Wk 8 Monday

Social attention-holding theory (SAHT)

● Gilbert, 1990
○ People differ in how attention others pay to them
○ Social attention-holding potential: the quality and quantity of attention that
others pay to a person
○ People compete to receive attention and those who receive more attention
experience high status
○ Why does attention = status
■ We pay attention to people who can produce benefits to us
■ So people compete to show they can provide benefits to others, to rise in
SAH potential
○ What is self-esteem for?
■ How much people care about us, pay attention to us, like us, benefits
■ Sociometer theory – self esteem is an indicator of how socially valued
we are
● Even when people succeed if others ignore them, they feel low
self esteem
The nature of status
● status is relative, depends on others around you!
● It exists BETWEEN individuals – a single individual does have ”status”
● Given that there are various benefits to having status, we have evolved to pursue higher
status in multiple ways
The psychology of “followership”
● Why do we “follow”?
○ Being in a group may still provide more benefits then being on your own
○ Leaders can be at risk in dangerous situations
■ Especially if you do not have relevant abilities
○ Leaders can get drawn into conflict themselves and may also incur costs

● An adaptive psychology of followership should

○ Choose to follow when leadership costs outweigh benefits
○ choose / support leaders with different traits depending on the situation
○ Leave a leader when one is being exploited
Activity - cooperation & conflict

● The acrelian/ taminian conflict is an example of the prisoner's dilemma

● In this example; there is a dominant strategy – a option/ behavior that always provide
more benefits to a player, no matter what the other person does
○ A nuclear strike is the dominant strategy here
Prisoner’s dilemma
● Classic prisoner's dilemma:
○ You're a crook
○ You and your complice have been arrested
○ Your lawyer presents you with the dilemma
○ Dominant strategy here is to confess (defect), even though the best outcome for
both is to stay silent (cooperate)
The problem of altruism
● Why do people help or even sacrifice themselves for others?
● Altruism towards relatives can be explained by inclusive fitness theory
● But what about altruism towards non-kin?
○ The prison’s dilemma does help… further evidence that evolution would have
selected for “selfish” behavior?
Prisoner's dilemma
● Study: The Axelrod Tournament, 1980
○ Called for people around the world to submit strategies to play in an iterated
prisoner’s dilemma
○ 62 strategies were submitted from 6 countries
○ Key traits for tournament:
■ strategies play each other for many rounds ~150
■ Strategies were programmed with rules
■ Every strategy plays w/ at least 5 other strategies
○ Which strategy will win?
 ● Cooperate on round 1, and copy partner’s previous choice
every round after that
● Tit-for-tat – cooperating at first, continuing to cooperate if others
are also cooperative, but switches to defecting if others are also
defecting
● Tit-for-tat does NOT always perform better than every other
strategy, it just does very well on average
● Evolution is likely to have selected for a tit-for-tat psychology in
our species (be nice first)--overtime on average does the best
■ Reciprocal altruism
● Tit-for-tat allows for reciprocal altruism – altruism can evolved if
the benefits are returned by the other person later on
● Massai of East Africa
○ Live in a very unpredictable environment
○ Individual Massai have “osotua” (umbilical cord) friends
that they ask for help from when in need.
○ Osotua Is a form of “risk pooling” – spreading out risk with
others – (help out without looking for return)/ backup in
times of need
○ Unclear whether there is an obligation for helpers to be
repaid
Costly signaling
● Costly signaling theory: costly acts of altruism evolved as displays to others of one’s
abilities and resources
● From this theory; altruism will be:
○ Highly costly
○ Observable by others
○ Carries benefits for actor in the long run

WK8 Wednesday
Review question
DEMO
**picture insert
Formal logic: “If P, then Q” – Check P not Q”

^^Cheater detection:
● Wason selection task:
○ 25% of people get the right answers in the abstract logic problem
○ 75% of people get the right answers when the problem is about social rules!
● Reciprocal altruism faces the problem of cheaters – people who do not return benefits
or generally break social rules
● We have evolved cognitive adaptations specialized for detecting cheaters
○ And not so much cognitive adaptations for doing abstract logic…
Coalitions
● Groups of individuals that work together on certain tasks or goals
● Coalitions can accomplish things that individuals cannot
● Coalitions can also protect oneself from being attacked
● Do coalitions differ in importance for men vs.women?
○ Male reproductive success is more limited by access to mates
○ One way of increasing access is taking over another group
○ Beyond direct conflict taking over territories with resources may serve the same
purpose
○ As a result, men are also more likely to be VICTIMS of coalitional aggression
● Male warrior hypothesis: males are more likely than female to have evolved a
psychological for forming and supporting coalitions
○ Ex: men and women asked to donate to their universities
■ Told that researchers interested in difference between individuals
■ OR tole that researches interest in differences between universities
 ■ Men: Individual vs individual – donate less; individual vs universities –
donate more when competition between group
■ women: Individual vs individual – donate same; individual vs universities –
donate same
○ Men gave more** check slides
“Who said what” task
● Within-race confusion show that people mentally categorize others by race
● Lots of research finding that we think about others along race (and other dimension)
● But why should evolution have shaped the psychology of race?
○ Race as coalitions hypothesis
■ We are unlikely to have evolved a psychology for thinking about race
specifically
● ancestrally , people were unlikely to have encountered people of
different race
● But we are likely to have encountered people of a different
coalition
■ If racial categorization is actually coalitional categorization, what happens
when we explicitly tell people who is in which coalition?
● We group people what we think coalition are, not so much of race.
■ When each race is equally presented across coalitions, race
categorization disappears
● Replaces with coalitional categorization
Race categorization seems a byproduct of evolved coalitional
categorization
DEMO**

● Which individual will have more children as an adult?

○ Ecology stereotypes
■ Williams et al 2016
● People imagined someone living in either a harsh/ unpredictable
or not harsh/ predictable environment – life history theory
○ Harshness = faster strategy early kids, focus on present
Race-as-ecology hypothesis: race stereotype may be a byproduct of ecology stereotypes
–stereotype of people of different races

Complements race-as-coalition hypothesis, which focused on race categorization – group

people by race

Evolutionary perspective can lend unexpected insights into what underlies race psychology

Cooperation and conflict

● Humans cooperate– but why?
○ Conditions under which cooperation and altruisms can evolve
○ The problem f cheater and evolved solutions
● Coalitions are important
○ Evolution should have shaped a coalitional psychology that behaves in specific
ways
○ CHAPTER 9 *** cooperative alliances!
Culture – NEW CHAPTER
● Culture: a system of shared beliefs and practices

WK 9 Monday

A, B, D = Coalition

Categorization: not collision; we see people who are typically same race works w/ each other

Evoked culture
● People living in countries with more disease emphasize physical attractiveness/
intelligence in partner more
● Why?
 ○ Individual who are still healthy physical attractiveness in such an environment
may be more resistant to local diseases
○ Intelligence also requires healthy development, may also reflect pathogen
resistance
● Evoked culture: cultural difference that emerges as a result of adaptive psychological
changes in reaction to environmental condition
● Our specifies has evolved to be flexible in our psychology
○ If a country has lots of disease, our evolved psychology shift our mate
preferences – “IF diseases, THEN prefer attractiveness more”
○ If a country are very harsh, our evolved psychology shifts our reproductive
behavior – “IF harsh THEN reproductive behavior”
● Individualism-collectivism: individualist societies tend to prefer independent
relationships and focus on personal goals; collectivist societies focus on interdependent
relationships and prioritize group goals
○ Focused on historical infectious diseases, particularly connects w/ collectivistic
● It is important to me that I respect decision made by my group – agreement reflects a
more collectivistic psychology
● Could ______ be a result of evoked culture?
○ IF Disease, THEN become more collectivistic
■ Clues: greater xenophobia, negativity/ avoidance of unfamiliar groups,
clear separation between ingroup and outgroup, importance if tradition
and conformity
■ Disease – outgroup may carry novel pathogens, distancing oneself from
outgroup may help avoid exposure
■ Sticking to tradition, what has been “tried and true” reduces new
behaviors that might be risky under high levels of disease
● We have evolved to adopt a more collectivistic psychology when living in environment
with high levels of disease
● Saying that people in two cultures are different because one culture is individualistic and
the other is collectivistic is not a full explanation
○ Why is one culture collectivistic and other not?
■ One answer is that levels of disease between cultures differ leading to
differences in collectivism because… one societies living in disease,
become more collectivistic
Levels of explanation
● Why are (some) people more sociosexually unrestricted?
○ Because they grew up with parent who are also unrestricted
● Why are their parents unrestricted?
○ Because their parents grew up in a culture that encourages unrestricted sexual
behavior
● Why is the culture unrestricted?
○ Because it has ____ a environment
○ Our psychology has evolved to adopt more unrestricted sociosexuality under
such environments
 ○ Proximate explanations: focus on immediate causes ←→ Ultimate
explanation: focus on how a behavior could have evolved
● Often explanation requires explanations
○ People are like that because they learned from X.. “how did x learn it? Why did X
learn to do this (instead of other things)”
○ People are like that because of their culture X… “why is culture X like that? ”
● Evolutionary perspective push “why” question moving towards ultimate explanations
● Ultimate explanation and proximate explanation are not contradictory

Activity: “The black apple on the tree is Poisonous/ The black apple on the tree is precious”
● Passing down the message in the activity was more “Reconstruction”

Transmitted culture
● ideas, beliefs, practices that are transferred across minds by interaction and observation
● But we do NOT learn randomly!
● There are certain transmission or learning biases
Content biases
● Content biases – certain information is more easily transmitted because they fit our
(evolved) psychology
● E.g we more easily learned that things from plants (vs. non plant) are edible
● We more easily learn to fear snakes and spiders (more likely to be afraid, more likely to
survive)-- whether it is poisonous or not is much more important
● Replication is not the same thing as reconstruction
○ Replication: copying the exact same letters/ word of the message and passing it
on
○ Reconstruction: recreate the content of the message, without necessarily
copying it word for word
● Proponents of transmitted culture sometimes argue that culture can override our evolved
psychology..
 ○ Assume that replication is the dominant process
● There are limit to culture, transmitted culture can be very influential