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Reviewing political opinion patterns in the 1950s, The American Voter concluded that self-interest played a key role in the public's views on social welfare policy. Since then, however, many researchers have argued that self-interest has very little effect on issue opinions. We argue that the principal reason for this shift lies not in self-interest coming to matter less, but, instead, because some scholars—by narrowing the definition of self-interest, declaring ordinary demographic effects uninterpretable, and assuming that group interest is distinct from self-interest—essentially defined out the possibility of self-interest being a major determinant of political views. Yet even with these limiting moves, the general denial of self-interest has come to include a long and growing list of exceptions. In addition, we find that many of the specific claims grounding the general denial are problematic. Thus, we argue that self-interest remains a potent factor in the context of a number of issue opinions. Further, taking a broader view of human interests, we see self-interest effects not only in economic opinions, but also in various cultural/social domains. For example, when it comes to individuals’ opinions on issues relating to meritocracy and discrimination, we find that levels of meritocratic competence are typically a key factor, along with racial, religious, and other relevant categories. Also, there are solid links among individuals’ sexual lifestyles, religiosity, and views on issues such as abortion and marijuana legalization. Not only are such domain-specific relationships “major,” but self-interest variables typically have more secure claims than individuals’ ideology, party, and values to being unambiguous “determinants” of issue opinions.

Exerting ‘effort’ or ‘self-control’ is experienced as aversive. From an evolutionary point of view, this is something of a mystery insofar as aversive phenomenology is usually associated with fitness costs or threats, whereas exerting self-control seems to be associated with positive outcomes. Recent theorizing surrounding the sense of effort suggests that there are costs to exerting effort, and these costs explain the accompanying unpleasant sensations. Debate remains, however, about the nature of and the mechanisms underlying these costs.

The academic and public interest in blood glucose and its relationship to decision making has been increasing over the last decade. To investigate and evaluate competing theories about this relationship, we conducted a psychometric meta-analysis on the effect of blood glucose on decision making. We identified 42 studies relating to 4 dimensions of decision making: willingness to pay, willingness to work, time discounting, and decision style. We did not find a uniform influence of blood glucose on decision making. Instead, we found that low levels of blood glucose increase the willingness to pay and willingness to work when a situation is food related, but decrease willingness to pay and work in all other situations. Low levels of blood glucose increase the future discount rate for food; that is, decision makers become more impatient, and to a lesser extent increase the future discount rate for money. Low levels of blood glucose also increase the tendency to make more intuitive rather than deliberate decisions. However, this effect was only observed in situations unrelated to food. We conclude that blood glucose has domain-specific effects, influencing decision making differently depending on the relevance of the situation to acquiring food. (PsycINFO Database Record

Many researchers have attempted to link evolutionary notions to political psychology by proposing a natural tendency for people to cluster into liberals and conservatives across various social and economic opinion domains. We review evidence showing that, in contrast, for the large majority of Americans, racial and economic opinions are only trivially correlated with opinions regarding matters of lifestyle and religious fundamentalism. The key exception is a group that does, in fact, show reasonably robust ideological alignment across diverse domains: whites with high levels of human capital (measured by education and test performance). Further, since the early 1980s, while the US public as a whole has increasingly tended to choose liberal/conservative labels and political parties in line with their issue opinions, substantial increases in cross-issue correlations have occurred only among whites with high levels of human capital. Nonetheless, mass public opinion is not unstructured—it maintains an underlying coherence grounded in domain-specific demographic connections relating to different opinion areas.

Prior research has suggested that men overestimate women’s sexual intentions. However, the bulk of the data supporting this view comes from participants from the USA. Here, we report three attempts to replicate this effect in samples from Chile, Spain, and France. While there was some evidence of overestimation of sexual intent by men on the aggregate measure, removing a single item decreases or even eliminates the sex difference in some of the cultures studied, suggesting that the aggregate effect is driven by a small number of particular behaviors. Furthermore, women from the USA appear to rate sexual intent differently from men and women in the other countries, whose ratings are relatively more homogeneous. While more work is needed, these results raise the possibility that the sex differences in sexual intent perception documented in the USA might not be cross-culturally universal.

The commentaries on our target article are surprisingly sympathetic to our overall approach to explaining subjective effort, though disagreement with particulars inevitably emerged. Here, in our response, we first review the few disagreements concerning the basic structure of our proposal, highlighting areas in which little or no resistance was voiced. Opposition to the assumptions that underlie our opportunity cost model is noticeably limited. Areas of genuine disagreement, however, include: (1) the inputs to and outputs of the relevant decision-making systems; (2) how to interpret data regarding individual differences in performance; (3) how to explain persistence on tasks that give rise to the sensation of subjective effort; and (4) the details of the relevant neuropsychological systems. Throughout we point to empirical issues raised by the commentaries and suggest research that will be useful in arbitrating points of disagreement.

Theories of the sources of contemporary individual differences in religiosity have been proposed involving religiosity's role both in (1) enhancing within-group cooperation and (2) supporting high-commitment reproductive strategies. The present study used data from 296,959 individuals in around 90 countries from the World Values Survey/European Values Study to test the relative strength of individual differences in cooperative morals and reproductive morals in predicting individual differences in religiosity. Cooperative morals tended not to predict religiosity either substantially or in a consistent direction across world regions when entered simultaneously with reproductive morals. In contrast, more-restrictive reproductive morals were significant predictors of increased religiosity in every region, with the size of the relationship being small in poorer regions and large in wealthier regions. These findings run counter to the view that religiosity has a fundamental connection with cooperative morals; instead, particularly in developed countries, individuals' relationships with religious groups are more closely aligned with reproductive strategies.

Mutual mate choice is prevalent in humans, where both males and females have a say in their choice of partner. How the choices made by one sex constrain the choice of the other remains poorly understood, however, because human studies have mostly limited themselves to measuring preferences. We used a sample of 5782 speed-daters making 128 104 choices to link preferences for partner height to actual choice and the formation of a match (the mutual expression of interest to meet again). We show that sexual conflict at the level of preferences is translated into choice: women were most likely to choose a speed-dater 25 cm taller than themselves, whereas men were most likely to choose women only 7 cm shorter than themselves. As a consequence, matches were most likely at an intermediate height difference (19 cm) that differed significantly from the preferred height difference of both sexes. Thus, our study reveals how mutual mate choice can result in suboptimal pair formation for both sexes, highlighting the importance of assessing the mate choice process in its entirety. (C) 2013 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

We propose that moral condemnation functions to guide bystanders to choose the same side as other bystanders in disputes. Humans interact in dense social networks, and this poses a problem for bystanders when conflicts arise: which side, if any, to support. Choosing sides is a difficult strategic problem because the outcome of a conflict critically depends on which side other bystanders support. One strategy is siding with the higher status disputant, which can allow bystanders to coordinate with one another to take the same side, reducing fighting costs. However, this strategy carries the cost of empowering high-status individuals to exploit others. A second possible strategy is choosing sides based on preexisting relationships. This strategy balances power but carries another cost: Bystanders choose different sides, and this discoordination causes escalated conflicts and high fighting costs. We propose that moral cognition is designed to manage both of these problems by implementing a dynamic coordination strategy in which bystanders coordinate side-taking based on a public signal derived from disputants' actions rather than their identities. By focusing on disputants' actions, bystanders can dynamically change which individuals they support across different disputes, simultaneously solving the problems of coordination and exploitation. We apply these ideas to explain a variety of otherwise mysterious moral phenomena.

Immanuel Kant, Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, George Williams, and Stephen J. Gould, among others, have pointed out that observing that a certain behavior causes a certain effect does not itself license the inference that the effect was the result of intent or design to bring about that effect. Compliance with duty might not reflect the action of conscience, gains in trade might not be due to the benevolence of traders, and fox paws might not be designed to make tracks in snow. Similarly, when person A inflicts costs on person B and, in so doing, generates benefits to C, D, and E (or the group to which A through E belong, in aggregate), the inference that A’s imposition of costs on B is by virtue of intent or design to bring about these welfare gains is not logically licensed. In short, labeling punishment “altruistic” because it has the effect of benefitting some individuals is inconsistent with key ideas in philosophy, economics, and biology. Understanding the ultimate cause and proximate design of the mechanisms that cause people to punish is likely to be important for understanding how punishment can help solve collective action problems.

Minimizing the costs that others impose upon oneself and upon those in whom one has a fitness stake, such as kin and allies, is a key adaptive problem for many organisms. Our ancestors regularly faced such adaptive problems (including homicide, bodily harm, theft, mate poaching, cuckoldry, reputational damage, sexual aggression, and the infliction of these costs on one's offspring, mates, coalition partners, or friends). One solution to this problem is to impose retaliatory costs on an aggressor so that the aggressor and other observers will lower their estimates of the net benefits to be gained from exploiting the retaliator in the future. We posit that humans have an evolved cognitive system that implements this strategy – deterrence – which we conceptualize as a revenge system. The revenge system produces a second adaptive problem: losing downstream gains from the individual on whom retaliatory costs have been imposed. We posit, consequently, a subsidiary computational system designed to restore particular relationships after cost-imposing interactions by inhibiting revenge and motivating behaviors that signal benevolence for the harmdoer. The operation of these systems depends on estimating the risk of future exploitation by the harmdoer and the expected future value of the relationship with the harmdoer. We review empirical evidence regarding the operation of these systems, discuss the causes of cultural and individual differences in their outputs, and sketch their computational architecture.

Interest in and research on disgust has surged over the past few decades. The field, however, still lacks a coherent theoretical framework for understanding the evolved function or functions of disgust. Here we present such a framework, emphasizing 2 levels of analysis: that of evolved function and that of information processing. Although there is widespread agreement that disgust evolved to motivate the avoidance of contact with disease-causing organisms, there is no consensus about the functions disgust serves when evoked by acts unrelated to pathogen avoidance. Here we suggest that in addition to motivating pathogen avoidance, disgust evolved to regulate decisions in the domains of mate choice and morality. For each proposed evolved function, we posit distinct information processing systems that integrate function-relevant information and account for the trade-offs required of each disgust system. By refocusing the discussion of disgust on computational mechanisms, we recast prior theorizing on disgust into a framework that can generate new lines of empirical and theoretical inquiry. © 2012 American Psychological Association.

When it comes to religiosity and its lifestyle correlates, the typical assumption is that the causal arrows run primarily from religiosity to morals to one’s own behavior. In contrast, this chapter argues that differences in sexual and reproductive lifestyles can substantially influence individual choices regarding religious involvement and related beliefs. Religious groups provide attractive benefits to high-commitment, high-fertility strategists, but are simultaneously less helpful or harmful to low-commitment, low-fertility strategists. The chapter reviews evidence showing not only that sexual and reproductive variables have relatively large statistical relationships with religiosity in modern, developed societies but also that the causal role of these sexual and reproductive variables helps to account for various longitudinal and correlational patterns involving religiosity. Human life is driven by concrete, fitness-relevant concerns, and contemporary differences in religiosity are no exception.

Make no mistake: Robert Kurzban is one of the most important scholars in modern evolutionary psychology (EP) circles. His work on social cognition and moral decision-making (e.g., Kurzban, DeScioli, & O’Brien, 2007) is as well-thought-out and implemented as any modern research in the social sciences. Further, he is an extremely eloquent scholar with an engaging presentational style. For these reasons, his first book has been met with great excitement and interest by folks in our field. And I’d have to say that while I don’t agree with all of his points, I think the overall product of Why Everyone (Else) is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind is really outstanding. Written in a highly engaging style, this book does an exceptional job of summarizing work on the psychology of morality and, to some extent, it serves as an interesting introduction to the field of EP. To my mind, this book has two primary goals – and these goals are encapsulated in the title and subtitle of the book respectively. Primarily, this book sheds light on the nature of moral psychology – with a specific eye toward elucidating hypocrisy. This is great for several reasons – largely because people are, without exception, fascinated by hypocrisy. People seem to love to catch others in moments of hypocrisy. And in a highly political world (as ours is), calling people out on hypocrisy is something of a silver bullet – often used by people in all sorts of contexts to advance their own agenda. Second, per the book’s subtitle, this book sets out to provide an evolutionarily informed argument for why a modular conception of the mind is the best way to understand human psychology.

Chiappe and Gardner (2012) argue that the concept of modularity proposed by us (Barrett & Kurzban, 2006) is different from the way modularity has been conventionally viewed in evolutionary psychology and that it cannot explain the existence of mechanisms designed to deal with novelty. We reiterate our view that there is no reason natural selection is limited to creating mechanisms that are innate, automatic, encapsulated, and domain-narrow. Indeed, all functionally designed mechanisms in the mind, including those that do not have these properties, are the products of natural selection, including “System 2” mechanisms. Further, if mechanisms designed to deal with “novelty” exist, then they must exploit some recurrent features of problems in order to work. Therefore, the problems System 2 mechanisms solve cannot be novel along every possible dimension, and System 2 mechanisms must have design features that allow them to find solutions.