Michael Barlev
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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…
View article: Cross-cultural evidence that intergroup conflict heightens preferences for dominant leaders: A 25-country study
Cross-cultural evidence that intergroup conflict heightens preferences for dominant leaders: A 25-country study Open
sponsorship: The authors thank the editors and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and constructive feedback on the project throughout the review process. The project benefitted from seed funding from the Department of Political S…
Google search data for psychological scientists: A tutorial and best practices Open
Google searches have been described as the most important dataset on the human psyche ever assembled. Google search data—accessible through a tool called Google Trends—can provide new insights on topics as varied as stereotypes and prejudi…
Google search data for social scientists: A tutorial and best practices Open
Google search data has been described as the most important dataset on human nature ever assembled, giving nearly instant access to datasets that can provide insights to questions about various topics, including disease, racism, religiosit…
What Are Social Norms For? Open
Whether as representations inhabiting individual minds, or as propositions codified in classic texts, norms play important roles in social life. But of the many social threats and opportunities humans face, which are norms most about? In s…
Stereotypes versus Preferences: Revisiting the Role of Alpha Males in Leadership Open
Why are women underrepresented in positions of leadership? According to the “think manager-think male” model, leaders are stereotyped as male—and, in turn, as dominant—and this stereotype translates into preferences. However, status and le…
The Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences (INOE): Evidence of validity in the United States and India Open
Researchers increasingly recognize that the mind and culture interact at many levels to constitute our lived experience, yet we know relatively little about the extent to which culture shapes the way people appraise their experiences and t…
How much cultural variation around the globe is explained by ecology? Open
How much cultural variation is explained by the physical and social ecologies people inhabit? Here, we provide an answer using nine ecological variables and 66 cultural variables (including personality traits, values and norms) drawn from …
The Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences (INOE): Evidence of Validity in the United States and India Open
Researchers increasingly recognize that the mind and culture interact at many levels to constitute our lived experience, yet we know relatively little about the extent to which culture shapes the way people appraise their experiences and t…
Rational Reasons for Irrational Beliefs Open
According to many, we live in “post-truth” times, with the pervasiveness of falsehoods being an existential threat to democracy and the functioning of free societies. Why do people believe and propagate falsehoods? Current accounts focus o…
The Ecology-Culture Dataset: A new resource for investigating cultural variation Open
Scholars interested in cultural diversity have long suggested that similarities and differences across human populations might be understood, at least in part, as stemming from differences in the social and physical ecologies individuals i…
How much cultural variation around the globe is explained by ecology? Open
How much cultural variation is explained by the physical and social ecologies people inhabit? Here, we provide an answer using nine ecological variables and 66 cultural variables (including personality traits, values, and norms) drawn from…
Sex Differences in Fearful Personality Traits Are Mediated by Physical Strength Open
Across cultures, women reliably exhibit higher levels of Neuroticism than men. Recent work shows that this sex difference, particularly in Neuroticism’s anxiety facet, is partly mediated by the sex difference in physical strength. We build…
Causal Judgment in the Wild: Evidence from the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election Open
When explaining why an event occurred, people intuitively highlight some causes while ignoring others. How do people decide which causes to select? Models of causal judgment have been evaluated in simple and controlled laboratory experimen…
Mapping nonordinary experiences across cultures in the U.S. and India Open
Cross-cultural similarities and differences in “nonordinary” experiences—experiences that stand out to people relative to what they consider ordinary or everyday—are not well understood by clinicians or researchers. Although such experienc…
Weight location moderates weight-based self-devaluation and perceived social devaluation in women Open
Overweight and obese (“heavyweight”) people devalue themselves because, it has been proposed, they are socially devalued. However, for women, social valuation depends not only on how much weight they carry but where on their bodies they ca…
Causal judgment in the wild: evidence from the 2020 US presidential election Open
A given event has many causes, but people intuitively view some causes as more important than others. Models of causal judgment have been evaluated in controlled laboratory experiments, but they have yet to be tested in complex real-world …
Causal judgment in the wild Open
We use forecasting models for the 2020 US presidential election to test a model of human causal judgment. Across tens of thousands of simulations of possible outcomes of the election, we computed, for each US state, an adjusted measure of …
What Counts as Religious Experience? The Inventory of Nonordinary Experiences as a Tool for Analysis across Cultures Open
When operationalizing ‘religiosity’ or ‘spirituality’ or ‘religious experience’ as measurable constructs, researchers tacitly treat them as if they were cross-culturally stable ‘things’ rather than investigating the way culturally-laden co…
Family Matters: Rethinking the Psychology of Human Social Motivation Open
What motives do people prioritize in their social lives? Historically, social psychologists, especially those adopting an evolutionary perspective, have devoted a great deal of research attention to sexual attraction and romantic-partner c…
The Embodied God: Core Intuitions About Person Physicality Coexist and Interfere With Acquired Christian Beliefs About God, the Holy Spirit, and Jesus Open
Why are disembodied extraordinary beings like gods and spirits prevalent in past and present theologies? Under the intuitive Cartesian dualism hypothesis, this is because it is natural to conceptualize of minds as separate from bodies; und…
Family Matters: Rethinking the Psychology of Human Social Motivation Open
What motives do people prioritize in their social lives? Historically, social psychologists, especially those adopting an evolutionary perspective, have devoted a great deal of research attention to sexual attraction and romantic partner c…
Minds, bodies, spirits, and gods: Does widespread belief in disembodied beings imply that we are inherent dualists? Open
Belief in beings without physical bodies is prevalent in present and past religions, from all-powerful gods to demonic spirits to guardian angels to immortal souls. Many scholars have explained this prevalence by a quirk in how we conceptu…
How the mind builds evolutionarily new concepts Open
The human mind is equipped with a variety of evolved mechanisms, each specialized for representing concepts from an adaptively important domain, such as persons and their mental states, animals and their biology, plants, and physical objec…
Core Intuitions About Persons Coexist and Interfere With Acquired Christian Beliefs About God Open
This study tested the hypothesis that in the minds of adult religious adherents, acquired beliefs about the extraordinary characteristics of God coexist with, rather than replace, an initial representation of God formed by co‐option of the…