– by Kristopher Brazil

What kind of characteristics come to mind when you think of a “psychopath?” Callous, cruel, calculating? Ruthless, reckless, remorseless? Daring, dominant, disaffiliated? No doubt, many readers will indicate these characteristics, and likely many others besides, possibly even with terms that have an ancient ring to modern ears that describe conspecifics who might do us harm—“cold-blooded,” “predatory,” “evil.” Despite the poignant descriptors of psychopathy that seem to disqualify it from humanity, evolutionary thinkers have wondered whether its characteristics might reveal an alternative “way of being human” that is a result of selection having formed it over generations and by which it finds itself amongst the variety of adaptive phenotypes available to human nature.

Research on psychopathy and evolutionary psychology, however, have not grown together over the last several decades, which prompted the need for a recent review in Evolution and Human Behavior in which I examined the two fields with a focus on their integration. Three aims of the review were to (1) get precise about the content domain of the phenotype that is proposed to be adaptive (i.e., clinical psychopathy), (2) address lingering assumptions that evolutionary analyses of psychopathy have maintained about the nature of psychopathy that are no longer tenable from contemporary psychopathy research, and (3) document specific hypotheses that stake a claim on how psychopathy might have been selected for its features.

What is Clinical Psychopathy?

Psychopathy is not a single trait—it isn’t a synonym for callousness, impulsivity, or fearlessness, even though it does encompass these traits. Clinically, it is defined by a constellation of multiple trait dimensions falling into domains of Interpersonal (e.g., dominant, manipulative), Affective (e.g., disaffiliated, remorseless), and Behavioral (e.g., disinhibited, risk-taking) functioning. The distinctiveness of clinical psychopathy may be most clearly grasped when we see the multiple features co-occurring within a person. Imagine three hypothetical 21-year-old men—Vincenzo, Markus, and Cassius. Vincenzo is charming and bold and has a great many ambitions to acquire power and influence. To achieve his goals, he sees manipulation of people and things as one useful tactic among many. But Vincenzo is not aggressive nor is he callous; he wants to win and is calculating—taking his time thinking through things and not acting in the moment—but he tries to minimize the harm done to others because it doesn’t “feel right” and it may negatively impact his reputation. He also places enormous pressure on himself to achieve great things to be able to provide for those he cares about. Markus is aggressive and impulsive, easily angered by others and often finds himself in the same old arguments and fights with other men time and time again. Deep down, he is soft-hearted and cares deeply about those closest to him, but he has been known to have angry outbursts even with close family and friends, often followed by feelings of guilt and shame. Cassius enjoys lying to others and pushing people to the edge because he finds it fun and entertaining. He often tries to express sincerity and concern for others to “change things up” or to get something out of them despite “not actually giving a shit about them.” Cassius never backs down from a fight or shouting match with other men and he has a reputation among acquaintances for being the most daring S.O.B. around (e.g., playing Russian roulette for a pack of smokes). He is never seen with family or the same friends, and he is often seen hitting on women—even when he or they are in a relationship.

Although Vincenzo and Markus exhibit some personality characteristics that are included in the broader psychopathy concept—especially interpersonal and behavioral traits, respectively—it is Cassius who exhibits all of the personality characteristics that make up the concept of psychopathy—interpersonal (e.g., insincerity), affective (e.g., disaffiliated), and behavioral (e.g., risk-taking). The evolutionary question is whether people like Cassius who exhibit all characteristics of psychopathy (a rare phenomenon; Lilienfeld et al., 2019) can be said to reflect an adaptive phenotype that has been selected.

Lingering Assumptions About Psychopathy

Evolutionary ideas of psychopathy were first budding in the 1970s and 1980s, so they are not new. But after Robert Hare catalyzed the field with a reliable and valid clinical measure of psychopathy (Hare, 1980, 1991), the field has progressed enormously. Despite progress in psychopathy research, however, several assumptions about psychopathy have held sway in evolutionary circles that have not kept up with contemporary research on it.

There are three assumptions no longer tenable given contemporary advances in psychopathy research. Assumption 1 is that “psychopaths” are a distinct category where someone is either a “psychopath” or not. An overwhelming number of studies now show measures of psychopathy are dimensional, including clinical measures (Hare, 2003). People differ on psychopathy as a matter of degree, not kind; it is not clearly a taxon as is biological sex or a condition like trisomy 21. Assumption 2 is that the structure of psychopathy consists of a core personality factor (Factor 1) and a deviant behavior factor (Factor 2) that might each warrant an evolutionary explanation. Recent conceptual and statistical modeling, however, now show the structure of psychopathy to exist along three separable personality domains (interpersonal, affective, and behavioral) and an antisociality domain more cleanly identifying its link to “deviance” (e.g., early onset antisocial behavior, criminal versatility). Lastly, Assumption 3 is that some psychopaths are genetically determined whereas others are environmentally caused phenocopies. Developmental and behavior genetic research in psychopathy has grown in recent decades, instead showing that all expressions of psychopathy likely involve gene x environment interactions, even in those who appear to have high genetic risk.

What Ancestral Problem Might Psychopathy Function to Solve?

Synthesizing across research on psychopathy from an evolutionary perspective, the review paper identifies six unique hypotheses (not necessarily mutually exclusive) that offer some suggestion about how psychopathy might have been selected for its features over evolutionary time. These are:

• Cheater strategy: social strategy that fills a niche of defecting in social relationships.
• Cheater-hawk strategy: social strategy that combines defection and aggression in social relationships.
• Mating effort strategy (male only): mate competition strategy that obtains access to mates through deception, competing, and appealing to female mate choice.
• Sexual coercion strategy (male only): mate competition strategy to obtain access to mates through using force and doing so at a young age.
• Fast life history strategy: part of an adaptive phenotypic response that speeds up reproduction because of cues to mortality in early life years.
• Conditional strategy: part of an adaptive phenotype response to adverse environments that increase the odds of reproductive viability in that environment.

The six hypotheses can further be granulated into fitting one of two selection pathways that precisely claim how psychopathy might have evolved. First, psychopathy may afford males some reproductive success by exploiting male reproductive tactics of acquiring mates, including through deception, charm, and aggression. Here, psychopathy may have been an adaptive solution to mate competition among males. Cassius exhibits psychopathy because male ancestors who had similar patterns of personality succeeded in acquiring mates and reproducing with them, which he may also be “trying” to do. Second, psychopathy may afford people in general some reproductive success by exploiting others in the population out of their resources and gaining status, thereby increasing their chances of survival and gaining reproductive opportunities. Psychopathy here may have been an adaptive solution to social competition. Cassius exhibits psychopathy because ancestors who had similar patterns of personality succeeded in acquiring resources and status that then enabled them to reproduce, which he may also be “trying” to do. To further examine which of these two—or both or neither—selection pathways might be most plausible, research on the evolution of psychopathy will benefit from adaptationist thinking (Lukaszewski et al., 2020) as well as more cross-pollination between the fields of evolutionary psychology (Buss, 2016) and psychopathy (Patrick, 2018).

Brazil, K. J. (2026). Psychopathy and evolution: An integrative and comprehensive review. Evolution and Human Behavior, 47(3), 106864.

References

• Buss, D. M. (Ed.). (2016). The handbook of evolutionary psychology. John Wiley & Sons.
• Hare, R. D. (1980). A research scale for the assessment of psychopathy in criminal populations. Personality and Individual Differences, 1(2), 111–119. https://doi.org/10.1016/0191-8869(80)90028-8
• Hare, R. D. (1991). The Hare Psychopathy Checklist Revised. Multi-Health Systems.
• Hare, R. D. (2003). The Hare Psychopathy Checklist Revised (2nd ed.). Multi-Health Systems.
• Lilienfeld, S. O., Watts, A. L., Murphy, B., Costello, T. H., Bowes, S. M., Smith, S. F., Latzman, R. D., Haslam, N., & Tabb, K. (2019). Personality disorders as emergent interpersonal syndromes: Psychopathic personality as a case example. Journal of Personality Disorders, 33(5), 577–622. https://doi.org/10.1521/pedi.2019.33.5.577
• Lukaszewski, A. W., Lewis, D. M. G., Durkee, P. K., Sell, A. N., Sznycer, D., & Buss, D. M. (2020). An adaptationist framework for personality science. European Journal of Personality, 34(6), 1151–1174. https://doi.org/10.1002/per.2292
• Patrick, C. J. (Ed.). (2018). Handbook of psychopathy (2nd ed.). Guilford.

– by McQueen Li, Eric Chung, Jessica D. Ayers, and Keelah Williams

 Consider the last time something in your life went wrong: An argument that upset you, a project that didn’t go as planned, a difficult moment at work. To whom did you reach out? For many of us, we look to our friends to provide emotional support in such situations–not necessarily because they will fix the problem for us, but because they make us feel better.

There are differences, though, in the extent to which men and women think it’s important that their friends provide them with emotional support. In general, women prioritize the provisioning of this type of support from their friends more so than men. In our recent paper in Evolution and Human Behavior, we asked whether this pattern holds true not only in the United States, where most friendship research has been done, but in other societies as well.

Why might this sex difference exist? It likely has to do with tradeoffs in how we select our friends. Our time and energy are finite. Every hour we spend cultivating one friendship means another hour that we cannot spend on other goals in our life. This constraint makes strategic friend selection an adaptive problem, leading to evolved friendship preferences: We want friends who can bring us the most benefit in return for our investment.

Many of those benefits are universally sought after. For instance, both men and women want friends who are loyal and trustworthy. Preferences for some qualities, though, differ based on sex. This is because friendships have historically helped men and women solve somewhat distinct challenges. For example, male friendships facilitated success in intergroup warfare. Banding together with allies brought access to territory and resources, making men more attractive as potential romantic partners. Women, by contrast, were rarely participants in those kinds of conflicts. Instead, their same-sex friendships likely supported the complex work of raising children. This may have mattered especially under patrilocality (the practice of women leaving their birth families to join a partner’s group). Without relatives nearby, a woman’s same-sex friends could take on kin-like roles, providing the support that relatives might otherwise supply. If this is the case, women should place greater value on friends who are nurturing and who offer the kind of investment we associate with close kin. Emotional support is a clear sign of that investment, so we would expect women to prioritize it in their same-sex friends more than men do.

A robust body of research already suggests this is indeed the case. Compared with men, women disclose more to same-sex friends, are more likely to name a “best friend,” and report greater closeness in those bonds. However, most of this evidence comes from studies carried out in the United States. The aim of our paper was to begin exploring whether this sex difference in friendship preferences exists across societies.

To do so, we ran five studies across four countries: Australia, China, the United Kingdom, and the United States (sampled twice). Our measure was simple and direct: Participants rated their agreement with the statement, “It is important to me that my same-sex friends provide emotional support for me.” For the Chinese sample, we had bilingual speakers translate and back-translate the survey.

Our results were consistent across societies. In all five samples, women prioritized emotional support significantly more than men did, although the magnitude of this sex difference varied by country. This suggests that the importance of emotional support in friendship may be attributable, in part, to the distinct adaptive problems men and women faced over evolutionary history. However, cultural factors may also influence how people give and receive emotional support. For example, people in individualistic cultures generally engage in greater emotional expressiveness and self-disclosure than those in collectivistic cultures.

As robust as the pattern was across our samples, it also raises questions for future work. Our findings are based on a single self-report item, yet “emotional support” spans a wide range of behaviors, such as listening, validating, and giving advice. Might the sex difference we observed depend on how emotional support is defined? Preliminary results from our lab suggest this is likely the case.

In sum, our work demonstrates once more that women in particular tend to prioritize same-sex friends who provide them with emotional support. This pattern exists in multiple countries, including both Eastern and Western societies. Altogether, our findings are consistent with a functional view of friendship—the notion that the preferences men and women bring to their friendships today trace back to the reproductive advantages those bonds once provided. In our modern world, where loneliness has reached ‘epidemic’ levels, it is more important than ever to understand the psychology behind our valued social relationships.

Keelah E.G. Williams, Jessica D. Ayers, Yingtao Li, and Eric Chung. Cross-societal evidence of sex differences in preference for emotional support from friends. Evolution and Human Behavior 48 (2026): 106877.

– by Ze Hong

Open the Yellow Emperor’s Inner Canon, one of the founding texts of Chinese medicine, and you will find a curious claim: the human body contains exactly 365 acupuncture points, one for each day of the solar year. Turn to the Zohar, the central text of Jewish Kabbalah, and you will read that the body contains 365 sinews—again, matched to the days of the year. The Babylonian Talmud teaches that the Torah contains 365 prohibitions, one for each day. A ninth-century collection of Islamic hadith declares that every child of Adam is created with 360 joints. Ancient Indian Ayurvedic texts count 360 bones in the body, mirroring the 360 days of the Vedic ritual year. Medieval Irish penitentials prescribe 365 prayers, 365 kneelings, and 365 lashes of the scourge—because, they explain, this is proportionate to the number of joints and sinews in the human body.

The modern reader (I hope!) will notice something odd. The adult human body has 206 bones, not 365 or 360. Anatomically, none of these counts are correct. And yet cultures separated by thousands of miles and thousands of years arrived at strikingly similar claims: that the human body somehow encodes the calendar, that the microcosm of the body mirrors the macrocosm of the heavens. Why?

In my recent paper, I argue that these “numerological correspondences” are cultural manifestations of deep-seated features of human cognition. Once we understand the psychological machinery that generates them, their widespread appearance across unrelated civilizations begins to look far less mysterious. I identify four cognitive ingredients that, working together, make numerological correspondences intuitively compelling.

The first is pattern detection. Human brains are exquisitely tuned to find regularities in the environment—an ability that served our ancestors well in tracking prey, predicting seasons, and reading social cues. But this same capacity has a well-documented downside: we readily perceive structure even when none objectively exists. Francis Bacon put it beautifully back in 1620: the human mind “is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds.” When a body part count of “roughly a few hundred” is available for comparison with a solar year of 365 days, the mind can find a match with only a modest nudge.

The second is analogical reasoning through structure mapping. Humans are remarkably skilled at drawing analogies between conceptually distinct domains (think of the classic analogy between the solar system and the hydrogen atom, or between water flowing through pipes and electricity through wires). Cognitive scientists like Dedre Gentner have shown that we do this automatically and reliably, even as children. This capacity is a cognitive superpower for learning and creativity, but it also makes cross-domain mappings feel meaningful.

The third ingredient is a preference for simplicity, symmetry, and breadth in our models of the world. From an early age, children prefer explanations that unify many facts under a single cause. Adults do the same. We find symmetric theories more elegant, more satisfying, and more likely to be true. This preference is more than aesthetic decoration; it shapes what ideas we find plausible in the first place. The nineteenth-century chemist Newlands proposed his “law of octaves” partly because he was moved by the resemblance between chemical periodicity and musical scales. Aristotle accused the Pythagoreans of inventing an extra heavenly body simply because they considered ten the perfect number.

The fourth is a holistic worldview—the belief, common across many premodern civilizations, that the universe forms an integrated whole in which the body, the cosmos, morality, and nature are all interconnected. Where this worldview is culturally dominant, cross-domain numerical mappings are not merely permitted but expected. A correspondence between body parts and calendar days thus becomes evidence of a deeper cosmic unity.

These mechanisms together form a powerful engine. Pattern detection is the trigger, analogical reasoning is the bridge, symmetry preferences are the filter, and holistic cosmology is the epistemic foundation that makes the whole enterprise feel intellectually respectable. Once such a correspondence enters a culture, it also tends to persist. In everyday life, no one actually counts the bones in the human body. And within an authoritative religious or medical framework, why would you want to?

Why, then, do these ideas feel so implausible today? The answer, I suggest, is not that modern humans have somehow shed the cognitive tendencies that produced them. If anything, magical and symbolic thinking persist widely in secular contexts—from astrology apps to wellness fads. What has changed is the institutional environment and the epistemic influence it has on lay people. Modern scientific cultures reward empirical testing, tolerate the revision of theories in the face of anomalies, and cultivate skepticism toward claims that link the human body to the cosmos through symbolic analogies. Individuals raised in such environments learn to find “the body has 365 bones because the year has 365 days” not profound, but suspicious.

Ze Hong. The evolutionary-cognitive foundation and cultural persistence of menstrual taboos in human societies. Evolution and Human Behavior 47 (2026): 106899.

– by Jessica D. Ayers & Diego Guevara Beltran

Friends are integral to our health, well-being, and survival. In fact, having at least one close friend does more for our longevity than quitting drinking, smoking, or picking up a steady habit of exercising. If just one friend is so good for us, why don’t people make as many friends as possible? One important reason is that our time and energy are finite–time spent making new friends cannot be spent doing other activities, such as helping family members, looking for potential romantic partners, or investing in our careers. The reality is that we often have to make difficult choices, not only about how much time to allocate towards making new friends, but also about how much to invest in our friendships. Is it possible that this decision reflects an underlying friendship quantity vs. quality trade-off, where our preferences influence how people navigate the social world?

 Our new paper published in Evolution and Human Behavior suggests that people may not sacrifice quality for quantity when it comes to their friendships. It seems that some people want it all: those who want many friends also typically report wanting intimacy with many of them, while those who want only a few friends are content having intimacy with just those few friends.

When we look at other domains of social life, we can see humans experience other quality vs. quantity trade-offs. For example, one trade-off includes whether to invest in having many offspring at the expense of their quality, or in having fewer offspring that are likely of higher quality. Another recurrent trade-off people experience is whether to invest in having many (potentially lower quality) short-term romantic partners, or having one (potentially higher quality) long-term romantic partner.

However, unlike monogamous mating relationships, where strong norms exist about exclusivity, there is no norm regarding the “appropriate” number of friendships one can pursue, explore, or maintain. Indeed, we can be friends with more than one person at a time, so that we can both invest in long-term friendships while also pursuing new potential friendships.

The similarities between romantic relationships and friendships inspired us to examine whether people experience a quantity vs. quality trade-off in their friendship making psychology. To this end, we created and validated the Friendship Making Orientation Scale by adapting the revised Sociosexual Inventory (SOI-R) to investigate friendship making psychology. Across five studies with over 5,000 participants, we determined the structure, validity, reliability, and cross-cultural generalizability of the scale.

The scale asks questions like “I enjoy making casual friendships with many different people“ and “I often wish others would introduce me to new people to talk to/hang out with.” These questions make up two underlying features of our friendship making psychology: preference for a wide friendship network, and desire for intimacy with many friends. Having established that these constructs are reliable and valid in US samples, we examined how these preferences related to participants’ actual friendships. On one hand, we found that people with a preference for having a wider network of friends tended to be more extraverted, had more friends, and had more friends willing to help them when in need. On the other hand, people with a stronger desire for intimacy with many friends reported having fewer friends, fewer of those friends were willing to help them, and being less satisfied with both the number and the quality of their friendships.

Yet, people with a higher preference for a wide network also scored higher in their desire for intimacy with many friends. This unexpected finding introduces a new puzzle: are people who want intimacy with many friends lacking in some aspect of their friendships? And if so, how could they also score higher on preference for wide networks–which is associated with a host of positive friendship outcomes? One plausible explanation is that desire for intimacy with many friends regulates friendship making motivations, increasing affiliative tendencies when one is below their desired friendship threshold, and decreasing such tendencies when one is above their threshold. Exploratory analyses suggested this may be the case; desire for intimacy with many friends was associated with friendship seeking motivations and behaviors for people who were both dissatisfied with their current number of friends and who scored high on preference for a wide friendship network.

Up to this point, our studies focused on American samples, limiting our ability to understand whether the idea of friendship making orientation travels well across cultures. To address this, we tested the Friendship Making Orientation Scale in a cross-cultural sample (Brazil, Egypt, and the Philippines, N_Total = 673), showing that the construct was applicable beyond American samples. Here, we confirmed the factor structure in a new cultural context and affirmed that the scale was associated with affiliative measures such as friendship quantity, prosociality, and closeness.

Although people make friends for many different reasons, the desire to make friends ultimately links back to their importance for our survival and well-being. The quality of our friendships is important because they provide crucial emotional and instrumental support. But having many friends is important too–a wider network of people can help us manage unpredictable risks, pool resources, provide protection, or even help us gain prestige. The time and energy needed to pursue these different friendship strategies have led researchers to believe that people experience a trade-off between these desires when it comes to their friendships.

And yet, our scale showed that the trade-off between the quality and quantity of friendships is not as clear-cut as once believed. Instead, it appears that people can have preferences for maximizing both the quantity and quality of their friendships without necessarily pitting these motivations against one another. However, whether people can actually have it all–many friends and emotional intimacy with all of them–without sacrificing their friendships or other important domains of life (such as mate retention or kin care) remains to be seen.

Jessica D. Ayers, J.D., Diego Guevara Beltran, Denise Mercado, and Athena Aktipis. “Friendship making orientation as indexed by preferences for wide networks and intimacy with many friends: structure and validity of a new construct.” Evolution and Human Behavior 47 (2026): 106878.

– by Turan Gunduz, Hasan Gunduz, Erkan Eyrikaya and Hakan Cetinkaya

Death has long fascinated philosophers, biologists, psychologists, and many other scholars. Alongside questions about why organisms age and die lies another puzzle: human awareness of mortality. Humans can imagine the future and know that their lives will one day come to an end. How does such awareness shape our thoughts, emotions, and behavior? And why would a mind shaped by natural selection possess a capacity that appears so psychologically unsettling? Is mortality awareness simply a by-product of sophisticated cognition, or might it serve an adaptive function? While influential theories have emphasized the psychological burdens associated with mortality awareness, alternative perspectives are possible. As we will see, awareness of mortality may do more than generate anxiety. It may help individuals navigate adaptive challenges by shaping priorities in context-dependent ways.

For nearly four decades, Terror Management Theory (TMT) has been a leading framework for understanding how mortality awareness shapes the human mind and behavior. TMT views mortality awareness as an unwanted consequence of evolved cognitive capacity. According to the theory, awareness of inevitable death creates an existential anxiety that threatens meaning and effective functioning unless it is managed. To cope with this predicament, people are thought to embrace cultural systems, shared worldviews, social norms, and collective identities that provide meaning, continuity, and a sense of belonging to something larger and more enduring than the self. TMT further suggests that people may seek meaning and symbolic immortality through close relationships, parenthood, and family continuity. Indeed, a large body of research has shown that mortality reminders often strengthen adherence to group norms and negative reactions toward opposing viewpoints, while increasing interest in close relationships and desire for offspring.

These findings paint a compelling picture of how reminders of mortality can shape human thought and behavior. But might there be another way to read this story? Rather than viewing mortality awareness as a by-product, we wondered whether it might serve a more functional role. The crucial question, then, may not be how mortality-related concerns are reduced, but why they arise. Perhaps the discomfort associated with mortality awareness is not merely a problem to be solved, but part of a broader motivational system that evolved to direct attention toward challenges and opportunities relevant to ultimate evolutionary endpoints: survival and reproduction. From this perspective, stronger commitment to norms and cultural worldviews after mortality awareness may reflect adaptive responses that historically promoted survival through protection and social support. At the same time, findings involving close relationships and family continuity may point toward motivations related to reproduction.

This reasoning led us to a question that was both theoretically important and empirically testable: What happens when these two priorities come into conflict? Which goal takes precedence, and why?

From a modern evolutionary perspective, reproductive success is the ultimate currency of natural selection. Survival matters because it creates opportunities for reproduction, but survival without reproduction leaves no descendants. Although survival and reproduction often work together, it is reproductive success that ultimately helps explain much of the behavioral diversity. Given this, reminders of mortality may do more than motivate self-protection. By signaling that time and future opportunities may be limited, they may sometimes orient individuals toward strategies that increase reproductive success. Such a prediction is broadly consistent with Life History Theory, which suggests that cues associated with uncertainty and harshness can increase the importance of immediate reproduction. Yet in previous TMT research, participants were often given opportunities either to defend cultural worldviews and social norms or to express preferences related to close relationships or family continuity. So, studies typically examined survival-related and reproduction-related outcomes separately. What, then, happens when opportunities to support both adaptive priorities are simultaneously present?

To investigate this question, we drew on the methodological tradition of TMT research while adapting it to our evolutionary framework. Participants first reflected either on their own mortality or on a control topic. They then evaluated one of two scenarios involving divorce and remarriage. Although both scenarios violated prevailing moral norms, only one offered a clear reproductive benefit. In that scenario, an individual divorced an infertile spouse and later had a child with a new partner. In the other, the divorce led only to financial gain. This distinction allowed us to contrast two competing interpretations of mortality awareness. If mortality awareness primarily motivates people to defend existing worldviews, participants should become more critical of both behaviors following mortality salience. However, if mortality awareness functions as a cue that helps individuals navigate fitness-relevant challenges, and if reproductive success carries greater evolutionary importance than survival alone, then norm defense should weaken when it stands in the way of reproduction.

The findings supported the latter. Mortality reminders did not simply increase condemnation of norm violations. When the violation led to a reproductive outcome, participants evaluated it more favorably. When the same violation offered no reproductive benefit, evaluations became more negative. In other words, mortality salience did not produce a uniform tendency toward norm enforcement. Instead, responses varied depending on the adaptive implications of the behavior being judged.

Because reproduction is tied to sex-specific evolutionary pressures, we also examined whether these effects differed between women and men. They did. The shift toward reproduction-favoring evaluations was driven primarily by men. Because reproduction has historically involved greater obligatory parental investment and potentially higher costs for women, mortality cues alone may not be sufficient to trigger a faster reproductive strategy. Additional cues related to partner commitment and reliability may be needed before reproduction is prioritized.

Our findings challenge the common assumption that mortality reminders invariably strengthen moral and cultural norm enforcement. Instead, mortality awareness appears capable of selectively relaxing norm defense when norm violation facilitates reproductive success. Perhaps mortality awareness is not simply a source of anxiety. It may be the mind’s way of deciding what matters most when the future suddenly feels shorter. Future research examining how these effects vary across cultures, reproductive histories, and reproductive opportunities will contribute to a deeper understanding of how mortality awareness shapes the human mind.

Gunduz, T., Gunduz, H., Eyrikaya, E., & Cetinkaya, H. 2026. Mortality salience shifts moral judgment: reproductive motivations override normative defenses in males. Evolution and Human Behavior, 47(3), 106857.