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People vary both in their embrace of their society's traditions, and in their perception of hazards as salient and necessitating a response. Over evolutionary time, traditions have offered avenues for addressing hazards, plausibly resulting in linkages between orientations toward tradition and orientations toward danger. Emerging research documents connections between traditionalism and threat responsivity, including pathogen-avoidance motivations. Additionally, because hazard-mitigating behaviors can conflict with competing priorities, associations between traditionalism and pathogen avoidance may hinge on contextually contingent tradeoffs. The COVID-19 pandemic provides a real-world test of the posited relationship between traditionalism and hazard avoidance. Across 27 societies (N = 7844), we find that, in a majority of countries, individuals' endorsement of tradition positively correlates with their adherence to costly COVID-19-avoidance behaviors; accounting for some of the conflicts that arise between public health precautions and other objectives further strengthens this evidence that traditionalism is associated with greater attention to hazards., (© 2023. The Author(s).)

Witnessing altruistic behaviour can elicit moral elevation , an emotion that motivates prosocial cooperation. This emotion is evoked more strongly when the observer anticipates that other people will be reciprocally cooperative. Coalitionality should therefore moderate feelings of elevation, as whether the observer shares the coalitional affiliation of those observed should influence the observer's assessment of the likelihood that the latter will cooperate with the observer. We examined this thesis in studies contemporaneous with the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests. Although BLM protests were predominantly peaceful, they were depicted by conservative media as destructive and antisocial. In two large-scale, pre-registered online studies (total N = 2172), political orientation strongly moderated feelings of state elevation elicited by a video of a peaceful BLM protest (Studies 1 and 2) or a peaceful Back the Blue (BtB) counter-protest (Study 2). Political conservatism predicted less elevation following the BLM video and more elevation following the BtB video. Elevation elicited by the BLM video correlated with preferences to defund police, whereas elevation elicited by the BtB video correlated with preferences to increase police funding. These findings extend prior work on elevation into the area of prosocial cooperation in the context of coalitional conflict., Competing Interests: The authors declare no competing interests., (© 2023 The Authors.)

Jagiello et al.'s bifocal stance theory provides a useful theoretical framework for attempting to understand the connection between greater adherence to traditional norms and greater sensitivity to threats in the world. Here, we examine the implications of the instrumental and ritual stances with regard to various evolutionary explanations for traditionalism-threat sensitivity linkages.

The evolutionary fitness payoffs of moral condemnation are greatest within an individual's immediate social milieu. Accordingly, insofar as human moral intuitions have been shaped by adaptive design, we can expect transgressive harms to be perceived as more wrong when transpiring in the here and now than when occurring at a distance, or with the approval of local authority figures. This moral parochialism hypothesis has been supported by research conducted in diverse societies, but has yet to be tested in an East Asian society, despite prior research indicating that East Asians appraise transgressive acts as being caused by situational and contextual factors to a greater extent than do Westerners, who tend to emphasize dispositional factors (i.e., the transgressor's personal nature). Here, in a quasi-experiment using field samples recruited in Seoul and Los Angeles, we tested (i) the moral parochialism hypothesis regarding the perceived wrongness of transgressions, as well as (ii) the extent to which these wrongness judgments might be influenced by cross-cultural differences in causal appraisals. Despite notably large differences across the two societies in situational versus dispositional appraisals of the causes of the transgressions, replicating previous findings elsewhere, in both societies we found that transgressions were deemed less wrong when occurring at spatial or temporal remove or with the consent of authorities. These findings add to the understanding of morality as universally focused on local affairs, notwithstanding cultural variation in perceptions of the situational versus dispositional causes of (im)moral acts., (© 2022. The Author(s).)

Early adversity is considered a major risk factor for adult posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Simultaneously, however, early adversity is also known to contribute to psychological resilience, and, indeed, some high-adversity groups do not display elevated PTSD risk. We explored correlates of PTSD in the Study to Assess Risk and Resilience in Servicemembers military dataset to evaluate contrasting accounts of the relationship between early adversity and PTSD. The standard deficit model depicts ontogeny as inherently vulnerable to insult, such that early adversity yields a less robust adult phenotype. A complementary life history theory account holds that adverse early experiences cue a fast life history orientation that reduces investment in maintenance, yielding an adult phenotype less able to recover from trauma. An opposing life history theory account holds that early adversity cues expectations of an adverse adult environment, adaptively reducing reactivity to adverse events. We use principal component analysis to extract a latent variable representing several childhood experiences and multiple lifestyle factors that plausibly proxy life history orientation. After correcting for covariates, we find a strong positive influence of such proxies on PTSD risk, suggesting that early adversity may indeed increase risk for PTSD, and thus that either the standard deficit model, the reduced maintenance account or a combination are correct., (© The Author(s) 2022.)