Life History Strategies, Prestige, and Dominance: An Evolutionary Developmental View of Social Hierarchy

Shorter Goals for the Faster Life: Childhood Unpredictability Is Associated With Shorter Motivational Time Horizons

Models of adaptive calibration provide an overarching theoretical framework for understanding the developmental roots of psychological and behavioral outcomes in adulthood. An adaptive calibration framework was used to examine an important dimension of motivation: goal timing. Across two studies, we saw mixed support for the hypothesis that unpredictability experienced in childhood would be negatively associated with the time horizons people use to set their goals, such that people who reported experiencing more unpredictability in their childhood tended to set goals on relatively shorter time horizons. The association was observed based on independent ratings of goal timing, but not based on participants' self-reported ratings of goal timing, and was statistically mediated by people's tendency to consider the short- versus long-term future consequences of their actions. These studies isolate a key component of childhood adversity-unpredictability-potentially underlying the time horizons people use to set, prioritize, and pursue their goals.

The Cocksure Conundrum: How Evolution Created a Gendered Currency of Corporate Overconfidence

Biological differences between men and women mandate that women’s obligatory investment in reproduction is significantly greater than that of men. As a result, women have evolved to be the “choosier” of the two sexes and men have evolved to compete for female choice. To the degree that overconfidence is an effective tool for attracting mates and driving away competitors, greater competition among men suggests that they should express more overconfidence than women. Thus, sexual selection may be the primary reason why overconfidence is typically more pronounced in men than it is in women. Sexual selection may also be a distal, causal factor in what we describe as a cult of overconfidence pervading modern organizations and institutions. Whereas overconfidence was once regulated and constrained by features of ancestral life, levels of social mobility and accountability in contemporary society and modern organizations make it increasingly difficult to keep this gendered bias in check.