The psychosemantics of free riding: Dissecting the architecture of a moral concept.

Delton, Andrew W.; Cosmides, Leda; Guemo, Marvin; Robertson, Theresa E.; Tooby, John

doi:10.1037/a0027026

Cited by 130 publications

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“…memory confusion paradigm used by Kurzban et al (2001) and Pietraszewski et al (2014), which unobtrusively measures implicit social categorization. This paradigm features three phases: (1) an initial presentation phase featuring a sequence of face and statement pairings, (2) a brief distracter task to suppress recency and rehearsal effects, and (3) a surprise recall phase in which participants are asked to recall which face was paired with each statement, in which patterns of memory attribution errors reveal the degree to which categories in the faces and/or statements are retrieved and activated in the mind at the point of recall (see also Delton et al, 2012;Pietraszewski & Schwartz, 2014a SOM;Taylor, Fiske, Etcoff, & Ruderman, 1978).…”

Section: Categorization By Age: a More Stringent Test Of The Selectivmentioning

confidence: 99%

Constituents of political cognition: Race, party politics, and the alliance detection system

et al. 2015

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!Research suggests that the mind contains a set of adaptations for detecting alliances: an alliance detection system, which monitors for, encodes, and stores alliance information and then modifies the activation of stored alliance categories according to how likely they will predict behavior within a particular social interaction. Previous studies have established the activation of this system when exposed to explicit competition or cooperation between individuals. In the current studies we examine if shared political opinions produce these same effects. In particular, (1) if participants will spontaneously categorize individuals according to the parties they support, even when explicit cooperation and antagonism are absent, and (2) if party support is sufficiently powerful to decrease participants' categorization by an orthogonal but typically-diagnostic alliance cue (in this case the target's race). Evidence was found for both: Participants spontaneously and implicitly kept track of who supported which party, and when party cross-cut race-such that the race of targets was not predictive of party support-categorization by race was dramatically reduced. To verify that these results reflected the operation of a cognitive system for modifying the activation of alliance categories, and not just socially-relevant categories in general, an identical set of studies was also conducted with in which party was either crossed with sex or age (neither of which is predicted to be primarily an alliance category). As predicted, categorization by party occurred to the same degree, and there was no reduction in either categorization by sex or by age. All effects were replicated across two sets of between-subjects conditions. These studies provide the first direct empirical evidence that party politics engages the mind's systems for detecting alliances and establish two important social categorization phenomena: (1) that categorization by age is, like sex, not affected by alliance information and (2) that political contexts can reduce the degree to which individuals are represented in terms of their race.!

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Section: Categorization By Age: a More Stringent Test Of The Selectivmentioning

confidence: 99%

Constituents of political cognition: Race, party politics, and the alliance detection system

et al. 2015

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“…Nonetheless, coordinated actions do evolve in many species, either via kin selection (e.g. social insects, Hamilton 1964) or through other means still being mapped by evolutionary psychologists and behavioral ecologists (Boyd, Gintis & Bowles 2010;Cosmides & Tooby 1992;Delton et. al 2012;Ostrom 2010;Panchanathan & Boyd 2004).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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

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Sznycer

Cosmides

et al. 2017

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.2

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“…These theories, in turn, led to the empirical discovery of various choice architectures that evolved to produce best-bet welfare trade-off decisions given the information available to the actor about a potential recipient [e.g., how to respond to cues of genetic relatedness; how to respond to cues predicting the recipient's ability to effectively assert and defend her or his interests; how to respond to cues indicating a potential partner tends to cheat or free-ride (11)(12)(13)(14)(15)(16)]. …”

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confidence: 99%

Shame closely tracks the threat of devaluation by others, even across cultures

Sznycer

Tooby

Cosmides

et al. 2016

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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We test the theory that shame evolved as a defense against being devalued by others. By hypothesis, shame is a neurocomputational program tailored by selection to orchestrate cognition, motivation, physiology, and behavior in the service of: (i) deterring the individual from making choices where the prospective costs of devaluation exceed the benefits, (ii) preventing negative information about the self from reaching others, and (iii) minimizing the adverse effects of devaluation when it occurs. Because the unnecessary activation of a defense is costly, the shame system should estimate the magnitude of the devaluative threat and use those estimates to cost-effectively calibrate its activation: Traits or actions that elicit more negative evaluations from others should elicit more shame. As predicted, shame closely tracks the threat of devaluation in the United States (r = .69), India (r = .79), and Israel (r = .67). Moreover, shame in each country strongly tracks devaluation in the others, suggesting that shame and devaluation are informed by a common species-wide logic of social valuation. The shame-devaluation link is also specific: Sadness and anxietyemotions that coactivate with shame-fail to track devaluation. To our knowledge, this constitutes the first empirical demonstration of a close, specific match between shame and devaluation within and across cultures.shame | emotion | valuation | culture | evolutionary psychology I n all known foraging societies past and present, humans have lived embedded in dense networks of cooperative and competitive interactions, a condition that is believed to have prevailed during the evolution of our species (1-3). Individuals in such social ecologies suffered or prospered depending on the summed effects of the choices of others-such as when and how often to share food, to provide care for another's child, to defer in conflicts, and so on. Ancestrally, the difference between an individual reproducing successfully, struggling, or dying early would have depended (in part) on the degree to which others traded off their own welfare for the welfare of that individual.Over the last fifty years, evolutionary researchers have identified a number of selection pressures that favored the evolution of decision systems that regulate welfare trade-offs between individuals, including kin selection (4), reciprocity/exchange (5, 6), risk-pooling (2), parenting (7), mating (8), externality management (9), and the asymmetric war of attrition (10). These theories, in turn, led to the empirical discovery of various choice architectures that evolved to produce best-bet welfare trade-off decisions given the information available to the actor about a potential recipient [e.g., how to respond to cues of genetic relatedness; how to respond to cues predicting the recipient's ability to effectively assert and defend her or his interests; how to respond to cues indicating a potential partner tends to cheat or free-ride (11-16)].In short, favorable valuation by others was a critical resource for our anc...

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The psychosemantics of free riding: Dissecting the architecture of a moral concept.

Cited by 130 publications

References 113 publications

Constituents of political cognition: Race, party politics, and the alliance detection system

Constituents of political cognition: Race, party politics, and the alliance detection system

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

Shame closely tracks the threat of devaluation by others, even across cultures

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