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The Effect of Induced Fear on Culturally Transmitted Credulity Assessments
Full text linkWhen threatening events occur, especially in the context of human violence, rumors spread precipitously. During such events as mass shootings and terrorist attacks, conflicting reports rapidly emerge and spread. People may be especially likely to believe these rumors because there is a general asymmetry in the costs of incorrectly maintaining vigilance in the case of a false positive, versus the costs of ignoring a potential threat in the course of a false negative. Likewise, even in the absence of a threatening situation, people appear to be simply more credulous of information concerning hazards than of information concerning benefits because of a fundamental disparity in costs between failing to act on a potential benefit versus disregarding, and incurring the costs of, a potential hazard. Here, using the framework of negatively biased credulity proposed by Fessler, Pisor, and Navarrete (2014), I investigated whether threatening situations impact an individual’s willingness to believe culturally-transmitted information about other hazards in the world. I hypothesized that participants primed to experience fear, but not anger, in the context of an imminent threat would be more credulous toward the existence of other hazards. Although findings were mixed across four studies, ultimately the results did not support the primary prediction, though it is difficult to resolve whether the null result was the product of an inaccurate hypothesis or methodological limitations in the experimental elicitation of fear. However, two out of three studies replicated the effect of negatively biased credulity as originally reported by Fessler and colleagues
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Dominance and Prestige in Diverse Contexts: Investigations into the Relative Contributions of Coercive and Persuasive Attributes in Mate Selection, Rape Avoidance, and the Social Dynamics of a Mutual Aid Organization
Full text linkEvolutionary anthropology is a scholarly endeavor informed by the history of human evolution, drawing on the fields of evolutionary biology, behavioral ecology, behavioral economics, and evolutionary psychology, in addition to the substantial contributions of conventional anthropology itself. This frame of reference allows for a functional perspective on human behavior without ignoring or neglecting important sources of individual and cultural variation. In a general way, this work investigates how natural and sexual selection pressures shape human psychology and behavior, generating evolved proclivities and propensities, including the propensity for humans to be cultural animals. Hence, this perspective situates humans as active agents navigating a complex terrain of selective regimes and interacting with multiple local social systems in the interest of achieving both cultural competency and fitness. More specifically, within this framework, the work of this dissertation examines both differing forms of social status and cooperation and conflict in mating and mate selection.Much of the work presented here explores how, as autonomous agents operating within the affordances and constraints of their social ecology, women negotiate heterosexual mateship choices across varying environments. Positing that dominant men may also be domineering mates in the household, my research previous to this dissertation focused on critiquing the simplistic perspective that heterosexual women prefer dominant men. This research established that it is more likely that, on average, women interested in upward mobility actually prefer prestige in their prospective partners rather than dominance. Furthermore, these women pay attention to the context of men's domineering behaviors, ensuring that men adhere to culturally-prescribed norms of behavior. Presumably, this suite of preferences functions to increase the probability of coordination and cooperation in long-term pair bonds - cooperation directed toward the raising of extremely altricial human offspring. While the majority of heterosexual women surveyed in my prior work prefer male partners who pursue social status through prestige rather than through dominance, nonetheless, observation suggests that some women select domineering partners in spite of available alternatives. Clinicians and scholars alike tend to approach this phenomenon from a perspective that pathologizes these women and deprecates their choices. Chapter 1 of the dissertation argues that such women can, in part, be understood as confronting a trade-off wherein they shift their preferences toward men who are likely to offer them necessary protection in spite of the strong possibility that these same men will be domineering in the household. This work reveals that women who perceive themselves to be more vulnerable to crime indeed have preferences for such aggressive and physically formidable men. Hence, women who select domineering men as long-term partners may be responding in a functional manner to their unfortunate circumstances. Rather than suffering pathology or dysfunction, these women are making the best of a bad situation, a fact that has likely eluded middle- and upper-class investigators who are less familiar with the experiences and dangerous environments that such women face. Importantly, this work also offers an explanation for why preferences for long-term partners who can offer protection were long posited but went previously undetected.Again focusing on cooperation and conflict in mateships and mate selection, Chapters 2 and 3 of the dissertation call to task evolutionary psychology researchers who have, I argue, incorrectly characterized women's psychological responses to rape and their defensive coping strategies. My data-driven investigations challenge widely-held views on the subject. It is important for any phenomenological investigation to be held to high standards of scientific rigor. In addition, as sexual coercion and rape are deeply disturbing social ills and a profound tragedy for the victims, it is especially important that the scholarship of this topic be held to the highest levels of rigor. Chapter 2 of the dissertation systematically re-evaluates the logic and methods used to investigate women's rape-avoidance behaviors. Here, I contend that a significant body of the investigation of this phenomenon relies heavily on self-report measures that are only applicable to women in university or college settings, failing to accurately capture important variation in women's behaviors according to age and relationship status. I suggest in this work that women's fear of rape should be the primary motivator of rape-avoidance behaviors; thus, fear of sexual assault should be a useful index in measuring rape defensive strategies. Employing this approach, I obtain results that significantly deviate from the findings of previous researchers.Chapter 3 is an extension of the notion that fear of rape is an important index. Here I examine partnered women's fear of rape, simultaneously calling for higher levels of rigor in the study of partnered women's risk for emotional sequalae following sexual assault. A reified but under-investigated hypothesis contends that partnered women face a higher cost of sexual assault because the victim's mate may misperceive the assault as a cuckoldry threat. A thorough review of the existing evidence suggesting that partnered women face higher costs of rape indicates that existing findings are equivocal at best. I then present novel results indicating that the effects of relationship status on fear of sexual assault do not correspond with the notion that partnered women face higher costs due to rape than unpartnered women. Turning from issues of dominance to issues of prestige, in Chapter 4 I present an ethnographic description of Narcotics Anonymous (NA) as a mutual-aid group and a quasi-egalitarian cooperative institution characterized by complex prestige dynamics. I argue that, within this egalitarian organization, there is a clear dependence on experience-based transmission of cultural norms through a process of apprenticeship and imitation that necessarily generates a prestige hierarchy. Whenever status becomes a commodity, there is a risk that individuals will leverage their status into positions of dominance and control over subordinates. The codified orthodoxy of this institution has specific proscriptions condemning such behaviors and, accordingly, proscribing the pursuit of status. Mirroring small-scale societies, individuals in NA strategically employ leveling mechanisms designed to limit the power and personally sanction self-aggrandizing behaviors. Thus, what emerges is a relatively stable organization, across regions and time, with more-experienced members teaching the norms of the institution to less-experienced members and gently leading at local levels while treading carefully as regards self-aggrandizement. In sum, adopting an evolutionary perspective concerned with questions of ultimate function, this work examines the psychology and social dynamics of cooperation and conflict in a variety of domains. Simultaneously, this work stands as a cautionary tale against ethnocentrism and disciplinary in-group favoritism, warning of the dual dangers of sweeping important cultural contexts under the rug and settling for low standards of scientific rigor
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Traditionalism, Pathogen Avoidance, and Competing Tradeoffs During a Global Threat
Full text linkIndividuals vary in the extent to which they embrace their society’s traditions, as well as in the perception of threats as salient and necessitating mitigation. Traditionalism and threat sensitivity may be linked if—over evolutionary time—traditions offered avenues for reliably addressing threats, either through instrumental and/or ritual and cooperative benefits. Alternatively, if traditionalists are particularly attuned to threats to their group, they may undertake stronger mitigating responses to those threats. These possibilities – which are not mutually exclusive – suggest that greater traditionalism may predict stronger mitigating responses toward particular threats. However, threat-avoidance motivations can conflict with competing priorities and epistemic commitments in the real world. The COVID-19 pandemic represented a moment in time in which people across the world undertook costly threat-mitigating behaviors, providing an important test of the traditionalism-threat avoidance relationship under complex real-world conditions. Chapter 1 investigates the relationship between COVID-19 precautions, traditionalism, political orientation, and perceptions of competing tradeoffs with public health measures in the U.S. early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Results show that while more socially conservative and traditional Democrats reported taking more COVID-19 precautions than more liberal Democrats, that same relationship did not hold true among Republicans. Instead, Republicans placed greater emphasis on priorities that competed with COVID-19 precautions, which suppressed an underlying positive correlation between traditionalism and threat-mitigation among Republicans.Chapter 2 investigates similar phenomena, but in a cross-cultural context given that perceptions of tradeoffs with COVID-19 precautions are likely to vary across social contexts. Data were collected on COVID-19 precautions, traditionalism, and associated tradeoffs across 27 different countries. Results indicated that, across these study sites, traditionalism tended to positively correlate with behaviors intended to mitigate the threat of COVID-19. Nevertheless, at some study sites, this relationship was suppressed by competing priorities, such as lower trust in scientists and greater concerns about personal liberties, similar to the results found in Study 1. Traditionalism is often concomitant with meaning systems such as religion. Using the same dataset from 27 countries, Chapter 3 further explores the relationship between religion and public health precautions. One predicted tested is whether religious precautions and public health precautions clashed during the COVID-19 pandemic, given the possibility for epistemic conflict between religion and science. An alternative prediction is that individuals hedge their bets by pursuing threat-mitigating behaviors across diverse epistemic domains. Results supported the latter possibility, showing that individuals’ enactment of religious precautions positively correlated with their enactment of public health precautions, although again this relationship was sensitive to specific tradeoffs.Chapter 4 reflects on possibilities for greater consilience between evolutionary and psychological anthropologies. Given the disciplinary siloing that occurs in academia, it is particularly important to consider how different fields can generatively produce better knowledge production through interaction. I point toward several areas of research as being particularly productive in this interchange, particularly in the domains of cultural transmission and emotion. This interdisciplinary spirit is reflected in the empirical work presented in Chapters 1-3
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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Datasets to accompany Fessler et al. Dressed to Kill
No full textThis file contains the complete data for the studies reported in Fessler, Holbrook, & Dashoff's "Dressed to Kill? Visible Markers of Coalitional Affiliation Enhance Conceptualized Formidability
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Dataset to accompany Fessler, Pisor, & Navarrete's The Spirits Are Not Your Friends
No full textThis file contains the complete datasets collected in the studies described in Fessler, Pisor, & Navarrete's The Spirits Are Not Your Friend
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Datasets to accompany Murray et al.'s "Kiss of Death"
No full textThese are the three datasets employed in Murray, D., Fessler, D.M.T., Kerry, N., White, C. & Marin M. "The Kiss of Death: Three Tests of the Relationship between Disease Threat and Ritualized Physical Contact within Traditional Cultures
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Sizing up Helen: Nonviolent physical risk-taking enhances the envisioned bodily formidability of women
Full text linkReturn of the lost letter: Experimental framing does not enhance altruism in an everyday context
No full textDebate surrounds interpretation of prosocial behavior in experimental games. Skeptics of the thesis that evolution produced a propensity for noncontingent altruism speculate that such results reflect the presence of information suggesting reputational consequences, including awareness that one is participating in an experiment. To examine the effects on prosocial behavior of awareness that research is being conducted, return rates were measured on 'lost' envelopes, some of which carried the message that they were dropped as part of an investigation. Return rates were not enhanced by such messages, indicating that awareness that one is in an experiment does not increase prosocial behavior.Altruism Anonymity Experimental methods Lost letter technique
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