UCLA-UCSB Conference on
Human Nature and Society
(tentative schedule)
Fall Quarter
Location: UCLA Anthropology Department
352 Haines Hall, UCLA
(driving directions below)
Undoubtedly, risks of pregnancy are greatest during the ovulatory phase of the menstrual cycle. During this period, poor mating decisions concerning sexual partners has greater potential for long-lasting consequences. Recent research suggests that females have unconscious psychological mechanisms that manage risks associated with increased fertility during ovulation. One valuable piece of information concerning mating decisions is the assessment of one’s mate value (i.e. one’s ability to attract valuable members of the opposite sex). One means by which individuals can assess their mate value is through social comparison (i.e. comparing oneself to others within our social environment). Since mate value is a valuable piece of information concerning mating decisions, it was hypothesized that as a woman becomes increasing fertile across her menstrual cycle the assessment of her mate value should become more important. Specifically, I hypothesized that during the ovulatory phase characteristics related to a woman’s mate value (e.g. being physical attractive; being kind and understanding) should become more important to her perceived social identity and she should assess herself on these characteristics more often via social comparison.
With some exceptions, evolutionary psychologists have not concerned themselves with personality and individual differences, being largely occupied with examining species-typical, evolved psychological mechanisms and how these mechanisms produce a constant and predictable human nature. Likewise, cross-cultural work conducted by evolutionary psychologists has largely been an exercise in transporting university lab results into the developing or non-Western world to demonstrate that all humans think quite alike after all.
In this presentation I demonstrate how examining inter-individual differences in personality and ideology as well as cultural differences in social cognition should be embraced as it can provide evidence for the existence of universal, evolved psychological mechanisms, as well as provide insight into how the mechanisms might operate. Data from several studies on ethnocentrism from North American and Central American samples will be employed to illustrate these points.
Individual differences in aggression and anger-related attitudes have traditionally been addressed from the SSSM perspective, however, such views are undercut by data suggesting that personality and aggression are highly heritable. An evolutionary psychological perspective suggests that differences in aggression and anger-related attitudes may be functional responses to differential ecological circumstances that may or may not be heritable. One such circumstance is physical strength. We had subjects work out at a local gym and found positive correlations between body strength and attitudes about aggression and anger on both personal and political scales. Results are discussed in terms of the Asymmetric War of Attrition Model of human anger.
Research in experimental economics indicates that people frequently cooperate and punish even when it is not in their economic interest, and data from debriefings of experimental subjects suggests that emotions play an important role in such behavior. However much about the role of emotions in cooperation is still uncertain. Existing data rely on self-report and we lack a detailed picture of which and how emotions regulate cooperative behavior. Social psychologists have investigated the relationships among emotion, cognition, and behavior, largely from an atheoretical perspective. Evolutionary psychologists have discussed, mostly at a theoretical level, the nature and function of emotions. Economists have begun to suspect that emotions are an important part of decision-making processes in contexts like those in behavioral economics games, with little emphasis on ultimate explanations. Little work has brought these perspectives together to systematically examine how emotions affect decision-making processes in the context of particular social interactions. Bringing these perspectives together, this talk will describe both theoretical and methodological details of a series of behavioral economics experiments designed to examine the effects of different emotions on economic-game behavior. Emotion induction tasks were used to manipulate five different emotion states in subjects —shame, embarrassment, guilt, anger, and gratitude—in the context of one-shot anonymous economic games. Preliminary results of these experiments will be discussed.
An important part of evolved human psychology is intuitive ontology: the way in which our minds carve up the world into different kinds of things for the purposes of inference. For example, the mind makes important cognitive distinctions between intentional agents, such as humans, and non-agents, such as meat and rocks (e.g., in the attribution of goals). In turn, the mind distinguishes between biological substances, such as meat, and non-biological substances, such as rocks (e.g., in the activation of disgust psychology). Interestingly, it is sometimes possible for an object to traverse the boundary between ontological categories, as when a living animal becomes meat, or when an artifact becomes a substance. Here, I use experiments in which German and Shuar children imagine such boundary crossings to map features of our evolved intuitive ontology.
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Map of the UCLA campus (Haines Hall at coordinates F, 3) - Driving directions.