Detecting cheaters.
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Biological Evolution↗
Biomedical subjects
John Tooby
Publications and source records attributed to John Tooby.
Does morality have a biological basis? An empirical test of the factors governing moral sentiments relating to incest.
Kin-recognition systems have been hypothesized to exist in humans, and adaptively to regulate altruism and incest avoidance among close genetic kin. This latter function allows the architecture of the kin recognition system to be mapped by quantitatively matching individual variation in opposition to incest to individual variation in developmental parameters, such as family structure and co-residence patterns. Methodological difficulties that appear when subjects are asked to disclose incestuous inclinations can be circumvented by measuring their opposition to incest in third parties, i.e. morality. This method allows a direct test of Westermarck's original hypothesis that childhood co-residence with an opposite-sex individual predicts the strength of moral sentiments regarding third-party sibling incest. Results support Westermarck's hypothesis and the model of kin recognition that it implies. Co-residence duration objectively predicts genetic relatedness, making it a reliable cue to kinship. Co-residence duration predicts the strength of opposition to incest, even after controlling for relatedness and even when co-residing individuals are genetically unrelated. This undercuts kin-recognition models requiring matching to self (through, for example, major histocompatibility complex or phenotypic markers). Subjects' beliefs about relatedness had no effect after controlling for co-residence, indicating that systems regulating kin-relevant behaviours are non-conscious, and calibrated by co-residence, not belief.
Adolescent↗
Perceptions of race.
UNTIL RECENTLY, EXPERIMENTS ON PERSON PERCEPTION HAD LED TO TWO UNWELCOME CONCLUSIONS: (1) people encode the race of each individual they encounter, and (2) race encoding is caused by computational mechanisms whose operation is automatic and mandatory. Evolutionary analyses rule out the hypothesis that the brain mechanisms that cause race encoding evolved for that purpose. Consequently, race encoding must be a byproduct of mechanisms that evolved for some alternative function. But which one? Race is not encoded as a byproduct of domain-general perceptual processes. Two families of byproduct hypotheses remain: one invokes inferential machinery designed for tracking coalitional alliances, the other machinery designed for reasoning about natural kinds. Recent experiments show that manipulating coalitional variables can dramatically decrease the extent to which race is noticed and remembered.
Journal Article↗
The second law of thermodynamics is the first law of psychology: evolutionary developmental psychology and the theory of tandem, coordinated inheritances: comment on Lickliter and Honeycutt (2003).
Organisms inherit a set of environmental regularities as well as genes, and these two inheritances repeatedly encounter each other across generations. This repetition drives natural selection to coordinate the interplay of stably replicated genes with stably persisting environmental regularities, so that this web of interactions produces the reliable development of a functionally organized design. Selection is the only known counterweight to the tendency of physical systems to lose rather than grow functional organization. This means that the individually unique and unpredictable factors in the web of developmental interactions are a disordering threat to normal development. Selection built anti-entropic mechanisms into organisms to orchestrate transactions with environments so that they have some chance of being organization-building and reproduction-enhancing rather than disordering.
Biological Evolution↗
Selective impairment of reasoning about social exchange in a patient with bilateral limbic system damage.
Social exchange is a pervasive feature of human social life. Models in evolutionary biology predict that for social exchange to evolve in a species, individuals must be able to detect cheaters (nonreciprocators). Previous research suggests that humans have a cognitive mechanism specialized for detecting cheaters. Here we provide neurological evidence indicating that social exchange reasoning can be selectively impaired while reasoning about other domains is left intact. The patient, R.M., had extensive bilateral limbic system damage, affecting orbitofrontal cortex, temporal pole, and amygdala. We compared his performance on two types of reasoning problem that were closely matched in form and equally difficult for control subjects: social contract rules (of the form, "If you take the benefit, then you must satisfy the requirement") and precaution rules (of the form, "If you engage in hazardous activity X, then you must take precaution Y"). R.M. performed significantly worse in social contract reasoning than in precaution reasoning, when compared both with normal controls and with other brain-damaged subjects. This dissociation in reasoning performance provides evidence that reasoning about social exchange is a specialized and separable component of human social intelligence, and is consistent with other research indicating that the brain processes information about the social world differently from other types of information.
Adult↗
Cross-cultural evidence of cognitive adaptations for social exchange among the Shiwiar of Ecuadorian Amazonia.
On the basis of evolutionary game theory, it was hypothesized that humans have an evolved cognitive specialization for reasoning about social exchange, including a subroutine for detecting cheaters. This hypothesis led to a specific prediction: Although humans are known to be poor at detecting potential violations of conditional rules in general, they should nevertheless detect them easily when the rule involves social exchange and looking for violations corresponds to looking for cheaters. This prediction was subsequently confirmed by numerous tests. Evolutionary analyses further predict that: (i) in humans, complex adaptations will be distributed in a species-typical fashion; and (ii) aspects of cognitive organization relevant to performing the evolved function of an adaptation should be more buffered against environmental and cultural variation than function-irrelevant aspects. Here we report experiments testing whether social exchange reasoning exhibits these properties of adaptations. Existing tests of conditional reasoning were adapted for nonliterate experimental subjects and were administered to Shiwiar hunter-horticulturalists of the Ecuadorian Amazon. As predicted, Shiwiar subjects were as highly proficient at cheater detection as subjects from developed nations. Indeed, the frequency of cheater-relevant choices among Shiwiar hunter-horticulturalists was indistinguishable from that of Harvard undergraduates. Also as predicted, cultural variation was confined to those aspects of reasoning that are irrelevant to social exchange algorithms functioning as an evolutionarily stable strategy. Finally, Shiwiar subjects displayed the same low performance on descriptive conditionals as subjects from developed nations. Taken together, these findings support the hypotheses that social exchange algorithms are species-typical and that their evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS)-relevant subroutines are developmentally buffered against cultural variation.
Adaptation, Psychological↗
Decisions and the evolution of memory: multiple systems, multiple functions.
Memory evolved to supply useful, timely information to the organism's decision-making systems. Therefore, decision rules, multiple memory systems, and the search engines that link them should have coevolved to mesh in a coadapted, functionally interlocking way. This adaptationist perspective suggested the scope hypothesis: When a generalization is retrieved from semantic memory, episodic memories that are inconsistent with it should be retrieved in tandem to place boundary conditions on the scope of the generalization. Using a priming paradigm and a decision task involving person memory, the authors tested and confirmed this hypothesis. The results support the view that priming is an evolved adaptation. They further show that dissociations between memory systems are not--and should not be--absolute: Independence exists for some tasks but not others.
Biological Evolution↗