Coren L Apicella
Biographic Data
| ID | 193124 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Coren L Apicella |
| GIVEN NAMES | Coren L |
| FAMILY NAME | Apicella |
| SIGNATURE | APICELLA C L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pennsylvania |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9661-6998 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 20 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Oral contraceptives and women's preferences for facial masculinity and symmetry: Evidence from a double-blind randomized controlled trial
Several studies have reported that heterosexual women's preferences for male faces vary with hormonal fluctuations over the menstrual cycle and that women tend to prefer more masculine faces during ovulation or when not using hormonal contraceptives. While this has been tested using observational data, we provide the first double-blind randomized controlled study testing if oral contraceptives reduce preferences for facial masculinity and symmetr…
US adults accurately assess Hadza and Tsimane men's hunting ability from a single face photograph
Appealing to the minds of gods: Religious beliefs and appeals correspond to features of local social ecologies
How do beliefs about gods vary across populations, and what accounts for this variation? We argue that appeals to gods generally reflect prominent features of local social ecologies. We first draw from a synthesis of theoretical, experimental, and ethnographic evidence to delineate a set of predictive criteria for the kinds of contexts with which religious beliefs and behaviors will be associated. To evaluate these criteria, we examine the conten…
Do humans agree on which body odors are attractive, similar to the agreement observed when rating faces and voices
Studies of mate choice from an evolutionary perspective often begin by investigating whether individuals of one sex share similar preferences for mates. Evidence for shared preferences is often interpreted as support for the hypothesis that preferences are adaptations that have evolved to select high-quality mates. To date, the importance of body odor in human mate choice is uncertain because fundamental questions, such as whether preferences for…
A cost for signaling: Do Hadza hunter-gatherers forgo calories to show-off in an experimental context
Generalized morality culturally evolves as an adaptive heuristic in large social networks
Why do people assume that a generous person should also be honest? Why do we even use words like "moral" and "immoral"? We explore these questions with a new model of how people perceive moral character. We propose that people vary in the extent to which they perceive moral character as "localized" (varying along many contextually embedded dimensions) versus "generalized" (varying along a single dimension from morally bad to morally good). This v…
Gods are watching and so what? Moralistic supernatural punishment across 15 cultures
Psychological and cultural evolutionary accounts of human sociality propose that beliefs in punitive and monitoring gods that care about moral norms facilitate cooperation. While there is some evidence to suggest that belief in supernatural punishment and monitoring generally induce cooperative behaviour, the effect of a deity's explicitly postulated moral concerns on cooperation remains unclear. Here, we report a pre-registered set of analyses t…
Hearing Prosocial Stories Increases Hadza Hunter-Gatherers' Generosity in an Economic Game
Why hunt? Why gather? Why share? Hadza assessments of foraging and food-sharing motive
Material insecurity predicts greater commitment to moralistic and less commitment to local deities: A cross-cultural investigation
The existential security hypothesis predicts that in the absence of more successful secular institutions, people will be attracted to religion when they are materially insecure. Most assessments, however, employ data sampled at a state-level with a focus on world religions. Using individual-level data collected in societies of varied community sizes with diverse religious traditions including animism, shamanism, polytheism, and monotheism, we con…
The moralization bias of gods’ minds: A cross-cultural test
There are compelling reasons to expect that cognitively representing any active, powerful deity motivates cooperative behavior. One mechanism underlying this association could be a cognitive bias toward generally attributing moral concern to anthropomorphic agents. If humans cognitively represent the minds of deities and humans in the same way, and if human agents are generally conceptualized as having moral concern, a broad tendency to attribute…
Do religious and market-based institutions promote cooperation in Hadza hunter-gatherers
Humans’ willingness to bear costs to benefit others is an evolutionary puzzle. Cultural group selection proposes a possible answer to this puzzle—cooperative norms and institutions proliferate due to group-level benefits. For instance, belief in knowledgeable, moralizing deities is theorized to decrease selfishness and favoritism through threat of supernatural punishment. Similarly, norms of fairness and cooperation are theorized to have coevolve…
Hadza hunter-gatherers are not deontologists and do not prefer deontologists as social partners
The religiosity gender gap in 14 diverse societies
Scholars of religion have long sought to explain the persistent finding that women tend to report greater religiosity than men. However, the size of this "gender gap" may depend on the measure of religiosity employed, the religious tradition being sampled, and socio-demographic factors. Here, we conduct a systematic cross-cultural investigation into the prevalence of, and explanations for, the religiosity gender gap in 2,002 individuals from 14 d…
Partner choice in human evolution: The role of cooperation, foraging ability, and culture in Hadza campmate preferences
Beyond Weird: A review of the last decade and a look ahead to the global laboratory of the future
Frank Wesley Marlowe (1954-2019)
Hadza Hunter-Gatherers Disagree on Perceptions of Moral Character
To the extent that moral character is grounded in stable and observable truths, there should exist agreement between people in their judgments of others’ character. In Western populations, this agreement is found. We examine whether this is universal in Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. Ninety-four judges ranked their campmates on global character and relevant character traits for a total of 802 observations. Judges disagreed on rankings of glo…
In Memoriam: Frank W. Marlowe (April 17, 1954–September 25, 2019)
The cognitive and cultural foundations of moral behavior
Evidence from hunter-gatherer and subsistence agricultural populations for the universality of contagion sensitivity
High levels of rule-bending in a minimally religious and largely egalitarian forager population
Our species’ biological success is unsurpassed – an achievement largely accredited to our remarkable capacity to cooperate. Large-scale cooperation, however, remains a puzzle. Recent work suggests that belief in the existence of omnipresent and omnipotent moralistic deities may have contributed to the emergence and maintenance of cooperation in large-scale societies. This study examines the relationship between religiosity and cooperation in the …
The evolution of religion and morality: A synthesis of ethnographic and experimental evidence from eight societies
Understanding the expansion of human sociality and cooperation beyond kith and kin remains an important evolutionary puzzle. There is likely a complex web of processes including institutions, norms, and practices that contributes to this phenomenon. Considerable evidence suggests that one such process involves certain components of religious systems that may have fostered the expansion of human cooperation in a variety of ways, including both cer…
Are there vocal cues to human developmental stability? Relationships between facial fluctuating asymmetry and voice attractiveness
Hunter-gatherer males are more risk-seeking than females, even in late childhood
Hadza hunter‐gatherer men do not have more masculine digit ratios (2 D: (4 D )
OBJECTIVES: The ratio between the length of the second and the length of the fourth digit (2D:4D) is sexually dimorphic such that males of many species possess a lower ratio than females, particularly in the right hand. Still, men and women often exhibit overlapping 2D:4D ranges and the ratio is highly variable between populations. In order to further explore populational variability, we chose to analyze 2D:4D in the Hadza, a population of hunter…
The religiosity gender gap in 14 diverse societies
Scholars of religion have long sought to explain the persistent finding that women tend to report greater religiosity than men. However, the size of this "gender gap" may depend on the measure of religiosity employed, the religious tradition being sampled, and socio-demographic factors. Here, we conduct a systematic cross-cultural investigation into the prevalence of, and explanations for, the religiosity gender gap in 2,002 individuals from 14 d…
Men's reproductive investment decisions: Mating, Parenting, and Self-perceived Mate Value
Hearing Prosocial Stories Increases Hadza Hunter-Gatherers' Generosity in an Economic Game
Gods are watching and so what? Moralistic supernatural punishment across 15 cultures
Psychological and cultural evolutionary accounts of human sociality propose that beliefs in punitive and monitoring gods that care about moral norms facilitate cooperation. While there is some evidence to suggest that belief in supernatural punishment and monitoring generally induce cooperative behaviour, the effect of a deity's explicitly postulated moral concerns on cooperation remains unclear. Here, we report a pre-registered set of analyses t…
Hadza hunter-gatherers are not deontologists and do not prefer deontologists as social partners
Perceived mate fidelity and paternal resemblance predict men's investment in children
Men's preferences for women's profile waist-to-hip ratio in two societies
Men's reproductive investment decisions: Mating, Parenting, and Self-perceived Mate Value
Testosterone and financial risk preferences
The 7R polymorphism in the dopamine receptor D4 gene (DRD4) is associated with financial risk taking in men
Upper-body strength predicts hunting reputation and reproductive success in Hadza hunter–gatherers
Hunting is a characteristic feature of early human subsistence, and many theories of evolution have emphasized the role of hunting in hominization. Still today hunting ability continues to be selected for in extant foragers with better hunters experiencing greater reproductive success. Yet little is known about the traits that comprise a successful hunter traits that are presupposed to also be under selection. Two complementary empirical analyses…
Moralistic gods, supernatural punishment and the expansion of human sociality
Using economic games, the authors examine the role of religion in the persistence of human cooperation; individuals who claim that their gods are moralizing, punitive and knowledgeable about human affairs are more likely to play fairly towards geographically distant co-religionists. How has cooperation persisted in human societies that are increasingly large and complex, where simple relatedness is not necessarily sufficient? These authors examin…
Hadza hunter‐gatherer men do not have more masculine digit ratios (2 D: (4 D )
OBJECTIVES: The ratio between the length of the second and the length of the fourth digit (2D:4D) is sexually dimorphic such that males of many species possess a lower ratio than females, particularly in the right hand. Still, men and women often exhibit overlapping 2D:4D ranges and the ratio is highly variable between populations. In order to further explore populational variability, we chose to analyze 2D:4D in the Hadza, a population of hunter…
Are there vocal cues to human developmental stability? Relationships between facial fluctuating asymmetry and voice attractiveness
Hunter-gatherer males are more risk-seeking than females, even in late childhood
The cognitive and cultural foundations of moral behavior
Evidence from hunter-gatherer and subsistence agricultural populations for the universality of contagion sensitivity
High levels of rule-bending in a minimally religious and largely egalitarian forager population
Our species’ biological success is unsurpassed – an achievement largely accredited to our remarkable capacity to cooperate. Large-scale cooperation, however, remains a puzzle. Recent work suggests that belief in the existence of omnipresent and omnipotent moralistic deities may have contributed to the emergence and maintenance of cooperation in large-scale societies. This study examines the relationship between religiosity and cooperation in the …
The evolution of religion and morality: A synthesis of ethnographic and experimental evidence from eight societies
Understanding the expansion of human sociality and cooperation beyond kith and kin remains an important evolutionary puzzle. There is likely a complex web of processes including institutions, norms, and practices that contributes to this phenomenon. Considerable evidence suggests that one such process involves certain components of religious systems that may have fostered the expansion of human cooperation in a variety of ways, including both cer…
Partner choice in human evolution: The role of cooperation, foraging ability, and culture in Hadza campmate preferences
Beyond Weird: A review of the last decade and a look ahead to the global laboratory of the future
Frank Wesley Marlowe (1954-2019)
Hadza Hunter-Gatherers Disagree on Perceptions of Moral Character
To the extent that moral character is grounded in stable and observable truths, there should exist agreement between people in their judgments of others’ character. In Western populations, this agreement is found. We examine whether this is universal in Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. Ninety-four judges ranked their campmates on global character and relevant character traits for a total of 802 observations. Judges disagreed on rankings of glo…
In Memoriam: Frank W. Marlowe (April 17, 1954–September 25, 2019)
Why hunt? Why gather? Why share? Hadza assessments of foraging and food-sharing motive
Material insecurity predicts greater commitment to moralistic and less commitment to local deities: A cross-cultural investigation
The existential security hypothesis predicts that in the absence of more successful secular institutions, people will be attracted to religion when they are materially insecure. Most assessments, however, employ data sampled at a state-level with a focus on world religions. Using individual-level data collected in societies of varied community sizes with diverse religious traditions including animism, shamanism, polytheism, and monotheism, we con…
The moralization bias of gods’ minds: A cross-cultural test
There are compelling reasons to expect that cognitively representing any active, powerful deity motivates cooperative behavior. One mechanism underlying this association could be a cognitive bias toward generally attributing moral concern to anthropomorphic agents. If humans cognitively represent the minds of deities and humans in the same way, and if human agents are generally conceptualized as having moral concern, a broad tendency to attribute…
Do religious and market-based institutions promote cooperation in Hadza hunter-gatherers
Humans’ willingness to bear costs to benefit others is an evolutionary puzzle. Cultural group selection proposes a possible answer to this puzzle—cooperative norms and institutions proliferate due to group-level benefits. For instance, belief in knowledgeable, moralizing deities is theorized to decrease selfishness and favoritism through threat of supernatural punishment. Similarly, norms of fairness and cooperation are theorized to have coevolve…
Hadza hunter-gatherers are not deontologists and do not prefer deontologists as social partners
The religiosity gender gap in 14 diverse societies
Scholars of religion have long sought to explain the persistent finding that women tend to report greater religiosity than men. However, the size of this "gender gap" may depend on the measure of religiosity employed, the religious tradition being sampled, and socio-demographic factors. Here, we conduct a systematic cross-cultural investigation into the prevalence of, and explanations for, the religiosity gender gap in 2,002 individuals from 14 d…
Psychology (29 works) · Social Psychology (20 works) · Sociology (16 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (15 works) · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior (15 works) · Biology (12 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (10 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (9 works) · Demography (7 works) · Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies (7 works)