P.H. Hawley

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Texas Tech University

The tension between evolution and religion is undeniable. Faith is an important part of teachers’ identities. This fact has documentable impact on the degree to which teachers teach evolution according to state standards because their loyalty to their faith can sometimes be at odds with their need to fulfill pedagogical responsibilities. At the sam...

Resource control theory (RCT) posits that both antisocial and prosocial behaviors combine in unique ways to control resources such as friendships. We assessed students (N = 2,803; 49.7% male) yearly from junior (grades 8–10) to senior high school (11–12) on antisocial (A) and prosocial (P) behavior, peer nominated friendship, and well-being. Non-pa...

Researchers in various contexts have long struggled with an apparent disconnect between an individual’s level of understanding of biological evolution and their acceptance of it as an explanation for the history and diversity of life. Here, we discuss the main factors associated with acceptance of evolution and chart a path forward for evolution ed...

Although most states across the United States have enacted anti-bullying legislation, state laws vary greatly in detail and direction, leaving many school districts wondering how to best address the problem of bullying and comply with their state’s legislative requirements. In response, a comprehensive, statewide training initiative was conducted f...

Across many disciplines, women are underrepresented in faculty positions relative to men. The present research focuses on the academic conference as a setting because it is a gateway to an academic career and a context in which women might experience sexism. We surveyed 329 presenters (63% women) from three U.S. national academic conferences, which...

Academic conferences are important settings for socialization, scholarly engagement, and networking. Two studies explore the effects of ambient cues in such settings on women's and men's climate perceptions. Participants (undergraduates in Study 1, graduate students in Study 2) viewed a flyer advertising a professional mixer that included an erotic...

Hawley's items used with college students to assess resource control strategies and resource control success.

The present chapter deconstructs the disclaimers—warning the reader about evolution—pasted into the front covers of science textbooks in Alabama. By now one might think that the disclaimer rhetoric should fall on deaf ears. However, such depictions have worked their way into the national psyche and that the misconceptions contained within them are...

Through the presentation of eight “myths”, the present chapter addresses evolution and children’s social development, especially as it relates to children’s aggression, social competence, and power. The first section addresses the independence of evolutionary selfishness from psychological selfishness. The second and third sections demonstrate the...

Resource Control Strategies Inventory -Revised (2006). For late adolescence, early adulthood.

Bullying is a common and familiar manifestation of power differentials and social hierarchy. Much has been written lately about bullying in schools, in the workplace, and even in the National Football League. Such hierarchies are pervasive in nature. They can be subtly, almost imperceptibly , managed (by glances, gestures, or implicit cultural expe...

The present study examined changes in university students' attitudes toward and knowledge of evolution measured by the previously validated Evolutionary Attitudes and Literacy Survey (EALS) in response to curricular content. Specifically, student responses on the survey were compared across an evolutionary psychology course, an introductory biology...

The present study examined changes in university students' attitudes toward and knowledge of evolution measured by the previously validated Evolutionary Attitudes and Literacy Survey (EALS) in response to curricular content. Specifically, student responses on the survey were compared across an evolutionary psychology course, an introductory biology...

This study explored how perceptions of resource control levels are related to perceptions of friendship functioning in late adolescent friendship dyads (92 female dyads, 43 male dyads; mean age = 19.59 years). Resource control, relationship influence, and positive and negative friendship features were determined using self- and friend-reports. Cont...

In the present article, I argue for a shift in perspective regarding aggression, prosociality, and social affinity. Psychological approaches construe antisociality and prosociality as serving opposing functions. In contrast, I here consider them to serve the same function and to form the behavioral foundation of human status striving as early as th...

Developmental science has long evolutionary roots and has historically focused on individual differences. Accordingly, developmental models can inform conversations about phylogeny and personality. The present paper evokes life history theory to describe a theoretical model of competitive behavior that applies to both children and adults (resour...

http://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=GNvQAgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PA43&ots=AMQwQXlQKG&sig=cQRz7mF6qKcXSHSLleCOhYtZSoE#v=onepage&q&f=false

In contrast to traditional developmental perspectives of aggression, evolutionary perspectives examine the potential benefits as well as costs of aggression at different times in development. Following resource control theory and life history theory, children develop alternative strategies of attaining resources, some of which involve using aggress...

In this paper we present domain-specific measures of academic and social self-regulation in young adults. We base our scales on Baltes and colleagues’ Selection, Optimization, and Compensation (SOC) model, and establish the factor structure of our new measures using data collected from a sample of 152 college students. We then compare the predictiv...

The Evolutionary Attitudes and Literacy Survey (EALS) is a multidimensional scale consisting of 16 lower- and 6 higher-order constructs developed to measure the wide array of factors that influence both an individual’s endorsement of and objection to evolutionary theory. Past research has demonstrated the validity and utility of the EALS (Hawley et...

This article proposes an evolutionary model of risky behavior in adolescence and contrasts it with the prevailing developmental psychopathology model. The evolutionary model contends that understanding the evolutionary functions of adolescence is critical to explaining why adolescents engage in risky behavior and that successful intervention depend...

The present survey was designed to assess predominant regional belief systems and the roles these beliefs play in science understanding and attitudes, and curricular effectiveness in colleges and universities. To this end, we created a wide variety of theory-driven subscales (lower order factors) reflecting, for example, exposure to evolutionary ma...

Adolescence is a period characterized by well-documented growth and change, including reproductive, social, and cognitive development. Though not unheard of, modern evolutionary approaches to adolescence are still relatively uncommon. Recent treatises in developmental biology, however, have yielded new tools through which to explore human physiolog...

Rather than viewing individual differences as merely the raw material upon which selection operates, this book provides theories and empirical evidence which suggest that personality and individual differences are central to evolved psychological mechanisms and behavioral functioning. The book draws theoretical inspiration from life history theory,...

This chapter attempts to describe and explain children's social and personality development through an evolutionary lense. It begins by briefly outlining the modern history of evolution and individual differences, including looking at key concepts (e.g., phenotypic plasticity) and using a very promising meta-theoretical perspective (the life histor...

The present work addresses the associations between self‐reported maternal parenting behaviours and aggression, personality and peer regard of children (n = 119) in early childhood (ages three–six years). A k‐means cluster analysis derived types of mothers based on their relative use of autonomy support and restrictive control. Outcomes included mo...

Friendships are essential for adolescent social development. However, they may be pursued for varying motives, which, in turn, may predict similarity in friendships via social selection or social influence processes, and likely help to explain friendship quality. We examined the effect of early adolescents' (N = 374, 12-14 years) intrinsic and extr...

The current study investigates whether adults’ attachment orientations are related to involvement of others in goal strategies in social contexts (e.g., peer relationships). Resource-control Theory identifies strategies that either include (prosocial) or exclude (coercive) others in material goal pursuit. We expect that attachment confidence will p...

Aggressive children are known to have friends. However, less is known about the impact of aggression on friendship development and how this can differ for overt and relational (i.e., the forms) and instrumental and reactive (i.e., the functions) aggression. This longitudinal study utilized the forms and functions perspective on aggression to assess...

Social competence is an oft-studied, little understood construct that nonetheless remains a hallmark of positive, healthy functioning across the life span. Social competence itself, however, remains a nebulous concept in the developmental literature, particularly in the peer relations field. Dodge (1985) pointed out that there are nearly as many de...

A firm grasp of evolution is invaluable for understanding our own species in addition to the rest of the biological world; however, not only does much of the American public reject evolution, but many thinkers within the scientific community resist its application to their own disciplines. In an attempt to overcome these challenges through educatio...

NOTE: see Youtube for TedX talk, What if we brought color to 50 Shades of Grey? (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZNPOJMrQZs) This study addresses forceful submission fantasies in men and women. Although many approaches implicitly or explicitly cast women's force fantasies in a pathological light, this study seeks to explore the associations of su...

Careful consideration of the evolutionary implications of competition and cooperation has significant repercussions for social dominance in humans across the life span. For example, two broad and phenomenologically distinct classes of resource control strategy appear to emerge in early childhood and persist through adulthood; namely, prosocial and...

Evolutionary and biological approaches tend to suggest that social dominance is predominately an aspect of male social organization. Furthermore, when females behave non-normatively, they are less positively evaluated than males engaging in the same behavior. Alternate, less familiar models of females and dominance/aggression underlie the present s...

Several lines of theory and research suggest that power (e.g., social dominance) and status (e.g., social prominence and positive peer regard) are enjoyed by those blessed with good looks. The present work addresses the relations among physical attractiveness, power, status, and aggression from a resource control theoretic perspective that suggests...

Recent theory on social dominance suggests that aggressive individuals should be socially successful if they also display prosocial behavior. The combination of coercive and prosocial strategies of resource control (i.e., bistrategic control) is thought to facilitate hierarchy ascension. Adolescents (N = 929, grades 7–10) were queried about the qua...

Little prior research has examined children's interpersonal perceptions of peers from a social relations model framework. This study examines the degree of actor and partner variances, as well as generalised and dyadic reciprocities, in a sample of 351 sixth graders' peer nominations of different forms and functions of aggression and aspects of soc...

Moral reasoning, moral affect, social problem solving skills, and social preferences were assessed in 163 ethnically mixed preschoolers (2.86-5.95 years). Participants were rated by their teachers on prosocial and coercive strategies of control, success at resource control, and aggression (overt and relational). Based on their employment of coerciv...

We compared five subgroups of aggressive youth (n = 1,723, Grades 5 through 10) on a number of adjustment correlates. The subgroups were determined by the self-reported functions (i.e., "why") of their aggressive behavior: (a) an "instrumental" group who were high on instrumental reasons only; (b) a "reactive" group who were high on reactive reason...

Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 49.3 (2003) 239-242 The following four papers were presented in a symposium at the meetings of the Society for Research in Child Development (Minneapolis, 2001) entitled Aggression and Adaptive Functioning: The Bright Side to Bad Behavior. The title of the symposium hinted at what we believe to be a frequently underreported...

Self- and other-reported characteristics of children who varied in their use of coercive (aggressive) and prosocial (cooperative) strategies of resource control were studied in a sample of over 1,700 children. Based on self-reported use of coercive and prosocial strategies of resource control, the children were categorized as bistrategic controller...

We examined the validity of a measurement system for the study of aggression that distinguishes among four principle dimensions of aggressive behaviour: overt and relational aggression (i.e., the “whats”) and instrumental and reactive aggression (i.e., the “whys”). The sample comprised 1723 adolescents (Grades 5 through 10) from Berlin, Germany. Th...

We examined the validity of a measurement system for the study of aggression that distinguishes among four principle dimensions of aggressive behaviour: overt and relational aggression (i.e., the "whats") and instrumental and reactive aggression (i.e., the "whys"). The sample comprised 1723 adolescents (Grades 5 through 10) from Berlin, Germany. Th...

We examined the validity of a measurement system for the study of aggression that distinguishes among four principle dimensions of aggressive behaviour: overt and relational aggression (i.e., the “whats”) and instrumental and reactive aggression (i.e., the “whys”). The sample comprised 1723 adolescents (Grades 5 through 10) from Berlin, Germany. Th...

We examined the validity of a measurement system for the study of aggression that distinguishes among four principle dimensions of aggressive behaviour: overt and relational aggression (i.e., the “whats”) and instrumental and reactive aggression (i.e., the “whys”). The sample comprised 1723 adolescents (Grades 5 through 10) from Berlin, Germany. Th...

Structural equation modelling (SEM) is a technique that is used to estimate, analyse and test models that specify relationships among variables. The ability to conduct such analyses is essential for many problems in ecology and evolutionary biology. This book begins by explaining the theory behind the statistical methodology, including chapters on...

We divided children (N = 719, grades 3–6) into five control types based on the degree to which they reported employing prosocial (indirect, cooperative) and coercive (direct, hostile) strategies of control (prosocial controllers, coercive controllers, bistrategic controllers, noncontrollers, and typicals). We tested for differences across the five...

This study was designed to investigate the predictors of social dominance, the strategies children use to control resources (prosocial and coercive), and the associations between these strategies and measures of personality, social skills, and peer regard. A total of 30 preschoolers (ages 3–6) were rated by their teachers on social dominance. Based...

A functional approach to social dominance (i.e., resource control) advances important and unique developmental questions not suggested by structuralist approaches. The functional approach to social dominance emphasizes that behavior can be motivated by self-interest, and yet recognizes the relative advantage gained by individuals who pursue their o...

Predictors of social dominance and the effects of social dominance on the play behavior of young children (N = 16, ages 1.4 to 3.2) were studied. The children were observed in multiple interactions (N = 74) with multiple partners to explore individual-level effects and effects due to individual-partner interactions (i.e., a social relations approac...

Social dominance results when members of a social group vary in their ability to acquire resources in the presence of others (i.e., compete). Traditional approaches to social dominance often emphasize coercive behavior, but nonetheless suggest that dominant individuals are socially central (e.g., watched, attractive social partners). These patterns...