photos dans les applications, nous avons examiné si les différences individuelles dans la sociosexualité non restreinte façonnent le...

Previous studies in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic indicated that wearing a medical-style mask affects whether a stranger’s face is judged as more trustworthy, socially desirable, or likely to be ill. However, given political controversies around mask use, these effects might vary by political orientation. In a pre-registered online experimen...

As a character strength, gratitude is linked with positive emotions and can potentially provide many benefits to children and adolescents. Yet little is known about how and why children typically experience gratitude, and how to promote its development. We conducted 10 focus groups and written exercises with 38 Colombian fifth-graders (19 girls and...

Children's punishment behavior may be driven by both retribution and deterrence, but the potential primacy of either motive is unknown. Moreover, children's punishment enjoyment and compensation enjoyment have never been directly contrasted. Here, British, Colombian, and Italian 7- to 11-year-old children (N = 123) operated a Justice System in whic...

The present study explored the psychometric properties of the Multi-Component Gratitude Measure (MCGM), in Spanish with a sample of Colombian children. The sample was composed of 540 schoolchildren between 8–12 years old (265 females, mean age 10.04 years; 75 males, mean age 10.08 years). The MCGM aims to examine more comprehensively the moral virt...

The study of moral judgements often centres on moral dilemmas in which options consistent with deontological perspectives (that is, emphasizing rules, individual rights and duties) are in conflict with options consistent with utilitarian judgements (that is, following the greater good based on consequences). Greene et al. (2009) showed that psychol...

This study aimed to explore Colombian fifth-graders views about people, events, and situations involved in their gratitude experiences. The sample consisted of 120 fifth-grade children from three mixed-gender schools (one public, two private) in Bogotá, Colombia. The study used a child-centered methodology that involved a novel combination of quali...

Most developmental studies of the role of outcomes and intentions in third-party moral evaluations sampled children from English-speaking countries and focused on harm and property transgressions. We tested instead 5- to 11-year-old children from Colombia and Spain (N = 123) employing moral scenarios involving disloyalty and unfairness. We found th...

We assessed negative bias in Colombian young offenders towards affective deviants (those who violate emotional norms). Postulating that affective deviants elicit an “uncanny/creepy” feeling resembling that produced by psychopaths, we explored social judgments of affective deviants in individuals with callous-unemotional (CU) traits. 188 young offen...

A central tenet of evolutionary ethics is that as a result of evolutionary processes, humans tend to respond in certain ways to particular moral problems. Various authors have posited “dual-process” conflicts between “fast”, automatic, evolved impulses, and “slower”, controlled, reasoned judgements. In this chapter we argue that the evolutionary so...

We used implicit and explicit measures to study whether “real” uncanny faces (by faces of Botox users and very ugly people) will be associated with perceptions of bad moral character and social avoidance. Implicit measures showed that uncanny faces were more strongly associated with negative aesthetic evaluations (“ugliness”) than with negative mor...

We used implicit and explicit measures to study whether “real” uncanny faces (by faces of Botox users and very ugly people) will be associated with perceptions of bad moral character and social avoidance. Implicit measures showed that uncanny faces were more strongly associated with negative aesthetic evaluations (“ugliness”) than with negative mor...

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused controversy over new norms of mask-wearing in public places. An online experiment previously showed that people from several Spanish-speaking countries perceived faces wearing medical-style masks as more trustworthy, socially desirable, and likely to be ill, compared to control faces without a mask. We replicated an...

Young people’s exposure to various types of risk on the Internet—including interactions with strangers, inappropriate material, and cyberbullying—is an increasing social concern. Exposure to online risks has been found to increase with age and to correlate with certain personality characteristics. However, adolescents’ own reporting to adults of th...

Previous research suggests that individual differences in pathogen disgust sensitivity and social anxiety predict avoidance behavior, especially of pathogen cues, and reduced tolerance for social ambiguity. Conversely, generalized social trust is associated with approach behavior and a greater tolerance for social ambiguity. We conducted an online...

Tinder has become a popular online dating tool for people looking for either short- or long-term relationships. In this study we build on existing research on gender differences in the motivations of Tinder users, by analyzing gender differences in self-presentation. We predicted that women would try to attract men to right-swipe (i.e., potentially...

It is unknown whether children enjoy punishing transgressors and whether they are motivated by retribution, as adults frequently are. Children’s approaches to compensation of victims have been little studied. British, Colombian and Italian 7- to 11-year-old children (N = 123) operated a Justice System in which they viewed different moral transgress...

A central tenet of evolutionary ethics is that as a result of evolutionary processes, humans tend to respond in certain ways to particular moral problems. Various authors (particularly those associated with “dual-process” theories of reasoning) have posited conflicts between “fast”, automatic, evolved impulses and more controlled judgements that ma...

With an estimated 50 million or more users worldwide, Tinder has become one of the most popular mobile dating applications. Although judgments of physical attractiveness are assumed to drive the “swiping” decisions that lead to matches, we propose that there is an additional evaluative dimension driving behind these decisions: judgments of moral ch...

La hipótesis del “uncanny valley” (Mori 1970/2012) propone que ciertas entidades casi-humanas o humanoides (por ejemplo, androides, payasos o figuras de cera) generan sensaciones afectivas negativas en el observador. Algunos autores sugieren que esta reacción emocional (“uncanny feeling”, UF) se extiende a la percepción de aquellas personas que pre...

In early-to-middle childhood children are thought to move from judging actions based solely on outcomes to also taking actors’ intentions into account. There is little research on how particular cognitive capabilities contribute to this breakthrough, or whether it occurs in children outside Europe and North America. We addressed both issues in a st...

Tinder has become a popular online dating tool for people looking for either short- or long-term relationships. In this study we build on existing research on gender differences in the motivations of Tinder users, by analyzing gender differences in self-presentation. We predicted that women would try to attract men to right-swipe (i.e., potentially...

Contradictory findings with regard to the nonlinear relation between human likeness and affective reactions have characterized psychological research on the uncanny valley hypothesis (Mori 1970/2005). In the present study we explored the phenomenology of the uncanny feeling (UF) by assessing implicit associations between uncanny stimuli (by android...

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...

Compassion-focused imagery (CFI) is an emotion-regulation technique involving visualization of a person, animal or object offering one compassion, to generate feelings of safeness. It is proven to increase self-compassion and reduce negative affect. This study explores two hypotheses not previously investigated: (1) which sensory modalities can sti...

Despite growing research on online social networking, implicit associations of Facebook users have been largely understudied. In Study 1, we used the Single-Target Implicit Association Test (ST-IAT; Karpinski and Steinman, 2006) in order to assess implicit associations between Facebook and two evolutionary relevant constructs: sexual and prosocial...

Gossip is a universal feature of all human societies but has not been systematically investigated in all of them: ethnographies that have focused on gossip largely concern semidispersed groups at the margins of modern European and North American societies. The anthropological study of gossip can be divided into four historical phases: pre‐1960s wor...

The aim of this cross-sectional study was to identify differences in memory processes and the role of executive functions in memory, in people with migraine and in a control group. Neuropsychological evaluation was made in one session on 63 participants distributed into interictal migraine-with-aura (n = 24), interictal migraine-without-aura (n = 1...

When individuals learn from what others tell them, the information is subject to transmission error that does not arise in learning from direct experience. Yet evidence shows that humans consistently prefer this apparently more unreliable source of information. We examine the effect this preference has in cases where the information concerns a judg...

This late-breaking poster describes a new three-year research project, which started in January 2016 and will investigate children's communication with peers while playing online games. The project is divided into three phases. In each phase I will be working with at least 120 children aged from 7-12 years. In the first phase, children's natural pa...

Human interactions are changing in far-reaching ways due to recent developments in Internet and mobile communication technologies, including widespread uptake of Facebook and other online social networks. Cyberpsychology, the study of computer-mediated communication and Internet behavior, is a rapidly developing field that has largely gone unnotice...

Humans unlike other primates continue to trust socially-learned information even when it is unreliable and in the face of direct evidence to the contrary. Our objective is to provide a model which can explain such seemingly mal-adaptive behaviour in evolutionary terms… Note from Publisher: This article contains the abstract only.

Newell & Shanks' (N&S's) conceptualization of the unconscious is overly restrictive, compared to standard social psychological accounts. The dichotomy between distal and proximal cues is a weak point in their argument and does not circumvent the existence of unconscious influences on decision making. Evidence from moral and developmental psychology...

A special feature at the Social Evolution Forum

In focusing on gender differences in anger expression, Trnka (2013) provides a useful complement to the article by Ingram et al., (2012) analyzing gender differences in children's narratives about peer conflict. I agree that gender differences in anger are more likely to be the result of differential socialization processes regarding the expression...

Learning environments must weave content and practice from different areas of expertise to achieve success in the end. In this paper, we describe the approach taken in the design of a serious game aimed at teaching children about conflict resolution. We address the issue of including users, both teachers and children, in the design process and the...

Games offer a compelling medium for learning. However, designing a successful learning game that features engagement alongside its educational objectives is a craft that is still underway. Our research adapts a user-centered approach toward designing a game that will teach children conflict resolution skills. By involving users of the game, namely...

Serious games have received much positive attention; correspondingly, many researchers have taken up the challenge of establishing how to best design them. However, the current literature often focuses on best practice design strategies and frameworks. Fine-grained details, contextual descriptions, and organisational factors that are invaluable in...

Conflict is an unavoidable feature of life, but the development of conflict resolution management skills can facilitate the parties involved in resolving their conflicts in a positive manner. The goal of our research is to develop a serious game in which children may experiment with conflict resolution strategies and learn how to work towards posit...

This thesis describes a mixed-methods investigation of young children’s everyday social communication, focusing on tattling—the reporting of a peer’s negative behaviour to an audience. There are links between tattling and the development of gossip, and thus with the evolution of cooperative norms in humans. Tattling is a daily activity for many chi...