HBES is a scholarly community, for many of us it is our academic home away from home. And just like most communities around the world, ours has faced considerable challenges over the past two years. In this message, I want to express my gratitude to those who helped effectively maneuver HBES through unprecedented times, especially Leda Cosmides for her work as HBES president these last two years and Doug Kenrick for his service as past-president of HBES. Thank you also to Bernhard Fink for enhancing the HBES website and improving our capacity for online engagement. Thank you to Nicole Barbaro for her incredible efforts as HBES communications officer, Catherine Salmon for her longstanding contributions as HBES treasurer, and all members of the HBES Executive Committee. HBES has remained strong and resilient because of their efforts in growing our ability to be inclusive, welcoming, and digitally connected.

I also want to express my deep appreciation to the hosts of planned HBES conferences in Detroit and Palm Springs for their flexibility and hard work over the past two years—both conferences are now on schedule for 2022 and 2023, respectively. This was no easy task. Thank you to everyone who helped make our upcoming HBES Virtually Everywhere (#HBES2021) online conference a reality, especially the host committee (Coren Apicella, Chris von Rueden, Nicole Barbaro) and programme committee (Aaron Lukaszewski, Jaimie Krems, Anne Pisor, Cari Goetz). Coren pretty much dropped everything to make HBES Virtually Everywhere happen this summer, we all owe her significant thanks. And kudos to everyone who dedicated themselves to making our HBES Roundtable Seminar Series such a tremendous success this past year (videos of these events may be viewed on YouTube here.

Finally, I want to thank those HBES members who have committed their time and energy for crucially important work on the HBES Grievance Committee and in evaluating HBES grant proposals and award nominations. Jaimie Krems, chair of the HBES Grievance Committee, deserves special thanks for helping to make our community safer and more inclusive these past two years, and thank you to Nicole Barbaro for vigilantly monitoring, analyzing, and reporting on results from our HBES conference climate survey. A key focus of HBES has been on welcoming, developing, and highlighting early-career scholars from across the evolutionary behavioral sciences. HBES has supported graduate student and prospective graduate student luncheons, methods and statistics workshops, and meetings such as Women of HBES. This year at HBES Virtually Everywhere we have an LGBTQ+ mixer event hosted by Michael Barlev (thank you, Michael!).

HBES has honored and rewarded several categories of early-career scholarship at our annual conference, including awards for best conference posters, best post-doc papers/presentations, and new investigator awards. Since 2010, we have honored the best paper published in the HBES-affiliated journal Evolution and Human Behavior with the Margo Wilson Award. We have given HBES awards for Early Career Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution (2020 Winner, Katherine McAuliffe) and the Lifetime Career Award for Distinguished Scientific Contribution (2020 Winner, David Perrett). Through several of our HBES grant funding mechanisms, we have reached out to support a diverse array of evolution-related undergraduate student meetings, regional academic conferences, and professional organizations around the world.

HBES is truly a worldwide scholarly collaboration, but our community is only as robust and vibrant as the individual HBES members who dedicate themselves to making it so. Thank you to all HBES members whose service to our community has made a difference these past two years and for setting the stage for future generations to make it better still.

Looking forward to the future of HBES, I’m drawn back to the inspiring comments by past-president Dick Alexander during his 2008 keynote address to HBES in Kyoto, Japan. He remarked that, “The most important and frightening of all human adaptations is likely our stubborn and perhaps unique manner of alternating our most intense emotional expressions between the two extremes of amity and enmity within our own species…We need every tool available to understand such things about ourselves. These are reasons why the Human Behavior and Evolution Society has the potential to become the most important scientific organization in the world.”

Every tool available. In my view, that phrase captures the greatest potential of our HBES community. Each year we bring together a wide variety of scholars and their tools from disciplines such as Darwinian literary studies and communications, Darwinian medicine and economics, Darwinian politics and philosophy, evolutionary anthropology and biology, evolutionary neuroscience and genetics, evolutionary psychology and human ethology, evolutionary sociology and family studies, human behavioral ecology and demography, and primatology and comparative psychology (among many, many others). HBES was founded in hopes that we continuously learn from each other, that every HBES conference provides an opportunity for new sparks of connection to be made across disciplines, and that these connections help us to more fully understand the best and the worst of human behavior.

Personally, I’ve found the best part of HBES often comes from attending sessions outside of my area of expertise. The first occasion I encountered the wonderful tool D-Place was at HBES whilst attending a presentation outside my discipline. The stimulating talks I heard and the questions and debates that transpired throughout that session greatly affected my thinking and scholarship for years to come. HBES can do that, should do that, for each of us every year. I’ve found interdisciplinarity and exploring an issue with “every tool available” is where the scholarly magic happens. Further cultivating that interdisciplinary ethos is something I very much look forward to as president of HBES in the next few years.

In these challenging times, our coming together in HBES has never been more important, to science and to our collaborative community. I look forward to seeing you and learning from you all at HBES Virtually Everywhere (#HBES2021). Stay safe.

–Dave Schmitt, President, HBES

 

Dave will take over duties as HBES President following the HBES 2021 conference, along with the rest of the new members of the Executive Council

by Pieter van den Berg

 

We all know humans are social animals. So it makes sense that much of our psychology is geared towards analyzing social situations and choosing appropriate actions for them. This social psychology has to work in a complex and messy world. Every social interaction is different, involving different parties with their own desires and interests, and different possible actions to choose from. To make matters worse, we have to operate under considerable uncertainty: it is often impossible to accurately predict how our actions will turn out.

How has evolution equipped us with an effective psychology to navigate social decision making in this complex and uncertain world? This is not an easy question. Social evolution is intricate, because the fitness consequences of social behaviors depend on what others in the population are doing. A cooperative individual may be successful in a population full of trustworthy interaction partners, but that same individual may fare much worse when surrounded by cheaters. To gain insight in how evolution shapes social behaviors despite these intricacies, scholars have often relied on highly simplified models of social evolution, often reducing the messy social world to just a single type of interaction such as (most famously) the Prisoner’s Dilemma Game. The idea is that if we understand how evolution hypothetically shapes behavior in that very specific situation, we will gain an understanding of how evolution shaped parts of our social psychology.

But does evolution really tailor behavior separately for each specific social circumstance that may arise? This seems unlikely – especially given the fact that individuals often don’t even know all the specifics of the situations they find themselves in. By now, a realization has settled in that the human mind is not a smooth optimization machine, but often works in ways that seem unsophisticated or crude. This is exemplified in what are referred to as ‘cognitive biases’ – proof that people are not consistent or systematically deviate from acting in their own rational interest. Such biases can be the result of a psychological machinery that is not perfectly attuned to the situation at hand, but rather operates by using ‘heuristics’: simple behavioral strategies that work well across a range of situations, but that can ‘misfire’ in some specific circumstances.

Do people apply such rough rules of thumb in social situations, leading to behavior that is suboptimal or inconsistent? A few recent evolutionary modelling studies suggest that we might expect them to. Bear & Rand have shown that evolution can produce a psychology where individuals ‘intuitively’ invest in cooperative relationships, even if that relationship will not extend far enough into the future to make that investment worthwhile. In 2018, I developed a model to investigate how individuals are selected to behave in a ‘messy’ world with many different types of social interactions and some uncertainty about which situation they are in. This model showed that evolution predictably leads to the emergence of simple heuristic strategies that often cooperate, even in situations where it is guaranteed to lead to bad outcomes. These ‘social heuristics’ even evolved when individuals had only intermediate uncertainty about the social interactions they engaged in, and could implement more sophisticated strategies (tailoring behavior to specific circumstances) without any extra cost.

For a new study that was just published in Evolution and Human Behavior, we conducted a decision making experiment in which we confronted participants with a similar situation as the individuals in our evolutionary simulation model. Through software specially designed for this study, our test subjects were repeatedly coupled with other participants to engage in a social interaction. At the core, the social interactions were simple: both participants in a pair had to simultaneously choose whether or not to ‘help’ the other. Helping provided a benefit to the interaction partner (in points that were later converted to real money), but it also had a consequence for the helper herself. This consequences of helping varied between situations: sometimes it was directly beneficial to the helper, but in other situations it carried a crippling cost. Between different experimental treatments, we varied how much uncertainty the participants had about the consequences of helping. This ranged from no uncertainty at all, via partial uncertainty (participants were told that the consequence of helping lied in some range), to complete uncertainty.

The social heuristic our participants were using was effective in turning a situation of uncertainty into a situation of virtual certainty. But, as a side-effect, it also led them to cooperate more.

Our results show that in the treatments with more uncertainty, participants helped their interaction partners more often than if they had little uncertainty. The reason behind this can be found in social heuristics. Most participants were interpreting the uncertainty range they were given in a very simple way: they just acted as if the real consequence of helping was given by the center of the uncertainty range. For example, a participant who was told that the consequence of helping would be anywhere between a cost of 5 and 15 points acted the same way as a participant who was certain that it was 10 points. This is a simple solution to dealing with uncertainty: if you do not know which of many possible scenarios is going to unfold, just choose one that seems typical or likely and act as if you are certain that this is what is going to happen.

The social heuristic our participants were using was effective in turning a situation of uncertainty into a situation of virtual certainty. But, as a side-effect, it also led them to cooperate more. To see why, consider a simplified version in which there are just three possibilities, each equally likely: the cost of helping is either 5, 10 or 15 points. Let’s say you would be willing to help at a cost of 5 of 10 points, but not 15. If you’re like our participants, you will reduce your uncertainty by assuming you are in the most typical situation: you will just act as if you are sure that the cost is 10 points, and so you will help. This means you are helping more than if you would not have had uncertainty, because then you would only have helped in two thirds of the cases. Our experimental results can be explained in a similar way: because participants who had to deal with uncertainty used a heuristic, they ended up helping more than their counterparts that suffered no uncertainty.

So what do these results teach us about the evolution of human social behavior? They confirm that human minds are not calculators aimed at optimizing behavior in every possible scenario that might arise, but that their cognitive solutions have been shaped by a world of considerable complexity and uncertainty. The way our minds deal with this uncertainty is not to painstakingly account for it, but to reduce it to something more manageable with limited losses to inconsistency and suboptimality. Such heuristics can probably play out in many ways, but our experiment shows that they can lead to a higher willingness to cooperate with others.

 

Read the paper: Uncertainty causes humans to use social heuristics and to cooperate more: An experiment among Belgian university students