Behavior, Evolution, and Culture Speaker Series

Mondays 12:00-1:30, Haines Hall 352, UCLA

 

Fall Quarter 2003

 

12 January: Gary Marcus NYU Dept. of Psychology

Language in the era of the Genome

Two of the most central questions in understanding the nature of the uniquely human talent for language are the extent to which the underlying neural machinery is "innate" (or "built-in"), and the extent to which that machinery is specialized for language as opposed to other cognitive functions. In this talk, I show how recent research in genetics and developmental neuroscience suggests new ways of thinking about these questions.

 

19 January: Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday

26 January: Jerome Siegel UCLA Dept. of Psychiatry

The Phylogeny of Mammalian Sleep

Sleep amounts vary by more than an order of magnitude across mammalian species. Either the amount of time spent sleeping has no relation to underlying function, which would distinguish sleep from many other homeostatically regulated processes, or sleep need varies considerably across species.

Prior data and new data on primitive mammals and cetaceans indicate a strong negative correlation between total sleep time and weight. Because metabolic rate is strongly and negatively correlated with body mass, this is also a positive correlation between metabolic rate and sleep time. Some evidence suggests that brain regions with high metabolic rate have higher levels of sleep deprivation induced damage. We hypothesized that non REM sleep serves to repair damage caused by oxidative stress (Eiland et al., 2002; Ramanathan et al., 2002).

REM sleep and nonREM sleep amounts are positively correlated. One explanation for this is that REM serves to stimulate the brain to prepare for waking after a period of nonREM (Ephron, Carrington, 1966; Snyder, 1966; Vertes, 1986).

However, much of the variation in REM amounts is independent of nonREM duration. Animals born in a relatively immature state, have more REM early in development (Jouvet-Mounier, 1970). One may hypothesize that REM facilitates development. A major mystery is why immaturity at birth is correlated with REM time in adulthood.

Cetaceans show unihemispheric sleep, with both hemispheres never being in deep sleep at the same time. Fur seals show both unihemispheric sleep and bihemispheric sleep and can switch between these two modes. Unihemispheric sleep appears to largely do away with sleep rebounds after deprivation of bilateral sleep. Unihemispheric sleep is linked to low or absent REM sleep. Understanding the mechanisms and functional relations underlying these unusual sleep adaptations of marine mammals can offer a major insight into the function and mechanisms of sleep.

2 February: Chris Boehm USC Dept. of Anthropology

Two Anthropological Models for Understanding Global Conflict Resolution

Chimpanzees and human hunter-gatherers are taken as models which help to explain our troubled world of nations, which in many ways is like a chimpanzee community with dominant alpha nations that throw their weight around---but in others is like a hunter-gatherer band, in which the group sees to it that no one individual is permitted to be too "alpha." In the latter sense, the United Nations is set up politically so that no single nation can dominate it because of the veto, and the resultant world of nations looks nothing like a single nation, which has sufficient coercive force at the political center to prevent most internecine conflict. Turning to the chimpanzee model again, there, too, coercive force is used within the society to control conflict, with alpha males displaying at combatants and separating them until they have cooled off. Distinctively, the alpha male mediation role is an even-handed one, even if the combatants are respectively allies and enemies of the alpha. Practical lessons to be learned come in the form of insights into problems and possibilities for creating a more effective world government, and in informing the world's superpowers that conflict resolution, to be effective, should be even-handed. The Israeli-Palestinian case is taken briefly as an example.

Read the Paper (Word document)

 

9 February: Aimee Plourde UCLA Dept. of Anthropology

The Evolution of Prestige Good Economies and the Origins of Sociopolitical Complexity

The emergence of social ranking and political hierarchy in human society constituted a fundamental departure from the small, egalitarian group structure thought to characterize society for most of our species’ history. Explaining the origins of social ranking is thus key to understanding the underlying structures of modern human societies, and the evolutionary processes that have generated them. Archaeologists have argued that the emergence of an economy of prestige goods in prehistory provided a critical means for leaders in chiefdom-level societies to attract followers and establish hierarchical relations with elites in neighboring polities. However, these arguments fail to explain the initial attraction of prestige goods themselves. Here I present a model for the evolution of psychological mechanisms that value prestige goods, and outline the evolving role of prestige goods in the negotiation of hierarchy at increasing levels of political ranking. This model is assessed against archaeological excavation and survey data collected in the northern Lake Titicaca Basin of highland Peru. The data demonstrate that strong correlations exist between increasing polity size and political hierarchy on the one hand and increasingly direct control of the trade routes used to procure prestige items on the other.

 

16 February: President's Day holiday

23 February: Rob Boyd UCLA Dept. of Anthropology

The Evolution of Contingent Cooperation

 

1 March: Jim Sidanius UCLA Dept. of Psychology

Individual and Institutional Congruence in the Reproduction of Group-based Social Hierarchy: A Social Dominance Perspective

Based upon ideas borrowed from classical elitism theory, social identity theory and evolutionary psychology, social dominance theory basically assumes that human social systems are predisposed to organize themselves as group-based social hierarchies. Given this assumption, social dominance theory then attempts to identity the multi-leveled processes that are responsible for the creation and maintenance of these hierarchies. Using social dominance theory as the guiding framework, in this talk I will discuss the manner in which the congruency between the hierarchical characteristics of social roles and the behavioral predispositions of people occupying those social roles are one set of processes contributing to the maintenance of group-based social hierarchy. Beginning with Holland (1959, 1966), numerous researchers have documented the fact that people’s work-related values tend to match the values of their work environments. Researchers have also found, as we might expect, that this value match yields superior job performance and greater employee satisfaction. Social dominance theory has proposed an important expansion of this research: people’s sociopolitical attitudes (e.g., anti-egalitarianism) should also be compatible, or congruent, with their institutional environments (e.g., schools, workplaces) and a growing body of research supports this claim. Specifically, recent research has shown that hierarchy-enhancing (HE) organizations (e.g., police forces) tend to be occupied by those with anti-egalitarian beliefs, while hierarchy-attenuating organizations (e.g., civil liberties organizations) tend to be occupied by those with relatively democratic beliefs. This research has also provided evidence for five (non-mutually exclusive) processes underlying this person/institution congruence: self-selection, institutional-selection, institutional socialization, differential reward, and differential attrition. Finally, targets of theoretical expansion will be discussed.

 

8 March: Greg Bryant UCSC Dept. of Psychology

Social and linguistic functions of prosodic cues in speech: an
evolutionary approach

During speech communication, conversationalists produce and understand many simultaneous pieces of information through prosodic features of the voice (i.e., pitch, loudness, and duration properties). Prosodic variations provide cues to lexical and grammatical units (linguistic prosody), as well as emotional and intentional information (affective prosody). But prosody may also be used by conversationalists to signal social information not necessarily linked to the meaning of the words used. In this talk I will present various research examining prosody production and perception in both linguistic and social contexts. I will then discuss related ideas concerning linguistic and affective prosodic distinctions, functional dissociations in pitch production including potential laryngeal specializations, and evidence for pitch perception differences between tone and non-tone language speakers. I will argue that prosodic communication systems are functionally organized and future research should examine correspondences between production systems and perceptual response biases.

 

15 March: Alan Dixson Center for Reproduction of Endangered Species, Zoological Society of San Diego

Sperm competition, mammalian reproduction, and human evolution

This talk focuses upon the structure and functions of the reproductive organs of mammals, as viewed from the perspective of sexual selection and sperm competition. The living collections of the Zoological Society of San Diego contain many rare and unusual species; valuable anatomical material becomes available whenever necropsies are performed. Comparative studies have allowed us to demonstrate effects of sexual selection upon sperm morphology, structure of the vas deferens, accessory sexual glands, and oviductal morphology in a variety of mammals. Inclusion of measurements of the human reproductive system in these studies has also provided some useful insights into the evolution of human sexuality.

Spring Quarter 2004

 

 

5 April: Lynn Stout UCLA School of Law

Other-Regarding Behavior and the Law

Legal scholars have become keenly interested in behavioral approaches to lawthat recognize that real people do not always behave in a selfishly rational fashion: numerous recent papers examine how human choice can be distorted by endowment effects, anchoring effects, availability biases, and other cognitive deficiencies. There is a curious imbalance to this "behavioral law and economics" literature, however. Contemporary critiques of the selfish rationality model of human behavior tend to focus far more on the
second modifier - the assumption of rationality - than on first - the assumption of self interest.

This article reverses that emphasis. It argues that the human tendency to act in an other-regarding fashion (to sacrifice in order to help or harm others) is far more pervasive and important than generally recognized. In support of this claim, it reviews the extensive empirical evidence that has been accumulated over the past five decades on human behavior in experiments known as social dilemma games, ultimatum games, and dictator games. These experiments have consistently found that under certain circumstances, subjects routinely behave as if they care about costs and benefits to others. In the parlance of economics, they predictably "reveal"
other-regarding preferences. Moreover, this other-regarding behavior seems driven primarily by social context - subjects' perceptions of what others believe, what others expect, and how others are likely to behave.

These findings are of importance not only to our understanding of individual behavior, but also to our understanding of a wide variety of social institutions, including the social institution known as law. To illustrate, this Article offers a simple model of other-regarding behavior derived from the experimental evidence. It then explores how the model sheds light on three basic areas of legal doctrine: tort, contract, and criminal law. As will be seen, incorporating other-regarding behavior into the analysis offers to explain a number of puzzles in these three areas that cannot be resolved by using the homo economicus model of selfish rationality. It also promotes a better appreciation of the essential role "conscience" may play in ensuring a functioning legal system, as well as the myriad, subtle, and sometimes counterintuitive ways in which state and private actors employ law to change behavior.

 

12 April: Nancy K. Dess Occidental College

Violence and Its Antidotes: Promises and Pitfalls of Evolutionarily Aware Policy Development

Glimpses at our primate relatives and diverse human cultures provide prima facie evidence that as a species, we are capable of far more benevolent, just, and healthful living than exists in many places. Illuminating human nature through evolutionary reasoning has great potential to make public policy more effective and more humane. To fulfill this promise, historical and political realities that constrain or are conducive to evolutionary reasoning must be appraised. In addition, five unhelpful habits must be broken: analysis by false dichotomy; anthropodenial; perpetuation of aggression myths; oversimplification; and wishful thinking. Understanding the kind of animal we are may be as helpful to overcoming these obstacles as it will be to the formulation of good policy.

 

 

19 April: Stephen Stich Rutgers Dept. of Philosophy

Why Moral Philosophers Need LOTS of Help from Psychologists, Anthropologists

and Other Social Scientists

The talk has three parts:

In Part I, I will sketch a hotly debated question in moral philosophy. Roughly stated, the issue in dispute is whether moral disagreement is fundamental or superficial; disagreement is fundamental if it would persist even under “idealized” circumstances in which the parties to the dispute are fully rational, impartial, and agreed on all non-moral issues. I’ll then explain why moral many moral philosophers think the answer is of enormous importance.

In Part II, I’ll review two empirical studies that suggest moral disagreement is indeed fundamental. One study, rarely cited by social scientists, is Richard Brandt’s philosophically motivated moral ethnography of the Hopi. The other is drawn from the work of Richard Nisbett and his colleagues on cultures of honor. These studies are hardly conclusive, however, and even if issues of interpretation are put to one side, those who do not believe that moral disagreement is fundamental might argue that the examples of moral disagreement on which they focus are outliers, and that in general moral views will converge under idealized circumstances. To address these concerns, we need an empirically supported theory of the psychological mechanisms underlying the acquisition & utilization of moral norms and of how those mechanisms might have evolved.

In Part III, I will provide an overview of a collaborative project aimed at developing an empirical theory of the psychology & evolution of moral norms. I will focus on two crucial issues that the theory must address:
• What sort of psychological mechanisms subserve the acquisition and implementation of norms?
• What constraints (if any) are there on the sorts of norms that can be acquired?
Though the existing empirical literature provides some very important clues, there are many crucial questions for which, as far as we have been able to discover, there is little or no relevant data available. My goal, in this part of the talk, is to provide a framework which makes clear what we need to know about the psychological mechanisms subserving moral norms. My hope is that some people in the audience will know of relevant findings that have escaped our notice, or (better still) that they can be tempted to design new studies that will help answer or reconfigure some of the most important and most venerable questions in moral theory.

26 April: Christine Harris UC San Diego Dept. of Psychology

Did Men and Women Evolve Different Jealousy Mechanisms?

The specific innate modular theory of jealousy (JSIM) hypothesizes that men are innately prone to upset over a mate’s sexual infidelity and women, over a mate’s emotional infidelity. This view claims that natural selection has shaped sexual jealousy as a mechanism to prevent cuckoldry and emotional jealousy as a mechanism to prevent resource loss. Three lines of evidence have been offered as support: 1) psychophysiological reactions when imagining the two forms of infidelity, 2) responses to hypothetical scenarios, and 3) rates of domestic violence and morbid jealousy. This talk will re-examine each line of work and present evidence that questions the extent to which there are robust sex differences. An alternative theory of jealousy will be discussed which proposes a more domain general mechanism that may show little sexual dimorphism.

Read the Paper (PDF)

 

3 May: Michael Gurven UCSB Anthropology

Determinants of Time Allocation Across the Lifespan

This paper lays the groundwork for a theory of time allocation across the life course. It first develops a parametric model of rates of return on time allocated to productive activities as a function of age. The model is based on the idea that strength and skill vary as a function of age, and that return rates for different activities vary as a function of the combination of strength and skills involved in performing those tasks. The model is then extended to explain time allocation to different activities through the life course from childhood to old age. In addition to age effects on efficiency or productivity, the model includes danger and mortality risks, future benefits of learning, relative efficiencies of different family members and joint execution of tasks, as inputs into time allocation decisions. We then apply the model to traditional human subsistence patterns. The model predicts that young children would engage most heavily in low strength/low skill activities, middle-aged adults in high strength/high skill activities, and older adults in low strength/high skill activities. Data on time allocation and productivity among Machiguenga and Piro forager-horticulturalists of southeastern Peru are used to evaluate the model.

 

8 May: SPRING 2004 UCLA-UCSB CONFERENCE ON HUMAN NATURE (click here for more info)

Due to budget constraints, this meeting is not open to the public. Attendance is restricted to faculty and graduate students at accredited institutions of higher learning, and to practicing professionals who are actively conducting research on relevant topics.

 

10 May : Shelly Gable UCLA Dept. of Psychology

Approaching affiliation and avoiding rejection: A motivational perspective on the formation and maintenance of social bonds

Social bonds are potent sources of both pleasure and pain; yet despite the precarious balance of interpersonal incentives and threats, across the life span people are tenaciously motivated to form and maintain strong and stable social bonds. Although myriad evidence supports the existence of a need for relationships, proportionately little work has investigated the regulatory processes involved in establishing, maintaining, and dissolving social bonds from a motivational or goal theory perspective. A critical dimension of motives and goals is their focus. Social motives and goals can be focused on the incentives and desired end-states of relational bonds—approach—or social motives and goals can be focused on the threats and undesired end-states of relational bonds—avoidance. And, work on motives and goals has shown that the approach/avoidance distinction has important implications for behavior, affect, well-being, and health, but this research has not focused explicitly on social motives and goals. And, close relationships research has often targeted either the incentives (e.g., intimacy) or the threats (e.g., insecurity) associated with social bonds, but rarely has examined them in tandem. Given that interpersonal relationships present us with both threats and incentives, research on motives, goals, and the regulation of social behavior needs to simultaneously address the approach dimension and the avoidance dimensions of social behavior. In this talk I will present data from several studies in which we test aspects of approach—avoidance model of social motivation in an effort to understand how humans weigh social incentives and threats and how approach and avoidance motivation influence attention, cognition, affect, and behavior in the context of social bonds.

 

17 May: Lynn Fairbanks UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute

Adolescent Impulsivity and Adult Male Dominance in
Vervet Monkeys

Adolescence is characterized by behavioral and physiological changes that prepare individuals for the transition to adulthood. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effects of behavioral, morphological, neurobiological and developmental characteristics of adolescent male vervets in predicting later dominance attainment. The results indicated that males that were high in impulsivity as adolescents and low in 5-HIAA prior to introduction were more likely to achieve stable alpha male status one year following introduction. These two factors, combined with body weight prior, resulted in correct prediction of rank attainment for 92% (33/36) of the males. Two other factors, maternal dominance rank and a measure of social anxiety from the Intruder Challenge test, were not related to adult dominance attainment in this sample. These results provide support for benefits of a high-risk, high-gain strategy by adolescent and young adult male vervets. They also demonstrated that adolescent impulsivity is age-limited. Males that achieved high rank moderated their behavior as adults, and no longer scored high in impulsivity relative to their age peers.

 

24 May: Laura Baker USC Dept. of Psychology

Risk Factors for Antisocial Behavior: Genes and Environment

Human aggression and antisocial behavior are known to be the product of both social and biological risk factors. What is not yet understood is how environment and genetic factors may mediate the interrelationships among these risk factors and antisocial outcomes. A study of twins and their families provides the ideal opportunity to answer the critical question in this regard: Do measured social and biological variables relate to antisocial development for genetic or environmental reasons? Our ability to develop effective and efficient interventions for antisocial behavior rests critically upon the answer to this question.

Preliminary results will be presented from the 1st wave of an ongoing longitudinal study of antisocial and aggressive behavior in 600 twin pairs (both male and female), aged 9-10 years old during an initial assessment. The study provides the first opportunity to investigate the environmental and genetic underpinnings of important social and biological risk factors for unlawful, antisocial, and aggressive behavior in boys and girls on the brink of adolescence. Social risk factors include aspects of the family environment, such as socio-economic status, emotional climate, cohesion, parental warmth and affection, parental supervision, discipline and control. Specific environmental factors for each twin are also studied, including individual relationships with each family member, as well as peer-group characteristics. Biological risk factors include psychophysiological indicators of arousal (both electrodermal and cardiovascular channels), electrocortical measures of brain activity (using both EEG and ERP measures) as well as neuropsychological and cognitive testing. Both the social and biological risk factors studied will be shown to distinguish between children exhibiting varying levels of aggressive and antisocial behavior. Biometrical analyses of twin similarity for ASB and a selected group of these risk factors will be presented.

31 May: Memorial Day holiday

7 June: David Funder UC Riverside Dept. of Psychology

The Personality Judgment Instinct

The Realistic Accuracy Model (RAM) describes the four stage, social-behavioral process necessary for the achievement of accuracy in personality judgment. A judgmental target must emit (1) relevant information in a context where it is (2) available to the judge, who must then (3) detect and correctly (4) utilize this information. This model implies that accuracy is a difficult attainment, and yet useful levels of accuracy are routinely observed, which suggests there may be a sort of instinct for personality judgment, akin to the "language instinct," that allows the cognitive system to go beyond the information given.

Read the Paper (PDF)

 

The Behavior, Evolution and Culture Speaker Series is supported in part by

Center for Governance, Templeton Foundation Research Lectures, Metanexus Institute Local Societies Initiative,

and the UCLA Department of Anthropology

The Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture (BEC) unites scholars exploring the connections among evolution, culture, the mind, and society. BEC provides a framework to facilitate research and training on the interaction among natural selection, cultural transmission, social relations, and psychology. To learn more, visit the BEC homepage at http://www.bec.ucla.edu/

Everyone is welcome to attend, and to volunteer to present research (session organizers need not have papers to present).

To be added to the BEC list-serv, send a message to listserv@weber2.sscnet.ucla.edu
with the message (not subject)   subscribe BEC your personal name (not user name).
To be taken off the BEC list-serv, send a message to  listserv@weber2.sscnet.ucla.edu
with the message (not subject) signoff BEC

BEC holds quarterly conferences with UCSB's sister program in Evolution, Mind, and Behavior.
Links to previous conferences can be found in the archive.

For related groups at UCLA, see the Center for Culture, Brain, and Development , the Program for Psychocultural Studies and Medical Anthropology , Social Psychology , and Animal Behavior.

For a variety of web-resources exploring the interactions between mind and culture,
see the International Culture and Cognition Program.

Some papers to be discussed may be in PDF format, which can be read only if you have previously downloaded the free Adobe Acrobat Reader .

This page is maintained by Serena Eng.  E-mail BECanthro@hotmail.com .

 

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