HBES Funding Grants Solicited for Oct 1 Deadline

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The HBES Executive Council is now soliciting funding applications from HBES members for an October 1, 2020 deadline.

 

Two grants are available for this round of funding:

1. General Funding Grant, which is intended to subsidize costs associated with hosting events such as conferences and pre-conference meetings, workshops, and other activities or educational opportunities related to the mission of HBES.

HBES will fund proposals of up to $5,500 (we do not fund honoraria).

Priority is given to proposals that:

  1. Benefit junior scholars (and, especially students) either directly, through subsidizing travel and cost of attendance to events or, indirectly, through educational opportunities afforded by the funding;
  2. Have a broad, wide-reaching impact; and
  3. Support is not easily available through other channels.

 

2. Student Funding Grant, which is intended to subsidize the cost of hosting a guest speaker at the student’s home institution. The topic of the guest speaker must be related to the mission of HBES.

HBES will fund proposals of up to $2,500 to subsidize travel, accommodation, and event costs for the speaker (we do not fund honoraria).
Funding is limited to one funded proposal per institution, per year.
The student applicant is required to submit a written report to the council following the event.

 

See our Funding page for details, submission guidelines, and submission links.

Not an HBES member? Join or renew today!

Early Career (Evolutionary) Writing Group!

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Early Career (Evolutionary) Writing Group!

 

Are you an early career HBES member feeling socially distanced from your evolutionary psychology peers?

Would you like some external motivation to get writing done?

 

A virtual writing group is being organized by Stacey Makhanova.

Assistant professors, post-docs, and graduate students at the dissertation stage are welcome to join.

 

If you are interested, see the Google Doc for details and to add your contact info to the email list:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1MApDYnB5OErkXhgIhA05ataUlJHhY9B16ighMk2xO0A/edit?usp=sharing

PhD Position at Nations Museum of Natural History, Paris, France

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Thesis: body piercing and past human migrations

Phd thesis proposal: National museum of natural history, Paris, France

 

Recommended background: archaeology, or anthropology, or human population

Genetics

 

Lab: Eco-Anthropologie Umr 7206, Musée De L’homme, Paris, France

Duration: 3 years (starting fall 2020)

Supervisors: Franz Manni and Evelyne Heyer

Net salary: 1,400 euro

Contact email: franz.manni@mnhn.fr

 

How to apply:

Contact us before the 11th of June 2020, sending a short motivation Letter, a cv and a list of available master 2 exams scores.  Candidates Will be contacted back. The best candidate will have to prepare some Paperwork by the June, 19, 2020 to be admitted to a formal skype interview Of 20 minutes (10 minutes to illustrate the project and 10 minutes for Questions) to be set 1-3, July, 2020.

 

This phd project is aimed at investigating the spread of ancestral Body piercing practices in relation to past human migrations. This Is to say that body piercing is here considered as a vertically Transmissible cultural trait, maybe having a limited number of origins in time and space.  Like other body modifications (skull deformations, Teeth alterations, scarifications, tattoos, neck elongation, etc.), body Piercing relies on a very specific and quite complex know-how. Although Its symbolism is variable, diachronically and synchronously, the Practice actually relies on the method used to create, heal and enlarge A “tunnel” in the flesh: when the know-how is lost, the practice Becomes hardly possible. This is the research hypothesis of the thesis: The ancestors of the populations who practice(d) body piercing learned How to do it by contact with other populations. The history of body Piercing is likely to mirror past human contacts and migrations.  To be Clear: this doctoral project concerns only the study of traditional Body piercing practiced by many peoples in the world, it does not Directly concern “modern” body piercing emerged in California (the “modern primitives”) in the mid-1970s. Nevertheless, this recent Renaissance has shown that several years have been necessary to develop, Ex nihilo, a viable body piercing technique, meaning that it is not easy to reinvent body piercing. This is why ancestral (“traditional”) body Piercing may have persisted only where the know-how related to it has Been transmitted through direct learning, generation after generation. The oldest body piercing ornament is dated 46,000 years ago (langley et Al. 2016). Although other body modifications (ex: tattooing) can be as Old, body piercing leaves more durable evidence: the ornaments. Easily Recognizable by their shape (rounded, cylindrical, conical, or toroidal), Their symmetry, weight and polishing, body piercing ornaments will be the major object of study of the thesis. Contemporary or old, they are Available in many collections (public or private), this is why fieldwork Will not be necessary.  The project stems from an exhibition that took place at the Musée De L’homme , Paris, France (march 2019/2020; Curator f. Manni) and related work. The candidate will benefit the Help of the research network at the origin of the exhibition (40 Researchers, 12 countries: archaeologists, ethnologists, anthropologists, Curators). Currently the network is involved in the writing of a manual on body modifications to be published by an international academic Publisher. The outcome of the thesis can be included in it.

 

See here for more information

Helping Behavior is Non-Zero-Sum

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by Michael Ent

 

In the television show Man vs. Wild, Bear Grylls would venture into inhospitable areas attempting to show viewers how one could survive alone in the wilderness. Few people would be enthusiastic about following in his footsteps. This reluctance is partly because humans generally rely on help from others to fulfill even basic survival needs like food and shelter. Despite extensive training, even Grylls frequently ended up scrounging for insects and drinking his own urine out of desperation.

While studying a group of modern hunter-gatherers, Lawrence Sugiyama found that a majority of adults had suffered an injury or illness that hindered their foraging ability to the point that they would have likely starved if they had not received help from others. In such a group, it often pays to help others in need because you might need to rely those same people in the future if you find yourself in dire straits. In a less relatable example of helping behavior, vampire bats that have just eaten have been found to regurgitate blood to feed hungry bats with whom they have established a reciprocal relationship. When one bat finds food and her friend doesn’t, she may share some of the spoils; when she is starving and her friend finds food, her friend may repay the favor. Importantly, for this type of reciprocal helping behavior to evolve, the benefit to the recipient must outweigh the cost to the helper – it wouldn’t do much good for a satiated bat to regurgitate blood into the mouth of another satiated bat. In other words, for reciprocal exchange relationships to be mutually beneficial, individual helping acts must be non-zero-sum—one party’s gain does not correspond to equal losses incurred by the other party.

In our research, my co-authors and I found that, when people reflected on helping episodes from their past, they reported that the benefits to the recipients vastly outweighed the costs to the helpers. In other words, the help was non-zero-sum. In this research, pairs of friends recalled and reported about occurrences in which they helped each other. This yielded two accounts of each helping episode: one from the perspective of the helper and one from the perspective of the recipient. Both helpers and recipients consistently, and to an equal degree, reported that the benefits of the help outweighed the costs. If people tend to help one another when they can confer large benefits to their relationship partners without incurring much cost, then acts of helping don’t merely transfer value from one person to another, they create gains through exchange.

 

“If people tend to help one another when they can confer large benefits to their relationship partners without incurring much cost, then acts of helping don’t merely transfer value from one person to another, they create gains through exchange.”

 

This research relied on subjective reports of costs and benefits, so there could be motivational factors that reduce people’s tendency to report help as non-zero-sum. People tend to report events in ways that cast themselves in an unrealistically favorable light, known as self-enhancement bias. By exaggerating the costs of the help they provided, helpers could cast themselves as self-sacrificing heroes. On the other side of the coin, by downplaying the benefits of the help they received, recipients could highlight their own self-reliance. Both of these distortions could reduce the degree to which people would regard helping acts as non-zero-sum. Nevertheless, we found that both helpers and recipients consistently reported that the benefits of help outweighed the costs.

In our research, helpers and recipients differed on one important dimension: their perceptions of indebtedness. Helpers underestimated the degree to which recipients felt indebted as a result of the help they received. This finding dovetails with previous research that suggests that recipients tend to view the help they receive as more generous than those who provided the help. This type of helper-recipient asymmetry could enable relationships strengthen over time. For example, if I do a favor for my friend, I might view it as trivial and undeserving of reciprocity. However, my friend might view it as a big deal and repay the favor. In this case, I would feel like I received excessive reciprocity and would be motivated to do something nice for my friend in the future. In this way, the helper-recipient asymmetry we found in our research could contribute to self-reinforcing cycles of altruism. Previous research on the victim-perpetrator “magnitude gap” has found a similar pattern at play in escalating cycles of revenge. Victims tend to view transgressions as more heinous than perpetrators. Because of this asymmetry, when victims seek revenge, they tend to do so in a way that seems excessive to the original perpetrators (who may feel that they now have a score to settle)5. Taken together, helper-recipient and victim-perpetrator asymmetries may lead acts of altruism and acts of harm to escalate over repeated interactions of the parties involved. In other words, both altruistic and antagonistic relationships may amplify over time.

 

“Although helping behavior is not unique to humans, it is a vital part of human nature.”

 

In a now famous exchange, the anthropologist Margaret Mead was asked what she considered to be the first sign of civilization. Instead of citing tools, religious artifacts, or the like, she cited a healed human femur that was about 15,000 years old. She explained that a broken femur would have been tantamount to a death sentence, and the fact that it had healed indicated that the person must have received help from others. Although helping behavior is not unique to humans, it is a vital part of human nature. The non-zero-sum nature of human helping behavior means that acts of help don’t merely redistribute value, they bring more goodness into the world.

 

 

Read the paper: Helping behavior is non-zero-sum: Helper and recipient autobiographical accounts of help

How Does the Mind Make Friend Choices?

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by Jaimie Arona Krems & Daniel Conroy-Beam with thanks to Laureon A. Merrie

 

Lenù & Lila, Gene & Phineas, Thelma & Louise, Cap & Bucky. Best friends are fixtures in our lives. Best friends might not benefit our fitness as obviously and directly as mates do, but having good friends is thought to be the next best thing for one’s health behind quitting smoking. In a recent paper, we ask how the mind might integrate our myriad friend preferences—for friends who are smart like Lenù, charismatic like Phineas, steadfast like Thelma or Cap—to make actual friend choices.

Perhaps in an ideal world, everyone we liked would like us back, time and affection would be infinite, and everyone we’ve ever encountered (and liked) we could maintain as friends. But as nice as ideal worlds and adages about the unbounded nature of love can sound, they bump up against reality. For example, time is inelastic yet required to maintain social relationships. To some extent, our affections might also be finite. In the end, we can maintain only so many ties at any one time.

Somehow, then, we must evaluate, compare, and ultimately select friends. Considering how important having friends and their support can be for one’s survival—and potentially even the thriving of one’s offspring—these friend choices matter.

To make these choices, we need an algorithm that combines information about what we prefer in friends, and the extent to which each prospective friend fulfills those friend preferences, presumably translating this information into a summary rating of sorts. There are a number of “preference integration” algorithms that could accomplish this.

In the mating literature, a Euclidean integration hypothesis has performed quite well. Therein, the Euclidean algorithm represents mate preferences and prospective mates as points within an n-dimensional space, computing a summary mate value that is inversely proportional to the distance between those points. For example, this summary can integrate the discrepancies between wanting a friend who’s a 10/10 in loyalty, a 10/10 on intelligence, a 4/10 on optimism, and so on, with a prospective friend who is a 6/10 on loyalty and intelligence and an 8/10 on optimism.

We tested whether some of those critical predictions derived from a Euclidean integration hypothesis—which have already found support in the mating literature—hold in the friendship domain. To do this, we gathered data from three separate samples of US participants (N = 817 undergraduate and adult community participant convenience samples). In each sample, we asked participants to rate themselves on 23 trait characteristics using 8-point bipolar scales. For example, we’d ask people to rate themselves as being “Very loyal” to “Very disloyal”. Participants also completed ratings for both their ideal same-sex best friends and their actual same-sex best friends. They also repeated this for their ideal and actual same-sex close friends and for their ideal and actual (or most recent) romantic partners.

We then computed several dimensions of partner value, including the friend and mate values of each participant, as well as the extent to which each participant’s actual best friends (and close friends, mates) fulfilled their ideals. For example, a person’s best-friend preference fulfillment was calculated as the Euclidean distance between the preferences they marked having in a best friend and where they marked their actual best friends as falling on those trait characteristics.

Using these data, we found support for several critical predictions implied by a Euclidean integration hypothesis in the friendship domain. First, we predicted that people who possess characteristics that render them ideal friends (i.e., people with high friend value) should be highly sought after, meaning that they have their pick of friends. Thus, we predicted—and found—that high friend-value individuals seem able to attract friends who better fulfill their preferences. We also predicted and found that high friend-value individuals not only set higher standards for ideal friends—after all, they would seem able to make such demands—but also that they report having real-world best friends who themselves have higher friend-value. In addition, we also explored these patterns with respect to people’s mate value, mate preferences, and mate preference fulfillment—replicating Conroy-Beam and colleagues’ previous research.

 

“We also predicted and found that high friend-value individuals not only set higher standards for ideal friends, but also that they report having real-world best friends who themselves have higher friend-value”

 

We also started to explore something new: the dissociability of friend- and mate-value. On one hand, the characteristics that make one an ideal friend (e.g., being nice) can overlap with the characteristics that make one an ideal mate (e.g., being nice). At the same time, people might also have some different preferences for prospective friends and mates. A same-sex friend who is highly sexually attractive might be a threatening rival in the mating domain, for example, but an other-sex mate who is highly sexually attractive might be rather desirable.

So, do people’s friend values better predict their friend outcomes (than mate outcomes), and do people’s mate values better predict their mate outcomes (than friend outcomes)?

Sort of.

We find some, albeit mixed, support for dissociability. This finding is particularly intriguing, though, insofar as it adds to the broader conversation about association value (see Michael Bang Petersen, Aaron Sell, John Tooby, and Leda Cosmides’ 2012 paper in this same journal for more on that).

A large part of the impetus for our work was to address the gap in friendship research. To some extent, these important relationships remain an evolutionary mystery. More work on friendships could contribute to solving that puzzle. Luckily, a pretty handy playbook for conducting some future work on friendship already exists—the robust, deep literature on mating relationships.

Here, drawing from work conducted in the mate preferences literature, we found some support for the Euclidean integration hypothesis, suggesting that this algorithm might be how the mind integrates friend preferences to make friend choices. However, exciting new work recently accepted at EHB also suggests another algorithm to explore in friendships (see Bradner, Brase, & Huxman, in press). We look forward to pleasantly arguing with our friends about this, and to the future of work on friendship in evolutionary social science.

 

 

Read the paper: First tests of Euclidean preference integration in friendship: Euclidean friend value and power of choice on the friend market

Evolving our Understanding of Morphometric Cues to Behavior Through the Study of Nonhuman Primates

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by Vanessa Wilson and Drew Altschul

 

Over the last 16 years, the study of human facial morphometry, and its potential links to social behaviour, has received a lot of attention. One metric in particular, the facial Width-to-Height ratio, has been linked to an array of dominance-like traits in males, such as aggression, achievement drive, psychopathy and (low) cooperation. In other words, men with higher ratios (i.e. relatively wider faces) tend to exhibit higher levels of dominance-like traits. Moreover, studies have found that people also tend to associate wider faces with being more dominant. The idea that we can ‘read’ certain traits in a person’s face is certainly an attractive one. But in reality, is such a relationship really so straight forward?

A number of studies have now cast doubt on the idea that these relationships are anything more than spurious. Indeed, early proposals that testosterone is the underlying mechanism that drives the relationship between aggressive, dominant male behaviours and wider faces are not strongly supported in the literature. There are several alternative explanations for what seems to be a tentative link between facial morphology and social behaviour. Amongst them is the evolutionary mismatch hypothesis, which proposes that facial cues to behavioural tendencies might have been salient in ancestral environments, yet no longer predict those tendencies in modern environments. Nevertheless, ancestral biases remain, resulting in a mismatch between existing behavioural traits, and how people predict those traits from facial features.

Where then, do nonhuman primates come into this? The problem with human-focuses studies is that, aside to the fact that most studies draw their samples from WEIRD populations (western, educated, industrialised, rich and democratic), by concentrating research on only humans, we learn little about the origins of facial morphology as a cue to social behaviour. If we really want to get into the evolution of the facial Width-to-Height ratio, or any other metric, as a behavioural cue, then we need to consider whether parallel relationships exist in other species. One theory that addresses the mechanisms underlying the link between face width and aggression, proposes that a wider zygomatic arch (producing a wider face) could improve skull strength, and therefore offers advantage in physical combat. Since humans live in relatively egalitarian societies, with low levels of in-group aggression, this could explain the weak findings for facial metrics as cues to traits pertaining to combat advantage. By examining whether similar relationships exist in species with lower levels of social tolerance and higher physical aggression, one can test this hypothesis.

 

“By concentrating research on only humans, we learn little about the origins of facial morphology as a cue to social behaviour.”

 

In our recent study, we examined links between facial morphometry and personality ratings in chimpanzees, a species that live in male-dominated, fission-fusion societies, where male displays of strength and physical aggression play an important role in social interactions. Notably, examination of chimpanzee personality dimensions on a 54-item scale reveals six components, five of which resemble the human ‘Big five’ (Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism), and a sixth that is labelled Dominance. Several of these components have been linked to observations of aggression in chimpanzees, in particular Dominance. We examined keeper-ratings on these six dimensions in relation to photo-derived measures of the facial Width-to-Height ratio, in a sample of 131 captive chimpanzees from zoos and research facilities in Japan, the UK and the USA. We found no evidence of sexual dimorphism in the facial Width-to-Height ratio, consistent with findings in humans. We did find a relationship between facial Width-to-Height ratio and the dimension Dominance, but in females, rather than males (as has been reported in the human literature), which was specific only to the western subspecies (Pan troglodytes verus).

At first glance these results may seem surprising. The differences in findings for males and females could, however, be explained by differences in rank stability with age. That is, females tend to maintain somewhat stable ranks across the lifespan, whereas males compete over social status, which tends to vary across the lifespan. Indeed, since male chimpanzees tend to be more aggressive than females, these findings do not support the hypothesis that the facial Width-to-Height ratio provides a combat advantage. The picture is perhaps more complicated than that, since our findings suggest that how social status is both achieved, and maintained, could play a role in whether the facial Width-to-Height ratio predicts dominant tendencies.

Moreover, we compared our findings with those from previous studies on humans, and bonobos, by examining differences in the strength of relationship between facial Width-to-Height ratio and social traits. We found that, compared to results for chimpanzee females and bonobos, the effect sizes for both humans and chimpanzee males were negligible, with the strongest effect emerging for bonobo Affiliative Dominance. Given that both bonobos and humans are considered to be more socially tolerant than chimpanzees, these differences suggest that social style (i.e. the level of tolerance a species exhibits) is not a strong predictor of trait-related variance in the facial Width-to-Height ratio, at least amongst apes.

So where do these findings stand with regard to current interpretations of the human literature? Alongside the accumulating results from brown capuchins, the Macaca genus, and bonobos, these findings suggest that the facial Width-to-Height ratio existed in a common primate ancestor, before the divergence of New World monkeys. Whilst questions remain about both the existence and strength of the facial Width-to-Height ratio as a cue to behavioural tendencies in humans, answers to these questions may be found by taking a comparative approach to understanding what selection pressures have driven this relationship. Specifically, examining broader differences in social style and rank stability could hold the key to understanding the variable nature of this relationship amongst primates.

 

“Our own recent evolutionary history, with the development of culture and language, could have provided alternative means to communicate dominance, reducing the need for facial cues to such traits”

 

For now, our own interpretations support the proposal of Wang and colleagues for an evolutionary mismatch in humans: our own recent evolutionary history, with the development of culture and language, could have provided alternative means to communicate dominance, reducing the need for facial cues to such traits. Yet the floor remains open for more thorough investigation, and we strongly encourage other researchers pondering this field to embrace comparative research as well as non-WEIRD samples, in order to understand the existence, origins and mechanisms of the relationship between facial morphology and dominance behaviour.

 

 

Read the paper: Facial width-to-height ratio in chimpanzees: Links to age, sex and personality

A Critique of Life History Approaches to Trait Covariation

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by Brendan Zietsch

 

Life history theory has been promoted as a unifying framework for understanding trait covariation in the social sciences. Underlying this approach is the assumption that patterns of trait covariation across species, and the Darwinian principles thought to underlie those patterns, can be extrapolated to trait covariation across individuals within human populations. In particular, it is assumed that a ‘fast-slow’ continuum of life history ‘strategies’, observed across species, should be observed across individuals within human populations – not only with regard to traditional life history traits but practically all individual differences, including personality and psychopathology.

In my paper with Morgan Sidari we argue that these assumptions are not justified. The processes that create trait covariation across species and across individuals are fundamentally different, and so the two types of covariation need not be parallel or even related. This fundamental problem undermines a great deal of research in this burgeoning field, and warrants a rethink moving forward.

To illustrate the point, we use the simple example of body height. Humans are taller than rabbits because of their different genes. Individual humans also differ in height largely because of their different genes. But the processes that create genetic height differences between rabbits and humans (i.e. Darwinian evolution) are nothing like the processes that create genetic height differences between individual humans. The fact I am taller than a rabbit is primarily due to our different histories of Darwinian evolution over countless generations of different selective pressures; the fact I am taller than my friend or my brother has little (or nothing, in the case of my brother) to do with our different histories of Darwinian evolution, but rather my chance inheritance of more “tall alleles” compared to them. As with all individuals of European ancestry, many of my friends and I share nearly the same set of ancestors who were alive 1,000 years ago (and likely many ancestors more recent than that) – a very short period in evolutionary time. Therefore, the reason my friends and I are of different heights is largely independent of our different histories of Darwinian evolution. We are different heights mostly for the same reason my brother and I (who share all our ancestors) are of different heights – that is, the random shuffling process of Mendelian segregation during meiosis gave us different combinations of our ancestors’ genetic material. Overall, this example highlights why we cannot straightforwardly transfer the same evolutionary principles from the explanation of human-rabbit differences to human-human differences.

 

“Darwinian phenotype-environment matching at the species level and plasticity at the individual level are completely different processes and may or may not lead to equivalent predictions regarding trait covariation.”

 

The same argument applies to trait covariation. If environments that tend to favour large bodies also tend to favour high parental investment, then genes controlling the two traits will come to covary across species. There is no equivalent evolutionary process creating trait covariation across individuals. Selection and evolution can lead to phenotypic plasticity and adaptive calibration of individuals’ traits to their personal environments; but Darwinian phenotype-environment matching at the species level and plasticity at the individual level are completely different processes and may or may not lead to equivalent predictions regarding trait covariation. Similarly, there are different consequences at the species and individual levels in situations where selection on one trait depends on the level of another trait. If genes for high parental investment are advantageous in a large species and disadvantageous in a small species, genes for large body size and genes for high parental investment will tend to go together across species, and likewise genes for small body size and low parental investment. But there is no equivalent evolutionary process by which variation in different traits within a population can be combined based on how well they work together. Darwinian evolution cannot combine “tall alleles” with “high parental investment alleles”, and “short alleles” with “low parental investment alleles”, within a sexually reproducing population in the same way as it can across species, because of Mendel’s Law of Independent Assortment: segregating alleles are transmitted to offspring independently of each other, so allele configurations are not inherited.

We explain why exceptions to Mendel’s Law of Independent Assortment – correlational selection, physical linkage, non-random mating, and pleiotropy – don’t change our central point. We also discuss adapted developmental plasticity, where variation and covariation of life history-related traits is shaped by environmental conditions during an individual’s development. In particular, we note behavioural genetics research that shows little influence of early environment on trait variation and covariation, and why these findings pose problems for these plasticity-based life history accounts. Further, we discuss why proposed trade-offs between specific life history traits – trade-offs that are typically on the within-individual level – need not translate to covariation of those traits across individuals.

 

“Much of the life history work on trait covariation in humans does not have a solid theoretical grounding; there is little basis for the fast-slow continuum as a framework for understanding human trait covariation.”

 

Overall, we conclude that much of the life history work on trait covariation in humans does not have a solid theoretical grounding. In particular, there is little basis for the fast-slow continuum as a framework for understanding human trait covariation. Given the frequent attacks on evolutionary psychology from other disciplines, our field must be especially vigilant for conceptual flaws in the underpinnings of our research – otherwise, we risk validating those criticisms. Those using life history theory to study individual differences and trait correlations must ensure their paradigm is properly connected to the fundamentals of evolutionary theory.

 

 

Read the paper: A critique of life history approaches to human trait covariation

Two funded Ph.D. students at the University of Kardinal Stefan Wyszyński (Warsaw, Poland)

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Peter Jonason is looking for two funded (conference travel included) Ph.D. students at the University of Kardinal Stefan Wyszyński (Warsaw, Poland) in the Institute of Psychology to study online dating advertisements from an extended phenotype perspective. The project involves cross-cultural collaborations, psychometrics training, and research in personality, cyber, and social psychology from an evolutionary perspective. Details can be found by contacting him (click here) or on the web (click here).