Clark Barrett (website), University of California Los Angeles Why Modularity is Indispensable to Psychology: A Modified Fodorian Approach Many evolutionary social psychologists regard modularity as indispensable to accounts of functional specialization. Yet modularity theory has come under heavy attack in psychology. Many psychologists believe that modular processes must be innate, inflexible, automatic, and isolated. Innateness refers to ideas about genetic specification, hard-wiring, and immunity to environmental influence during development. Inflexibility refers to both lack of plasticity during development and to inflexibility during processing, e.g., inability to handle novel stimuli. Automaticity entails that processing must occur, and occur the same way, regardless of context or circumstances. Isolatedness refers to the idea that modules do not interact with other systems and are spatially and functionally isolable, such that they can be cleanly removed without affecting other systems or processes. All current critiques of modularity are based on suggesting that one or more of these properties is implausible for a given psychological process. Some would be surprised to discover that many modularity theorists, especially evolutionary psychologists, agree with them. These properties were implausible from the start as a reasonable model of modularity, and do not invalidate it. Some of them, such as “genetic specification,” are simply incoherent from a biological point of view. Others, such as “automaticity” in the sense of complete lack of sensitivity to context, while plausible, are probably rare, and certainly not necessary properties of modularity. Instead, the key feature of modularity endorsed by evolutionary psychologists is functional specificity. In this talk, I survey critiques of modularity and show how they all fail to come to terms with this central notion of function, and are based on misunderstandings about cognition, evolution, and development. Roy Baumeister (website), Florida State University Might Culture Have Influenced Evolution? Although most specific cultural differences are regarded as of too recent origin to have affected human genes, culture per se has a much longer history and may predate the human species. The first part of this talk will provide a brief overview of the argument that human nature can be effectively understood as having been selected to create and sustain culture. In a sense, culture can be understood as the main biological strategy of humankind. Culture builds on sociality but takes it in radically new directions, including exchange relationships. Exchange relationships, of the sort that make possible a market economy, are underappreciated by social psychologists but represent a key to human success. The second part of this talk will explore the evolutionary requirements for making a species capable of flexible exchange relationships. Elaine Hatfield (website), University of Hawaii Love in the Afternoon In the 1970s, Russell Clark and I conducted a study designed to explore “Gender Differences in Receptivity to Sexual Offers.” As predicted, we found that while men were eager to engage in casual sex, women were not. A firestorm of criticism greeted our first attempts to publish these “controversial” findings. Since then, attention in a wide variety of manifestations has been lavished on the study. It has inspired rock songs, novels, many TV replications, and lots of new research; and the controversy that this small study set off continues right to this day. I will conclude by offering some ideas about the direction of future research in this provocative and rich area. Nicole Hess (website), Humboldt University, Berlin Informational Warfare: The Evolution of Female Coalitional Competition Via Gossip Evolutionists have argued for the role of coordinated physical aggression in shaping coalitional behavior among human males. When physical force determines access to important resources like food, territory, and mates, coalitions have a distinct competitive advantage over loners in conflicts ('stronger' coalitions similarly have advantages over 'weaker' coalitions). Historical, ethnographic, and even experimental evidence supports this hypothesis. Human females exhibit enduring bonds as well, however they almost never engage in coordinated physical aggression. As Rodseth et al (1991, p. 232) write, relationships among women: seem to be characterized by high degrees of noninterference mutualism, i.e., cooperation that does not impose a cost on any 'third party.' This varies little with residence pattern, so that even unrelated women in the most extreme patriarchal societies…regularly engage in peaceful cooperation toward common goals with close and enduring friendships. Have women's and girls' coalitions avoided the conflict-centered goals of male coalitions? I argue that the answer is “no.” Females engage in informational warfare, where the weapon is not violence but information, and where female coalitions may indeed have a competitive advantage over loners. Among non-human primate species, the degree to which females form alliances and coalitions to aggress against competitors varies markedly. The so-called socioecological model has been quite successful at explaining this variation. The key, distilled insight of the model that is relevant to the human case is that alliances and coalitions are useful in competition when the conflict is of the 'contest' type (that is, when resources are scarce, valuable, and monopolizable rather than abundant, low-quality, and nonmonopolizable). Both within and between groups, humans have long faced problems of conflict over contestable resources. The socioecological model may thus be useful in understanding the evolution of coalitional behavior in humans. In this talk I will briefly review: features of human sociality as they relate to those of other primates; the socioecological model and how it relates to humans; empirical and theoretical work suggesting that reputation is an important mediator of access to contested resources; reputation manipulation via gossip; factors affecting the veracity of gossip; sex differences in human aggression; and the hypothesis that coalitions facilitate the ability to strategically manipulate reputations with gossip. Finally, I will present evidence suggesting that coalitions may provide some protection from such reputational manipulation during such conflicts. Norm Li (website), University of Texas at Austin Long- and Short-Term Mate Selection Priorities: What, Whether, and Why Are there sex differences in criteria for relationships? The answer depends on what question a researcher asks. Evolutionary theory and research on mate preference are organized along the three dimensions of whether, what, and why. Data from using an economic methodology suggest that whereas the sexes differ in whether or not they will enter short-term sexual relationships, they are more similar in what they prioritize in partners for such relationships. Whereas women prioritize status in long-term mates, they instead (like men) prioritize physical attractiveness much like an economic necessity in short-term mates. Both sexes also show evidence of favoring well-rounded long- and short-term mates when given the chance. However, additional data and context of other findings and theory suggest different underlying reasons why. Results generally support a good genes account of short-term mating, as per Strategic Pluralism Theory (Gangestad & Simpson, 2000). The link between method and theory in examining social decision processes is also discussed. Randolph M. Nesse (website), University of Michigan Ann Arbor Goals, Evolution and Mood Work by Klinger, Heckhausen, Carver and Scheier and others has documented the role of affect in regulating goal pursuit. When progress towards a goal is faster than expected, positive affect increases the rate and duration of investment; when progress is slower than expected, negative affect conserves effort and reallocates it to better strategies or different goals. This presentation first describes mathematical models of how these mechanisms give a selective advantage, with implications for why genetic tendencies to affective disorders are so common. It then shows how the categories of effort from behavioral ecology can provide a framework for understanding the trade-offs in every goal pursuit decision. This provides a way to incorporate idiographic variations in goal pursuit into an evolutionary nomothetic framework. To test this theory, we developed methods to gather data on individual goals and used them to study 100 individuals in a population sample balanced in groups of 25 by race and middle or lower income. Individuals whose main life problem was "being trapped pursuing an unreachable goal" had significantly more intense depression than those with other main life problems. In another study of patients seen in a psychiatry outpatient clinic for depression, symptoms could be attributed to pursuit of a major unreachable goal in about half of the cases. In both samples, these methods often revealed covert life problems, as well as profound individual differences in strategies for dealing with unreachable goals. They also suggest how cultural forces shape the motivational structures of individual lives in ways that may explain profound cultural variations in rates of depression. An evolutionary perspective on affect and goal pursuit provides a nomothetic framework that uses idiographic data about individual motivational structures to explain depression. Jill Sundie (website), University of Houston & Robert Cialdini (website), Arizona State University Porsches, Peacocks, and Thorstein Veblen: An Evolutionary Perspective on Conspicuous Consumption Three studies examine the links between conspicuous consumption and the goal of attracting a mate. Using sexual selection theory as a framework, conspicuous consumption's function as a sexual signal is explored. Choosing more conspicuous products was predicted by favorable attitudes towards having sex without commitment, particularly among men when their mating goals were activated. Observers perceived men, but not women, to have more unrestricted sexual attitudes if they conspicuously consumed. Discussion of these studies considers implications of sexual selection theory for understanding motivations for status consumption, sex differences in consumer behavior, and consumers' impression management processes. In applying an evolutionary perspective to social influence research, we consider how similarly broad social goals (e.g., coalition formation and status-seeking) when activated for an influence target can change the effectiveness of certain influence tactics used to try to gain the target's compliance. John Tooby (website), University of California Santa Barbara The Agony and the Ecstasy: Recalibration, Scaling and Tradeoffs in the Evolution of Motivational Adaptations Motivation is central to psychology, psychiatry, neuroscience, and the behavioral sciences, but its study has been relatively neglected in recent decades. Even the best developed of existing theories cannot accommodate the great majority of motivational competences that humans exhibit. Traditional approaches to motivation such as drive reduction theories, conditioning theories, preferences, and goal-seeking models, while admirable in many respects, need to be fundamentally reformulated and incorporated into a more encompassing and computationally more explicit theory to account for the full range of motivational phenomena. We have been working on a new theoretical framework for motivation that is both adaptationist and computational to address these limitations. We propose that the motivational architecture contains a heterogeneous set of evolved mechanisms designed to compute a large series of internal regulatory variables (IRVs)—computational elements with magnitudes that dynamically track fitness-relevant aspects of the social, physical, and biotic environment. For example, one IRV that plays a role in many motivational systems is a welfare trade-off ratio (WTR) that is accessed to regulate behaviors that jointly affect one’s own welfare and the welfare of another. The set of IRVs and the mechanisms that compute them are accessed to assign meaning and value to aspects of actual and potential situations, to generate goals and other motivational phenomena, and to arbitrate trade-offs among competing values. This understudied computational substrate coevolved with the adaptive designs of the emotions to produce a suite of mechanisms—the recalibrational emotions such as anger, guilt, shame, gratitude, and so on—that we experience as feelings, and that implement the episodic reweighting of IRVs in the light of new information.