The architecture of human kin detection

Differential inter-subject correlation of brain activity when kinship is a variable in moral dilemma

Previous behavioural studies have shown that humans act more altruistically towards kin. Whether and how knowledge of genetic relatedness translates into differential neurocognitive evaluation of observed social interactions has remained an open question. Here, we investigated how the human brain is engaged when viewing a moral dilemma between genetic vs. non-genetic sisters. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, a movie was shown, depicting refusal of organ donation between two sisters, with subjects guided to believe the sisters were related either genetically or by adoption. Although 90% of the subjects self-reported that genetic relationship was not relevant, their brain activity told a different story. Comparing correlations of brain activity across all subject pairs between the two viewing conditions, we found significantly stronger inter-subject correlations in insula, cingulate, medial and lateral prefrontal, superior temporal, and superior parietal cortices, when the subjects believed that the sisters were genetically related. Cognitive functions previously associated with these areas include moral and emotional conflict regulation, decision making, and mentalizing, suggesting more similar engagement of such functions when observing refusal of altruism from a genetic sister. Our results show that mere knowledge of a genetic relationship between interacting persons robustly modulates social cognition of the perceiver.

Amygdala-midbrain connectivity indicates a role for the mammalian parental care system in human altruism

Costly altruism benefitting a stranger is a rare but evolutionarily conserved phenomenon. This behaviour may be supported by limbic and midbrain circuitry that supports mammalian caregiving. In rodents, reciprocal connections between the amygdala and the midbrain periaqueductal grey (PAG) are critical for generating protective responses toward vulnerable and distressed offspring. We used functional and structural magnetic resonance imaging to explore whether these regions play a role in supporting costly altruism in humans. We recruited a rare population of altruists, all of whom had donated a kidney to a stranger, and measured activity and functional connectivity of the amygdala and PAG as altruists and matched controls responded to care-eliciting scenarios. When these scenarios were coupled with pre-attentive distress cues, altruists' sympathy corresponded to greater activity in the left amygdala and PAG, and functional connectivity analyses revealed increased coupling between these regions in altruists during this epoch. We also found that altruists exhibited greater fractional anisotropy within the left amygdala-PAG white matter tract. These results, coupled with previous evidence of altruists' increased amygdala-linked sensitivity to distress, are consistent with costly altruism resulting from enhanced care-oriented responses to vulnerability and distress that are supported by recruitment of circuitry that supports mammalian parental care.

Evitação e proibição do incesto: fatores psicobiológicos e culturais

Resumo Embora historicamente a regulação proibitiva do incesto seja considerada um fenômeno cultural quase universal que não é influenciado por fatores psicobiológicos relativos à história evolutiva da espécie humana, evidências recentes têm questionado essa visão tradicional e defendido que a evitação e a proibição do incesto são influenciadas biológica e cognitivamente com a cultura. Este artigo objetiva desenvolver uma discussão teórica acerca da inibição e proibição do incesto, enfatizando os mecanismos evolutivos subjacentes a esses fenômenos. Argumenta-se a existência de mecanismos endógenos que evoluíram porque inibem a atividade sexual entre parentes próximos e que formam a base para regular socialmente a proibição do incesto (mecanismo exógeno). Destaca-se o efeito Westermarck, no qual a proximidade de pessoas que vivem juntas desde a infância provoca uma aversão ao intercurso sexual entre elas. A ausência de propensão ao incesto e sua proibição institucional constituem uma complexa integração entre fatores psicobiológicos e culturais.

Mapping the Cultural Learnability Landscape of Danger

Cultural transmission is often viewed as a domain-general process. However, a growing literature suggests that learnability is influenced by content and context. The idea of a learnability landscape is introduced as a way of representing the effects of interacting factors on how easily information is acquired. Extending prior work (Barrett & Broesch, ), learnability of danger and other properties is compared for animals, artifacts, and foods in the urban American children (ages 4-5) and in the Shuar children in Ecuador (ages 4-9). There is an advantage for acquiring danger information that is strongest for animals and weakest for artifacts in both populations, with culture-specific variations. The potential of learnability landscapes for assessing biological and cultural influences on cultural transmission is discussed.

Willingness to Invest in Children: Psychological Kinship Estimates and Emotional Closeness

In general, adults invest more in related children compared to unrelated children. To test whether this pattern reflects variations in psychological kinship estimates (i.e., putative relatedness weighted by certainty in relatedness), willingness to invest in children belonging to different categories (direct offspring, nieces/nephews, stepchildren, and friends' children) was measured in a population-based sample of 1,012 adults. Respondents reported more willingness to invest in their own biological children, than in other related children (nieces and nephews), or in stepchildren and friends' children. Compared to putative relatedness, respondents' psychological kinship estimates better predicted the willingness to invest. This association was partially mediated by emotional closeness. Additionally, the age of a child and the number of children in the care of the respondent were negatively associated with willingness to invest. The association between psychological kinship estimates and willingness to invest supports evolutionary predictions. Investment in stepchildren was, however, higher than expected.

Cross-cousin marriage among the Yanomamö shows evidence of parent-offspring conflict and mate competition between brothers

Marriage in many traditional societies often concerns the institutionalized exchange of reproductive partners among groups of kin. Such exchanges most often involve cross-cousins-marriage with the child of a parent's opposite-sex sibling-but it is unclear who benefits from these exchanges. Here we analyze the fitness consequences of marrying relatives among the Yanomamö from the Amazon. When individuals marry close kin, we find that (i) both husbands and wives have slightly lower fertility; (ii) offspring suffer from inbreeding depression; (iii) parents have more grandchildren; and (iv) siblings, especially brothers, benefit when their opposite-sex siblings marry relatives but not when their same-sex siblings do. Therefore, individuals seem to benefit when their children or opposite-sex siblings marry relatives but suffer costs when they, their parents, or same-sex siblings do. These asymmetric fitness outcomes suggest conflicts between parents and offspring and among siblings over optimal mating strategies. Parental control of marriages is reinforced by cultural norms prescribing cross-cousin marriage. We posit that local mate competition combined with parental control over marriages may escalate conflict between same-sex siblings who compete over mates, while simultaneously forging alliances between opposite-sex siblings. If these relationships are carried forward to subsequent generations, they may drive bilateral cross-cousin marriage rules. This study provides insights into the evolutionary importance of how kinship and reciprocity underlie conflicts over who controls mate choice and the origins of cross-cousin marriage prescriptions.

Learning a commonsense moral theory

We introduce a computational framework for understanding the structure and dynamics of moral learning, with a focus on how people learn to trade off the interests and welfare of different individuals in their social groups and the larger society. We posit a minimal set of cognitive capacities that together can solve this learning problem: (1) an abstract and recursive utility calculus to quantitatively represent welfare trade-offs; (2) hierarchical Bayesian inference to understand the actions and judgments of others; and (3) meta-values for learning by value alignment both externally to the values of others and internally to make moral theories consistent with one's own attachments and feelings. Our model explains how children can build from sparse noisy observations of how a small set of individuals make moral decisions to a broad moral competence, able to support an infinite range of judgments and decisions that generalizes even to people they have never met and situations they have not been in or observed. It also provides insight into the causes and dynamics of moral change across time, including cases when moral change can be rapidly progressive, changing values significantly in just a few generations, and cases when it is likely to move more slowly.

The evolution of extreme cooperation via shared dysphoric experiences

Willingness to lay down one's life for a group of non-kin, well documented historically and ethnographically, represents an evolutionary puzzle. Building on research in social psychology, we develop a mathematical model showing how conditioning cooperation on previous shared experience can allow individually costly pro-group behavior to evolve. The model generates a series of predictions that we then test empirically in a range of special sample populations (including military veterans, college fraternity/sorority members, football fans, martial arts practitioners, and twins). Our empirical results show that sharing painful experiences produces "identity fusion" - a visceral sense of oneness - which in turn can motivate self-sacrifice, including willingness to fight and die for the group. Practically, our account of how shared dysphoric experiences produce identity fusion helps us better understand such pressing social issues as suicide terrorism, holy wars, sectarian violence, gang-related violence, and other forms of intergroup conflict.

Cross-cultural regularities in the cognitive architecture of pride

Pride occurs in every known culture, appears early in development, is reliably triggered by achievements and formidability, and causes a characteristic display that is recognized everywhere. Here, we evaluate the theory that pride evolved to guide decisions relevant to pursuing actions that enhance valuation and respect for a person in the minds of others. By hypothesis, pride is a neurocomputational program tailored by selection to orchestrate cognition and behavior in the service of: (i) motivating the cost-effective pursuit of courses of action that would increase others' valuations and respect of the individual, (ii) motivating the advertisement of acts or characteristics whose recognition by others would lead them to enhance their evaluations of the individual, and (iii) mobilizing the individual to take advantage of the resulting enhanced social landscape. To modulate how much to invest in actions that might lead to enhanced evaluations by others, the pride system must forecast the magnitude of the evaluations the action would evoke in the audience and calibrate its activation proportionally. We tested this prediction in 16 countries across 4 continents (n = 2,085), for 25 acts and traits. As predicted, the pride intensity for a given act or trait closely tracks the valuations of audiences, local (mean r = +0.82) and foreign (mean r = +0.75). This relationship is specific to pride and does not generalize to other positive emotions that coactivate with pride but lack its audience-recalibrating function.

Acquisition and functional consequences of social knowledge in macaques

To manoeuvre in complex societies, it is beneficial to acquire knowledge about the social relationships existing among group mates, so as to better predict their behaviour. Although such knowledge has been firmly established in a variety of animal taxa, how animals acquire such knowledge, as well as its functional significance, remains poorly understood. In order to understand how primates acquire and use their social knowledge, we studied kin-biased redirected aggression in Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) relying on a large database of over 15 000 aggressive episodes. Confirming previous research, macaques redirected aggression preferentially to the kin of their aggressor. An analysis that controlled for the rate of affiliation between aggressors and targets of redirection showed that macaques identified the relatives of group mates on the basis of the frequency of their ongoing associations. By contrast, having observed group mates interact with their mother as infants did not increase the monkeys' success in correctly identifying kin relationships among third parties. Inter-individual variation in the successful identification of the kin of aggressors and in redirecting aggression accordingly translated into differences in the amount of aggression received, highlighting a selective advantage for those individuals that were better able to acquire and use social knowledge.

Fitness Costs Predict Emotional, Moral, and Attitudinal Inbreeding Aversion

In terms of sexual intercourse, the very last people we think about are our kin. Imagining inbreeding intercourse, whether it involves our closest kin or not, induces aversion in most people who invoke inbreeding depression problems or cultural considerations. Research has focused on the disgust felt when facing inbreeding intercourse between close kin but little is known about other responses. In this study, we considered the influence of fitness costs on aversive reactions by including disgust and emotional reaction as well as moral judgment and attitudes toward inbreeding: higher costs should induce a stronger aversive reaction. The fitness costs were manipulated by two factors: (i) the degree of the participants' involvement in the story (themselves, a sib or an unknown individual), and (ii) the degree of relatedness between the two inbreeding people (brother/sister, uncle-aunt/niece-nephew, cousin). To test this hypothesis, 140 women read and assessed different inbreeding stories varying in the fitness costs incurred. Findings showed that the higher the fitness costs were, the greater the aversive reaction was in an overall way. First, our results fitted with previous studies that tested the influence of fitness costs on disgust. Second, and more interestingly, findings went further by examining overall aversion, showing that fitness costs could influence emotions felt as well as attitudes and behaviors toward inbreeding people. The higher the fitness costs were, the less inbreeding people were perceived as moral and the more they were considered as a nuisance. However, results regarding avoidance were more nuanced.

Safety, Threat, and Stress in Intergroup Relations: A Coalitional Index Model

Contact between people from different groups triggers specific individual- and group-level responses, ranging from attitudes and emotions to welfare and health outcomes. Standard social psychological perspectives do not yet provide an integrated, causal model of these phenomena. As an alternative, we describe a coalitional perspective. Human psychology includes evolved cognitive systems designed to garner support from other individuals, organize and maintain alliances, and measure potential support from group members. Relations between alliances are strongly influenced by threat detection mechanisms, which are sensitive to cues that express that one's own group will provide less support or that other groups are dangerous. Repeated perceptions of such threat cues can lead to chronic stress. The model provides a parsimonious explanation for many individual-level effects of intergroup relations and group-level disparities in health and well-being. This perspective suggests new research directions aimed at understanding the psychological processes involved in intergroup relations.

Etiological Risk Factors for Sibling Incest: Data From an Anonymous Computer-Assisted Self-Interview

Retrospective data from 1,821 women and 1,064 men with one or more siblings, provided anonymously using a computer-assisted self-interview, were used to identify risk factors for sibling incest (SI); 137 were participants in SI. In order of decreasing predictive power, the risk factors identified by the multiple logistic regression analysis included ever having shared a bed for sleeping with a sibling, parent-child incest (PCI), family nudity, low levels of maternal affection, and ever having shared a tub bath with a sibling. The results were consistent with the idea that SI in many families was the cumulative result of four types of parental behaviors: (a) factors that lower external barriers to sexual behavior (e.g., permitting co-sleeping or co-bathing of sibling dyads), (b) factors that encourage nudity of children within the nuclear family and permit children to see the parent's genitals, (c) factors that lead to the siblings relying on one another for affection (e.g., diminished maternal affection), and (d) factors that eroticize young children (e.g., child sexual abuse [CSA] by a parent). Thirty-eight of the 137 SI participants were participants in coerced sibling incest (CSI). In order of decreasing predictive power, risk factors for CSI identified by multiple logistic regression analysis included ever having shared a bed for sleeping with a brother, PCI, witnessing parental physical fighting, and family nudity. SI was more likely to have been reported as CSI if the sibling had touched the reporting sibling's genitals, and less likely to have been reported as CSI if the siblings had shared a bed.

Self-Resemblance and Social Rejection

Humans perceive and treat self-resembling others in ways that suggest that self-resemblance is a cue of kinship. However, we know little about how individuals respond to treatment by self-resembling others. Here we approach this problem by connecting facial self-resemblance to social rejection. Given that individuals should expect to cooperate with kin, we hypothesized that (1) social inclusion by perceived kin should elicit lesser feelings of rejection and (2) social exclusion by perceived kin should elicit greater feelings of rejection relative to inclusion or exclusion, respectively, by nonkin. To test these hypotheses, we recruited 90 participants to play two games of Cyberball, a virtual ball-tossing game, with separate pairs of ostensible partners. In one game, the ostensible partners were programed to fully include the participants in group play and, in the other game, they were programed to exclude the participants after a few rounds; the order of inclusion and exclusion was counterbalanced across participants. Partner faces were digitally manipulated to be either self- or nonself-resembling, and these conditions were also counterbalanced. Rejection feelings differed significantly as a function of self-resemblance between the inclusion and exclusion conditions, but only for participants who experienced inclusion first. Moreover, for these individuals, inclusion by self-resembling partners led to significantly lesser feelings of rejection than did inclusion by nonself-resembling partners. To explain this effect, we explore potential mechanisms of kin recognition and social rejection. Although nuanced, our results suggest that perceptions of kinship can moderate psychological responses to the actions of others.

Imprinting and flexibility in human face cognition

Faces are an important cue to multiple physiological and psychological traits. Human preferences for exaggerated sex typicality (masculinity or femininity) in faces depend on multiple factors and show high inter-subject variability. To gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms underlying facial femininity preferences in men, we tested the interactive effect of family structure (birth order, sibling sex-ratio and number of siblings) and parenthood status on these preferences. Based on a group of 1304 heterosexual men, we have found that preference for feminine faces was not only influenced by sibling age and sex, but also that fatherhood modulated this preference. Men with sisters had a weaker preference for femininity than men with brothers, highlighting a possible effect of a negative imprinting-like mechanism. What is more, fatherhood increased strongly the preference for facial femininity. Finally, for fathers with younger sisters only, the more the age difference increased between them, the more femininity preference increased. Overall our findings bring new insight into how early-acquired experience at the individual level may determine face preference in adulthood, and what is more, how these preferences are flexible and potentially dependent on parenthood status in adult men.

The Evolution of Generosity in the Ultimatum Game

When humans fail to make optimal decisions in strategic games and economic gambles, researchers typically try to explain why that behaviour is biased. To this end, they search for mechanisms that cause human behaviour to deviate from what seems to be the rational optimum. But perhaps human behaviour is not biased; perhaps research assumptions about the optimality of strategies are incomplete. In the one-shot anonymous symmetric ultimatum game (UG), humans fail to play optimally as defined by the Nash equilibrium. However, the distinction between kin and non-kin-with kin detection being a key evolutionary adaption-is often neglected when deriving the "optimal" strategy. We computationally evolved strategies in the UG that were equipped with an evolvable probability to discern kin from non-kin. When an opponent was not kin, agents evolved strategies that were similar to those used by humans. We therefore conclude that the strategy humans play is not irrational. The deviation between behaviour and the Nash equilibrium may rather be attributable to key evolutionary adaptations, such as kin detection. Our findings further suggest that social preference models are likely to capture mechanisms that permit people to play optimally in an evolutionary context. Once this context is taken into account, human behaviour no longer appears irrational.

Ultrasociality without group selection: Possible, reasonable, and likely

It is uncontroversial that humans are extremely social, and that cultures have changed over time. But, the evidence shows that much of the social psychology underlying these phenomena (1) predates the agricultural transition, and (2) is not the result of group selection. Instead, this psychology appears intricately designed to capture social gains when possible in our complex ancestral social ecology.

Hamilton's rule

This paper reviews and addresses a variety of issues relating to inclusive fitness. The main question is: are there limits to the generality of inclusive fitness, and if so, what are the perimeters of the domain within which inclusive fitness works? This question is addressed using two well-known tools from evolutionary theory: the replicator dynamics, and adaptive dynamics. Both are combined with population structure. How generally Hamilton's rule applies depends on how costs and benefits are defined. We therefore consider costs and benefits following from Karlin and Matessi's (1983) "counterfactual method", and costs and benefits as defined by the "regression method" (Gardner et al., 2011). With the latter definition of costs and benefits, Hamilton's rule always indicates the direction of selection correctly, and with the former it does not. How these two definitions can meaningfully be interpreted is also discussed. We also consider cases where the qualitative claim that relatedness fosters cooperation holds, even if Hamilton's rule as a quantitative prediction does not. We furthermore find out what the relation is between Hamilton's rule and Fisher's Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection. We also consider cancellation effects - which is the most important deepening of our understanding of when altruism is selected for. Finally we also explore the remarkable (im)possibilities for empirical testing with either definition of costs and benefits in Hamilton's rule.

Functional Interdependence Theory: An Evolutionary Account of Social Situations

Social interactions are characterized by distinct forms of interdependence, each of which has unique effects on how behavior unfolds within the interaction. Despite this, little is known about the psychological mechanisms that allow people to detect and respond to the nature of interdependence in any given interaction. We propose that interdependence theory provides clues regarding the structure of interdependence in the human ancestral past. In turn, evolutionary psychology offers a framework for understanding the types of information processing mechanisms that could have been shaped under these recurring conditions. We synthesize and extend these two perspectives to introduce a new theory: functional interdependence theory (FIT). FIT can generate testable hypotheses about the function and structure of the psychological mechanisms for inferring interdependence. This new perspective offers insight into how people initiate and maintain cooperative relationships, select social partners and allies, and identify opportunities to signal social motives.

The Association between Unequal Parental Treatment and the Sibling Relationship in Finland: The Difference between Full and Half-Siblings

Studies have shown that unequal parental treatment is associated with relationship quality between siblings. However, it is unclear how it affects the relationship between full and half-siblings. Using data from the Generational Transmissions in Finland project ( n = 1,537 younger adults), we study whether those who have half-siblings perceive more unequal parental treatment than those who have full siblings only. In addition, we study how unequal parental treatment is associated with sibling relationship between full, maternal, and paternal half-siblings. First, we found that individuals who have maternal and/or paternal half-siblings are more likely to have encountered unequal maternal treatment than individuals who have full siblings only. Second, we found that unequal parental treatment impairs full as well as maternal and paternal half-sibling relations in adulthood. Third, unequal parental treatment mediates the effect of genetic relatedness on sibling relations in the case of maternal half-siblings, but not in the case of paternal half-siblings. After controlling for unequal parental treatment, the quality of maternal half-sibling relationships did not differ from that of full siblings, whereas the quality of paternal half-sibling relationships still did. Fourth, the qualitative comments ( n = 206) from the same population reveal that unequal parental treatment presents itself several ways, such as differential financial, emotional, or practical support.

Disgusted by Sexual Abuse: Exploring the Association Between Disgust Sensitivity and Posttraumatic Stress Symptoms Among Mothers of Sexually Abused Children

Nonoffending mothers of sexually abused children often exhibit high levels of posttraumatic stress (PTS) symptoms. Emerging evidence suggests that trait-like individual differences in sensitivity to disgust play a role in the development of PTS symptoms. One such individual difference, disgust sensitivity, has not been examined as far as we are aware among victims of secondary traumatic stress. The current study examined associations between disgust sensitivity and PTS symptoms among mothers of sexually abused children (N = 72). Mothers completed the Impact of Event Scale-Revised and the Three Domain Disgust Scale (Tybur, Lieberman, & Griskevicius, 2009). More than one third of mothers scored above a suggested cutoff (mean score = 1.5) for high levels of PTS symptoms. Hierarchical linear regression analysis results indicated that sexual disgust sensitivity (β = .39, p = .002) was associated with PTS symptoms (R(2) = .18). An interaction analysis showed that sexual disgust sensitivity was associated with maternal PTS symptoms only when the perpetrator was not biologically related to the child (β = -.32, p = .047; R(2) = .28). Our findings suggested that sexual disgust sensitivity may be a risk factor for developing PTS symptoms among mothers of sexually abused children.

Are Humans Too Generous and Too Punitive? Using Psychological Principles to Further Debates about Human Social Evolution

Are humans too generous and too punitive? Many researchers have concluded that classic theories of social evolution (e.g., direct reciprocity, reputation) are not sufficient to explain human cooperation; instead, group selection theories are needed. We think such a move is premature. The leap to these models has been made by moving directly from thinking about selection pressures to predicting patterns of behavior and ignoring the intervening layer of evolved psychology that must mediate this connection. In real world environments, information processing is a non-trivial problem and details of the ecology can dramatically constrain potential solutions, often enabling particular heuristics to be efficient and effective. We argue that making the intervening layer of psychology explicit resolves decades-old mysteries in the evolution of cooperation and punishment.

A teleofunctional account of evolutionary mismatch

When the environment in which an organism lives deviates in some essential way from that to which it is adapted, this is described as "evolutionary mismatch," or "evolutionary novelty." The notion of mismatch plays an important role, explicitly or implicitly, in evolution-informed cognitive psychology, clinical psychology, and medicine. The evolutionary novelty of our contemporary environment is thought to have significant implications for our health and well-being. However, scientists have generally been working without a clear definition of mismatch. This paper defines mismatch as deviations in the environment that render biological traits unable, or impaired in their ability, to produce their selected effects (i.e., to perform their proper functions in Neander's sense). The machinery developed by Millikan in connection with her account of proper function, and with her related teleosemantic account of representation, is used to identify four major types, and several subtypes, of evolutionary mismatch. While the taxonomy offered here does not in itself resolve any scientific debates, the hope is that it can be used to better formulate empirical hypotheses concerning the effects of mismatch. To illustrate, it is used to show that the controversial hypothesis that general intelligence evolved as an adaptation to handle evolutionary novelty can, contra some critics, be formulated in a conceptually coherent way.

Children's Expectations and Understanding of Kinship as a Social Category

In order to navigate the social world, children need to understand and make predictions about how people will interact with one another. Throughout most of human history, social groups have been prominently marked by kinship relations, but few experiments have examined children’s knowledge of and reasoning about kinship relations. In the current studies, we investigated how 3- to 5-year-old children understand kinship relations, compared to non-kin relations between friends, with questions such as, “Who has the same grandmother?” We also tested how children expect people to interact based on their relations to one another, with questions such as “Who do you think Cara would like to share her treat with?” Both in a storybook context and in a richer context presenting more compelling cues to kinship using face morphology, 3- and 4-year-old children failed to show either robust explicit conceptual distinctions between kin and friends, or expectations of behavior favoring kin over friends, even when asked about their own social partners. By 5 years, children’s understanding of these relations improved, and they showed some expectation that others will preferentially aid siblings over friends. Together, these findings suggest that explicit understanding of kinship develops slowly over the preschool years.

Shame closely tracks the threat of devaluation by others, even across cultures

We test the theory that shame evolved as a defense against being devalued by others. By hypothesis, shame is a neurocomputational program tailored by selection to orchestrate cognition, motivation, physiology, and behavior in the service of: (i) deterring the individual from making choices where the prospective costs of devaluation exceed the benefits, (ii) preventing negative information about the self from reaching others, and (iii) minimizing the adverse effects of devaluation when it occurs. Because the unnecessary activation of a defense is costly, the shame system should estimate the magnitude of the devaluative threat and use those estimates to cost-effectively calibrate its activation: Traits or actions that elicit more negative evaluations from others should elicit more shame. As predicted, shame closely tracks the threat of devaluation in the United States (r = .69), India (r = .79), and Israel (r = .67). Moreover, shame in each country strongly tracks devaluation in the others, suggesting that shame and devaluation are informed by a common species-wide logic of social valuation. The shame-devaluation link is also specific: Sadness and anxiety-emotions that coactivate with shame-fail to track devaluation. To our knowledge, this constitutes the first empirical demonstration of a close, specific match between shame and devaluation within and across cultures.

Looking Under the Hood of Third-Party Punishment Reveals Design for Personal Benefit

Third-party intervention, such as when a crowd stops a mugger, is common. Yet it seems irrational because it has real costs but may provide no personal benefits. In a laboratory analogue, the third-party-punishment game, third parties (“punishers”) will often spend real money to anonymously punish bad behavior directed at other people. A common explanation is that third-party punishment exists to maintain a cooperative society. We tested a different explanation: Third-party punishment results from a deterrence psychology for defending personal interests. Because humans evolved in small-scale, face-to-face social worlds, the mind infers that mistreatment of a third party predicts later mistreatment of oneself. We showed that when punishers do not have information about how they personally will be treated, they infer that mistreatment of other people predicts mistreatment of themselves, and these inferences predict punishment. But when information about personal mistreatment is available, it drives punishment. This suggests that humans’ punitive psychology evolved to defend personal interests.

Neural, cognitive, and evolutionary foundations of human altruism

This article considers three forms of altruism from both a psychological and a neural perspective, with an emphasis on homologies that can be observed across species and potentially illuminate altruism's evolutionary origins. Kin-based altruism benefits biological relatives and, according to the theory of inclusive fitness, is ultimately beneficial to the altruist from a genetic standpoint. Kin selection adequately explains some altruistic behavior, but it is not applicable to much human altruism. Little is known about the neural processes that support it, but they may include cortical regions involved in processing autobiographical memory and the identities of familiar others. Reciprocity-based altruism is performed in expectation of future rewards and is supported by dopaminergic cortico-striatal networks that guide behavior according to anticipated rewards. Care-based altruism is aimed at improving the well-being of distressed and vulnerable individuals and is closely linked to empathic concern. This form of altruism is thought to rely on the subcortical neural systems that support parental care, particularly structures densely populated with receptors for the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin, including the amygdala, stria terminalis, and striatum. The amygdala may be a particularly important convergence point for care-based altruism because of its dual role in responding both to cues that signal infantile vulnerability and those that signal distress. Research on altruism continues to converge across disciplines, but more research linking molecular-level neural processes to altruistic behavior in humans and other species is needed, as is research on how various forms of altruism intersect. For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website.