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In recent years, evolutionary psychologists and anthropologists have debated whether ethnic markers have evolved to solve adaptive problems related to interpersonal coordination or to interpersonal cooperation. In the present study, we add to this debate by exploring how individuals living in a modern society utilize the accents of unfamiliar individuals to make social decisions in hypothetical economic games that measure interpersonal trust, generosity, and coordination. A total of 4603 Danish participants completed a verbal-guise study administered over the Internet. Participants listened to four speakers (two local and two nonlocal) and played a hypothetical Dictator Game, Trust Game, and Coordination Game with each of them. The results showed that participants had greater faith in coordinating successfully with local speakers than with nonlocal speakers. The coordination effect was strong for individuals living in the same city as the particular speakers and weakened as the geographical distance between the participants and the speakers grew. Conversely, the results showed that participants were not more generous toward or more trusting of local speakers compared with nonlocal speakers. Taken together, the results suggest that humans utilize ethnic markers of unfamiliar individuals to coordinate behavior rather than to cooperate.

Th is study examines the principles we apply, when people, objects and animals are to be organized in relation to other representatives of their kind. Most cross-cultural studies on personal space focus on cultural diff erences, but here we look for proxetics (universals) as well as proxemics (cultural diff erences). 793 subjects from six countries (Greenland, Finland, Denmark, Italy, India and Cameroon) situated in four diff erent climate zones are tested with a projective simulation measure (the 'IPROX'). A number of cross-cultural similarities are documented, and it is suggested that six of these are examples of high-level universals in the sense of Norenzayan and Heine (2005). But spacing also diff ers, and participants from Greenland, Finland, and Denmark systematically keep a larger interpersonal distance than subjects from Italy, India and Cameroon, which confi rms the classic diff erence between southern 'contact-cultures' and northern 'low-contact cultures'. It is documented how personal space shrinks or expands depending on context and depending on whether a person occupies a territory or arrives at a territory occupied by somebody else. Personal space may even 'rub off ' on a person's belongings, and this opens up for a whole new area of spatial relations not studied before.

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A fetish is a specific emotionally loaded object, body part, or situation that draws our attention and desire, and sexual fetishism is the sexual arousal that a person experiences when in contact with such a loaded object. Until now, psychology has had trouble understanding the distinctive lust objects and the orchestration of urges in the world of fetishism, so fetishism has therefore fallen into the category of perversions and abnormal behavior. In this study, fetishism is moved to the field of aesthetics, and a new theory is presented: Fetishism is the attraction to certain species-specific key stimuli that are perceived as especially beautiful and exciting. A topic or an object that contains important key stimuli automatically becomes a power object or a fetish. Therefore, we have to look into the innate sensibilities on which our aesthetics are based and into the micro-processes of the aesthetic impulse to understand why something captivates and fascinates us in a fetishist way.