B A Scelza
Biographic Data
| ID | 18268 |
|---|---|
| NAME | B A Scelza |
| GIVEN NAMES | B A |
| FAMILY NAME | Scelza |
| SIGNATURE | SCELZA B A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Los Angeles |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-5875-8875 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 151 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
The Role of Medical Mistrust in Vaccination Decisions in Rural, Indigenous Namibian Communities
The causes and consequences of women's status in Himba pastoralists
On causes and consequences; a reply to Durkee
Medical mistrust, discrimination and healthcare experiences in a rural Namibian community
Substantial evidence indicates that medical mistrust, resulting from experiences with discrimination and marginalisation, is a determinant of health disparities in minority populations. However, this research is largely limited to the US and other industrialised countries. To broaden our understanding of the role of medical mistrust on health-care decision making, we conducted a study on healthcare experiences and perceptions in a rural, underser…
Sex ratios and gender norms
Sexual conflict theory has been successfully applied to predict how in non-human animal populations, sex ratios can lead to conflicting reproductive interests of females and males and affect their bargaining positions in resolving such conflicts of interests. Recently this theory has been extended to understand the resolution of sexual conflict in humans, but with mixed success. We argue that an underappreciation of the complex relationship betwe…
Context dependent preferences in prestige bias learning about vaccination in rural Namibian pastoralists
The cuckoldry conundrum
Concerns about cuckoldry are a dominant theme in evolutionary studies of mating, frequently used to explain sex differences in reproductive strategies. However, studies in nonhuman species have shown that cuckoldry can be associated with important benefits. These insights have not been well integrated with the human literature, which continues to focus on anticuckoldry tactics and negative repercussions for men. I evaluate two key assumptions cen…
The dietary impacts of drought in a traditional pastoralist economy
OBJECTIVES: Arid pastoralism is often understood as an adaptive strategy to marginal environments. As pastoralists become increasingly market integrated, novel dietary preferences and access to low quality market foods can erode traditional diets. These market-based dietary shifts are particularly problematic during sustained drought, where reductions in traditional foods make pastoralists increasingly reliant on a cash economy. Among the Himba o…
Only Death Will Separate Us
The Role of Spousal Separation on Norms Related to Gender and Sexuality among Himba Pastoralists
The gender-specific labor demands of arid pastoralism often lead to spousal separation. Men typically respond in one of two ways: engage in mate guarding tactics, or loosen restrictions on female sexuality. Among Himba pastoralists in northwest Namibia, the latter strategy is dominant. Rooted in a history of matriliny, Himba have strong norms promoting female sexual autonomy. We propose that these conditions, combined with a stochastic resource b…
Kinship intensity and the use of mental states in moral judgment across societies
Paternity confidence and social obligations explain men's allocations to romantic partners in an experimental giving game
The ethics and logistics of field-based genetic paternity studies
Resource demands reduce partner discrimination in Himba women
Patterns of paternal investment predict cross-cultural variation in jealous response
Crucial Contributions
Maternal grandmothers play a key role in allomaternal care, directly caring for and provisioning their grandchildren as well as helping their daughters with household chores and productive labor. Previous studies have investigated these contributions across a broad time period, from infancy through toddlerhood. Here, we extend and refine the grandmothering literature to investigate the perinatal period as a critical window for grandmaternal contr…
Partner preferences in the context of concurrency
Behavioral Ecology, Human
Human behavioral ecology (HBE) is an adaptationist approach to the study of behavior. Its primary goal is to understand how behavior varies as a function of local socioecological context. HBE relies on a hypothetico‐deductive research strategy to test simple models using empirical data, often from small‐scale societies. Research in HBE covers a wide range of topics but mainly focuses on behaviors that are most directly related to Darwinian fitnes…
What's in Your Bag, Anthropologists
Child fosterage and sex‐biased nutritional outcomes among Namibian pastoralists
OBJECTIVES: Across cultures, fosterage has been shown to impact child health. Contextual factors, such as the reason for fosterage and the relationship between foster parent and child, are known to magnify variance in nutritional outcomes for foster children. Another important, but less studied, factor is the role of gender. Sex-biases in physiology and cultural norms are both known to affect child nutrition, and we posit these effects might be m…
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…
Perceptions of Polygyny
The costs and benefits of polygyny have been widely debated and vary according to local sociopolitical context, the level of female autonomy, and economic considerations such as the mode of production. This study aims to understand perceptions of polygyny as a function of household demography, particularly the number of female kin present in the household who can provide labor that is largely substitutable to that of a co-wife. The presence of th…
The Effect of Recent Ethnogenesis and Migration Histories on Perceptions of Ethnic Group Stability
Several researchers have proposed that humans are predisposed to treat ethnic identities as stable and inherent. However, the ethnographic, historical, and genetic records attest to the ubiquity of inter-ethnic migrations across human history. These two claims seem to be at odds. In this article we compare three evolutionary accounts of how people reason about identity stability, and the effect that the cultural evolution of ethnic group boundari…
Jealousy in a small-scale, natural fertility population
Bush Tucker, Shop Tucker
Foraging models have rarely been used to address how behavior is altered by the presence of non-foraged foods. Here, choices of store-bought and hunted foods in one Aboriginal community are analyzed. Hunting occurs frequently, but community residents also purchase food from the shop. Increases in the frequency of hunting certain large and small prey are associated with reduced access to food in the shop. Higher-variance hunt types are not associa…
Group Structure and Female Cooperative Networks in Australia's Western Desert
Fathers' Presence Speeds the Social and Reproductive Careers of Sons
To date, the great majority of human paternal investment studies have focused on the effects that men have on their preadolescent children, mainly in terms of child care and provisioning. These qualifications limit the ways in which paternal investment is viewed, potentially obscuring a more complete understanding of the importance of paternal care. In this study, I explore how paternal investment in postadolescent sons can have measurable benefi…
Paternal Investment and the Positive Effects of Fathers among the Matrilineal Mosuo of Southwest China
The matrilineal Mosuo of Southwest China have been described as the only human society that lacks fathers and husbands. These claims are based on ethnographic descriptions of normative practices and have typically not employed rigorous tests of quantitative behavioral or demographic data to verify actual practices. Here we challenge these claims, providing quantitative evidence of paternal investment among contemporary Mosuo fathers. We show that…
Female Mobility and Postmarital Kin Access in a Patrilocal Society
Fosterage as a System of Dispersed Cooperative Breeding
The Place of Proximity
The Role of Spousal Separation on Norms Related to Gender and Sexuality among Himba Pastoralists
The gender-specific labor demands of arid pastoralism often lead to spousal separation. Men typically respond in one of two ways: engage in mate guarding tactics, or loosen restrictions on female sexuality. Among Himba pastoralists in northwest Namibia, the latter strategy is dominant. Rooted in a history of matriliny, Himba have strong norms promoting female sexual autonomy. We propose that these conditions, combined with a stochastic resource b…
Patterns of paternal investment predict cross-cultural variation in jealous response
Crucial Contributions
Maternal grandmothers play a key role in allomaternal care, directly caring for and provisioning their grandchildren as well as helping their daughters with household chores and productive labor. Previous studies have investigated these contributions across a broad time period, from infancy through toddlerhood. Here, we extend and refine the grandmothering literature to investigate the perinatal period as a critical window for grandmaternal contr…
The Effect of Recent Ethnogenesis and Migration Histories on Perceptions of Ethnic Group Stability
Several researchers have proposed that humans are predisposed to treat ethnic identities as stable and inherent. However, the ethnographic, historical, and genetic records attest to the ubiquity of inter-ethnic migrations across human history. These two claims seem to be at odds. In this article we compare three evolutionary accounts of how people reason about identity stability, and the effect that the cultural evolution of ethnic group boundari…
Resource demands reduce partner discrimination in Himba women
The ethics and logistics of field-based genetic paternity studies
Context dependent preferences in prestige bias learning about vaccination in rural Namibian pastoralists
Only Death Will Separate Us
Group Structure and Female Cooperative Networks in Australia's Western Desert
The grandmaternal niche
This paper expands upon the existing literature on the evolutionary importance of grandmothers by examining how direct care by grandmothers differs from care provided by other helpers within a population of Martu Aborigines. Behavioral observations were collected on ten babies who ranged from 3 months to 3 years of age. The results show that Martu grandmothers were in contact with their grandchildren more than any person other than the mother, an…
Fathers' Presence Speeds the Social and Reproductive Careers of Sons
To date, the great majority of human paternal investment studies have focused on the effects that men have on their preadolescent children, mainly in terms of child care and provisioning. These qualifications limit the ways in which paternal investment is viewed, potentially obscuring a more complete understanding of the importance of paternal care. In this study, I explore how paternal investment in postadolescent sons can have measurable benefi…
Female Mobility and Postmarital Kin Access in a Patrilocal Society
The Place of Proximity
The hierarchy of virtue
Paternal Investment and Status-Related Child Outcomes
Recent work in human behavioural ecology has suggested that analyses focusing on early childhood may underestimate the importance of paternal investment to child outcomes since such investment may not become crucial until adolescence or beyond. This may be especially important in societies with a heritable component to status, as later investment by fathers may be more strongly related to a child's adult status than early forms of parental invest…
Choosy But Not Chaste
When Charles Darwin set out to relate his theory of evolution by natural selection to humans he discovered that a complementary explanation was needed to properly understand the great variation seen in human behavior. The resulting work, The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex , laid out the defining principles and evidence of sexual selection. In brief, this work is best known for illuminating the typically male strategy of intrasexu…
Jealousy in a small-scale, natural fertility population
Bush Tucker, Shop Tucker
Foraging models have rarely been used to address how behavior is altered by the presence of non-foraged foods. Here, choices of store-bought and hunted foods in one Aboriginal community are analyzed. Hunting occurs frequently, but community residents also purchase food from the shop. Increases in the frequency of hunting certain large and small prey are associated with reduced access to food in the shop. Higher-variance hunt types are not associa…
Fosterage as a System of Dispersed Cooperative Breeding
Paternal Investment and the Positive Effects of Fathers among the Matrilineal Mosuo of Southwest China
The matrilineal Mosuo of Southwest China have been described as the only human society that lacks fathers and husbands. These claims are based on ethnographic descriptions of normative practices and have typically not employed rigorous tests of quantitative behavioral or demographic data to verify actual practices. Here we challenge these claims, providing quantitative evidence of paternal investment among contemporary Mosuo fathers. We show that…
Perceptions of Polygyny
The costs and benefits of polygyny have been widely debated and vary according to local sociopolitical context, the level of female autonomy, and economic considerations such as the mode of production. This study aims to understand perceptions of polygyny as a function of household demography, particularly the number of female kin present in the household who can provide labor that is largely substitutable to that of a co-wife. The presence of th…
The Effect of Recent Ethnogenesis and Migration Histories on Perceptions of Ethnic Group Stability
Several researchers have proposed that humans are predisposed to treat ethnic identities as stable and inherent. However, the ethnographic, historical, and genetic records attest to the ubiquity of inter-ethnic migrations across human history. These two claims seem to be at odds. In this article we compare three evolutionary accounts of how people reason about identity stability, and the effect that the cultural evolution of ethnic group boundari…
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…
Child fosterage and sex‐biased nutritional outcomes among Namibian pastoralists
OBJECTIVES: Across cultures, fosterage has been shown to impact child health. Contextual factors, such as the reason for fosterage and the relationship between foster parent and child, are known to magnify variance in nutritional outcomes for foster children. Another important, but less studied, factor is the role of gender. Sex-biases in physiology and cultural norms are both known to affect child nutrition, and we posit these effects might be m…
Partner preferences in the context of concurrency
Behavioral Ecology, Human
Human behavioral ecology (HBE) is an adaptationist approach to the study of behavior. Its primary goal is to understand how behavior varies as a function of local socioecological context. HBE relies on a hypothetico‐deductive research strategy to test simple models using empirical data, often from small‐scale societies. Research in HBE covers a wide range of topics but mainly focuses on behaviors that are most directly related to Darwinian fitnes…
What's in Your Bag, Anthropologists
Patterns of paternal investment predict cross-cultural variation in jealous response
Crucial Contributions
Maternal grandmothers play a key role in allomaternal care, directly caring for and provisioning their grandchildren as well as helping their daughters with household chores and productive labor. Previous studies have investigated these contributions across a broad time period, from infancy through toddlerhood. Here, we extend and refine the grandmothering literature to investigate the perinatal period as a critical window for grandmaternal contr…
Kinship intensity and the use of mental states in moral judgment across societies
Paternity confidence and social obligations explain men's allocations to romantic partners in an experimental giving game
The ethics and logistics of field-based genetic paternity studies
Resource demands reduce partner discrimination in Himba women
Psychology (27 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior (20 works) · Biology (14 works) · Social Psychology (14 works) · Demography (12 works) · Geography (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Demographic Trends and Gender Preferences (10 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (10 works)