Matthew M. Gervais

The strategy of psychopathy: primary psychopathic traits predict defection on low-value relationships

Recent evidence suggests that psychopathy is a trait continuum. This has unappreciated implications for understanding the selective advantage of psychopathic traits. Although clinical psychopathy is typically construed as a strategy of unconditional defection, subclinical psychopathy may promote strategic conditional defection, broadening the adaptive niche of psychopathy within human societies. To test this, we focus on a ubiquitous real-life source of conditional behaviour: the expected relational value of social partners, both in terms of their quality and the likely quantity of future interactions with them. We allow for conversational interaction among participants prior to their playing an unannounced, one-shot prisoners dilemma game, which fosters naturalistic interpersonal evaluation and conditional behaviour, while controlling punishment and reputation effects. Individuals scoring higher on factor 1 (callous affect, interpersonal manipulation) of the Levenson self-report psychopathy scale defected conditionally on two kinds of low-value partners: those who interrupted them more during the conversation, and those with whom they failed to discover cues to future interaction. Both interaction effects support the hypothesis that subclinical primary psychopathy potentiates defection on those with low expected relational value. These data clarify the function and form of psychopathic traits, while highlighting adaptive variation in human social strategies.

Men’s Physical Strength Moderates Conceptualizations of Prospective Foes in Two Disparate Societies

Across taxa, strength and size are elementary determinants of relative fighting capacity; in species with complex behavioral repertoires, numerous additional factors also contribute. When many factors must be considered simultaneously, decision-making in agonistic contexts can be facilitated through the use of a summary representation. Size and strength may constitute the dimensions used to form such a representation, such that tactical advantages or liabilities influence the conceptualized size and muscularity of an antagonist. If so, and given the continued importance of physical strength in human male-male conflicts, a man’s own strength will influence his conceptualization of the absolute size and strength of an opponent. In the research reported here, male participants’ chest compression strength was compared with their estimates of the size and muscularity of an unfamiliar potential antagonist, presented either as a supporter of a rival sports team (Study 1, conducted in urban California, and Study 2, conducted in rural Fiji) or as a man armed with a handgun (Study 3, conducted in rural Fiji). Consistent with predictions, composite measures of male participants’ estimates of the size/strength of a potential antagonist were inversely correlated with the participant’s own strength. Therefore, consonant with a history wherein violent intrasexual selection has acted on human males, a man’s own physical strength influences his representations of potential antagonists.

From Whence the Captains of Our Lives: Ultimate and Phylogenetic Perspectives on Emotions in Humans and Other Primates

We outline an evolutionary approach to emotions intended to spur further research on the subject in humans and nonhumans alike. Combining adaptationist, comparative, and phylogenetic analyses, we seek to illuminate the functions that emotions fulfill, the reasons why they take the forms that they do, and the extent to which they are shared across species. Using similar logic, we distinguish between emotions and attitudes, cognitive representations of other actors that are both informed by, and potentiate, emotions. Employing select emotions as illustrations, we discuss a taxonomy of emotions. We begin with emotions that address adaptive challenges common across animals, and which require minimal cognitive capacities, features that make it likely that they are widely shared across species. Next, we consider emotions involved in elementary sociality, a category further elaborated in emotions playing a role in parenting and pair-bonding. In light of the importance of dyadic cooperative relationships in primate societies, we describe a set of emotions undergirding such relationships that we expect to be shared by human and nonhuman primates. To a more limited degree, we expect pan-primate similarities with regard to vicarious emotions, those wherein the individual experiencing the emotion is affected only indirectly by the eliciting event. The greater range and complexity of human social relationships, including the human propensity to essentialize cultural groups, extend the class of vicarious emotions beyond anything evident in nonhumans. Finally, underscoring the importance of culture in human evolution, we examine moral emotions elicited by norm violations, a pattern unique to humans.

Moral Parochialism Misunderstood: A Reply to Piazza and Sousa

rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org Invited reply Cite this article: Fessler DMT et al. 2016 Moral parochialism misunderstood: a reply to Piazza and Sousa. Proc. R. Soc. B 283: http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2015.2628 Received: 3 November 2015 Accepted: 3 December 2015 Author for correspondence: Daniel M. T. Fessler e-mail: dfessler@anthro.ucla.edu Present address: Department of Anthropology, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901- 1414 USA and The School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-2402, USA. The accompanying comment can be viewed at http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2015.2037. Electronic supplementary material is available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2015.2628 or via http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org. Moral parochialism misunderstood: a reply to Piazza and Sousa Daniel M. T. Fessler 1 , Colin Holbrook 1 , Martin Kanovsky 2 , H. Clark Barrett 1 , Alexander H. Bolyanatz 3 , Matthew M. Gervais 1,† , Michael Gurven 4 , Joseph Henrich 5 , Geoff Kushnick 6 , Anne C. Pisor 4 , Stephen Stich 7 , Christopher von Rueden 8 and Stephen Laurence 9 Department of Anthropology and Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA 90095-1553, USA Institute of Social Anthropology, FSEV, Comenius University, 820 05 Bratislava 25, Slovakia Social Sciences Subdivision, College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, IL 60137-6599, USA Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106-3210, USA Department of Psychology and Department of Economics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada V6T 1Z4 School of Archaeology and Anthropology, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 0200, Australia Department of Philosophy and Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University, New Brunswick NJ 08901-1107, USA Jepson School of Leadership Studies, University of Richmond, VA 23173, USA Department of Philosophy and Hang Seng Centre for Cognitive Studies, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S3 7QB, UK Our paper [1] compared two competing hypotheses. The hypothesis that we label universalistic moral evaluation holds that a definitional feature of reasoning about moral rules is that, ceteris paribus, judgements of violations of rules con- cerning harm, rights or justice will be insensitive to spatial or temporal distance or the opinions of authority figures. The hypothesis that we label moral parochi- alism, consonant with a variety of theories of the evolutionary origins of morality, holds that, because moral judgements primarily serve to navigate local social arenas, remote events will not activate the mechanisms that generate negative moral evaluation to the same extent as events occurring in the here and now, whereas the consent of local authority figures will temper condemna- tion. Hence, moral parochialism predicts that the collective output of the faculties responsible for moral judgement will exhibit a reduction in the severity of judgement as a function of spatial or temporal distance or the opinions of local authority figures. We provided evidence from seven diverse societies, including five small-scale societies, showing that such reductions in severity judgements exist in all of the societies examined. Piazza and Sousa [2] argue that our data do not support parochialism, and instead support universalism, because (1) Only a minority of our participants reversed their initial judgement of the wrong- ness of an action (from wrong to not wrong or good) when it was subsequently framed as having occurred long ago or far away, or as having been sanctioned by authority figures. (2) Our use of graduated moral judgements, rather than dichotomous judgements, is inappropriate. (3) Only a minority of our participants diminished the severity of their initial judgement of the wrongness of an action when it was subsequently framed as having occurred long ago or far away, or as having been sanctioned by an important person. These objections stem from misunderstandings of moral parochialism and the evolutionary reasoning behind it. & 2016 The Authors. Published by the Royal Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, provided the original author and source are credited.

General trust impedes perception of self-reported primary psychopathy in thin slices of social interaction

Little is known about people’s ability to detect subclinical psychopathy from others’ quotidian social behavior, or about the correlates of variation in this ability. This study sought to address these questions using a thin slice personality judgment paradigm. We presented 108 undergraduate judges (70.4% female) with 1.5 minute video thin slices of zero-acquaintance triadic conversations among other undergraduates (targets: n = 105, 57.1% female). Judges completed self-report measures of general trust, caution, and empathy. Target individuals had completed the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy (LSRP) scale. Judges viewed the videos in one of three conditions: complete audio, silent, or audio from which semantic content had been removed using low-pass filtering. Using a novel other-rating version of the LSRP, judges’ ratings of targets’ primary psychopathy levels were significantly positively associated with targets’ self-reports, but only in the complete audio condition. Judge general trust and target LSRP interacted, such that judges higher in general trust made less accurate judgments with respect to targets higher in primary and total psychopathy. Results are consistent with a scenario in which psychopathic traits are maintained in human populations by negative frequency dependent selection operating through the costs of detecting psychopathy in others.

Seeing the elephant: Parsimony, functionalism, and the emergent design of contempt and other sentiments

The target article argues that contempt is a sentiment, and that sentiments are the deep structure of social affect. The 26 commentaries meet these claims with a range of exciting extensions and applications, as well as critiques. Most significantly, we reply that construction and emergence are necessary for, not incompatible with, evolved design, while parsimony requires explanatory adequacy and predictive accuracy, not mere simplicity.

Evolution after mirror neurons: tapping the shared manifold through secondary adaptation.

Cook et al. laudably call for careful comparative research into the development of mirror neurons. However, they do so within an impoverished evolutionary framework that does not clearly distinguish ultimate and proximate causes and their reciprocal relations. As a result, they overlook evidence for the reliable develop of mirror neurons in biological and cultural traits evolved to work through them.

Revenge without redundancy: functional outcomes do not require discrete adaptations for vengeance or forgiveness.

We question whether the postulated revenge and forgiveness systems constitute true adaptations. Revenge and forgiveness are the products of multiple motivational systems and capacities, many of which did not exclusively evolve to support deterrence. Anger is more aptly construed as an adaptation that organizes independent mechanisms to deter transgressors than as the mediator of a distinct revenge adaptation.