John Tooby’s research while affiliated with University of California System and other places

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Publications (169)


Physically strong men are more militant: A test across four countries
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November 2016

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554 Reads

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52 Citations

Evolution and Human Behavior

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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 ancestrally relevant but not relevant in modern war. For example, ancestrally in small-scale combat, a skilled fighter would be more likely to survive a war and bring his side to victory. This ancestral regularity would have left its mark on modern men's intergroup psychology: more formidable men should still be more supportive of war. We test this hypothesis in four countries: Argentina, Denmark, Israel, and Romania. In three, physically strong men (but not strong women) were significantly more supportive of military action. These findings support the hypothesis that modern warfare is influenced by a psychology designed for ancestral war.


Figure 1 of 1
Supplementary Materials (SOM)
  • Data
  • File available

May 2016

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29 Reads

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Fig. 1. Studies 1a–1c. Scatter plots and regression lines: Shame as a function of devaluation. Each point represents the mean devaluation rating and mean shame rating of one scenario. Bars represent SEs. Shame and devaluation ratings were given by different sets of subjects. (A) United States sample, (B) India sample, (C) Israel sample. n (A) = n (B) = 29; n (C) = 24.  
Table 1 . Studies 1a-1c
Shame closely tracks the threat of devaluation by others, even across cultures

February 2016

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686 Reads

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238 Citations

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

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 devaluation that results when negative information reaches others—by deterring actions that would lead to more devaluation than benefits, for example. If so, the intensity of shame people feel regarding a given item of negative information should track the devaluation that would happen if that item became known. Indeed, the data indicate a close match between shame intensities and audience devaluation, which suggests that shame is an adaptation.


Fig. 1. Punisher spending and dictator allocation in Study 1. Bars indicate the proportion of punishers who spent $0 to $5 on punishing as a function of how much of the stake dictators allocated to recipients. Diamonds indicate the proportion of dictators who allocated that amount of the stake to the recipient.
Fig. 2. Valuations and punisher spending in (a) Study 1 and (b) the matching (one-recipient) condition of Study 2. The y-axes on the left of each graph show dictators' mean valuations of recipients and punishers, along with punishers' mean inferences about dictators' valuations. The y-axes on the right of each graph show the mean amount punishers spent to punish dictators. All values are graphed as a function of the percentage of the total stake that dictators allocated to recipients. So few Study 1 dictators allocated more than 50% (n = 3) that we did not include their valuations in these graphs. In (b), the lines for punishers' inferences completely overlap. Error bars indicate ±1 SEM.
Fig. 3. Punisher spending in Study 2 in (a) the two-recipients condition and (b) the self-and-other condition. In (a), the mean amount punishers spent is shown as a function of how dictators treated recipients B and A, respectively. In (b), the mean amount punishers spent is shown as a function of how dictators treated the recipient and the punisher, respectively. Treatment was indexed by how much of their total stake dictators gave to each subject. Error bars indicate ±1 SEM.
Looking Under the Hood of Third-Party Punishment Reveals Design for Personal Benefit

February 2016

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666 Reads

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130 Citations

Psychological Science

Third-party intervention, such as when a crowd stops a mugger, is common. Yet it seems irrational because it has real costs but may provide no personal benefits. In a laboratory analogue, the third-party-punishment game, third parties ("punishers") will often spend real money to anonymously punish bad behavior directed at other people. A common explanation is that third-party punishment exists to maintain a cooperative society. We tested a different explanation: Third-party punishment results from a deterrence psychology for defending personal interests. Because humans evolved in small-scale, face-to-face social worlds, the mind infers that mistreatment of a third party predicts later mistreatment of oneself. We showed that when punishers do not have information about how they personally will be treated, they infer that mistreatment of other people predicts mistreatment of themselves, and these inferences predict punishment. But when information about personal mistreatment is available, it drives punishment. This suggests that humans' punitive psychology evolved to defend personal interests.


Human cooperation shows the distinctive signatures of adaptations to small-scale social life

January 2016

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587 Reads

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13 Citations

Behavioral and Brain Sciences

The properties of individual carbon atoms allow them to chain into complex molecules of immense length. They are not limited to structures involving only a few atoms. The design features of our evolved neural adaptations appear similarly extensible. Individuals with forager brains can link themselves together into unprecedentedly large cooperative structures without the need for large group-beneficial modifications to evolved human design. Roles need only be intelligible to our social program logic and judged better than alternatives.


The Theoretical Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology

November 2015

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2,798 Reads

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149 Citations

The human brain is the most highly organized system yet identified, and natural selection is the only physical process capable of pushing the designs of species uphill against entropy.Consequently, all functional mechanisms present in our species' neural architecture were constructed by selection acting on our ancestors.The design features of our psychological mechanisms are therefore linked directly as cause and effect to the specific structure of ancestral adaptive problems, allowing models of the adaptive problems identified by biologists and anthropologists to serve as maps that accelerate the discovery of previously unknown psychological mechanisms.The brain's function is specifically computational: to regulate behavior, development, and the body in ways that would have produced responses likely to have promoted genetic propagation under ancestral conditions.Evolutionary psychologists and allies are working toward two goals: The first is the progressive mapping of the program architectures (circuit logics) of the neurocomputational adaptations designed to solve ancestral adaptive problems. The second is the reformulation and theoretical unification of the social sciences made possible by an accurate, natural-science-based model of human nature.Here we sketch the discipline's theoretical foundations together with illustrative empirical discoveries (in reasoning, emotion and motivational programs, and parametric coordinative adaptations).


Figure 25.3 Detecting Violations of Unfamiliar Conditional Rules: Social Contracts Versus Descriptive Rules. In these experiments, the same, unfamiliar rule was embedded either in a story that caused it to be interpreted as a social contract or in a story that caused it to be interpreted as a rule describing some state of the world. For social contracts, the correct answer is always to pick the benefit accepted card and the requirement not satisfied card. (A) For standard social contracts, these correspond to the logical categories P and not-Q. P and not-Q also happens to be the logically correct answer. Over 70% of subjects chose these cards for the social contracts, but fewer than 25% chose them for the matching descriptive rules. (B) For switched social contracts, the benefit accepted and requirement not satisfied cards correspond to the logical categories Q and not-P. This is not a logically correct response. Nevertheless, about 70% of subjects chose it for the social contracts; virtually no one chose it for the matching descriptive rules (see Figure 25.4).
Figure 25.6 Performance of Shiwiar Hunter-Horticulturalists and Harvard Undergraduates on Standard and Switched Social Contracts (percent of subjects choosing each card). There was no difference between the two populations in their choice of cheater relevant cards (benefit accepted, requirement not satisfied). They differed only in their choice of cheater-irrelevant cards (Shiwiar showing more interest in cards that could reveal acts of generosity or fair play). Shiwiar high performance on cheater-relevant cards is not caused by indiscriminate interest in all cards. Holding logical category constant, Shiwiar always chose a card more frequently when it was relevant to cheater detection than when it was not. This can be shown by comparing performance on standard versus switched social contracts (e.g., the P card is cheater relevant for a standard social contract, but not for a switched one; see Figure 25.4).
Adaptations for Reasoning About Social Exchange

November 2015

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487 Reads

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58 Citations

Social exchange—cooperation for mutual benefit—is rare in the animal kingdom. Yet it is as characteristic of human beings as language and tool use. We present evidence that our brains contain cognitive adaptations for reasoning about social exchange, which include a subroutine designed for detecting cheaters. The programs that generate cooperative behavior must have very specific computational properties to be evolutionarily stable. When people reason about social exchange, the cognitive system activated has precisely those design features predicted by evolutionary game theory. The cognitive, cross-cultural, neuropsychological, behavioral economic, and developmental experiments demonstrating this also test—and eliminate—every counterhypothesis that has been proposed to explain reasoning about social exchange. The pattern of results cannot be explained by familiarity effects, a content-free formal logic, a permission schema, a general deontic logic, or principles for calculating economic advantage. A specialization for reasoning about social exchange reliably develops across cultures, whereas specializations for more commonly encountered reasoning problems do not develop at all. Developmental theories that invoke domain-general forms of statistical learning or economic reasoning cannot explain this pattern. The most parsimonious theory accounting for all the results is that natural selection built a neurocognitive adaptation designed for reasoning about social exchange.


Figure 20.3 Detecting Violations of Unfamiliar Conditional Rules: Social Contracts versus Descriptive Rules. In these experiments, the same, unfamiliar rule was embedded either in a story that caused it to be interpreted as a social contract or in a story that caused it to be interpreted as a rule describing some state of the world. For social contracts, the correct answer is always to pick the benefit accepted card and the requirement not satisfied card. (A) For standard social contracts, these correspond to the logical categories P and not-Q. P and not-Q also happens to be the logically correct answer. Over 70% of subjects chose these cards for the social contracts, but fewer than 25% chose them for the matching descriptive rules. (B) For switched social contracts, the benefit accepted and requirement not satisfied cards correspond to the logical categories Q and not-P. This is not a logically correct response. Nevertheless, about 70% of subjects chose it for the social contracts; virtually no one chose it for the matching descriptive rules (see Figure 20.4).
Figure 20.4 Generic Structure of a Wason Task When the Conditional Rule Is a Social Contract. A social contract can be translated into either social contract terms (benefits and requirements) or logical terms (Ps and Qs). Check marks indicate the correct card choices if one is looking for cheaters-these should be chosen by a cheater detection subroutine, whether the exchange was expressed in a standard or switched format. This results in a logically incorrect answer (Q and not-P) when the rule is expressed in the switched format, and a logically correct answer (P and not-Q) when the rule is expressed in the standard format. By testing switched social contracts, one can see that the reasoning procedures activated cause one to detect cheaters, not logical violations (see Figure 20.3B). Note that a logically correct response to a switched social contract-where P = requirement satisfied and not-Q = benefit not accepted-would fail to detect cheaters.
Neurocognitive Adaptations Designed for Social Exchange

September 2015

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292 Reads

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85 Citations

For 25 years, the authors have been investigating the hypothesis that the enduring presence of social exchange interactions among our ancestors has selected for cognitive mechanisms that are specialized for reasoning about social exchange. This chapter discusses some of the high points of this 25-year research program. It argues that social exchange is ubiquitously woven through the fabric of human life in all human cultures everywhere. The complex pattern of functional and neural dissociations reveals that a neurocognitive specialization for reasoning about social exchange is implicated, including a subroutine for cheater detection. The chapter shows that the design, ontogenetic timetable, and cross-cultural distribution of social exchange are not consistent with any known domain-general learning process. Taken together, the data showing design specificity, precocious development, cross-cultural universality, and neural dissociability implicate the existence of an evolved, species-typical neurocomputational specialization.


Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology

September 2015

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347 Reads

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472 Citations

The long-term scientific goal toward which evolutionary psychologists are working is the mapping of the universal human nature. Evolutionary psychology provokes so much reflexive opposition because the stakes for many social scientists, behavioral scientists, and humanists are so high. If evolutionary psychology turns out to be well-founded, then the existing superstructure of the social and behavioral sciences, the Standard Social Science Model, have to be dismantled. To be effective researchers, psychologists needs to become at least minimally acquainted with the principles of organic design. One reason why cognitive psychologists arbitrarily limit their scope is the folk psychological distinction made between knowledge acquisition on the one hand and motivation, emotion, and preferences on the other. Evolutionary theory when joined with a computational approach to the mind leads to the conclusion that the human psychological architecture is very likely to include a large array of adaptive specializations.


Fig 1.  Sample evolutionary dynamics.
This figure plots the average level of Default-CooperationProbability and Punish-FreeridingProbability over generations from one representative simulation run from the original simulation and from the no-memory control. For these runs group size = 5, b = 0.8, expected encounters = 50, and it was a mixing ecology.
Table 1.  GLM of Punish-FreeridingProbability.
Table 2.  GLM of Default-CooperationProbability.
Fig 2.  Final average values of Punish-FreeridingProbability.
This figure plots the average willingness to punish of the last 500 generations of each simulation.
Fig 3. Final averaged cooperation rate (genetic & induced). This figure plots the average cooperation rate of the final round of the last 500 generations of each simulation. The full height of each bar indicates the cooperation rate. The cooperation rate is decomposed into cooperation induced by punishment (white) and cooperation given by the gene Default-Cooperation Probability (black). 
Group Cooperation without Group Selection: Modest Punishment Can Recruit Much Cooperation

April 2015

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205 Reads

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45 Citations

Humans everywhere cooperate in groups to achieve benefits not attainable by individuals. Individual effort is often not automatically tied to a proportionate share of group benefits. This decoupling allows for free-riding, a strategy that (absent countermeasures) outcompetes cooperation. Empirically and formally, punishment potentially solves the evolutionary puzzle of group cooperation. Nevertheless, standard analyses appear to show that punishment alone is insufficient, because second-order free riders (those who cooperate but do not punish) can be shown to outcompete punishers. Consequently, many have concluded that other processes, such as cultural or genetic group selection, are required. Here, we present a series of agent-based simulations that show that group cooperation sustained by punishment easily evolves by individual selection when you introduce into standard models more biologically plausible assumptions about the social ecology and psychology of ancestral humans. We relax three unrealistic assumptions of past models. First, past models assume all punishers must punish every act of free riding in their group. We instead allow punishment to be probabilistic, meaning punishers can evolve to only punish some free riders some of the time. This drastically lowers the cost of punishment as group size increases. Second, most models unrealistically do not allow punishment to recruit labor; punishment merely reduces the punished agent 's fitness. We instead realistically allow punished free riders to cooperate in the future to avoid punishment. Third, past models usually restrict agents to interact in a single group their entire lives. We instead introduce realistic social ecologies in which agents participate in multiple, partially overlapping groups. Because of this, punitive tendencies are more expressed and therefore more exposed to natural selection. These three moves toward greater model realism reveal that punishment and cooperation easily evolve by direct selection - even in sizeable groups.


Citations (81)


... Instead, it is Bianca who experiences the reward of having all of her belongings transported where they need to be. An observer relying on a naive utility calculus framework can reason about actions like Anne's by inferring that Anne has incorporated Bianca's rewards into the utility calculations Anne uses to select which actions to pursue (Hamlin et al., 2013b;Jara-Ettinger et al., 2016;Powell, 2022;Quillien et al., 2023;Ullman et al., 2009). Adopting such an interest in Bianca's rewards could be considered evidence that Anne cares about Bianca. ...

Reference:

Watching Others Mirror: Explaining the Range of Third-Party Inferences from Imitation
Rational inferences about social valuation
  • Citing Article
  • July 2023

Cognition

... Moreover, addressing how experience plays a justificatory role for everyday possibility beliefs opens up a way to naturalize the justification of everyday necessity beliefs. If evolutionary psychologists, e.g., Cosmides and Tooby [2006], who argue that our moral attitudes are rooted in cognitive modules, are correct, then some details about everyday possibility belief justification would apply to everyday necessity belief justification. Moral necessity facts are paradigmatic examples of everyday necessity facts, and given this sort of cognitive understanding of moral attitudes, moral necessity beliefs would be output by some cognitive systems. ...

Evolutionary Psychology, Moral Heuristics, and the Law
  • Citing Chapter
  • August 2006

... Previous research suggests that people's decisions about whether to be kind to others do not depend solely on the cost incurred ('help if cost is below a certain level'), or the benefit provided ('help if benefit is above a certain level'), but rather on the ratio of the cost to benefit ('help if the ratio of cost to benefit is below a certain level') [20]. This ratio represents the point at which individuals are indifferent between cost to self and benefit to others, and can be interpreted as the weight an actor attaches to their own welfare relative to the recipient's welfare. 1 This ratio can be precisely measured by identifying the point at which an individual switches from 'yes' to 'no' over a series of decisions with different cost-benefit ratios. ...

Cognitive foundations for helping and harming others: Making welfare tradeoffs in industrialized and small-scale societies
  • Citing Article
  • February 2023

Evolution and Human Behavior

... In contrast, the foundation of loyalty is about target-specific moral motives (Pietraszewski, 2016). Valuing loyalty involves prizing, and sticking with, established relations, even if that comes at a price such as, for example, not being able to tell the truth (Tooby & Cosmides, 2010). While loyalty may derivatively be expressed in context of concepts or notions (e.g., feminism, democracy etc.)-most theorists assume that loyalty is most frequently and properly attached to group membership (Kleinig, 2022). ...

Groups in Mind: The Coalitional Roots of War and Morality
  • Citing Chapter
  • January 2010

... effective ways to withhold cooperation with non-cooperators (cf. [198]), while attenuating antisocial punishment, and while facilitating forgiveness where cooperatively advantageous. (See above; cf. ...

Why punish cheaters? Those who withdraw cooperation enjoy better reputations than punishers, but both are viewed as difficult to exploit
  • Citing Article
  • October 2022

Evolution and Human Behavior

... Crucially, there is no particular need for this negative information to be truthful (see also Petersen et al., 2020). Given that gossip and character assassination rarely allow for the victim to respond, great gains can be had against a target provided there is no one to counter the negative information. ...

The Evolutionary Psychology of Conflict and the Functions of Falsehood
  • Citing Chapter
  • January 2022

... Silva, M., Jr. 30 erroneamente atribuída aos psicólogos evolucionistas, mas de uma revolução no conceito de animal (Carvalho, 1989). As próximas décadas serão decisivas para que a Psicologia Evolucionista em seu processo de expansão cumpra não somente a previsão de Darwin, como também a previsão dos seus fundadores, a saber: fornecer um corpo teórico integrado ao revelar um mundo de fenômenos sociais instanciados nas adaptações psicológicas (Tooby, 2020). ...

Evolutionary Psychology as the Crystalizing Core of a Unified Modern Social Science

Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences

... That is, even though the benefit to the punisher is not immediately apparent, third-party punishment is driven by a motive to gain or protect some personal benefit in potential interactions in the future. For example, the personal deterrence hypothesis argues that people punish perpetrators to signal that they themselves would not accept being treated unfavorably, and thus try to get a better bargain for themselves in the future (Petersen et al., 2010). In line with this claim, studies have shown that adults are more likely to punish a person for being selfish toward another individual when they infer that this person would treat them poorly in a future interaction than when this person would treat a third-party individual poorly (Delton & Krasnow, 2017;Krasnow et al., 2016). ...

Evolutionary Psychology and Criminal Justice: A Recalibrational Theory of Punishment and Reconciliation
  • Citing Chapter
  • January 2010

... Culture, in general, encompasses societal characteristics and knowledge including language, beliefs (religion), modes of reasoning, values, social practices, and music and the arts. This brings us to cultural theory (Thompson et al., 2018), the sociology of knowledge (Merton, 1973), evolutionary psychology (Tooby, 2018), and similar approaches. Cultures include a normative framing (often strongly shaped by religion; Eller, 2014), different forms of reasoning and decision-making, and particularly the rules of interaction for different societies. ...

The Emergence of Evolutionary Psychology
  • Citing Chapter
  • March 2018

... Incidentally, strategies aiming to undermine support for one's opponents may sometimes be best served by claims that, within limits of plausibility, invent or exaggerate the misdemeanors they accuse opponents of having perpetrated, because fictitious actions can be made juicier than those occurring in reality (Horowitz, 2020;Marie & Petersen, 2022;Petersen, Osmundsen, & Tooby, 2020). Note that this strategic advantage of information being factually false (or misleading) would be the same irrespective of whether social media users believe the claims to be true or diffuse them with the intention to disinform and deceive (Littrell et al., 2023). ...

The Evolutionary Psychology of Conflict and the Functions of Falsehood
  • Citing Preprint
  • August 2020