April 2015
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352 Reads
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105 Citations
Cognition
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April 2015
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352 Reads
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105 Citations
Cognition
September 2014
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1,589 Reads
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108 Citations
Evolution and Human Behavior
Animals typically deploy their morphology during conflict to enhance competitors' assessments of their fighting ability (e.g. bared fangs, piloerection, dewlap inflation). Recent research has shown that humans assess others' fighting ability by monitoring cues of strength, and that the face itself contains such cues. We propose that the muscle movements that constitute the human facial expression of anger were selected because they increased others' assessments of the angry individual's strength, thereby increasing bargaining power. This runs contrary to the traditional theory that the anger face is an arbitrary set of features that evolved simply to signal aggressive intent. To test between these theories, the seven key muscle movements constituting the anger face were systematically manipulated one by one and in the absence of the others. Raters assessed faces containing any one of these muscle movements as physically stronger, supporting the hypothesis that the anger face evolved to enhance cues of strength.
September 2014
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147 Reads
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47 Citations
Evolution and Human Behavior
Prior to, or concurrent with, the encoding of concepts into speech, the individual faces decisions about whether, what, when, how, and with whom to communicate. Compared to the existing wealth of linguistic knowledge however, we know little of the mechanisms that govern the delivery and accrual of information. Here we focus on a fundamental issue of communication: The decision whether to deliver information. Specifically, we study spontaneous confession to a victim. Given the costs of social devaluation, offenders are hypothesized to refrain from confessing unless the expected benefits of confession (e.g. enabling the victim to remedially modify their course of action) outweigh its marginal costs—the victim’s reaction, discounted by the likelihood that information about the offense has not leaked. The logic of welfare tradeoffs indicates that the victim’s reaction will be less severe and, therefore, less costly to the offender, with decreases in the cost of the offense to the victim and, counter-intuitively, with increases in the benefit of the offense to the offender. Data from naturalistic offenses and experimental studies supported these predictions. Offenders are more willing to confess when the benefit of the offense to them is high, the cost to the victim is low, and the probability of information leakage is high. This suggests a conflict of interests between senders and receivers: Often, offenders are more willing to confess when confessions are less beneficial to the victims. An evolutionary-computational framework is a fruitful approach to understanding the factors that regulate communication.
June 2014
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317 Reads
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17 Citations
Evolution and Human Behavior
Some people are especially physically adept, others carry dangerous pathogens, some have valuable and rare knowledge, and still others cheat or deceive those around them. Because of these differences, and the costs and benefits they pose, natural selection has crafted mechanisms of partner choice that are selective: some people are chosen as social partners, others are not. When people are not chosen as partners-when they are socially excluded-they lose access to important fitness benefits. Thus, the mind should have adaptations to recapture these benefits by regaining inclusion. Is there one best way to regain inclusion? This is unlikely because there are multiple causes of exclusion; a single response is unlikely to be successful across all possible causes. Instead, distinct causes of exclusion might require adaptively tailored responses. We test whether there are tailored responses to five possible causes of exclusion from a cooperative group: inability to contribute, pathogen infection, free riding, disrupting group coordination, and exit from the group. Our results show that different causes of exclusion lead to distinct profiles of emotions and behavior. Each emotion and behavior profile is adaptively specialized to reverse or mitigate its specific cause of exclusion. Our research shows how taking an evolutionary view of human sociality can help map the psychology of cooperation and exclusion.
February 2014
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218 Reads
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123 Citations
Humans in all societies form and participate in cooperative alliances. To successfully navigate an alliance-laced world, the human mind needs to detect new coalitions and alliances as they emerge, and predict which of many potential alliance categories are currently organizing an interaction. We propose that evolution has equipped the mind with cognitive machinery that is specialized for performing these functions: an alliance detection system. In this view, racial categories do not exist because skin color is perceptually salient; they are constructed and regulated by the alliance system in environments where race predicts social alliances and divisions. Early tests using adversarial alliances showed that the mind spontaneously detects which individuals are cooperating against a common enemy, implicitly assigning people to rival alliance categories based on patterns of cooperation and competition. But is social antagonism necessary to trigger the categorization of people by alliance-that is, do we cognitively link A and B into an alliance category only because they are jointly in conflict with C and D? We report new studies demonstrating that peaceful cooperation can trigger the detection of new coalitional alliances and make race fade in relevance. Alliances did not need to be marked by team colors or other perceptually salient cues. When race did not predict the ongoing alliance structure, behavioral cues about cooperative activities up-regulated categorization by coalition and down-regulated categorization by race, sometimes eliminating it. Alliance cues that sensitively regulated categorization by coalition and race had no effect on categorization by sex, eliminating many alternative explanations for the results. The results support the hypothesis that categorizing people by their race is a reversible product of a cognitive system specialized for detecting alliance categories and regulating their use. Common enemies are not necessary to erase important social boundaries; peaceful cooperation can have the same effect.
May 2013
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651 Reads
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86 Citations
Psychological Science
Over human evolutionary history, upper-body strength has been a major component of fighting ability. Evolutionary models of animal conflict predict that actors with greater fighting ability will more actively attempt to acquire or defend resources than less formidable contestants will. Here, we applied these models to political decision making about redistribution of income and wealth among modern humans. In studies conducted in Argentina, Denmark, and the United States, men with greater upper-body strength more strongly endorsed the self-beneficial position: Among men of lower socioeconomic status (SES), strength predicted increased support for redistribution; among men of higher SES, strength predicted increased opposition to redistribution. Because personal upper-body strength is irrelevant to payoffs from economic policies in modern mass democracies, the continuing role of strength suggests that modern political decision making is shaped by an evolved psychology designed for small-scale groups.
April 2013
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127 Reads
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72 Citations
Humans are often generous, even towards strangers encountered by chance and even in the absence of any explicit information suggesting they will meet again. Because game theoretic analyses typically conclude that a psychology designed for direct reciprocity should defect in such situations, many have concluded that alternative explanations for human generosity-explanations beyond direct reciprocity-are necessary. However, human cooperation evolved within a material and informational ecology: Simply adding consideration of one minimal ecological relationship to the analysis of reciprocity brings theory and observation closer together, indicating that ecology-free analyses of cooperation can be fragile. Using simulations, we show that the autocorrelation of an individual's location over time means that even a chance encounter with an individual predicts an increased probability of a future encounter with that same individual. We discuss how a psychology designed for such an ecology may be expected to often cooperate even in apparently one-shot situations.
January 2013
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2,826 Reads
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435 Citations
Annual Review of Psychology
Evolutionary psychology is the second wave of the cognitive revolution. The first wave focused on computational processes that generate knowledge about the world: perception, attention, categorization, reasoning, learning, and memory. The second wave views the brain as composed of evolved computational systems, engineered by natural selection to use information to adaptively regulate physiology and behavior. This shift in focus-from knowledge acquisition to the adaptive regulation of behavior-provides new ways of thinking about every topic in psychology. It suggests a mind populated by a large number of adaptive specializations, each equipped with content-rich representations, concepts, inference systems, and regulatory variables, which are functionally organized to solve the complex problems of survival and reproduction encountered by the ancestral hunter-gatherers from whom we are descended. We present recent empirical examples that illustrate how this approach has been used to discover new features of attention, categorization, reasoning, learning, emotion, and motivation.
November 2012
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590 Reads
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94 Citations
Evolution and Human Behavior
We propose that intuitions about modern mass-level criminal justice emerge from evolved mechanisms designed to operate in ancestral small-scale societies. By hypothesis, individuals confronted with a crime compute two distinct psychological magnitudes: one that reflects the crime's seriousness and another that reflects the criminal's long-term value as an associate. These magnitudes are computed based on different sets of cues and are fed into motivational mechanisms regulating different aspects of sanctioning. The seriousness variable regulates how much to react (e.g., how severely we want to punish); the variable indexing the criminal's association value regulates the more fundamental decision of how to react (i.e., whether we want to punish or repair). Using experimental designs embedded in surveys, we validate this theory across several types of crime and two countries. The evidence augments past research and suggests that the human mind contains dedicated psychological mechanisms for restoring social relationships following acts of exploitation.
September 2012
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259 Reads
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153 Citations
Why did punishment and the use of reputation evolve in humans? According to one family of theories, they evolved to support the maintenance of cooperative group norms; according to another, they evolved to enhance personal gains from cooperation. Current behavioral data are consistent with both hypotheses (and both selection pressures could have shaped human cooperative psychology). However, these hypotheses lead to sharply divergent behavioral predictions in circumstances that have not yet been tested. Here we report results testing these rival predictions. In every test where social exchange theory and group norm maintenance theory made different predictions, subject behavior violated the predictions of group norm maintenance theory and matched those of social exchange theory. Subjects do not direct punishment toward those with reputations for norm violation per se; instead, they use reputation self-beneficially, as a cue to lower the risk that they personally will experience losses from defection. More tellingly, subjects direct their cooperative efforts preferentially towards defectors they have punished and away from those they haven't punished; they avoid expending punitive effort on reforming defectors who only pose a risk to others. These results are not consistent with the hypothesis that the psychology of punishment evolved to uphold group norms. The circumstances in which punishment is deployed and withheld-its circuit logic-support the hypothesis that it is generated by psychological mechanisms that evolved to benefit the punisher, by allowing him to bargain for better treatment.
... 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. ...
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. ...
Reference:
Perceptual Modal Justification
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. ...
Reference:
Kindness and happiness at work
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). ...
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. ...
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. ...
Reference:
The Neutralization Theory of Hatred
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). ...
October 2020
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). ...
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. ...
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). ...
August 2020