H Clark Barrett
Biographic Data
| ID | 113808 |
|---|---|
| NAME | H Clark Barrett |
| GIVEN NAMES | H Clark |
| FAMILY NAME | Barrett |
| SIGNATURE | BARRETT H C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4157-6511 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 40 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 105 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 40 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1962 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Hot hand thinking in children
What do we want from culture
The role of parent-offspring conflict in Shuar partner choice and marital practices
Previous research argues that female choice may not be as powerful an influence on the evolution of human mating preferences as once expected given the importance of parental choice in marital practices across cultures. Furthermore, much of the literature supporting this argument assumes that endorsed cultural norms reported in the ethnographic record accurately represent individuals' behaviors. Here, we argue that the roles of parent-offspring c…
Cultural and contextual variation in first mover norms of ownership: Evidence from an Achuar community
Lying about the future: Shuar-Achuar epistemic norms, predictions, and commitments
Kinship intensity and the use of mental states in moral judgment across societies
Deciding what to observe: Thoughts for a post-Weird generation
Universal norm psychology leads to societal diversity in prosocial behaviour and development
Modularity and Domain Specificity
Modularity refers to the degree to which brain processes can be decomposed into semiautonomous parts or units. Domain specificity refers to the degree to which a particular process is modified as a function of what it is operating on. The history of these concepts in thinking about the mind and implications for the study of cognition and culture in anthropology are discussed
Small-scale societies exhibit fundamental variation in the role of intentions in moral judgment
Significance It is widely considered a universal feature of human moral psychology that reasons for actions are taken into account in most moral judgments. However, most evidence for this moral intent hypothesis comes from large-scale industrialized societies. We used a standardized methodology to test the moral intent hypothesis across eight traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and t…
Cognition, Evolution of
Illusionary pattern detection in habitual gamblers
Adaptive Content Biases in Learning about Animals across the Life Course
Encrypted humor and social networks in rural Brazil
Prepared social learning about dangerous animals in children
What are the functions of System 2 modules? A reply to Chiappe and Gardner
Chiappe and Gardner (2012) argue that the concept of modularity proposed by us (Barrett & Kurzban, 2006) is different from the way modularity has been conventionally viewed in evolutionary psychology and that it cannot explain the existence of mechanisms designed to deal with novelty. We reiterate our view that there is no reason natural selection is limited to creating mechanisms that are innate, automatic, encapsulated, and domain-narrow. Indee…
Recognizing infant-directed speech across distant cultures: Evidence from Africa
When communicating with infants, caregivers often modulate their speech in an effort to make their communicative and informative intentions more clear. Infant-directed (ID) speech differs acoustically from adult-directed (AD) speech, and systematically varies according to different kinds of intentions. This way of speaking to infants is thought to be a species-specific adaptation, as research has documented highly similar patterns in ID speech ac…
Prosody in spontaneous humor: Evidence for encryption
The study of conversational humor has received relatively little empirical attention with almost no examinations of the role of vocal signals in spontaneous humor production. Here we report an analysis of spontaneous humorous speech in a rural Brazilian collective farm. The sample was collected over the course of ethnographic fieldwork in northeastern Brazil, and is drawn specifically from the monthly communal business meetings conducted in Portu…
Chapitre 33. Le développement comme cible de l’évolution: Une approche computationnelle des systèmes développementaux
Chapitre 32. Les modules « en chair et en os »
The hot hand phenomenon as a cognitive adaptation to clumped resources
Cooperative Breeding and Adolescent Siblings: Evidence for the Ecological Constraints Model
In humans, alloparents are usually thought to be grandmothers and adolescent girls. Although many studies have examined the influence of grandmothers on child outcomes, fewer have explored the effect of adolescents on such outcomes. We tested the hypothesis that in a community of Ecuadorian Shuar horticulturists, adolescent girls would have a positive influence on the growth and development of younger siblings. We measured height, weight, and ski…
The dominance dilemma: Do women really prefer dominant mates
Previous research has led to a widely accepted conclusion that heterosexual women prefer mates who are high in dominance . Three experiments designed to distinguish dominance from prestige and examine moderating contextual factors challenge this conclusion. College women at 2 U.S. universities evaluated hypothetical, potential mates described in written vignettes. Participants in Study 1 preferred a high‐prestige to a high‐dominance target. With …
Vocal Emotion Recognition Across Disparate Cultures
There exists substantial cultural variation in how emotions are expressed, but there is also considerable evidence for universal properties in facial and vocal affective expressions. This is the first empirical effort examining the perception of vocal emotional expressions across cultures with little common exposure to sources of emotion stimuli, such as mass media. Shuar hunter-horticulturalists from Amazonian Ecuador were able to reliably ident…
Artifacts and Original Intent: A Cross-Cultural Perspective on the Design Stance
How do people decide what category an artifact belongs to? Previous studies have suggested that adults and, to some degree, children, categorize artifacts in accordance with the design stance, a categorization system which privileges the designer's original intent in making categorization judgments. However, these studies have all been conducted in Western, technologically advanced societies, where artifacts are mass produced. In this study, we e…
Do human parents face a quantity‐quality tradeoff: Evidence from a Shuar community
A number of evolutionary theories of human life history assume a quantity‐quality tradeoff for offspring production: parents with fewer offspring can have higher biological fitness than those with more. Direct evidence for such a tradeoff, however, is mixed. We tested this assumption in a community of Ecuadorian Shuar hunter‐horticulturalists, using child anthropometry as a proxy for fitness. We measured the impact of household consumer/producer …
The encryption theory of humor: A knowledge-based mechanism of honest signaling
We propose that intentionally produced humor is a form of communication that evolved to broadcast information about the self and to obtain information about others by honestly signaling the fact of shared common knowledge. According to this model, humorous utterances and acts are encrypted in the sense that what makes the joke funny is not merely its surface content, but a relationship between the surface content and one or more unstated implicat…
Cooperative Breeding and Adolescent Siblings: Evidence for the Ecological Constraints Model
In humans, alloparents are usually thought to be grandmothers and adolescent girls. Although many studies have examined the influence of grandmothers on child outcomes, fewer have explored the effect of adolescents on such outcomes. We tested the hypothesis that in a community of Ecuadorian Shuar horticulturists, adolescent girls would have a positive influence on the growth and development of younger siblings. We measured height, weight, and ski…
Universal norm psychology leads to societal diversity in prosocial behaviour and development
On the functional orgins of essentialism
Perinatal Sadness among Shuar Women: Support for an Evolutionary Theory of Psychic Pain
Psychiatry faces an internal contradiction in that it regards mild sadness and low mood as normal emotions, yet when these emotions are directed toward a new infant, it regards them as abnormal. We apply parental investment theory, a widely used framework from evolutionary biology, to maternal perinatal emotions, arguing that negative emotions directed toward a new infant could serve an important evolved function. If so, then under some definitio…
The Second Law of Thermodynamics Is the First Law of Psychology: Evolutionary Developmental Psychology and the Theory Of Tandem, Coordinated Inheritances: Comment on Lickliter and Honeycutt (2003)
Organisms inherit a set of environmental regularities as well as genes, and these two inheritances repeatedly encounter each other across generations. This repetition drives natural selection to coordinate the interplay of stably replicated genes with stably persisting environmental regularities, so that this web of interactions produces the reliable development of a functionally organized design. Selection is the only known counterweight to the …
Adaptive Content Biases in Learning about Animals across the Life Course
Vocal Emotion Recognition Across Disparate Cultures
There exists substantial cultural variation in how emotions are expressed, but there is also considerable evidence for universal properties in facial and vocal affective expressions. This is the first empirical effort examining the perception of vocal emotional expressions across cultures with little common exposure to sources of emotion stimuli, such as mass media. Shuar hunter-horticulturalists from Amazonian Ecuador were able to reliably ident…
Can manipulations of cognitive load be used to test evolutionary hypotheses
D. DeSteno, M. Y. Bartlett, J. Braverman, and P. Salovey proposed that if sex-differentiated responses to infidelity are evolved, then they should be automatic, and therefore cognitive load should not attenuate them. DeSteno et al. found smaller sex differences in response to sexual versus emotional infidelity among participants under cognitive load, an effect interpreted as evidence against the evolutionary hypothesis. This logic is faulty. Cogn…
Recognizing infant-directed speech across distant cultures: Evidence from Africa
When communicating with infants, caregivers often modulate their speech in an effort to make their communicative and informative intentions more clear. Infant-directed (ID) speech differs acoustically from adult-directed (AD) speech, and systematically varies according to different kinds of intentions. This way of speaking to infants is thought to be a species-specific adaptation, as research has documented highly similar patterns in ID speech ac…
Artifacts and Original Intent: A Cross-Cultural Perspective on the Design Stance
How do people decide what category an artifact belongs to? Previous studies have suggested that adults and, to some degree, children, categorize artifacts in accordance with the design stance, a categorization system which privileges the designer's original intent in making categorization judgments. However, these studies have all been conducted in Western, technologically advanced societies, where artifacts are mass produced. In this study, we e…
Relationships and emotions in children's understanding of social contract violations
Previous research on children's understanding of social contracts has shown that children are able to identify violations of social contracts from an early age, that they attribute negative feelings including anger to victims of contract violations, and that attributions of negative (moral) feelings to violators increase with age. This study examines two questions that have not been systematically investigated in prior work. First, do children at…
Descent Versus Design in Shuar Children's Reasoning about Animals
The ability to make inductive inferences is important because without it, generalization of knowledge to new circumstances would be impossible. One context in which such inductive skills are likely to have been important over evolutionary time is encounters with animals. Previous research suggests that children take into account at least two kinds of relationships between animals when making inductive inferences about them: descent relationships …
The classical tradition: Rhetoric and oratory
(1997). The classical tradition: Rhetoric and oratory. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 27, No. 2, pp. 7-38
Scott of the oregonian vs. William Jennings Bryan
Scott of the oregonian vs. William Jennings Bryan
Les grands sophistes dans l'Athenes de Pericles
The classical tradition: Rhetoric and oratory
(1997). The classical tradition: Rhetoric and oratory. Rhetoric Society Quarterly: Vol. 27, No. 2, pp. 7-38
On the functional orgins of essentialism
The Second Law of Thermodynamics Is the First Law of Psychology: Evolutionary Developmental Psychology and the Theory Of Tandem, Coordinated Inheritances: Comment on Lickliter and Honeycutt (2003)
Organisms inherit a set of environmental regularities as well as genes, and these two inheritances repeatedly encounter each other across generations. This repetition drives natural selection to coordinate the interplay of stably replicated genes with stably persisting environmental regularities, so that this web of interactions produces the reliable development of a functionally organized design. Selection is the only known counterweight to the …
Descent Versus Design in Shuar Children's Reasoning about Animals
The ability to make inductive inferences is important because without it, generalization of knowledge to new circumstances would be impossible. One context in which such inductive skills are likely to have been important over evolutionary time is encounters with animals. Previous research suggests that children take into account at least two kinds of relationships between animals when making inductive inferences about them: descent relationships …
Accurate judgments of intention from motion cues alone: A cross-cultural study
Modularity in cognition: Framing the debate
Modularity has been the subject of intense debate in the cognitive sciences for more than 2 decades. In some cases, misunderstandings have impeded conceptual progress. Here the authors identify arguments about modularity that either have been abandoned or were never held by proponents of modular views of the mind. The authors review arguments that purport to undermine modularity, with particular attention on cognitive architecture, development, g…
Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature
Essay Review: Debunking Adapting Minds
David Buller's recent book, Adapting Minds , is a philosophical critique of the field of evolutionary psychology. Buller argues that evolutionary psychology is utterly bankrupt from both a theoretical and an empirical point of view. Although Adapting Minds has been well received in both the academic press and the popular media, we argue that Buller's critique of evolutionary psychology fails
Do human parents face a quantity‐quality tradeoff: Evidence from a Shuar community
A number of evolutionary theories of human life history assume a quantity‐quality tradeoff for offspring production: parents with fewer offspring can have higher biological fitness than those with more. Direct evidence for such a tradeoff, however, is mixed. We tested this assumption in a community of Ecuadorian Shuar hunter‐horticulturalists, using child anthropometry as a proxy for fitness. We measured the impact of household consumer/producer …
Can manipulations of cognitive load be used to test evolutionary hypotheses
D. DeSteno, M. Y. Bartlett, J. Braverman, and P. Salovey proposed that if sex-differentiated responses to infidelity are evolved, then they should be automatic, and therefore cognitive load should not attenuate them. DeSteno et al. found smaller sex differences in response to sexual versus emotional infidelity among participants under cognitive load, an effect interpreted as evidence against the evolutionary hypothesis. This logic is faulty. Cogn…
Relationships and emotions in children's understanding of social contract violations
Previous research on children's understanding of social contracts has shown that children are able to identify violations of social contracts from an early age, that they attribute negative feelings including anger to victims of contract violations, and that attributions of negative (moral) feelings to violators increase with age. This study examines two questions that have not been systematically investigated in prior work. First, do children at…
Perinatal Sadness among Shuar Women: Support for an Evolutionary Theory of Psychic Pain
Psychiatry faces an internal contradiction in that it regards mild sadness and low mood as normal emotions, yet when these emotions are directed toward a new infant, it regards them as abnormal. We apply parental investment theory, a widely used framework from evolutionary biology, to maternal perinatal emotions, arguing that negative emotions directed toward a new infant could serve an important evolved function. If so, then under some definitio…
The dominance dilemma: Do women really prefer dominant mates
Previous research has led to a widely accepted conclusion that heterosexual women prefer mates who are high in dominance . Three experiments designed to distinguish dominance from prestige and examine moderating contextual factors challenge this conclusion. College women at 2 U.S. universities evaluated hypothetical, potential mates described in written vignettes. Participants in Study 1 preferred a high‐prestige to a high‐dominance target. With …
Vocal Emotion Recognition Across Disparate Cultures
There exists substantial cultural variation in how emotions are expressed, but there is also considerable evidence for universal properties in facial and vocal affective expressions. This is the first empirical effort examining the perception of vocal emotional expressions across cultures with little common exposure to sources of emotion stimuli, such as mass media. Shuar hunter-horticulturalists from Amazonian Ecuador were able to reliably ident…
Artifacts and Original Intent: A Cross-Cultural Perspective on the Design Stance
How do people decide what category an artifact belongs to? Previous studies have suggested that adults and, to some degree, children, categorize artifacts in accordance with the design stance, a categorization system which privileges the designer's original intent in making categorization judgments. However, these studies have all been conducted in Western, technologically advanced societies, where artifacts are mass produced. In this study, we e…
The encryption theory of humor: A knowledge-based mechanism of honest signaling
We propose that intentionally produced humor is a form of communication that evolved to broadcast information about the self and to obtain information about others by honestly signaling the fact of shared common knowledge. According to this model, humorous utterances and acts are encrypted in the sense that what makes the joke funny is not merely its surface content, but a relationship between the surface content and one or more unstated implicat…
The hot hand phenomenon as a cognitive adaptation to clumped resources
Cooperative Breeding and Adolescent Siblings: Evidence for the Ecological Constraints Model
In humans, alloparents are usually thought to be grandmothers and adolescent girls. Although many studies have examined the influence of grandmothers on child outcomes, fewer have explored the effect of adolescents on such outcomes. We tested the hypothesis that in a community of Ecuadorian Shuar horticulturists, adolescent girls would have a positive influence on the growth and development of younger siblings. We measured height, weight, and ski…
Prosody in spontaneous humor: Evidence for encryption
The study of conversational humor has received relatively little empirical attention with almost no examinations of the role of vocal signals in spontaneous humor production. Here we report an analysis of spontaneous humorous speech in a rural Brazilian collective farm. The sample was collected over the course of ethnographic fieldwork in northeastern Brazil, and is drawn specifically from the monthly communal business meetings conducted in Portu…
Chapitre 33. Le développement comme cible de l’évolution: Une approche computationnelle des systèmes développementaux
Chapitre 32. Les modules « en chair et en os »
Prepared social learning about dangerous animals in children
What are the functions of System 2 modules? A reply to Chiappe and Gardner
Chiappe and Gardner (2012) argue that the concept of modularity proposed by us (Barrett & Kurzban, 2006) is different from the way modularity has been conventionally viewed in evolutionary psychology and that it cannot explain the existence of mechanisms designed to deal with novelty. We reiterate our view that there is no reason natural selection is limited to creating mechanisms that are innate, automatic, encapsulated, and domain-narrow. Indee…
Psychology (33 works) · Social Psychology (21 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Biology (13 works) · Cognitive psychology (12 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Developmental psychology (11 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (11 works) · Philosophy (10 works)