Conference on Human Nature & Society

Spring Quarter 2002

Joint UCLA-UCSB Conferences held quarterly by
UCSB’s Evolution, Mind, and Behavior Program ( EMB ) and
UCLA’s Behavior, Evolution, and Culture Program ( BEC )

Saturday, 4 May 2002

Anthropology Reading Room
352 Haines Hall
UCLA

Agenda

9:30 Breakfast provided

10:30 Daphne Bugental UCSB Psychology

Acquisition of the Algorithms of Social Life A Domain-Based Approach

Proposals are offered that follow from Bugental's model of the algorithms that regulate the basic domains of social life. In the first study, it was proposed that if such domains reflect basic evolutionary design features, there should be greater universality at younger than at older ages in children's ways of thinking about relationships. In a test of this prediction, children between the ages of 6 and 10 were asked to categorize their relationships into those that had similar interaction features. Half of the children were Anglo and half were Latino (recent immigrants from Mexico). Results were consistent with predictions.
In a second study, a test was made of Bugental's proposal that the implementation of different social domains is fine-tuned to (recurring) variations in environmental affordances. An experimental test was made of the prediction that parents make a higher investment in their "low risk" infants than their "high risk" infants if they lack resources (e.g., problem-solving skills, social support); in contrast, they make a higher investment in their "high risk" infants than their "low risk" infants if they are provided such resources. Predictions were supported, and evidence was given to show the implications for child health.

12:00 Lunch provided

1:30 Tim P. German UCSB Psychology

Acquiring (and maintaining) a ‘theory of mind’
Competence and performance in belief-desire reasoning across the lifespan ‘Theory of mind’ is the capacity to predict and explain the behavior of others in terms of mental state concepts such as belief and desire. A major discovery in this field is that before the age of four years, children fail tasks requiring them to attribute false beliefs to another person. This finding is often taken to indicate the child has undergone ‘conceptual change’ – that a new concept has been ‘discovered’ – as a result of the operation of domain general theory building mechanisms. An alternative proposal is that mental state concepts, including belief, are available much earlier in life via the operation of innate, domain specific learning mechanisms, and that failure at false belief tasks is a result of performance demands inherent in the typical task structure. In this talk I will provide evidence and argument in favor of the second view, showing how false belief task success and failure is largely a result of developing ability to exert inhibitory control over the salience of competing representations of belief content. This competence-performance approach can be used to develop models of successful belief-desire reasoning, which make predictions about the course of this ability across the lifespan.

3:00 Susanne Lohmann UCLA Political Science

Why Some Groups Work and Others Fail Collective action and institutions are the two central topics of political science. Human beings, by coordinating their efforts or by cooperating with each other, can achieve better payoffs than they can if they act as isolated individuals or exploit each other. The interaction of human beings is often structured by political institutions-majority rule, committees, federalism, bureaucracy, and the like. How can human beings, by subjecting themselves to political institutions, shape collective action to achieve better outcomes? The workings of governance structures are especially hard to understand in decentralized systems with distributed information and dispersed decision-making powers. Such systems are notoriously prone to factionalism, ideology, and morale problems.

5:30 Adjourn for no-host dinner

PLEASE NOTE: The HNAS meeting scheduled for May 4 is NOT open to the public. Unfortunately, due to limited resources we are forced to restrict the meeting to those scholars and students who are pursuing an active research and/or educational program in evolutionary approaches and closely related fields, and who have a formal affiliation with an institute of higher learning or similar research center (i.e., you must be a faculty member, postdoc, research associate, graduate student, or invited undergrad to attend). Individuals who do not meet these criteria will not be admitted.