Steven L Neuberg

• PhD
• Professor at Arizona State University

Perceivers hold ecology stereotypes—beliefs about how the environments others live in shape their behavior. Drawing upon a life history perspective, we examine the stereotypes people hold about those who live in relatively harsh and unpredictable ecologies. First, across diverse demographic groups and societies (the United States, India, Japan, Rom...

According to many, we live in “posttruth” times, with the pervasiveness of falsehoods being an existential threat to democracy and the functioning of free societies. Why do people believe and propagate falsehoods? Current accounts focus on psychological deficiencies, heuristic errors, self-enhancing motivations, and motivations to sow chaos. Here,...

How do natural changes in disease avoidance motivation shape thoughts about and behaviors toward ingroup and outgroup members? During the COVID-19 pandemic, political party affiliation has been a strong predictor in the United States of COVID-19-related opinions, attitudes, and behaviors. Using a six-wave longitudinal panel survey of representative...

How do natural changes in disease avoidance motivation shape thoughts about and behaviors toward ingroup and outgroup members? During the COVID-19 pandemic, political party affiliation has been a strong predictor in the United States of COVID-related opinions, attitudes, and behaviors. Using a six-wave longitudinal panel survey of representative Am...

Suspicion probes are the traditional tool employed to assess the extent to which participants suspect intentional misdirection or deception within the research context. A primary reason psychologists use deception in research settings is to prevent participants from altering their behavior in light of knowing what is being studied, which could unde...

Modern low fertility is an unresolved paradox. Despite the tremendous financial growth and stability in modern societies, birth rates are steadily dropping. Almost half of the world's population lives in countries with below-replacement fertility and is projected for a continued decline. Drawing on life history theory and an evolutionary mismatch p...

Extending the growing literature on adaptive functionality of inner experiential states, we take the approach that life satisfaction functions as a part of a psychological system that monitors current and potential achievement on important goals. From this perspective, life satisfaction is sensitively calibrated to how well one is moving toward suc...

Why do people hold irrational beliefs? Two accounts predominate. The first spotlights the information ecosystem and how people process this information; this account either casts those who hold irrational beliefs as cognitively deficient or focuses on the reasoning and decision-making heuristics all people use. The second account spotlights an inwa...

Social perceivers seek to understand the opportunities and threats others potentially afford—for example, whether a teammate will behave tenaciously or a romantic partner, faithfully. We typically detect affordances and draw trait inferences by observing behaviors that reveal or predict others’ likely intentions and characteristics. However, detect...

Why do some people have children earlier compared to others who delay reproduction? Drawing from an evolutionary, life history theory perspective, we posited that reproductive timing could be influenced by economic uncertainty and childhood socioeconomic status (SES). For individuals lower in childhood SES, economic uncertainty influenced the desir...

Overweight and obese (“heavyweight”) people devalue themselves because, it has been proposed, they are socially devalued. However, for women, social valuation depends not only on how much weight they carry but also on where on their bodies they carry it. Here, we investigated whether weight-based self-valuation and perceived social valuation simila...

Climate change is a problem that requires a multi-scale response from the individual to the global. Each level and type of entity has some capacity to influence climate change action and policy, but as a multi-level collective action problem, it is not surprising that there is underprovision of climate change action; this challenge highlights the n...

If life satisfaction has functional significance for goal achievement, it should be calibrated to cues of potential success on active and fundamentally important goals. Within the context of mating motivation, we tested this hypothesis with self-perceived mate value—an assessment of one’s potential mating success. As hypothesized, because most indi...

People with overweight and obesity devalue themselves, partially because they are socially devalued. However, for women, social valuation depends not only on how much weight they carry but where on their bodies they carry it. Here, we investigate whether weight-based self-valuation and perceived social valuation also depend on body shape. Study 1,...

Heavier bodies—particularly female bodies—are stigmatized. Such fat stigma is pervasive, painful to experience, and may even facilitate weight gain, thereby perpetuating the weight-stigma cycle. Leveraging research on functionally distinct forms of fat (deposited on different parts of the body), we propose that body shape plays an important but lar...

Heavier bodies—particularly female bodies—are stigmatized. Such fat stigma is pervasive, painful to experience, and may even facilitate weight gain, thereby perpetuating the obesity-stigma cycle. Leveraging research on functionally distinct forms of fat (deposited on different parts of the body), we propose that body shape plays an important but la...

The affordance-management approach conceptualizes stereotyping, stereotype content, prejudices, and discriminatory inclinations as interlinked cognitive, affective, and behavioral tools used to manage the social opportunities and threats afforded by other people. Presenting research from our labs, we show how the affordance management approach enha...

Social science answers to the essential question of group conflict have focused on two main explanations—their motivating “grievances” and their mobilization “capacity” for collective action. Recent years have seen a renewed focus on grievances in the form of horizontal inequalities (between-group inequality), but the important conceptual and poten...

Why do perceivers categorize and stereotype others by their biological sex and age? We suggest that perceivers do so because sex and age interactively shape adaptive goals (e.g., mating, parenting) and strategies. And because such goals and strategies pose different fitness-relevant opportunities and threats, social perceivers use others’ sex-age a...

Advances in contemporary cognitive science suggest that our internal representational systems are powerfully shaped by interacting evolutionary, developmental, and neuro-computational processes. Although Jung’s archetypes of the collective unconscious are largely dismissed by modern psychological science, something very much like them emerges from...

We revived Jung’s Archetypes to characterize what we see as an emerging confluence of evolutionary, embodied, and ecological responses to traditional cognitive models of mental representation. We propose that all humans possess archetypal representational systems that are (a) computationally grounded in perception and action, (b) shaped by learning...

Replication research holds an increasingly important place in modern psychological science. If such work is to improve the state of knowledge rather than add confusion, however, replication attempts must be held to high standards of rigor. As an example of how replication attempts can add confusion rather than clarity, we consider an article by Sha...

Faced with punishing severe offenders, why do some prefer imprisonment whereas others impose death? Previous research exploring death penalty attitudes has primarily focused on individual and cultural factors. Adopting a functional perspective, we propose that environmental features may also shape our punishment strategies. Individuals are attuned...

Convincing people who doubt the validity of climate change and evolution to change their beliefs requires overcoming a set of ingrained cognitive biases

Recent work has documented a wide range of important psychological differences across societies. Multiple explanations have been offered for why such differences exist, including historical philosophies, subsistence methods, social mobility, social class, climactic stresses, and religion. With the growing body of theory and data, there is an emergi...

Throughout the world, groups that are socially disadvantaged have poorer health compared to groups that are more advantaged. This book examines the role that stigma and discrimination play in creating and sustaining these group health disparities. Stigma is a social construction in which people who are distinguished by a “mark” are viewed as devian...

A new theoretical tool called life history theory offers an answer

An evolutionary perspective on human motivation provides a means of identifying conceptually distinct motivational systems (including motives pertaining to self-protection, disease avoidance, affiliation, status, mate acquisition, mate retention, and parental care), each of which has unique implications for affect, cognition, and behavior. We provi...

The world population has doubled over the last half century. Yet, research on the psychological effects of human population density, once a popular topic, has decreased over the past few decades. Applying a fresh perspective to an old topic, we draw upon life history theory to examine the effects of population density. Across nations and across the...

Negative behaviors targeting gay men and lesbians range from violent physical assault to casting a vote against gay marriage, with very different implications for those targeted. Existing accounts of such actions, however, are unable to differentially predict specific anti-gay behaviors, leaving a large theoretical hole in the literature and hinder...

Conversations are ubiquitous and central elements of daily life. Yet a fundamental feature of conversation remains a mystery: It is genuinely difficult to maintain an everyday conversation with more than four speakers. Why? We introduce a “mentalizing explanation” for the conversation size constraint, which suggests that humans have a natural limit...

The Cambridge Handbook of the Psychology of Prejudice aims to answer the questions: why is prejudice so persistent? How does it affect people exposed to it? And what can we do about it? Providing a comprehensive examination of prejudice from its evolutionary beginnings and environmental influences through to its manifestations and consequences, thi...

For women, forming close, cooperative relationships with other women at once poses important opportunities and possible threats-including to mate retention. To maximize the benefits and minimize the costs of same-sex social relationships, we propose that women's mate guarding is functionally flexible and that women are sensitive to both interperson...

Significance Ecological features shape people’s goals, strategies, and behaviors. Our research suggests that social perceivers possess a lay understanding of ecology’s influence on behavior, resulting in ecology-driven stereotypes. Moreover, because race is confounded with ecology in the United States, Americans’ stereotypes about racial groups may...

From an evolutionary perspective, prejudices, stereotypes, and discriminatory behaviors can be viewed as functionally organized strategies designed to manage the threats and opportunities posed by the human forms of sociality. This chapter explores, first, the evolved psychological mechanisms by which individuals (1) identify those who afford fitne...

Intrasexual conflict may pose unique challenges for women. Whereas men’s aggression tends to be physical and direct, women’s tends to be relational and indirect, particularly when directed toward other women. Moreover, women’s expressions of anger are often suppressed, perhaps particularly when other women are the targets. Thus, women may face diff...

Motivation has long been recognized as an important component of how people both differ from, and are similar to, each other. The current research applies the biologically grounded fundamental social motives framework, which assumes that human motivational systems are functionally shaped to manage the major costs and benefits of social life, to und...

The authors expect humans to exhibit discriminate sociality and to possess psychological mechanisms designed to preserve the benefits of sociality and simultaneously limit its costs. They suggests that these evolved, domain-specific mechanisms collectively lead to phenomena that fall under the rubrics of social exclusion, stigmatization, and discri...

The article provides an overview of key insights that have emerged from an evolutionary approach to the psychology of prejudice. Within this framework, prejudices and related phenomena are viewed as products of adaptations designed by natural selection to manage fitness-relevant threats and opportunities faced by ancestral populations. This framewo...

I was a young, untenured assistant professor, a few years into my first job. Investigating social interaction processes, my laboratory studies were especially effort-and time-intensive. Each 90-minute experimental session required three participants who would engage in live interactions with at least one of the others. So that participants would be...

We focus here on evolutionary social cognition—how everyday cognition is tied to the fundamental, recurring adaptive challenges of social life. We begin by articulating the logical foundations of evolutionary social cognition. We then discuss the ways in which evolutionary social cognition is inherently motivated social cognition and subsequently r...

Research on the Behavioral Immune System (BIS) has made impressive gains in a short period of time. Distilled from the 7 thoughtful contributions to this forum, the author highlights 3 sets of ideas for moving BIS theory and research forward: (a) The benefits to be gained via additional vertical and horizontal conceptual integration, and via greate...

Hibbing et al. use evolutionarily derived logic to suggest that political attitudes are related to responses to negative features of the environment. We suggest that the authors focus too narrowly on the negative and contend, instead, that a more comprehensive evolutionary approach focusing on people's responses to threats and opportunities will be...

The connection between selfish genes and selfish goals is not merely metaphorical. Many goals that shape contemporary cognition and behavior are psychological products of evolutionarily fundamental motivational systems and thus are phenotypic manifestations of genes. An evolutionary perspective can add depth and nuance to our understanding of “self...

Sexual prejudice may arise from beliefs that certain sexual orientation groups direct unwanted sexual interest, with the implication that heterosexual men and women hold prejudices against different groups. Study 1 confirmed that heterosexual women believe bisexual men, bisexual women, and lesbians (but not gay men) direct unwanted sexual interest,...

The authors present a framework to better account for the social dimensions people use to categorize others and the nuanced stereotypes they hold. Conceiving stereotypes as imperfect but useful tools for managing social threats and opportunities, and incorporating ideas from Life History Theory, the authors propose three dimensions of special signi...

How might religion shape intergroup conflict? We tested whether religious infusion-the extent to which religious rituals and discourse permeate the everyday activities of groups and their members-moderated the effects of two factors known to increase intergroup conflict: competition for limited resources and incompatibility of values held by potent...

This study examined whether and under what conditions parents might stereotype their own heavyweight children. Parents completed a survey assessing their beliefs about their 9- to 11-year-old children. Parents were also assessed on factors previously demonstrated to moderate people's reactions to heavyweight strangers, including Protestant work eth...

Why does beauty win out at the ballot box? Some researchers have posited that it occurs because people ascribe generally positive characteristics to physically attractive candidates. We propose an alternative explanation-that leadership preferences are related to functional disease-avoidance mechanisms. Because physical attractiveness is a cue to h...

Evolutionary approaches to social cognition investigate how cognition may be intrinsically linked to long-recurring adaptive challenges of human social life. Prominent features of the evolutionary approach include the ideas that cognition is systematically modulated by fitness-relevant fundamental goals (e.g., self-protection, disease avoidance, so...

Evolutionary approaches to social cognition investigate how cognition may be intrinsically linked to long-recurring adaptive challenges of human social life. Prominent features of the evolutionary approach include the ideas that cognition is systematically modulated by fitness-relevant fundamental goals (e.g., self-protection, disease avoidance, so...

How do economic recessions influence attitudes toward redistribution of wealth? From a traditional economic self-interest perspective, attitudes toward redistribution should be affected by one's financial standing. A functional evolutionary approach suggests another possible form of self-interest: That during periods of economic threat, attitudes t...

How do targets of stigma manage social interactions? We built from a threat-specific model of prejudice to predict that targets select impression-management strategies that address the particular threats other people see them to pose. We recruited participants from two groups perceived to pose different threats: overweight people, who are heuristic...

Diversification of resources is a strategy found everywhere from the level of microorganisms to that of giant Wall Street investment firms. We examine the functional nature of diversification using life-history theory-a framework for understanding how organisms navigate resource-allocation trade-offs. This framework suggests that diversification ma...

From an evolutionary perspective, human relationships are shaped by multiple cognitive and affective mechanisms designed to solve long-recurring problems and opportunities faced by our ancestors. Different relationships—romantic, parental, friendship, acquaintanceship—differ in the threats and opportunities they afford. Because of this, the psychol...

An evolutionary perspective on human cognition provides a foundation for research programs that identify unique linkages between specific threats and specific prejudices directed against specific categories of people. It also provides a set of logical tools that help identify conditions under which these prejudices are exaggerated or inhibited. We...

Different groups, because they are perceived to pose different threats, elicit different prejudices. Collective action by disadvantaged groups can amplify the perception of specific threats, with predictable and potentially counterproductive consequences. It is important to carefully consider the threat-based psychology of prejudice(s) before imple...

Humans have perennially faced threats of violence from other humans and have developed functional strategies for surviving those threats. Five studies examined the relation between threats of violence and agreeableness at the level of nations, individuals, and situations. People living in countries with higher military spending (Study 1) and those...

When anger or happiness flashes on a face in the crowd, do we misperceive that emotion as belonging to someone else? Two studies found that misperception of apparent emotional expressions - "illusory conjunctions" - depended on the gender of the target: male faces tended to "grab" anger from neighboring faces, and female faces tended to grab happin...

This chapter explores scientific influence and the importance of connections, citing the positions of Kevin Bacon in the network of actors, Paul Erdös in the network of mathematicians, and Robert Cialdini in the network of psychologists, economists, and politicians. It argues that the most important connections in the case of research scientists de...

Classic economic models presumed that human decision-makers are rational, making self-serving strategic choices based on full information about alternatives. Behavioral economic models assume decision processes are bounded by limited information, leading to biased and irrational choices that are often based on immediately salient cues. An evolution...

Much research shows that people are loss-averse, meaning that they weigh losses more heavily than gains. From an evolutionary perspective, loss aversion would be expected to increase or decrease as a function of adaptive context. For example, loss aversion could have helped deal with challenges in the domain of selfprotection, but would not have be...

Cancer therapy selects for cancer cells resistant to treatment, a process that is fundamentally evolutionary. To what extent, however, is the evolutionary perspective employed in research on therapeutic resistance and relapse? We analyzed 6,228 papers on therapeutic resistance and/or relapse in cancers and found that the use of evolution terms in a...

Much research shows that people are loss averse, meaning that they weigh losses more heavily than gains. Drawing on an evolutionary perspective, we propose that although loss aversion might have been adaptive for solving challenges in the domain of self-protection, this may not be true for men in the domain of mating. Three experiments examine how...

Detecting signs that someone is a member of a hostile outgroup can depend on very subtle cues. How do ecology-relevant motivational states affect such detections? This research investigated the detection of briefly-presented enemy (versus friend) insignias after participants were primed to be self-protective or revenge-minded. Despite being told to...

Neoplastic progression is an evolutionary process and cancer prevention is successful to the extent that it can impact that process, reducing the likelihood that premalignant cells will evolve invasive or metastatic phenotypes. Despite the centrality of somatic evolution in cancer progression, evolutionary tools and analyses have rarely been applie...

A number of studies have found a disjunction between women's attention to, and memory for, handsome men. Although women pay initial attention to handsome men, they do not remember those men later. The present study examines how ovulation might differentially affect these attentional and memory processes. We found that women near ovulation increased...

1. What is Evolutionary Social Psychology? 2. Important Assumptions and Conceptual Tools 3. The Affordance Management System 4. Evolutionary Perspectives on Social Psychological Phenomena 5. Linkages to Development, Learning, and Culture 6. Thinking Straight about Theory and Research in Evolutionary Social Psychology 7. Future Directions 8. Final C...

Four thoughtful commentaries identify important issues and insights pertaining to the pyramid of needs presented by Kenrick, Griskevicius, Neuberg, and Schaller (2010, this issue). Here, we offer additional thoughts on some of these issues and insights, with an emphasis on the logical implications that result from an evolutionary analysis of fundam...

Maslow's pyramid of human needs, proposed in 1943, has been one of the most cognitively contagious ideas in the behavioral sciences. Anticipating later evolutionary views of human motivation and cognition, Maslow viewed human motives as based in innate and universal predispositions. We revisit the idea of a motivational hierarchy in light of theore...

When encountering individuals with a potential inclination to harm them, people face a dilemma: Staring at them provides useful information about their intentions but may also be perceived by them as intrusive and challenging-thereby increasing the likelihood of the very threat the people fear. One solution to this dilemma would be an enhanced abil...

Previous theorizing suggests that often-stigmatized individuals may be just as likely, if not more likely, than infrequently stigmatized individuals to protect self-regard by derogating members of low-status groups after receiving negative feedback from high-status others. Often-stigmatized individuals, however, can discount criticism from these hi...

Social living brings humans great rewards, but also associated dangers, such as increased risk of infection from others. Although the body's immune system is integral to combating disease, it is physiologically costly. Less costly are evolved mechanisms for promoting avoidance of people who are potentially infectious, such as perceiving oneself as...

Fundamental motives have direct implications for evolutionary fitness and orchestrate attention, memory, and social inference in functionally specific ways. Motivational states linked to self-protection and mating offer illustrative examples. When self-protective motives are aroused, people show enhanced attention to, and memory for, angry male str...

When encountering individuals with a potential inclination to harm them, people face a dilemma: Staring at them provides useful information about their intentions but may also be perceived by them as intrusive and challenging—thereby increasing the likelihood of the very threat the people fear. One solution to this dilemma would be an enhanced abil...

What is a "rational" decision? Economists traditionally viewed rationality as maximizing expected satisfaction. This view has been useful in modeling basic microeconomic concepts, but falls short in accounting for many everyday human decisions. It leaves unanswered why some things reliably make people more satisfied than others, and why people freq...

Does seeing a scowling face change your impression of the next person you see? Does this depend on the race of the two people? Across four studies, White participants evaluated neutrally expressive White males as less threatening when they followed angry (relative to neutral) White faces; Black males were not judged as less threatening following an...

The unfavorable treatment of people with physical disfigurements is well-documented, yet little is known about basic perceptual and cognitive responses to disfigurement. Here, we identify a specialized pattern of cognitive processing consistent with the hypothesis that disfigurements act as heuristic cues to contagious disease. Disfigurements are o...

How do frequently stigmatized individuals feel about and respond to members of other potentially stigmatizable groups? Four studies demonstrated that perceptions of majority group norms regarding prejudice expression can shape how minority individuals respond to minority individuals from other groups. Study 1 revealed that Black and White men and w...

Group living offers humans substantial fitness-enhancing benefits, although it also affords significant fitness-decreasing costs. To enhance these benefits and reduce these costs, individuals use emotional, cognitive, and behavioral mechanisms designed to help them effectively manage the complexities of life in highly interdependent groups. The aut...

We tested the hypothesis that, compared with sociosexually restricted individuals, those with an unrestricted approach to mating would selectively allocate visual attention to attractive opposite-sex others. We also tested for sex differences in this effect. Seventy-four participants completed the Sociosexual Orientation Inventory, and performed a...

More than 100 articles have examined the construct of stereotype threat and its implications. However, stereotype threat seems to mean different things to different researchers and has been employed to describe and explain processes and phenomena that appear to be fundamentally distinct. Complementing existing models, the authors posit a Multi-Thre...

Findings of 7 studies suggested that decisions about the sex of a face and the emotional expressions of anger or happiness are not independent: Participants were faster and more accurate at detecting angry expressions on male faces and at detecting happy expressions on female faces. These findings were robust across different stimulus sets and judg...

Humans, as discriminately social creatures, make frequent judgments about others' suitability for interdependent social relations. Which characteristics of others guide these judgments and, thus, shape patterns of human affiliation? Extant research is only minimally useful for answering this question. On the basis of a sociofunctional analysis of h...

People often find it more difficult to distinguish ethnic out-group members compared with ethnic in-group members. A functional approach to social cognition suggests that this bias may be eliminated when out-group members display threatening facial expressions. In the present study, 192 White participants viewed Black and White faces displaying eit...

The present study explored the possibility that notetaking would help accuracy-minded interviewers to avoid cognitive expectation biases. Interviewers in simulated employment interviews were given bogus pre-interview expectations about their applicants and were either encouraged or not encouraged to take extensive notes. Consistent with past resear...

Before delving deeply into our evolution-based perspective, we begin by noting the evolutionary significance of simple social categorization and stereotyping processes. The bulk of the chapter is then devoted to describing a threat-based approach to understanding prejudices, outlining some implications of this approach for altering unwarranted prej...

ABSTRACT—People oftenfinditmoredifficult todistinguish ethnic out-group members,compared,with ethnic in-group members.,A functional approach,to social cognition sug- gests that this bias may,be eliminated,when,out-group members,display threatening,facial expressions. In the present study, 192 White participants viewed Black and White faces displayi...

An evolutionary approach to social cognition yields novel hypotheses about the perception of people belonging to specific kinds of social categories. These implications are illustrated by empirical results linking the perceived threat of physical injury to stereotypical impressions of outgroups. We review a set of studies revealing several ways in...

The authors suggest that the traditional conception of prejudice--as a general attitude or evaluation--can problematically obscure the rich texturing of emotions that people feel toward different groups. Derived from a sociofunctional approach, the authors predicted that groups believed to pose qualitatively distinct threats to in-group resources o...

In this chapter, Robert Kurzban and Steven Neuberg approach problems of group living through a different lens-adaptations for managing in-group and out-group relationships. Specifically, they focus on discrimination, stigmatization, and social exclusion. Whereas most mainstream psychologists treat these pervasive human social phenomena as by-produc...