'Our Roots Run Deep': Historical Myths as Culturally Evolved Technologies for Coalitional Recruitment

One of the most remarkable manifestations of social cohesion in large-scale entities is the belief in a shared, distinct and ancestral past. Human communities around the world take pride in their ancestral roots, commemorate their long history of shared experiences, and celebrate the distinctiveness of their historical trajectory. Why do humans put so much effort into celebrating a long-gone past? Integrating insights from evolutionary psychology, social psychology, evolutionary anthropology, political science, cultural history and political economy, we show that the cultural success of historical myths is driven by a specific adaptive challenge for humans: the need to recruit coalitional support to engage in large scale collective action and prevail in conflicts. By showcasing a long history of cooperation and shared experiences, these myths serve as super-stimuli, activating specific features of social cognition and drawing attention to cues of fitness interdependence. In this account, historical myths can spread within a population without requiring group-level selection, as long as individuals have a vested interest in their propagation and strong psychological motivations to create them. Finally, this framework explains, not only the design-features of historical myths, but also important patterns in their cross-cultural prevalence, inter-individual distribution, and particular content.

Coalitionality shapes moral elevation: evidence from the U.S. Black Lives Matter protest and counter-protest movements

Witnessing altruistic behaviour can elicit moral elevation, an emotion that motivates prosocial cooperation. This emotion is evoked more strongly when the observer anticipates that other people will be reciprocally cooperative. Coalitionality should therefore moderate feelings of elevation, as whether the observer shares the coalitional affiliation of those observed should influence the observer's assessment of the likelihood that the latter will cooperate with the observer. We examined this thesis in studies contemporaneous with the 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests. Although BLM protests were predominantly peaceful, they were depicted by conservative media as destructive and antisocial. In two large-scale, pre-registered online studies (total N = 2172), political orientation strongly moderated feelings of state elevation elicited by a video of a peaceful BLM protest (Studies 1 and 2) or a peaceful Back the Blue (BtB) counter-protest (Study 2). Political conservatism predicted less elevation following the BLM video and more elevation following the BtB video. Elevation elicited by the BLM video correlated with preferences to defund police, whereas elevation elicited by the BtB video correlated with preferences to increase police funding. These findings extend prior work on elevation into the area of prosocial cooperation in the context of coalitional conflict.

An Alternative Account of Anti-Effeminacy Bias: Reputation Concerns and Lack of Coalitional Value Explain Honor-Oriented Men's Reluctance to Befriend Feminine Men

Anti-effeminacy bias follows a specific pattern with men showing stronger anti-effeminacy bias against male targets than women. Previous explanations focused on men’s higher tendency to stigmatize feminine men as homosexual and motives to maintain a dominant group status. Here, we suggest that certain expressions of anti-effeminacy bias may rather be a manifestation of men’s reputation management motives for coalition formation, and be amplified among high (vs. low) masculine honor-oriented men. In three studies with samples from the United Kingdom and Turkey, we showed that men perceived feminine (vs. masculine) male targets as lower on coalitional value and were more reluctant to befriend them, yet this applied only to high (not low) honor-oriented men. Honor-oriented men’s friendship reluctance was mediated by concern with losing reputation by association with targets lacking coalitional value. These findings extend understanding of anti-effeminacy bias by drawing attention to men’s reputation concerns for coalitional reasons and individual differences.

Cross-Cultural and Cross-Organizational Evidence for an Evolved Hazing Motivation

We report the first cross-cultural and cross-organizational evidence for an evolved hazing motivation. Using experiments performed in the United States, Japan, and among members of a hazing and a nonhazing organization, we demonstrate an invariant set of core hazing predictors. In particular, we show that the perception of near-term group benefits, which would have been ancestrally exploitable by new group members, substantially increases desired hazing severity in all samples. Results are discussed in light of human organizational psychology and the difficulty of reliably suppressing hazing behavior.

Public Reactions to Male Versus Female Terrorism: Experimental Evidence for the Male Warrior Hypothesis

One of the most consistent findings in the domain of criminal justice is that female and male offenders are perceived differently, often resulting in milder sentencing of women compared to men. Although previous studies have sought to identify factors that shape public reactions to terrorism and support for harsh interrogation techniques in its aftermath, empirical studies on differential reactions to female (vs. male) terrorist violence remain scarce. Here, it is argued that the often-violent evolutionary history of our species has shaped the way in which we perceive and react to female (vs. male) terrorist violence. Based on the framework of coalitional psychology-and specifically, the male warrior hypothesis-the assumption is tested that terror-suspect sex, in interaction with other threat cues such as in- or out-group membership and size of coalition, affects support for interrogational torture. This prediction was tested by conducting a survey experiment on a nationally representative sample of 2,126 U.S. adults. Results demonstrated that terror-suspect sex significantly shapes reactions to and perceptions of terrorist violence. Further, nuanced responses based on respondent sex revealed that these associations were exclusively driven by male participants. Gender attitudes and mere punitiveness did not account for the findings, suggesting that male coalitional psychology is deeply ingrained and readily activated by cues implying intergroup conflict.

The Evolutionary Psychology of War: Offense and Defense in the Adapted Mind

The study of warfare from an evolutionary perspective has expanded rapidly over the last couple of decades. However, it has tended to focus on the ancestral origins, prevalence, and instruments of war rather than adaptationist analyses of its underlying psychology. I argue that our evolved coalitional psychology may contain a set of distinct evolved heuristics designed specifically for offensive and defensive coalitional aggression. Data from two survey experiments are presented, in which subjects were given scenarios depicting offensive or defensive aggression and were told to make decisions, for example, regarding their willingness to participate in the conflict, their opinions of others who did not choose to participate, and their expectations benefit. The results indicate that humans do indeed distinguish readily between these two domains and that their willingness to participate, as well as their emotional responses toward others, is highly contingent upon this informational cue in adaptively relevant ways. In addition, and consistent with parental investment theory, data reveal a range of sex differences in attitudes toward coalitional aggression in the two conflict domains. Beyond the study of warfare, this project has implications for our understanding of the relationship between individual behavior and group dynamics, as well as for our understanding of the mechanisms by which the psychological framing of political events can lead to important social outcomes.

Can race really be erased? A pre-registered replication study

When encountering an unknown individual, social categorization of the individual has been shown to automatically proceed on the basis of three fundamental dimensions: People seem to mandatorily encode race, sex and age. In contradiction to this general finding, Kurzban et al. (2001) showed that race encoding is not automatic and inevitable, but rather a byproduct of categorization in terms of coalitions. In particular, they argue and empirically support that when other coalitional information is present, the encoding of race is spectacularly reduced. In the present contribution, we present a replication of the race-erased effect reported by Kurzban et al. First, we give a detailed overview of the hypotheses, the experimental methodology, the derivation of the sample size required to achieve a power of 95%, and the criteria that need to be met for a successful replication. Then we present the findings of an empirical test that met the requirements of our power analyses. Our results indicate that the encoding of race is indeed reduced when another coalitional cue is available, yet this reduction is less marked than in the original study. This experiment was preregistered before data collection at Open Science Framework, osf.io/vnhrm/.