Taylor Davis

Purdue University West Lafayette | Purdue · Department of Philosophy

The rapid growth of cultural evolutionary science, its expansion into numerous fields, its use of diverse methods, and several conceptual problems have outpaced corollary developments in theory and philosophy of science. This has led to concern, exemplified in results from a recent survey conducted with members of the Cultural Evolution Society, th...

In recent years, there has been an increase in environmental awareness in the United States, leading to steady growth in environmentally conscious consumerism. Looking specifically at green home marketing, understanding the consumer behavior of the next generation of homebuyers, Generation Z (GenZ), is important for environmental and business reaso...

The vast literature on negative treatment of outgroups and favoritism toward ingroups provides many local insights but is largely fragmented, lacking an overarching framework that might provide a unified overview and guide conceptual integration. As a result, it remains unclear where different local perspectives conflict, how they may reinforce one...

The emerging field of socio-hydrology is a special case of social-ecological systems research that focuses on coupled human-water systems, exploring how the hydrologic cycle and human cultural traits coevolve and how such coevolutions lead to phenomena of relevance to water security and sustainability. As such, most problems tackled by socio-hydrol...

Moral realists often assume that folk intuitions are predominantly realist, and they argue that this places the burden of proof on antirealists. More broadly, appeals to intuition in metaethics typically assume that folk judgments are generally consistent across individuals, such that they are at least predominantly something, if not realist. A sub...

Our primary aim in this paper is to sketch a cognitive evolutionary approach for developing explanations of social change that is anchored in the psychological mechanisms underlying normative cognition and the transmission of social norms. We throw the relevant features of this approach into relief by comparing it with the self-fulfilling social ex...

Owing to a technical error, this Perspective was originally published without its received and accepted dates; the dates ‘Received: 29 November 2017; Accepted: 9 April 2018’ have now been included in all versions.

We endorse Stanford's project, which calls attention to features of human psychology that exhibit a “puzzling combination of objective and subjective elements,” and that are central to cooperation. However, we disagree with his delineation of the explanatory target. What he calls “externalization or objectification” conflates two separate propertie...

An emerging literature on the evolution of culture can offer new explanations for how norms encourage or obstruct sustainable practices. In particular, dual-inheritance theory describes how interactions between genetic and cultural evolution give rise, in part, to prosociality. Based on this theory, we identify the concept of normative motivation —...

The literature on the evolution of religion has been divided by a fundamental debate between adaptation theories, which explain religious traits as products of selection for religion, and byproduct theories, which explain religious traits as products of selection for other, non-religious functions. Recently, however, a new position has emerged in t...

In the scientific literature on religious evolution, two competing theories appeal to group selection to explain the relationship between religious belief and altruism, or costly, prosocial behavior. Both theories agree that group selection plays an important role in cultural evolution, affecting psychological traits that individuals acquire throug...

In our paper, “The Free-Will Intuitions Scale and the question of natural compatibilism” (this issue), we seek to advance empirical debates about free will by measuring the relevant folk intuitions using the scale methodology of psychology, as a supplement to standard experimental methods. Stephen Morris (this issue) raises a number of concerns abo...

Standard methods in experimental philosophy have sought to measure folk intuitions using experiments, but certain limitations are inherent in experimental methods. Accordingly, we have designed the Free-Will Intuitions Scale to empirically measure folk intuitions relevant to free-will debates using a different method. This method reveals what folk...

Smaldino's proposed extension of the theory of cultural evolution embraces emergent group-level traits. We argue, instead, that group-level traits reduce to the traits of individuals, particularly when it comes to the question of how group-level traits are inherited or transmitted, and that this metaphysical fact is integral to the theory of cultur...

Four experiments investigated whether memory conjunction errors could be reduced when memories were inspected in a source-monitoring task as opposed to the standard recognition tests that have traditionally been used in this literature. A conjunction stimulus is composed of pieces that have been experienced previously but in different contexts. We...