PSY-6305 Thèmes avancés en psychologie sociale (Evolutionary Psychology) 3 credits Syllabus Winter, 2018

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1 PSY-6305 Thèmes avancés en psychologie sociale (Evolutionary Psychology) 3 credits Syllabus Winter, 2018 INSTRUCTOR Daniel Sznycer Office: Pav. Marie-Victorin, C-365 Phone , X daniel.sznycer@umontreal.ca Office hours: Friday, 4:10 5:40 pm CLASS TIME AND LOCATION Friday, 1 4 pm. Classroom: D (Pav. Marie-Victorin) GOAL The goal of this course is to give you advanced training in evolutionary psychology. You will learn some of the major concepts, theories, and controversies in evolutionary psychology. Topics covered include: the theoretical foundations of evolutionary psychology, the psychologies of altruism as shaped by various selection pressures, and the psychological mechanisms underlying emotion, coalitions and war, mating, culture, and politics. This course assumes basic familiarity with the gene-centered theory of natural selection, mendelian genetics, and hunter-gatherer life. If you need a refresher, these are some classic references: Dawkins, R. (1976). The selfish gene. New York: Oxford University Press. Williams, G. C. (1966). Adaptation and natural selection: A critique of some current evolutionary thought. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press Trivers RL Natural Selection and Social Theory. Oxford, UK: Oxford Univ. Press Daly, M., & Wilson, M. (1983). Sex, evolution, and behavior. Boston: Willard Grant Press. Marjorie Shostak Nisa: The life and words of a!kung woman. New York: Vintage Books. Brown, D. E. (1991). Human Universals. New York: McGraw Hill. Barkow, J., Cosmides, L., and Tooby, J The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Pinker S How the Mind Works. New York: Norton Symons, D. (1979). The evolution of human sexuality. New York: Oxford University Press. Buss, D. M. (1994). The evolution of desire. New York: Basic Books Boyer P Religion explained. New York: Basic Books. FORMAT OF THE COURSE The course will have a seminar format. The meetings will be spent discussing and critically analyzing the assigned readings. I will moderate the discussions and provide guidance, but the bulk of the work during class time will be done by the students. That s how you learn to become a mature, independent researcher. EVALUATION 1

2 This is how you will be evaluated in this course: First, weekly comments and/or questions. Before class, you have to me two questions or comments about the readings assigned for the meeting. Are the theoretical assumptions reasonable? Have the assumptions been shown to be flat out false? Are the studies well designed? Are the experiments missing an important control condition? Are the conclusions of the study fundamentally at odds with what we know about humans from psychology or other fields of study? What, if anything, have we learned from the reading? What would you do differently if you were the author? Etc. This requirement holds only for those meetings when there are readings assigned. The questions/comments should be written in the body of the (no attachments) and ed to by 11:59 pm of the Thursday before class (the day before class). Keep your questions/comments to less than 500 words just two sentences may be enough. Assignments past the deadline will not get credit. This can earn you up to 20% of the total grade. IMPORTANT: The subject line of your s should always include your surname and the week (e.g. Tremblay, week 4 ). To see what week you re in, refer to the leftmost column of the Table under SCHEDULE AND READINGS. Second, classroom participation. This course is for you and your classmates to learn by discussing, thinking out loud, and criticizing the readings. Talk. If assertiveness is not your style, ask questions. I wonder if is as good as I think that. If you re right but you don t participate in class, you won t get any credit; if you re wrong but you participate, you ll get full credit (20% of the grade). Third, an essay. This can earn you up to 60% of the total grade. Choose one of the topics covered in this seminar and formulate a hypothesis related to that topic. The hypothesis should be something that you think is likely to be true about the human psychology of sociality but hasn t been documented or explained yet. The essay should include following sections: (a) Title, (b) Your name, (c) Brief review of what is known about the issue, (d) Hypothesis (about that which is poorly understood or unknown), (e) Prediction(s) derived from the hypothesis, (f) Outline of an experimental (or other) design to test the predictions, (g) List of the references cited (APA style). You will not conduct the study in this seminar, so the essay will not include any data. However, you may use this essay as a stepping stone to conduct the study in the future. The essay should be no longer than 3,000 words (the references do not count toward the word limit). Use single space and Times New Roman 12 font. The essay is due on April 20, in class. Late essays will not be accepted or graded. This sums up the grade breakdown: Item Percent of total grade Weekly comments & questions 20 Classroom participation 20 Essay 60 This is the equivalence between grade as percentage and letter grade. 2

3 Percent of total grade Letter grade GPA grade A A A B B B C C C D D E F 0 IMPORTANT: At the University of Montreal, plagiarism is sanctioned by the Disciplinary Rules on Student Plagiarism. For more information about the Rules, visit OFFICE HOURS I will hold regular office hours (see time and location above). You are welcome and encouraged to make full use of that resource. SCHEDULE AND READINGS WEEK DATE TOPIC READINGS 1 Jan 12 First meeting 2 Jan 19 Theoretical Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology 3 Jan 26 Cooperation - Reciprocity Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (1992). The psychological foundations of culture. In J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Barrett, H. C., and Kurzban, R. (2006). Modularity in cognition: Framing the debate. Psychological Review, 113, Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J. (1992). Cognitive adaptations for social exchange. In J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture. New York: Oxford University Press. Hoffman, Elizabeth, Kevin McCabe, and Vernon L. Smith, "Social Distance and Other-Regarding Behavior in Dictator Games," American Economic Review, 1996, 86(3),

4 WEEK DATE TOPIC READINGS Fehr, E. & Henrich, J. (2003) Is strong reciprocity a maladaptation? On the evolutionary foundations of human altruism. In: The genetic and cultural evolution of cooperation, ed. P. Hammerstein, pp MIT Press Krasnow, M.M., Cosmides, L., Pedersen, E. & Tooby, J. (2012). What Are Punishment and Reputation for? PLoS ONE 7(9): e doi: /journal.pone Feb 2 Cooperation kin 5 Feb 9 Cooperation Other models 6 Feb 16 Groups, war, morality Lieberman, D., Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (2007). The architecture of human kin detection. Nature, 445, doi: /nature05510 Burnstein, E., Crandall, C., & Kitayama, S. (1994). Some neo-darwinian decision rules for altruism: Weighing cues for inclusive fitness as a function of the biological importance of the decision. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, Daly, M., & Wilson, M. (1980). Discriminative parental solicitude: A biological perspective. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 42, Euler HA, Weitzel B Discriminative grandparental solicitude as reproductive strategy. Hum. Nat. 7:39 59 Barclay, P., & Willer, R. (2007). Partner choice creates competitive altruism in humans. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B, 274, Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (1996). Friendship and the Banker's Paradox: Other pathways to the evolution of adaptations for altruism. In W. G. Runciman, J. Maynard Smith, & R. I. M. Dunbar (Eds.), Evolution of Social Behaviour Patterns in Primates and Man. Proceedings of the British Academy, 88, Griskevicius, V., Tybur, J. M., & Van den Bergh, B. (2010). Going green to be seen: Status, reputation, and conspicuous consumption. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98, Kaplan HS, Schniter E, Smith VL, Wilson BJ (2012) Risk and the evolution of human exchange. Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Delton, A. W., Cosmides, L., Guemo, M., Robertson, T. E., & Tooby, J. (2012). The Psychosemantics of Free Riding: Dissecting the Architecture of a Moral Concept. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Yamagishi, T., Jin, N. & Kiyonari, T. (1999). Bounded generalized reciprocity: Ingroup favoritism and ingroup boasting. Advances in Group Processes, 16,

5 WEEK DATE TOPIC READINGS McDonald, M. M., Navarrete, C. D., & Van Vugt, M. (2012). Evolution and the psychology of intergroup conflict: the male warrior hypothesis. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 367, Kurzban, R., Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (2001). Can race be erased?: Coalitional computation and social categorization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(26), DeScioli, Peter, Maxim Massenkoff, Alex Shaw, Michael Bang Petersen, and Robert Kurzban Equity or Equality? Moral Judgments Follow the Money. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, Series B: Biological Sciences 281(1797): Feb 23 No class: Time to work on essay 8 Mar 2 Emotion Tooby, J., Cosmides, L., Sell, A., Lieberman, D. & Sznycer, D. (2008). Internal regulatory variables and the design of human motivation: A computational and evolutionary approach. In Andrew J. Elliot (Ed.) Handbook of approach and avoidance motivation. pp Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. Sell, A., Sznycer, D., Al-Shawaf, L., Lim, J., Krauss, A., Feldman, A., Rascanu, R., Sugiyama, L., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (2017). The grammar of anger: Mapping the computational architecture of a recalibrational emotion. Cognition, 168, Sznycer, D.,Tooby, J., Cosmides, L., Porat, R., Shalvi, S. & Halperin, E. (2016). Shame closely tracks the threat of devaluation by others, even across cultures. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113(10), Tybur, J. M., Lieberman, D., Kurzban, R., and DeScioli, P. (2012). Disgust: Evolved function and structure. Psychological Review, 120, Mar 9 Break (no class) 10 Mar 16 Mating Buss, D. M. (1989a). Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 12, 1 14 Precis of The evolution of human sexuality D Symons. Behavioral and Brain Sciences,

6 WEEK DATE TOPIC READINGS Roney, J.R., Maher, S.V., Maestripieri, D., Behavioral and hormonal responses of men to brief interactions with women. Evol. Hum. Behav. 24, Wilson, M. & Daly, M. (2004) Do pretty women inspire men to discount the future? Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 271 (Suppl. 4): Mar 23 Culture Boyd, R. & Richerson, P. J. (2009) Culture and the evolution of human cooperation, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (B) 364: Sperber, D., & Hirschfeld, L. A. (2004). The cognitive foundations of cultural stability and diversity. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, Boyer, P & Petersen, MB (2011) The Naturalness of (many) social institutions. Journal of Institutional Economics 8(1): Mar 30 Easter (no class) 13 Apr 6 Science Day (no class) 14 Apr 13 Politics Petersen, M. B., Sznycer, D., Sell, A., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (2013). The ancestral logic of politics: Upper body strength regulates men's assertion of self-interest over economic redistribution. Psychological Science, 24(7), Aarøe, Lene, and Michael Bang Petersen Crowding Out Culture: Scandinavians and Americans Agree on Social Welfare in the Face of Deservingness Cues. Journal of Politics 76(03), Sznycer, D., Lopez Seal, M. F., Sell, A., Lim, J., Porat, R., Shalvi, S., Halperin, E., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (2017). Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(31), Apr 20 Deadline to turn in essay (during class) 6

Psychology 4590 Evolutionary Psychology Spring, 2004

Psychology 4590 Evolutionary Psychology Spring, 2004 Professor: Steve Scher Office: Physical Sciences 4143 www: ux1.eiu.edu/~cfsjs Office Ph: 581-7269 Home Ph: 239-4262 Email: cfsjs@eiu.edu Office Hours: