• FEBRUARY 23, 2023

    HYATT REGENCY ATLANTA

    HANOVER HALL C

  • We invite you to join us for the 21st annual SPSP Evolutionary Psychology Preconference, to be held in person at the Hyatt Regency atlanta On February 23, 2023

    ABOUT THE PRECONFERENCE

    The Evolutionary Psychology preconference is a forum for discussing innovative research on the myriad psychological mechanisms that evolved to help humans navigate the social world they faced over evolutionary history (and still do today).

     

    Presenters and attendees aim to tackle questions about the functions and structures of human social cognition and humans social behavior (e.g., cooperation, morality, romantic relationships, culture, stereotypes and prejudice).

     

    For the past 20 years, the Evolutionary Psychology Preconference has spotlighted interdisciplinary research spanning:

    • social + personality psychology
    • developmental, cognitive, + cultural psychology
    • evolutionary anthropology + behavioral ecology
    • primatology + comparative research
    • political science, philosophy, + economics, and more!​

     

    Each year, we showcase cutting-edge research from scholars across career stages. ​We welcome scholars at every career stage to attend (and to submit data blitz and poster presentations)!

     

    The preconference is a single, all-day event.

    Registration is open via the SPSP website.

     

    We look forward to seeing you!

  • INVITED SPEAKERS

     

  • we are excited to welcome the following speakers this year:

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    Marcela Benítez

    Emory University

    Department of Anthropology

    Cooperation, Conflict, and Social Choices in Capuchin Monkeys

    Human cognitive abilities are remarkable, but not exceptional. In light of evolution, humans are an extreme primate on one end of an already-sophisticated spectrum. One hypothesis for explaining the evolution of primate cognition is that living in groups selected for a “social
    mind”, a larger brain and complex cognitive abilities to aid in solving a myriad of social challenges. This hypothesis has garnered considerable support from experimental paradigms in captivity, however, these studies often control against normal social interactions. Understanding the selective pressure of social challenges on primate cognition requires studying the social mind in a social context. My research examines how nonhuman primates
    make decision in their social world and what factors impact these choices. I approach these questions from an evolutionary perspective while utilizing a mechanistic approach, through the integration of experimental paradigms in the wild, and the analysis and manipulation of hormones. In this talk, I focus on decision-making during cooperation and conflict, two situations in which making the wrong choice can have significant fitness consequences. First, I examine how conflict influences cooperation in capuchin monkeys, and the role of oxytocin in promoting cooperation during conflict. Second, I present novel methods to examine experimental cognition and decision-making in wild primates. By combining the best aspects of field work, highlighting the emergence of social challenges, and the best aspects of controlled experiments, highlighting the mechanisms of social choices, my research offers a promising
    avenue for understanding the importance of sociality, cooperation, and conflict on primate cognitive evolution.

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    Jordann Brandner

    Elon University

    Department of Psychology

    Evolved Optimality: The Synthesis of Error Management Theory and Signal Detection Theory to Study Evolved Biases ​

    Error management theory (EMT) broadly states that decisions repeatedly made under uncertainty result in evolutionarily strategic biases that reduce costs, maximize benefits, or both, even if it produces more errors overall. At its core, EMT bears many similarities to Signal Detection Theory (SDT) which describes how the presence or absence of a signal is judged while in noisy or uncertain environments. A synthesis of EMT and SDT can help researchers better understand evolved biases, such as sexual overperception, commitment skepticism, and overperception of venomous animals. This talk will present the results from several studies combining SDT and EMT to establish a more nuanced way of evaluating bias that incorporates a measure of cue discriminability, avoids the pitfalls of difference scores, tests novel hypotheses that could not be generated by either theory alone, and allows for the comparison of biases across topic areas.

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    Leda Cosmides

    University of California, Santa Barbara

    Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences

    A Moral Tradeoff System Produces Intuitive Judgments that are Rational, Coherent, and

    Strike a Balance Between Conflicting Moral Values

    Hominin social life routinely created moral dilemmas. For many, striking a balance between two competing moral obligations by partially satisfying both (a compromise judgment) would have promoted fitness better than neglecting one to fully satisfy the other (an extreme judgment). Making adaptive judgments required a moral tradeoff system (MTS): a cognitive system that weighs the conflicting moral values, and uses the resulting representation to identify, from the available solutions, the one that is most right (Guzmán et al., PNAS 2022). We drew on rational choice theory to develop a cognitive model of how a well-designed MTS should work; it should
    produce rational judgments, even when striking a balance that results in compromises. We tested the model using revealed preference methods and a sacrificial moral dilemma. This allowed a critical test between the MTS hypothesis and an influential dual process model, which claims that sacrificial dilemmas activate a “non-negotiable” emotion that prevents compromises. Each
    subject considered 21 scenarios, which varied the human cost of saving lives, each with 2-7 possible resolutions. When asked which is morally right, many people made compromise judgments, contradicting the dual process model. Moreover, their judgments satisfied the axioms
    of rational choice, no matter how many compromise judgments they made. This highly improbable result cannot be produced by deliberative reasoning; it is the signature of an optimizing algorithm. As the MTS model predicts, judgments were intuitive, yet rational: People
    consistently identified the resolution that is most right, given how their minds weighed the competing moral values.

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    Donna Maney

    Emory University

    Department of Psychology

    Inside the Supergene of the Bird with Four Sexes

    The white-throated sparrow (Zonotrichia albicollis) offers unique opportunities to understand mechanisms underlying the evolution of social behavior. In this species, alternative plumage morphs are associated with a segment of chromosome 2 that has been called a ‘supergene’. Because the supergene occurs equally in males and females, and because each breeding pair in the wild consists of one individual with the supergene and one without it, this species has been called the “bird with four sexes.” The supergene is associated with a behavioral phenotype; birds with the supergene are more aggressive and less parental than birds without it. In this talk, I will present the results of our efforts to identify genes inside the supergene that are responsible for this behavioral polymorphism. We hypothesize that two genes in particular, ESR1 and VIP, contribute to behavior in a coordinated way and could represent co-adapted alleles. Because the supergene contains more than 1000 individual genes, this species provides rich possibilities for discovering alleles that work together to mediate life-history trade-offs and maximize the fitness of alternative complex phenotypes.

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    Mark Moffett

    National Museum of Natural History

    Smithsonian Institution

    Comfort Around Strangers: The Turning Point in Human Prehistory that Made Huge Societies Possible

    An essential feature of any society is the capacity of its members to distinguish one another from outsiders and exclude foreigners on that basis. In most species that live in societies, the members must recognize each other as individuals. I contrast such "individual recognition societies” with the societies of humans and a few other animals in which membership can be anonymous, a condition that, under suitable conditions, makes possible enormous populations. How and why anonymous societies emerged in our ancestors is a question of significance for psychologists, anthropologists, biologists, and sociologists.

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    Eric Pedersen

    University of Colorado Boulder

    Department of Psychology and Neuroscience

    The Elements of Gratitude​

    Over the past twenty years, research on gratitude has focused on its antecedents and consequences, its potential mental and physical health benefits, and its role in relationship formation. Despite this impressive body of research, we do not yet know, in a deep sense, how and why gratitude functions the way that it does. I argue that gratitude helps solve the adaptive problem of forming cooperative relationships by motivating individuals to communicate to their benefactors that there has been an increase in the value that the beneficiary ascribes to the benefactor. This signal of gratitude, in turn, updates the benefactor’s view of the beneficiary as “someone who cares about me” and motivates cognitive processes and behaviors that increase the likelihood they will develop and maintain a cooperative relationship. Here I present the results of several experiments testing what produces gratitude, how benefit delivery increases beneficiaries’ valuation of benefactors’ welfare, and how expressions of gratitude alter the expressor’s reputation in the eyes of both their benefactors and third-party observers.

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    Jeffry Simpson

    University of Minnesota

    Department of Psychology

    Life History Theory and Adult Outcomes:

    Evidence from the Minnesota Longitudinal Study

    of Risk and Adaptation

    Life history theory (LHT) is a broad, meta-theoretical approach to understanding how certain kinds of experiences encountered earlier in life may be prospectively associated with certain social development outcomes later in life. In this talk, I first review core principles of LHT and then discuss longitudinal studies that have tested hypotheses derived from Belsky, Steinberg, and Draper’s (1991) Evolutionary Model of Social Development. Working with lifespan data from the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation, we have examined how exposure to unpredictable (versus harsh) early-life environments are prospectively related to risk-taking, mating, and parenting in adulthood. These studies reveal the mediation pathways through which exposure to early-life unpredictability in particular is associated with these important adult outcomes.

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    Daniel Sznycer

    Oklahoma State University

    Department of Psychology

    Value Computation in Humans​

    The variables cost and benefit are of central importance in selectionist models. Evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, and other disciplines have added much to our understanding of how humans represent and estimate these variables and carry out biological processes on the basis of their corresponding estimates. But many questions, including basic ones, remain unanswered. Things afford positive, neutral, or negative long-run effects on the replicative probability of the focal individual’s genes. At the most general level, values are internal estimates of those effects. Value information steers physiology and behavior in the right direction: approach apple, avoid lion. Thus, value computation is of paramount biological importance. Task analysis suggests human evaluative psychology is fantastically complex. There are many prerequisites for valuing things aptly. Here, I focus on two: the need to compute value accurately, and the need to properly feed and integrate value information into the various systems that use value information in their computations (e.g., emotion systems). For example, the subjective food value imputed to an apple needs to reflect the nutrient content of the apple (accuracy); the intensity of gratitude aroused if someone gave you an apple needs to reflect the food value imputed to the apple (integration). Here, I evaluate these hypotheses with two preregistered studies. Consistent with the integration hypothesis, there are close correspondences between (i) the food values that participants impute to each of 40 food items (Study 1; goods) and (ii) the social values and the social emotions (including: gratitude, anger, shame, and pride) that result when those food items occur as constituents of broader social events. Similar correspondences are observed when participants evaluate each of 28 diseases and injuries (Study 2; bads). Consistent with the accuracy hypothesis, exploratory analyses indicate that the food values, the social values, and the social emotions elicited by the food items all track the nutrient content of those food items. Valuation in organisms is inherently a computational process. For this reason, a computational–adaptationist perspective is distinctively suited to spur progress in our understanding of value computation in humans.

  • Program

    8:00-8:30am: Continental Breakfast

    8:30-8:40am: Opening Remarks

    8:40-9:00am: Eric Pedersen

    9:00-9:40am: Donna Maney

    9:40-10:00am: Marcela Benítez

    10:00-10:20am: Quick Morning Coffee Break

    10:20-10:40am: Daniel Sznycer

    10:40-11:20am: Jeffry Simpson

    11:30-12:30pm: Lunch, featuring a professional development luncheon (11:45am-12:30pm) - "Careers for Evolutionary Social Scientists: Alternatives to the Academic Job Market" with Courtney Crosby, & Kevin Rosenfield

    12:40-1:25pm: Poster Session

    1:30-2:10pm: Mark Moffett

    2:10-3:10pm: Data Blitzes: Khandis Blake, Elena Brandt, Alessandra Cassar, William Costello, Amanda Kirsch, Mitchell Landers, Thomas McCauley, Sierra Peters

    3:10-3:25pm: Quick Afternoon Coffee Break

    3:25-3:45pm: Jordann Brandner

    3:45-4:25pm: Leda Cosmides

    4:25pm: Closing Remarks

    5:00-8:00pm: HBES-Sponsored Happy Hour Networking Reception: Hudson Grille Downtown, 120 Marietta St NW (click for map & directions)

     

  • Data blitz AND poster submissions

    The organizing committee invites authors to submit their research for either a data blitz or poster presentation at the preconference.
     

    Data Blitz: Each data blitz presenter will have 5 minutes to present their research and will also have time to answer 1 brief audience question.

     

    Poster Presentation: We'll provide more information about this presentation mode as we receive it from SPSP.

     

    Abstracts are to be submitted through SPSP's preconference submission portal.

    This portal will be open until November 15, 2022.
     
    First authors will be notified of acceptances in early December.

    1

    DO YOU WANT TO PRESENT A DATA BLITZ OR POSTER?

    We will be accepting data blitz and poster submissions from researchers at any level

    2

    SUBMIT YOUR ABSTRACT

     

    Click here to submit your abstract through Nov 15th

    3

    YOU'LL BE NOTIFIED

     

     

    First authors will receive notifications in early December

  • registration

    Are you planning to attend the 21st annual Evolutionary Psychology preconference at SPSP?

     

    Register via the SPSP Meeting Website!

  • *Back this year!* Registration Subsidies

    Our sponsor, the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, has generously provided funds for subsidizing the cost of preconference attendance for students and early career researchers with financial hardships. If you have no or minimal travel funding and this would make it difficult for you to join us, we may be able to cover your preconference registration costs.

     

    To apply for a registration subsidy, please fill out this form before November 15th.

     

    Limited subsidies are available, and priority will be given to applicants who submit for a data blitz or poster presentation and those who have to travel long distances to attend the preconference.

  • your 2023 Evolutionary Psychology

    preconference organizers

    Have a question? Email us!

    Photo credit: Robert Bejil Productions via VisualHunt / CC BY

    Nick Grebe

    University of Michigan

    nicholas.grebe@gmail.com

    Photo credit: Robert Bejil Productions via VisualHunt / CC BY

    Juliana French

    Oklahoma State University

    juliana.french@okstate.edu