February 6th, 2003, February 6th, 2003, February 6th, 2003, February 6th, 2003, February 6th, 2003

SPSP Evolutionary Psychology Preconference

Thursday, February 6th, 2003 9:00 am - 3:30 pm Sheraton Universal Hotel, Studio 4

333 Universal Hollywood Drive, Universal City, California 91608 Phone (818) 980-1212

Evolutionary Psychology Preconference Schedule

Note: Each talk will be approximately 30 minutes long followed by 5 minutes of discussion.

Morning Schedule

9:00 Coffee and Pastries and Welcome

9:30-10:05 Martie Haselton, Error Management and the Evolution of Receiver Bias

10:05-10:40 David Buss, Sexual Conflict

10:40-10:50 Short Break

10:50-11:25 Doug Kenrick & Jon Maner, How the mind warps: Selective attention and functional projection

11:25-12:00 Leda Cosmides, Robert Kurzban, & John Tooby, Can Race be Erased? Coalitional Computation and Social Categorization

Afternoon Schedule

12:00-1:15 Lunch

1:15-1:50 Jim Sidanius, The Interactive Nature of Patriarchy and Arbitrary-Set Hierarchy: The Dynamics of Sexism and Racism from an Evolutionary and Social Dominance Perspective

1:50-2:25 Dacher Keltner, Evolutionary Underpinnings of a Benevolent Species

2:25 - 2:35 Break

2:35-3:10 Shelley Taylor, Using Biological Evidence to Build an Evolutionary Model: The Case of Tend and Befriend

3:10-3:30 Gian Gonzaga, Coping with Attractive Alternatives: Distal Causes and Proximal Mechanisms

Following the Conference, Coffee and Cocktails, Location TBA...

Select Abstracts (listed alphabetically)

David Buss, Sexual Conflict Sexual conflict permeates many social relationships. Empirical evidence points to the “footprints” of coevolutionary arms races between the sexes, such as deceptive mating strategies in one sex and coevolved defensive strategies in the other. This paper proposes that some mating strategies have also evolved as a result of triadic or multi-party antagonistic coevolution. This form of antagonistic coevolution creates multidimensional adaptive problems, selecting for strategies that simultaneously solve conflicting problems imposed by intrasexual competitors, existing mates, and prospective mates. These conflicts play out across the entire temporal duration of mating--before mating has taken place, after a mateship has formed, and in the aftermath of a breakup. The hallmarks of triadic antagonistic coevolution have been documented in fruitflies. Male seminal proteins produced by one male simultaneously combat competitor’s sperm and reduce female sexual appetite, but can be toxic to the female. This paper proposes that there are psychological and strategic analogues of toxic male seminal proteins in human mating. These include strategies to induce bidding wars among prospective mates before mating, sending sexual signals to non-mates during a mateship, driving a wedge between existing mates in order to promote a breakup, and running interference with re-mating after a breakup.

Leda Cosmides, Robert Kurzban, & John Tooby, Can Race be Erased? Coalitional Computation and Social Categorization Previous studies have established that people encode the race of each individual they encounter, and do so via computational processes that appear to be both automatic and mandatory. If true, this conclusion would be important, because categorizing others by their race is a precondition for treating them differently according to race. Here we report experiments, using unobtrusive measures, showing that categorizing individuals by race is not inevitable, and supporting an alternative hypothesis: that encoding by race is instead a reversible byproduct of cognitive machinery that evolved to detect coalitional alliances. The results show that subjects encode coalitional affiliations as a normal part of person representation. More importantly, when cues of coalitional affiliation no longer track or correspond to race, subjects markedly reduce the extent to which they categorize others by race, and indeed may cease doing so entirely. Despite a lifetime’s experience of race as a predictor of social alliance, less than 4 min of exposure to an alternate social world was enough to deflate the tendency to categorize by race. These results suggest that racism may be a volatile and eradicable construct that persists only so long as it is actively maintained through being linked to parallel systems of social alliance.

Gian Gonzaga, Coping with Attractive Alternatives: Distal Causes and Proximal Mechanisms Committed intimate relationships confer a number of evolutionary benefits on those involved, including a division of labor, social support, mating opportunities, and assistance in raising offspring to the age of viability. Relationships also bring challenges, namely how do partners remain committed to each other in the face of alternatives that may, in the moment, be more attractive, but would jeopardize the long-term benefits of a pair bond. The current work investigates what strategies individuals use when faced with the thought of an attractive alternative and tests the hypothesis that the momentary experience of love, but not sexual desire, allows an individual to successfully suppress the thought of an attractive alternative. Further, it is predicted that the momentary experience of love, but not sexual desire, relates to higher commitment to an intimate relationship. Discussion centers on how evolutionary theories and social psychological processes can inform each other in order to aid psychologists in a better understanding of social behavior.

Martie Haselton, Error Management and the Evolution of Receiver Bias Receivers often have biased interpretations of a communicator’s intentions. Men, for example, appear to systematically over-estimate a woman’s sexual interest on the basis of ambiguous cues such as a smile. Theoretically, these biases have been explained by invoking cognitive heuristics, biased effects of mass media images, and insufficient adjustment away from the receiver’s own intentions and desires. We propose an alternative explanatory framework, Error Management Theory (EMT; Haselton & Buss, 2000), to account for many systematic biases in communication. EMT proposes that biased decision-making procedures will evolve whenever there is a recurrent asymmetry in the costs of false positive and false negative errors. The sexual overperception bias in men, for example, is hypothesized to reduce the chances of missing reproductively beneficial sexual opportunities. EMT predictions to be discussed include the following: (1) the sexual overperception bias will be most pronounced for female targets displaying fertility cues, (2) women systematically underestimate men’s commitment, particularly in the early stages of courtship, (3) men and women involved in committed relationships overestimate the sexual intentions of potential sexual rivals. Supporting evidence from a series of empirical studies will be presented.

Doug Kenrick & Jon Maner, How the mind warps: Selective attention and functional projection We will discuss a series of studies examining very proximate cognitive processes in light of functionalist models of thought and behavior. The general goals are 1) to focus a bit more than usual on the content of cognition - what people are inclined to pay attention to, encode, and remember, 2) to begin to understand how selective attention, encoding, and memory might be affected by important adaptive motivations (such as self-protection and mating). In one series of studies, we found that both sexes are more likely to focus their eyes on and to later remember attractive female photographs. When given only a brief exposure to a group with some very attractive photos, both sexes also overestimate the number of attractive women (as compared to estimates made by participants given ample time to view the group). Although women do initially focus their eyes on attractive men, neither sex is particularly good at later remembering attractive men, nor does either sex overestimate the number of attractive men in the way they did for good-looking women. In another series of studies, we activated self-protective motivation (by having participants view a frightening film clip) or mating motivation (via a romantic film clip). Subsequently, men in the romantic motive condition attributed sexual arousal to photographically depicted attractive women (but not to other targets), but women showed no such effect in judgments of any targets. For both sexes, activating self-protective motivation led to increased attribution of anger to specific targets (male targets from a racial outgroup). Results are discussed in terms of Hume's classic dictum that "attention, encoding, and retrieval are the slaves of the limbic system" (well, perhaps Hume said it more eloquently).

Jim Sidanius, The Interactive Nature of Patriarchy and Arbitrary-Set Hierarchy: The Dynamics of Sexism and Racism from an Evolutionary and Social Dominance Perspective Using evolutionary psychology and social dominance theory (SDT) as the theoretical frameworks, this presentation will suggest that we re-think the problem of prejudice and discrimination in a number of specific ways. This re-thinking includes: a) fully appreciating the fact that the problems of prejudice and discrimination are most probably not primarily a question of intergroup antipathy, b) possibly accepting the fact that discrimination and intergroup oppression is intimately associated with the apparently ubiquitous tendency for human social systems to form and maintain group-based social hierarchies, c) fully embracing the necessity of understanding the problem of discrimination and intergroup conflict using multiple levels of analysis, and even theorizing about the intersections among these levels of analysis, and d) accepting the fact that the some of the essential dynamics of discrimination and prejudice might be qualitatively different, depending upon the targets of that discrimination. Thus, the subordinate-male-target hypothesis within SDT suggests that, while related to one another, sexism is a qualitatively different phenomenon than racism.