Children Doubt Magic but Believe in Miracles

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– by Ayse Payir and Paul L. Harris

Young children are typically seen as naturally credulous beings, endowed with a rich imagination and incapable of distinguishing fantasy from reality. Given that they believe in entities like Santa, create imaginary friends, and fear monsters under the bed, this common stereotype is hard to dismiss.

In line with this stereotype, an early claim in developmental psychology was that young children are prone to magical thinking. Piaget argued that children’s magical thinking arises from the lack of any boundary between their mind and the outside world, so that the content of their mental world—dreams, emotions, imaginings—spill over into their ideas about physical reality. He proposed that children’s animism—their tendency to attribute mental states to inanimate beings—and artificialism—their tendency to think that natural phenomena are created to serve a purpose—are two manifestations of this spillover. So, according to a young child, clouds “…come from the smoke that people make in their chimneys…to make it rain for the gardens,” and clouds “… move because they want to make it rain somewhere else.” (Piaget, 1929). Gradually, such magical explanations are replaced with naturalistic explanations based on cause and effect: The clouds move “…because of the wind. The air moves and pushes the clouds along.”

Are children prone to magical causality?

Piaget’s proposal was initially challenged by Huang (1930) and Mead (1932), who showed that children provide very prosaic explanations even for events that violate their expectations. For example, in one study Huang covered a tube filled with water with a piece of paper over the mouth and quickly turned it upside down. When the water did not spill out (due to air pressure), children explained this seemingly strange event with natural rather than magical causation, arguing, for instance, that there must something sticky on the paper or at the rim of the tube which prevents the water to escape. Similarly, when Mead (1932) asked Manus children in Papua New Guinea to speculate about the cause of some unusual outcomes—such as a canoe escaping its moorings overnight—children typically invoked explanations that are quite mundane: Perhaps the owner did not tie up the canoe properly.

Decades later Hickling and Wellman (2001) reached similar conclusions when they analyzed children’s spontaneous causal explanations across a range of phenomena (e.g., objects, animals, humans) in everyday conversations. These explanations were not always factually correct, but they were consistent with the relevant domain and rarely involved magic. For example, children made a clear distinction between living versus nonliving beings and offered biological explanations for the former but not for the latter.

In a more recent study, we found further evidence for this naturalistic outlook (Payir et al., 2022). We presented children with short stories in which the main character experienced a bad outcome. For example, in one story a farmer ended up with a poor crop. When asked how the farmer could have avoided this bad outcome, children invoked realistic rather than supernatural or miraculous possibilities—for example “he could have watered the plants more”—and they did this regardless of their religious background, be it secular or religious.

In summary, recent research portrays children as rational, down-to-earth thinkers rather than muddled fantasists.

Are children natural-born believers?

If children are truly skeptical about magical causes, why do they believe in supernatural forces, such as divine agency? Maybe children are ‘born believers’ who are predisposed to invoke supernatural agency. Within the Cognitive Science of Religion framework researchers proposed children’s endorsement of God’s extraordinary powers (Barrett et al., 2001) and their tendency to entertain an afterlife (e.g., Bering, 2006) as evidence for this provocative claim. However, later studies showed that children attribute no extraordinary powers to God before the age of 5 to 7 (Heiphetz et al., 2016; Lane, 2021; Makris & Pnevmatikos, 2007) and initially endorse an irreligious, biological account of death (Harris & Giménez, 2005; Lane et al., 2016; Watson-Jones et al., 2017). By implication, children are not ‘born believers.’

A compelling case for young children’s belief in the divine was provided by Kelemen. Drawing on Piaget’s argument of young children’s artificialism (1929), Kelemen (2004) claimed that children have a natural inclination to ‘promiscuous teleology’—to think that everything in the natural world is created for a purpose by a divine being. Kelemen provided persuasive cross-cultural evidence that children do indeed think teleologically, but only children exposed to religion invoke a divine agent in doing so (Kelemen & DiYanni, 2005; Schachner et al., 2017). Essentially, children’s tendency to invoke a divine creator appears to be based on cultural learning rather than any innate tendency.

How do children learn to believe?

If children eventually come to believe that God exists via cultural learning, what exactly makes them endorse this claim, which is hard to verify? Anthropologist Henrich (2009) argued that unverifiable claims are not convincing unless accompanied by behaviors that enhance their credibility, for example, actions that pose obvious costs to the believer—such as ascetism, tithing or fasting. Such actions speak louder than words. Supporting Henrich’s proposal, various studies with adults indicate a strong relation between parental displays of religiosity during childhood and conviction in adulthood (e.g., Gervais & Najle, 2015; Willard & Cingl 2017).

Further support for the key role of cultural learning comes from developmental research on the role of testimony in learning about hard-to-observe phenomena. Studies indicate that across the world, children’s and adults’ belief in such phenomena—be they scientific, such as germs, or religious, such as God—vary based on the community consensus surrounding those phenomena (Ma et al., 2024). Accordingly, even in highly religious communities like Iran, there is greater confidence in the existence of scientific entities—whose existence is generally taken for granted—as compared to religious entities—for which the community consensus is less secure. Studies analyzing parent-child conversations show that this differential confidence is reflected in parental talk: Even religious parents talk about religious entities with less certainty as compared to scientific entities, and such linguistic cues moderate children’s level of confidence, providing direct evidence for the transmission of beliefs via testimony (McLoughlin et al., 2021; 2023).

In sum, scientific evidence casts doubt on the stereotype of the child as “magical thinker,” and suggests instead that children are naturalistic thinkers when left to their own devices. Nevertheless, they learn about supernatural possibilities, such as divine agency and the afterlife, from others in their family and immediate community. Exactly why such cultural learning is so potent remains an intriguing question that we hope to tackle in future research. (1083 words)

Ayse Payir and Paul L. Harris. Children doubt magic but believe in miracles. Evolution and Human Behavior 47.5 (2026): 106920.

References

Barrett, J. L., Richert, R. A. & Driesenga, A. (2001). God’s beliefs versus mother’s: The development of non-human agent concepts. Child Development, 72, 50-65. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8624.00265

Bering, J. M. (2006). The folk psychology of souls. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29, 453–498.

Gervais, W. M., Najle, M. B., & Caluori, N. (2021). The origins of religious disbelief: A dual inheritance approach. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 12(7), 1369–1379. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550621994001

Harris, P. L. & Giménez, M. (2005). Children’s acceptance of conflicting testimony: The case of death. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 5, 143-164.  https://doi.org/10.1163/1568537054068606

Heiphetz, L., Lane, J. D.  Waytz, A. & Young, L. L. (2016).  How children and adults represent God’s mind. Cognitive Science, 40, 121-144. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12232

Henrich, J. (2009). The evolution of costly displays, cooperation and religion: Credibility enhancing displays and their implications for cultural evolution. Evolution and human behavior, 30(4), 244-260. https://psycnet.apa.org/doi/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2009.03.005

Hickling, A. K., & Wellman, H. M. (2001). The emergence of children’s causal explanations and theories: Evidence from everyday conversation. Developmental Psychology, 37, 668–683. https://doi.org/10.1037/0012-1649.37.5.668

Huang, I. (1930). Children’s explanations of strange phenomena. Psychologische Forschung, 14, 63-183. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00403871

Kelemen, D. (2004). Are children “Intuitive Theists”?: Reasoning about purpose and design in nature. Psychological Science, 15, 295-301. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0956-7976.2004.00672.x

Kelemen, D & DiYanni, C. (2005). Intuitions about origins: Purpose and intelligent design in children’s reasoning about nature. Journal of Cognition and Development, 6, 3-31. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327647jcd0601_2

Lane, J. D. (2021). Constructing ideas of the supernatural. Journal of Cognition and Development, 22(3), 343-355. https://doi.org/10.1080/15248372.2021.1906679.

Lane, J. D., Zhu, L., Evans, M. E. & Wellman, H. M. (2016). Developing concepts of the mind, body, and afterlife: exploring the roles of narrative context and culture. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 16, 50–82. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685373-12342168

Ma, S., Payir, A., McLoughlin, N., & Harris, P. L. (2024). Scientific and religious beliefs are primarily shaped by testimony. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 28(9), 792-803. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2024.04.014

Makris, N. & Pnevmatikos, D.  (2007). Children’s understanding of human and super-natural mind. Cognitive Development, 22, 65–375. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cogdev.2006.12.003

Mead, M. (1932). An investigation of the thought of primitive children, with special reference to animism. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 62, 173-190.

McLoughlin, N., Cui, Y. K., Davoodi, T., Payir, A., Clegg, J. M., Harris, P. L., & Corriveau, K. H. (2023). Expressions of uncertainty in invisible scientific and religious phenomena during naturalistic conversation. Cognition, 237, 105474. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105474

McLoughlin, N., Jacob, C., Samrow, P., & Corriveau, K. H. (2021). Beliefs about unobservable scientific and religious entities are transmitted via subtle linguistic cues in parental testimony. Journal of Cognition and Development, 22(3), 379-397. https://doi.org/10.1080/15248372.2020.1871351

Payir, A., Corriveau, K. H., & Harris, P. L. (2026). Peaceful coexistence or inevitable clash? Confronting the claims of science and religion about death. Child Development, 1-17.

https://doi.org/10.1093/chidev/aacag035

Payir, A., Heiphetz, L., Harris, P. L., & Corriveau, K. H. (2022). What could have been done? Counterfactual alternatives to negative outcomes generated by religious and secular children. Developmental Psychology, 58(2), 376-391. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0001294

Piaget, J. (1929). The child’s conception of the world. Harcourt Brace

Schachner, A., Zhu, L., Li, J., & Kelemen, D. (2017). Is the bias for function-based explanations culturally universal? Children from China endorse teleological explanations of natural phenomena. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 157, 29-48. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2016.12.006

Watson-Jones, R. E., Busch, J. T. A., Harris, P. L., & Legare, C. H. (2017). Does the body survive death? Cultural variation in beliefs about life everlasting. Cognitive Science, 41, 455-476. https://doi.org/10.1111/cogs.12430

Willard, A. K., & Cingl, L. (2017). Testing theories of secularization and religious belief in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Evolution and Human Behavior, 38(5), 604–615. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2017.01.002

Casual sex and the paths to parenthood

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– by By Dmitry Grigoryev, Albina Gallyamova, and Elizaveta Komyaginskaya

If someone is more open to casual sex, would you expect them to have more children? The prediction has intuitive appeal: more partners could mean more opportunities for reproduction. In our recent study in Evolution and Human Behavior, however, people who were more open to uncommitted sex than others in their country tended to report fewer children.  Understanding this result requires separating several ideas that are often bundled together: life history trade-offs, mating effort, demographic context, and the pathways through which sexual relationships ultimately become births.

Life history theory starts from a general problem: organisms have limited time and resources, so investment in growth, survival, mating, and parenting involves trade-offs. In parts of the psychological life history literature, these trade-offs have often been organized along a fast–slow continuum, with earlier reproduction, greater mating effort, and openness to casual sex treated as features of a relatively “fast” strategy. But this way of grouping the traits together has become increasingly debated. Recent theoretical and empirical work has questioned whether mating-versus-parenting and offspring quantity-versus-quality are really expressions of the same underlying continuum, and studies do not consistently show that unrestricted sociosexuality goes together with earlier or greater reproduction. Whether these characteristics actually fit together is therefore an empirical question.

Working with an international consortium, we investigated that question using a preregistered analysis plan and data from 80,047 heterosexual adults across 92 countries. We examined sociosexuality: individual differences in openness to sex without commitment. Three questions assessed comfort with casual sex, sexual fantasies about someone just met, and the number of partners with whom respondents had had sex without seeking a committed relationship. We analyzed attitudes and desire together, separately from reported behavior. These questions did not directly measure the time or energy invested in finding partners or raising children.

We also constructed a country-level demographic index combining total fertility, adolescent fertility, and mortality before age 40. Higher scores described relatively faster demographic regimes, with higher fertility, more adolescent births, and greater early mortality. This index characterized national demographic conditions; it did not assign a life history strategy to each respondent. Participants separately reported how many children they had.

Because respondents were nested within countries, we took a multilevel approach and separated two questions that are easy to confuse. One asks whether people who are more sexually unrestricted than others in their own country have more children. The other asks whether countries whose respondents report higher average sociosexuality also have respondents with more children. These comparisons capture different sources of variation—and, as it turned out, they gave different answers. Within countries, people who were more sociosexually unrestricted than the average person in their country reported fewer children. This negative within-country association appeared both for attitudes and desire and for reported behavior. It remained after accounting for age and national reproductive timing, as well as national wealth, education, gender equality, and historical kinship institutions, such as extended-family residence and marriage rules. The associations were modest and stronger among women than men. They also persisted in analyses restricted to parents or respondents aged 40 and older.

A comparison across countries told a different story: countries where respondents reported more uncommitted sexual behavior also tended to have respondents with more children. We did not find the same country-level pattern for attitudes and desires. This does not mean that more sexually unrestricted individuals in those countries had more children. Within the same country, the individual-level association still ran in the opposite direction: more unrestricted individuals tended to report fewer children. This contrast is exactly why separating levels of analysis is so important.

People living in faster demographic regimes also reported more children after country-level adjustment. This is partly unsurprising since fertility itself contributes to our demographic index, but the broader pattern is still informative. In our paper, we treat these regimes as reproductive contexts rather than as psychological strategies carried by every individual: local reproductive timing, kin networks, norms, and institutions may all help make earlier and higher fertility more common and easier to sustain. Faster regimes initially appeared associated with lower sociosexuality, but that association was no longer statistically clear after adjustment for national wealth, education, gender equality, and kinship institutions. Country context also mattered for one specific part of sociosexuality: behavior. In faster demographic regimes, the negative association between a person’s unrestricted sexual behavior and number of children became weaker, especially among men. In other words, unrestricted behavior did not become a fertility advantage overall; rather, it was less strongly associated with having fewer children. One possible interpretation is that where reproduction begins earlier and sexual behavior, partnership, and childbearing remain more tightly coupled, mating behavior has a more direct route to births. Attitudes and desire showed little evidence of this contextual variation, and the behavioral variation was less clear in the older and parent-only samples.

The picture changed most when we took relationship status into account. Accounting for whether respondents were single, married, or in other relationship situations reduced the negative association for attitudes and desire by almost 90%; it was no longer statistically clear. The behavioral association weakened much less and remained negative. Relationships therefore deserve close attention in explaining how sexual dispositions and childbearing become connected.

Why might relationships matter so much? There are at least two directions of influence. Openness to casual sex may be related to the formation and stability of partnerships through which parenthood often occurs. But entering a stable partnership or becoming a parent may also change sexual interests and opportunities. Reliable partners and relatives can help sustain the prolonged demands of raising human children, so stable pair bonds don’t have to mean having fewer children; in some circumstances, they may make several births easier to support. And all of this depends on the surrounding social environment: access to сontraception, expectations about marriage, and available family support may further alter how sexual relationships are realized into births. Our cross-sectional data cannot tell us which of these pathways produced the associations we observed. Beyond the limits of the cross-sectional design, several features of the data also place some limits on how broadly these results can be interpreted. The data was self-reported, and respondents were about 31 years old on average, so many had not completed childbearing. About two-thirds were women. The response scale combined five or more children into one category. Country sample sizes were unequal, and cultural differences in willingness to report sexual experiences could affect comparisons. We left offspring survival and later reproduction unmeasured, so number of children at the time of the survey is therefore only an incomplete measure of lifetime reproductive success.

Even with those limitations, our results are difficult to reconcile with one simple story: that greater openness to casual sex is a straightforward marker of a single “fast” strategy that should also lead to more children. The multilevel approach shows where the pieces come apart. Faster demographic regimes are associated with higher fertility, while within those same societies, more sexually unrestricted individuals tend to report fewer children. They leave open how the underlying dispositions evolved. A useful next step is to follow people—and ideally couples—through partnership formation, first births, and subsequent births to see when and how mating dispositions are actually converted into parenthood. That may be a more useful question than asking whether sociosexuality is simply “fast” or “slow.”

Grigoryev, D., Gallyamova, A., Komyaginskaya, E., et al. (2026). Sociosexual orientation, life history strategy, and reproductive success: A large-scale cross-cultural analysis across 92 contemporary societies. Evolution and Human Behavior, 47(5), 106938.

Who really believes in magic?

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– by Neil Levy, Rob Ross, and Ryan McKay

Anthropology must steer a narrow course between twin dangers. On the one hand, there is the perennial risk of exoticizing other peoples. On the other hand, there is a danger of a failure to recognize genuine difference, rendering somewhat alien worldviews mere variants of our own. Nowhere do these risks loom larger than when it comes to understanding the attitudes of other cultures to magic.

On the one hand, if we interpret magic as an instrumental technology, we are faced with the problem of understanding how rational people could genuinely believe in its efficacy, given the evidence against it. On the other hand, if we deny that they are genuine believers, we risk obscuring their genuine differences from us. The same problem arises closer to home, at least for those of us who accept a squarely secular worldview: how can our neighbors or our families genuinely believe in the supernatural agents of religions?

Non-instrumental accounts of magic (and religion) focus on its roles in fostering a sense of belonging, community, and in satisfying existential needs, without postulating a wholehearted belief in it as an instrumental technology. These accounts are today powerfully challenged by instrumentalist accounts, that maintain that people are, in the main, genuine believers, and suggest that (nevertheless) universal cognitive biases and heuristics can explain a diversity of attitudes to magic, including genuine belief in its efficacy.

We take our inspiration from recent work in political science and psychology (some of it by us) that provides evidence that belief reports are not always sincere. People sometimes insincerely report believing bizarre claims (like some conspiracy theories) or politically relevant claims for a variety of reasons.

One motivation for insincere belief reports is to express an attitude. Political scientists call this expressive responding or partisan cheerleading. For example, people may report believing that the crowd at the first Trump inauguration was bigger than at Obama’s to express support for Trump, just as someone might report believing the Browns are the greatest team to express support for their side, rather than because one genuinely believes.

People may also report believing a conspiracy theory or engaging in a strange behavior (like drinking bleach to prevent COVID-19) for a different reason: to ‘troll’ experimenters or because they think it’s funny.

People may also sincerely but wrongly report their own beliefs. Asked to report what they believe about some question they’ve never explicitly considered before (“will Donald Trump invade Canada?”), people may sample a range of considerations that come to mind and construct a narrative. This report may not reflect their true attitude. The tendency to misreport an attitude may be particularly strong when the attitude is one that is fun to maintain and receives community support.

Most of the evidence, at least from political science and psychology, concerns the belief reports of people in WEIRD societies. We see no reason to think that the reports of people in non-WEIRD society are more likely to be sincere, and (when sincere) accurate. While the accusation that Margaret Mead’s informants were hoaxing them is sharply contested, there’s evidence that informants may troll anthropologists. Salamone quotes one Tiv informant’s ridicule: “When I read what the white man has written of our customs, I laugh, for it is the custom of our people to lie as a matter of course to outsiders, especially the white man.”

The evidence concerning expressive responding, trolling, and the construction of attitudes among WEIRD participants does not suggest that everyone is insincere or mistakenly reporting a belief. Rather, it supports what we call a motley of attitudes: some people are genuine believers, some are trolls, some are sincere but mistaken. The proportion of genuine believers varies from topic to topic, and a single individual may take a variety of attitudes across topics. We think that exactly the same is true of people in non-WEIRD societies when it comes to belief in magic. Some may understand magic symbolically, some may be sincere believers (or disbelievers) in it, and some may have no stable attitude at all.

Instrumentalist accounts offer compelling evidence that some people are really true believers. However, we point to evidence in the anthropological literature to argue that other attitudes exist alongside belief. We suggest that postulating a heterogeneity of attitudes is needed to make sense of many ethnographic reports without attributing a lack of rationality to informants. In his study of Burmese animism, Spiro notes that the beliefs of his informants are “marked by inconsistency, contradiction, and by what might be called cognitive looseness,” with different informants manifesting different degrees of belief ranging from wholehearted acceptance to outright skepticism. We suspect this sort of heterogeneity is widespread across many societies, including our own.

When Evans-Pritchard attributes inconsistent beliefs among the Azande and a blatant failure to “perceive the contradiction” between their beliefs, he risks not only making them alien, but failing to recognize their rationality. While we acknowledge the risk we run of the reverse mistake — of assuming that people from “exotic” societies are entirely like ourselves — we think our suggestion that people of all societies take a motley of attitudes is both more respectful of our shared humanity and more faithful to the evidence.

Neil Levy, Robert M. Ross, and Ryan McKay. A motley of attitudes: belief, insincerity, and non-doxastic commitment in magical practice. Evolution and Human Behavior 47.5 (2026): 106945

When Nature Has Agency: What Folktales Tell Us About Environmental Attitudes

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Illustration by Cecilia Sinclair from West African Folk-Tales, collected by W. H. Barker and Cecilia Sinclair (London: George G. Harrap, 1917). Public domain.

– by Bart Bonikowski, Juan Miguel Jimenez, Nathan Nunn, Oscar Stuhler, and Satish Wasti

Among the Blackfoot of the North American plains, bison are treated as relatives rather than as a resource, and relations with them are governed by reciprocity rather than exploitation. The Cree hold that animals are sentient and know more about the world than people do; when an animal is caught, it is because it has chosen that fate, which obliges the hunter to show it respect. In Anishinaabe law, water is not something to be owned or used but an actor in a relationship, with a spirit of its own. Among the Igbo of Nigeria, the land is not property belonging to people — the people belong to the land, and animals such as crocodiles, tortoises, and water birds are messengers of land and water spirits, and so must not be harmed.

These views stand in contrast to the perspective that prevails in much of the West, which assigns intrinsic value primarily to humans and regards the natural world largely in terms of its usefulness to human ends. The difference is not merely philosophical. Whether nature is an active agent or a passive object shapes what obligations humans are thought to have towards it, and what rights it is thought to hold.

Occasionally these worldviews become law. Ecuador’s 2008 constitution formally recognizes the legal personhood of Mother Earth, drawing on the Andean conception of Pacha Mama; Bolivia followed in 2010. New Zealand’s 2017 Te Awa Tupua Act granted legal personhood to the Whanganui River, formalizing the Māori view of ancestral waterways as living entities. Colombia’s Constitutional Court recognized the Atrato River as a rights-bearing subject in 2016. Dozens of jurisdictions have now extended some form of legal standing to lakes, rivers, mountains, and forests.

In our paper, we ask whether differences in how a society conceptualizes the natural world is related to contemporary environmental attitudes and environmental conditions.

A primary challenge is measurement. Ethnographic descriptions are rich, but they are difficult to compare systematically across a broad cross-section of societies. The multidimensional worldviews of societies must be distilled to simple measures that capture the core variation.

Our analysis turns to traditional folktales. Our source is the Folklore Catalogue compiled over several decades by the anthropologist Yuri Berezkin, and introduced to economics by Stelios Michalopoulos and Melanie Xue. It records which of 2,564 narrative motifs were held by each of 958 ethnic groups.

A motif is a short summary of the events in a folktale, and its sentences typically have a subject, an action, and an object. That structure is what we exploit. We process the corpus with the spaCy language pipeline to recover the syntactic relations between words, then we extract subject–verb and subject–verb–object composites. The logic is simple: in the sentence “A kills B,” A has agency, because A is the subject and the one acting; B does not, because B is the object and the one acted upon. We then classified entities by whether they unambiguously represent nature. Animals, plants, and atmospheric or cosmic elements such as sky, rainbow, and moon account for 28 percent of all entity tokens.

This yields three measures for each group: the share of its motifs mentioning nature at all, the share mentioning nature as a subject, and the share mentioning nature as an object. The appeal of the approach is its objectivity and simplicity. It reads the sentence structure, applies the same rule everywhere, and produces an easily interpretable continuous measure.

We then run two analyses. The first links these measures to environmental attitudes among roughly 300,000 respondents in the World Values Survey and European Values Study, connecting people to ethnic groups through the language they speak at home. We combine four survey items — membership in an environmental group, prioritizing the environment over economic growth, confidence in the environmental protection movement, and a preference for beautifying cities and countryside over achieving economic growth — into a single index, and include demographic controls and subnational region-by-wave fixed effects. We find that respondents from ethnic groups whose folktales mention nature more often, today, express more support for environmental conservation. When we separate subjects from objects, the association is driven by nature appearing as an active subject rather than a passive agent. Interestingly, this relationship only holds for individuals without higher education, suggesting that the persistence of traditional worldviews weakens with formal education.

The second analysis moves beyond reported attitudes and examines environmental outcomes. Using the Ethnologue language polygons to locate where these groups live today, we measure three environmental conditions from remote sensing data in 2000: biodiversity intactness, forest cover, and seasonal surface water. We find that groups whose folktales feature nature have better environmental outcomes. Again, the association is driven by mentions where nature is a subject rather than as an object. That coefficient is stable across specifications that account for human impact, Köppen–Geiger climatic-zone fixed effects, elevation and ruggedness, protected-area coverage, and country fixed effects.

We are careful about what this does and does not show. Folklore is not randomly assigned. Groups living in forested, biodiverse places may have told more stories about animals for the obvious reason that there were more animals around, and those same places may retain more forest today for reasons unconnected to anyone’s worldview. Our controls address this as far as cross-cultural data allows, but our correlations stop short of identifying causal relationships.

What our analysis does establish is that the mental models embedded in oral tradition are measurable, that they vary systematically across societies, and that this variation is not orthogonal to how the environment is thought about and persists in later generations. Furthermore, it is becoming clear that the obstacles to addressing the impending climate crisis are not only technological but cultural, social, and political. How a group views and characterizes nature is a potentially important factor affecting its receptivity to environmentally conscious policies and practices.

Bart Bonikowski, Juan Miguel Jimenez, Nathan Nunn, Oscar Stuhler, and Satish Wasti. When nature has agency: Traditional worldviews and contemporary environmental conservation. Evolution and Human Behavior 47.5 (2026): 106942.

What do people want in a friend? Ancestral cooperation shaped contemporary friend preferences

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– by Adar Eisenbruch

How do people choose their friends? Given how ubiquitous friendships are, you might think that the answer to this question would be obvious and well-established. In reality, we’re still learning a lot about friendship formation. There are two broad theories of why people choose the friends that they choose. The standard in social psychology is called the “instrumentality principle,” which states that people are attracted to potential friends with traits that are useful for their current goals. Want to play basketball? You’re going to want tall friends. Hungry? Time to hang out with that guy who went to culinary school. Need help with your math homework? The nerd down the hall suddenly seems pretty cool.

Evolutionary psychologists have suggested another theory, which my colleagues and I have called “social taste buds.” On this theory, people have evolved friend preferences, just like we have evolved food preferences and mate preferences. Since friendship likely evolved as a form of long-term, ongoing cooperative relationship, we hypothesize that people want friends with traits that would have contributed to cooperative partner value in ancestral environments. For example, cues of generosity, trustworthiness, health, and the ability to produce resources as a forager should all be attractive in a potential friend.

We recently tested this theory in two studies reported in Evolution and Human Behavior. In Study 1, we had pairs of unacquainted, same-sex college students come to the lab. After a half-hour conversation, the participants privately rated each other on friend desirability and on traits that might predict friend desirability (e.g. trustworthiness, attractiveness, ability as a hunter-gatherer). At the end of the study, the participants had the opportunity to leave their email address for the other person so that they could meet up outside the lab. We actually exchanged their email addresses if both participants wanted to.

Overall, ratings of ancestral productivity (the ability to produce resources as a hunter-gatherer), attractiveness, prosociality, dominance, social status, nurturance (the ability to take care of kin), and knowledge of what the other sex likes were all positive predictors of friend desirability. Two preferences in particular support the social taste buds theory. First is the preference for physically attractive friends, which was the single strongest preference. This seems like a strange thing to want in a same-sex friend – what good is a friend’s attractiveness to you? But physical attractiveness is likely a summary judgment of partner value. Attractiveness is based on a combination of cues of health, maturity, strength, etc. Since so many of the traits that made someone a good mate likely also made them a good cooperative partner, we suggest that humans evolved a preference for physical attractiveness in same-sex relationships too.

The second is the preference for ancestral productivity, that is, the ability to produce resources as a hunter-gatherer, which was stronger among men than women. This is another bizarre trait for undergraduates to want in a friend – the campus dining halls don’t make students forage for their dinner. It makes sense, however, if friend preferences evolved as cooperative partner preferences, and men faced stronger selection pressures for choosing good hunting partners.

Another sex difference was also striking. Recall that the participants had the opportunity to leave their contact info for the other participant so that they could continue their relationship outside the lab. Men were significantly more likely than women to leave their contact information for the other person (50% vs. 30%). This wasn’t because the men found their partners more desirable as friends. Instead, at any level of friend desirability, men were more likely than women to initiate a real-world friendship. This is consistent with the hypothesis that men have evolved a looser friendship style than women in order to facilitate building a flexible network of cooperative partners and allies. Previous studies have found that men prefer to have more, but less intimate, friendships than women, but this is the first observation of men’s lower friendship standards affecting real relationship formation.

Notice that many of the preferences we observed could be explained by either theory. A preference for friends high in prosociality or social status, for example, could be due to ancestral selection pressures or due to the relevance of those traits for current goals. We therefore conducted a second study that compared participants’ friend preferences to the traits that they said would be useful for their current goals. Participants first spent a few minutes writing about their most important current goal, then they rated 11 traits on how much a friend having each trait would help them achieve their goal. The participants then rated same-sex faces for how much they wanted to be friends with each person. The faces had also been rated on the same 11 traits, so we could calculate the effect of each trait on participants’ friend desirability judgments and compare it to the trait’s goal-relevance.

Attractiveness, extraversion, and ancestral productivity were more attractive in a potential friend than could be explained by their goal-relevance, suggesting that the preferences for those traits were not motivated by current goals. Overall, there was little evidence that preferences were calibrated to current utility, but stronger evidence of preferences like those observed in Study 1 irrespective of their current goal-relevance.

Of course, the instrumentality principle and the social taste buds theory are not mutually exclusive. These studies provided clear evidence of evolved friend preferences, but it’s very likely that people sometimes choose their friends based on evolved preferences and sometimes to serve their current goals. This would match how people choose foods; sometimes your dietary goals lead you to order a salad, and sometimes your evolved preferences win and you order an ice cream sundae. Researchers can now proceed to the interesting question of how these two types of preferences are integrated with each other.

Adar B. Eisenbruch, Rachel L. Grillot, and James R. Roney. What do people want in a friend? Cues of ancestral cooperative partner value predict same-sex friend preferences. Evolution and Human Behavior 47.5 (2026): 106919.

Tenure-track position in the Department of Psychology – UC San Diego

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The Department of Psychology at UC San Diego invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position focused on high-level human cognition, with an anticipated start date of July 1st, 2027. We seek candidates ready to establish a rigorous, independent research program on high-level cognitive processes in humans (e.g. aesthetics, attention, attitudes, decision-making, effort, inference, language, learning, memory, preferences, reasoning, self-control, social cognition, well-being) that leverages insights from experimental research to inform formal/computational theories. Ideal candidates will possess strong empirical, theoretical, and quantitative skills, with the potential to bridge between areas of the department. Additional responsibilities include teaching graduate- and undergraduate-level courses and mentoring students within the Department of Psychology, as well as participating in department and university service.

For more information, visit this link.

Tenure-Track Faculty Position in Psychology – Cal Poly Humboldt

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Cal Poly Humboldt and the Department of Psychology invite applicants for a full-time, academic year, tenure-track faculty position in any field of psychology (e.g., Behavioral, Clinical, Cognitive, Developmental, Neuroscience, Quantitative, Social).

The Cal Poly Humboldt Psychology department is dedicated to providing undergraduate and graduate students with the skills to scientifically and critically evaluate psychological processes. Our courses address the impact of culture and context on human functioning, fostering an appreciation for differences through research and applied experiences. We value and respect diversity as a strength and in this regard, seek to attract and retain the best possible students, staff, and faculty. We prepare our students to apply their knowledge and skills from psychology to create a socially just and an equitable society.

The Department of Psychology offers a B.A. degree, a minor program, course options for general education requirements and electives, service courses for other majors, and three graduate options leading to the M.A. degree in School Psychology, Counseling Psychology (MFT), and Academic Research in Psychology. Faculty with specializations in each area contribute to all programs and options in the department.

For more information about the position, please visit the job listing.

 

Psychopathy and Evolution

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– 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.

Women build coalitions too and they matter!

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– by Maud Mouginot

Coalitions — two or more people cooperating in a competitive context at the expense of a third party — are a widespread strategy among mammals and a basic building block of human social life. In mammals, coalitions for between-group competition is heavily male-biased, however, within-group coalitions are formed by either sex in many species (e.g., banded mongooses, African wild dogs, hanuman langurs, olive baboons, white-faced capuchins). Yet in human subsistence societies, studies on coalitions have concentrated on men. Women’s cooperation is well documented in childcare, foraging and food sharing, however women’s coalitions have often been thought to be limited to the households.

Coalitions along the Omo River

We collected data from Kwegu, Kara and Nyangatom communities, three subsistence groups along the Omo River in southwest Ethiopia. Those communities are all polygynous, patrilineal, patrilocal and patriarchal, with male elders holding the highest social status. Focus groups in each community identified three contexts in which both men and women described joining forces against a third party: interpersonal disagreements, group decision-making, and motivating the opposite gender to work. We carried those contexts into structured interviews with 142 people in one Kwegu community (82 women, 60 men), asking about participation, preferred partner attributes, and preferred number of partners.

We tested three hypotheses. A household-based hypothesis: women’s coalitions are confined largely to the household and to kin, while men can widely choose coalition partners. A women-biased hypothesis: because women compete over more shareable resources, coalition returns are more predictable for them, favoring more coalition formation compared to men. And a gender-neutral hypothesis: both genders form coalitions to a similar extent, with preferences varying by context rather than by gender.

Are women choosier than men?

When it comes to forming coalitions, we found no strong effect of gender, meaning that gender did not predict reporting participation in coalitions. Preferences for coalitionary partners vary across the three coalition types, but our analyses revealed distinct gender-based patterns. Women reported stronger preferences than men for partners of the same clan and with kinship ties; a trend in the same direction appeared for same-age-group partners. Both genders preferred higher-status partners, but especially men. Finally, men preferred a larger number of coalitionary partners than women, while women reported a stronger preference for same-gender partners.

A fundamental feature of our social organization

Each hypothesis received partial support and none was fully confirmed. Both men and women participate in the 3 coalitionary contexts we studied at a similar rate. Preferences for coalitionary partners vary across those contexts but we still identified some patterns. Our results show that women exhibit greater selectivity than men in their choice of coalitionary partners. Importantly, contrary to work hypothesizing that women’s coalitions tend to be with relatives, we found that they clearly extend beyond the household to the community level.

This study covers only three communities in southwest Ethiopia, but the findings highlight how far women’s support systems are underrecognized in subsistence societies. Differences in partner preferences may shape group dynamics, with women influencing social processes within their communities in ways that differ from men, through group decision-making, interpersonal disputes and interactions with the opposite gender. These results support a growing body of literature indicating that women’s cooperative behavior encompasses scales and domains typically associated with men.

None of this makes women unusual among mammals. Coalitions for within-group competition occur in both sexes across many species, including non-human primates. Even among our two closest relatives, females form coalitions: rarely in chimpanzees, frequently in bonobos. As in other mammals, then, female coalitions in humans may be a fundamental feature of our social organization.

Mouginot, M., Garfield, Z. H., & Glowacki, L. (2026). Coalitions matter for both men and women: Insights from three subsistence communities in southwest Ethiopia. Evolution and Human Behavior, 47, 106882.

The role of emotional support in men’s and women’s friendships

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– 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.