John Tooby
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Willingness to protect from violence, independent of strength, guides partner choice Open
Ancestrally, physical violence from conspecifics was a recurrent adaptive problem. Did selection favor preferences for partners who are both strong (highly able) and willing to protect us from violence? Strength and willingness are interre…
Group as a biological market: Eliminating reputation concern decreases ingroup-favouring cooperation and punishment Open
Accumulating evidence suggests that group is a cue of reputation-based partner choice: it evokes an assumption that one is being recognized and evaluated as a cooperation partner and thereby triggers reputation concern. For instance, studi…
Rational inferences about social valuation Open
The decisions made by other people can contain information about the value they assign to our welfare---for example how much they are willing to sacrifice to make us better off. An emerging body of research suggests that we extract and use…
Willingness to physically protect, independent of the ability to do so, guides social decision-making Open
Physical violence was a recurrent selection pressure in ancestral social environments. The psychology of partner choice may have partially been shaped by this. Here, we investigate whether people prefer partners who are willing and able to…
Motivations to reciprocate cooperation and punish defection are calibrated by estimates of how easily others can switch partners Open
Evolutionary models of dyadic cooperation demonstrate that selection favors different strategies for reciprocity depending on opportunities to choose alternative partners. We propose that selection has favored mechanisms that estimate the …
Motivations to reciprocate cooperation and punish defection are calibrated by estimates of how easily others can switch partners Open
Evolutionary models of dyadic cooperation demonstrate that selection favors different strategies for reciprocity depending on opportunities to choose alternative partners. We propose that selection has favored mechanisms that estimate the …
The Evolutionary Psychology of Conflict and the Functions of Falsehood Open
Truth is commonly viewed as the first casualty of war. As such the current circulation of fake news, conspiracy theories and other hostile political rumors is not a unique phenomenon but merely another example of how people are motivated t…
Cross-cultural invariances in the architecture of shame Open
Significance This set of experiments shows that in 15 traditional small-scale societies there is an extraordinarily close correspondence between ( i ) the intensity of shame felt if one exhibited specific acts or traits and ( ii ) the magn…
Invariances in the architecture of pride across small-scale societies Open
Significance It has been proposed that one key function of pride is to guide behavior in ways that would increase others’ valuation of the individual. To incline choice, the pride system must compute for a potential action an anticipated p…
View article: Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness
Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness Open
Significance Markets have lifted millions out of poverty, but considerable inequality remains and there is a large worldwide demand for redistribution. Although economists, philosophers, and public policy analysts debate the merits and dem…
View article: Cross-cultural regularities in the cognitive architecture of pride
Cross-cultural regularities in the cognitive architecture of pride Open
Significance Cross-cultural tests from 16 nations were performed to evaluate the hypothesis that the emotion of pride evolved to guide behavior to elicit valuation and respect from others. Ancestrally, enhanced evaluations would have led t…
Shame closely tracks the threat of devaluation by others, even across cultures Open
Significance Prominent theories of shame hold that shame is inherently maladaptive. However, direct tests of the fit between shame and its probable target domain have not previously been conducted. Here we test the alternative hypothesis t…