Robert Kurzban
Biographic Data
| ID | 631070 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert Kurzban |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert |
| FAMILY NAME | Kurzban |
| SIGNATURE | KURZBAN R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Pennsylvania |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7695-1513 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 274 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 35 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Whoever is not with me is against me: The costs of neutrality among friends
Self‐Interest Is Often a Major Determinant of Issue Attitudes
Reviewing political opinion patterns in the 1950s, The American Voter concluded that self‐interest played a key role in the public's views on social welfare policy. Since then, however, many researchers have argued that self‐interest has very little effect on issue opinions. We argue that the principal reason for this shift lies not in self‐interest coming to matter less, but, instead, because some scholars—by narrowing the definition of self‐int…
A meta-analysis of blood glucose effects on human decision making
The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind: How Self-Interest Shapes Our Opinions and Why We Won't Admit It
When it comes to politics, we often perceive our own beliefs as fair and socially beneficial, while seeing opposing views as merely self-serving. But in fact most political views are governed by self-interest, even if we usually don't realize it. Challenging our fiercely held notions about what motivates us politically, this book explores how self-interest divides the public on a host of hot-button issues, from abortion and the legalization of ma…
The Evolution of Altruism in Humans
Humans are an intensely social species, frequently performing costly behaviors that benefit others. Efforts to solve the evolutionary puzzle of altruism have a lengthy history, and recent years have seen many important advances across a range of disciplines. Here we bring together this interdisciplinary body of research and review the main theories that have been proposed to explain human prosociality, with an emphasis on kinship, reciprocity, in…
What predicts religiosity? A multinational analysis of reproductive and cooperative morals
Disgust: Evolved function and structure.
Interest in and research on disgust has surged over the past few decades. The field, however, still lacks a coherent theoretical framework for understanding the evolved function or functions of disgust. Here we present such a framework, emphasizing 2 levels of analysis: that of evolved function and that of information processing. Although there is widespread agreement that disgust evolved to motivate the avoidance of contact with disease-causing …
An opportunity cost model of subjective effort and task performance
Why does performing certain tasks cause the aversive experience of mental effort and concomitant deterioration in task performance? One explanation posits a physical resource that is depleted over time. We propose an alternative explanation that centers on mental representations of the costs and benefits associated with task performance. Specifically, certain computational mechanisms, especially those associated with executive function, can be de…
Cognitive systems for revenge and forgiveness
Minimizing the costs that others impose upon oneself and upon those in whom one has a fitness stake, such as kin and allies, is a key adaptive problem for many organisms. Our ancestors regularly faced such adaptive problems (including homicide, bodily harm, theft, mate poaching, cuckoldry, reputational damage, sexual aggression, and the infliction of these costs on one's offspring, mates, coalition partners, or friends). One solution to this prob…
Toward an Evolutionarily Informed Political Psychology
The aim of this chapter is to discuss how one can use modern evolutionary thinking to increase our understanding of some of the deep-seated mechanisms contributing to the evolved nature of the human mind and, subsequently, human political behavior. The chapter starts by reviewing the basic principles of evolution by the processes of natural and sexual selection and the manner in which these principles help us better understand the nature of altru…
Subcomponents of psychopathy have opposing correlations with punishment judgments
Psychopathy research is plagued by an enigma: Psychopaths reliably act immorally, but they also accurately report whether an action is morally wrong. The current study revealed that cooperative suppressor effects and conflicting subsets of personality traits within the construct of psychopathy might help explain this conundrum. Among a sample of adult male offenders (N = 100) who ranked deserved punishment of crimes, Psychopathy Checklist-Revised…
Individual Differences in Reproductive Strategy are Related to Views about Recreational Drug Use in Belgium, The Netherlands, and Japan
A solution to the mysteries of morality
We propose that moral condemnation functions to guide bystanders to choose the same side as other bystanders in disputes. Humans interact in dense social networks, and this poses a problem for bystanders when conflicts arise: which side, if any, to support. Choosing sides is a difficult strategic problem because the outcome of a conflict critically depends on which side other bystanders support. One strategy is siding with the higher status dispu…
Hamilton vs. Kant: Pitting adaptations for altruism against adaptations for moral judgment
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…
The omission effect in moral cognition: Toward a functional explanation
Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind
We're all hypocrites. Why? Hypocrisy is the natural state of the human mind. Robert Kurzban shows us that the key to understanding our behavioral inconsistencies lies in understanding the mind's design. The human mind consists of many specialized units designed by the process of evolution by natural selection. While these modules sometimes work together seamlessly, they don't always, resulting in impossibly contradictory beliefs, vacillations bet…
Best Friends: Alliances, Friend Ranking, and the MySpace Social Network
Like many topics of psychological research, the explanation for friendship is at once intuitive and difficult to address empirically. These difficulties worsen when one seeks, as we do, to go beyond "obvious" explanations ("humans are social creatures") to ask deeper questions, such as "What is the evolved function of human friendship?" In recent years, however, a new window into human behavior has opened as a growing fraction of people's social …
The Alliance Hypothesis for Human Friendship
BACKGROUND: Exploration of the cognitive systems underlying human friendship will be advanced by identifying the evolved functions these systems perform. Here we propose that human friendship is caused, in part, by cognitive mechanisms designed to assemble support groups for potential conflicts. We use game theory to identify computations about friends that can increase performance in multi-agent conflicts. This analysis suggests that people woul…
Mysteries of morality
Representing metarepresentations: Is there Theory of Mind-specific cognition
Reciprocity in groups: Information‐seeking in a public goods game
Questions remain about the details of the reciprocal strategies people use in the context of group cooperation. Here we report an experiment in which participants in public goods games could access information about the lowest, median, or highest contribution to the public good before making their own contribution decisions. Results suggest that people have clear preferences for particular pieces of information and that information preferences va…
The family of fundamental social categories includes kinship: Evidence from the memory confusion paradigm
Kinship is a fundamental component of human sociality influencing a range of behaviors including altruism, aggression, and mating. Though a central focus in psychology's neighboring disciplines, kinship has been largely neglected within psychology. An illustrative example – and the focus here – is research on social categorization. Researchers investigating the categories into which our mind carves the social world have focused primarily on sex, …
Public Goods Games in Japan: Cultural and Individual Differences in Reciprocity
Do advertised preferences predict the behavior of speed daters
Because researchers are making increasing use of data gleaned from Internet dating sites, it is important to know if the preferences people specify in Internet advertisements predict the choices that they actually make. HurryDate, a commercial speed‐dating firm, collected data from over 10,000 people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s who participated in speed‐dating events in cities across the United States. The present analysis compared these speed dat…
Evolutionary origins of stigmatization: The functions of social exclusion
A reconceptualization of stigma is presented that changes the emphasis from the devaluation of an individual's identity to the process by which individuals who satisfy certain criteria come to be excluded from various kinds of social interactions. The authors propose that phenomena currently placed under the general rubric of stigma involve a set of distinct psychological systems designed by natural selection to solve specific problems associated…
The Evolution of Altruism in Humans
Humans are an intensely social species, frequently performing costly behaviors that benefit others. Efforts to solve the evolutionary puzzle of altruism have a lengthy history, and recent years have seen many important advances across a range of disciplines. Here we bring together this interdisciplinary body of research and review the main theories that have been proposed to explain human prosociality, with an emphasis on kinship, reciprocity, in…
Self‐Interest Is Often a Major Determinant of Issue Attitudes
Reviewing political opinion patterns in the 1950s, The American Voter concluded that self‐interest played a key role in the public's views on social welfare policy. Since then, however, many researchers have argued that self‐interest has very little effect on issue opinions. We argue that the principal reason for this shift lies not in self‐interest coming to matter less, but, instead, because some scholars—by narrowing the definition of self‐int…
A solution to the mysteries of morality
We propose that moral condemnation functions to guide bystanders to choose the same side as other bystanders in disputes. Humans interact in dense social networks, and this poses a problem for bystanders when conflicts arise: which side, if any, to support. Choosing sides is a difficult strategic problem because the outcome of a conflict critically depends on which side other bystanders support. One strategy is siding with the higher status dispu…
Anxiety and Intergroup Bias: Terror Management or Coalitional Psychology
Contemplation of death increases support of ingroup ideologies, a result explained by proponents of terror management theory (TMT) as an attempt to buffer existential anxiety. While TMT claims that only death-salient stimuli yield such effects, an evolutionary perspective suggests that increased intergroup bias may occur in response to a wide variety of situations that, in ancestral environments, posed adaptive problems for which marshaling socia…
The family of fundamental social categories includes kinship: Evidence from the memory confusion paradigm
Kinship is a fundamental component of human sociality influencing a range of behaviors including altruism, aggression, and mating. Though a central focus in psychology's neighboring disciplines, kinship has been largely neglected within psychology. An illustrative example – and the focus here – is research on social categorization. Researchers investigating the categories into which our mind carves the social world have focused primarily on sex, …
Best Friends: Alliances, Friend Ranking, and the MySpace Social Network
Like many topics of psychological research, the explanation for friendship is at once intuitive and difficult to address empirically. These difficulties worsen when one seeks, as we do, to go beyond "obvious" explanations ("humans are social creatures") to ask deeper questions, such as "What is the evolved function of human friendship?" In recent years, however, a new window into human behavior has opened as a growing fraction of people's social …
Whoever is not with me is against me: The costs of neutrality among friends
A meta-analysis of blood glucose effects on human decision making
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…
Revocable commitments to public goods provision under the real‐time protocol of play
Using the real‐time protocol of play—a relatively new experimental mechanism in which the order of play and timing of decisions are determined endogenously —we investigate voluntary contributions to the provision of pure public goods. We consider the case where the good is binary, players are asymmetric, communication is prohibited, and all‐or‐none contributions to the public good can be withdrawn at any time during the round of play. Our results…
Subcomponents of psychopathy have opposing correlations with punishment judgments
Psychopathy research is plagued by an enigma: Psychopaths reliably act immorally, but they also accurately report whether an action is morally wrong. The current study revealed that cooperative suppressor effects and conflicting subsets of personality traits within the construct of psychopathy might help explain this conundrum. Among a sample of adult male offenders (N = 100) who ranked deserved punishment of crimes, Psychopathy Checklist-Revised…
Individual Differences in Reproductive Strategy are Related to Views about Recreational Drug Use in Belgium, The Netherlands, and Japan
Reciprocity in groups: Information‐seeking in a public goods game
Questions remain about the details of the reciprocal strategies people use in the context of group cooperation. Here we report an experiment in which participants in public goods games could access information about the lowest, median, or highest contribution to the public good before making their own contribution decisions. Results suggest that people have clear preferences for particular pieces of information and that information preferences va…
Public Goods Games in Japan: Cultural and Individual Differences in Reciprocity
Evolutionary origins of stigmatization: The functions of social exclusion
A reconceptualization of stigma is presented that changes the emphasis from the devaluation of an individual's identity to the process by which individuals who satisfy certain criteria come to be excluded from various kinds of social interactions. The authors propose that phenomena currently placed under the general rubric of stigma involve a set of distinct psychological systems designed by natural selection to solve specific problems associated…
Evolution and the Human Mind: Modularity, Language and Meta-Cognition
Evolution and the Human Mind: Modularity, Language and Meta-Cognition. Peter Carruthers and Andrew Chamberlain. eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 331 pp
Perceptions of race
Revocable commitments to public goods provision under the real‐time protocol of play
Using the real‐time protocol of play—a relatively new experimental mechanism in which the order of play and timing of decisions are determined endogenously —we investigate voluntary contributions to the provision of pure public goods. We consider the case where the good is binary, players are asymmetric, communication is prohibited, and all‐or‐none contributions to the public good can be withdrawn at any time during the round of play. Our results…
Anxiety and Intergroup Bias: Terror Management or Coalitional Psychology
Contemplation of death increases support of ingroup ideologies, a result explained by proponents of terror management theory (TMT) as an attempt to buffer existential anxiety. While TMT claims that only death-salient stimuli yield such effects, an evolutionary perspective suggests that increased intergroup bias may occur in response to a wide variety of situations that, in ancestral environments, posed adaptive problems for which marshaling socia…
HurryDate: Mate preferences in action
Withdrawn: Audience effects on moralistic punishment☆
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…
Audience effects on moralistic punishment
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…
Do advertised preferences predict the behavior of speed daters
Because researchers are making increasing use of data gleaned from Internet dating sites, it is important to know if the preferences people specify in Internet advertisements predict the choices that they actually make. HurryDate, a commercial speed‐dating firm, collected data from over 10,000 people in their 20s, 30s, and 40s who participated in speed‐dating events in cities across the United States. The present analysis compared these speed dat…
Reciprocity in groups: Information‐seeking in a public goods game
Questions remain about the details of the reciprocal strategies people use in the context of group cooperation. Here we report an experiment in which participants in public goods games could access information about the lowest, median, or highest contribution to the public good before making their own contribution decisions. Results suggest that people have clear preferences for particular pieces of information and that information preferences va…
The family of fundamental social categories includes kinship: Evidence from the memory confusion paradigm
Kinship is a fundamental component of human sociality influencing a range of behaviors including altruism, aggression, and mating. Though a central focus in psychology's neighboring disciplines, kinship has been largely neglected within psychology. An illustrative example – and the focus here – is research on social categorization. Researchers investigating the categories into which our mind carves the social world have focused primarily on sex, …
Public Goods Games in Japan: Cultural and Individual Differences in Reciprocity
The Alliance Hypothesis for Human Friendship
BACKGROUND: Exploration of the cognitive systems underlying human friendship will be advanced by identifying the evolved functions these systems perform. Here we propose that human friendship is caused, in part, by cognitive mechanisms designed to assemble support groups for potential conflicts. We use game theory to identify computations about friends that can increase performance in multi-agent conflicts. This analysis suggests that people woul…
Mysteries of morality
Representing metarepresentations: Is there Theory of Mind-specific cognition
The omission effect in moral cognition: Toward a functional explanation
Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind
We're all hypocrites. Why? Hypocrisy is the natural state of the human mind. Robert Kurzban shows us that the key to understanding our behavioral inconsistencies lies in understanding the mind's design. The human mind consists of many specialized units designed by the process of evolution by natural selection. While these modules sometimes work together seamlessly, they don't always, resulting in impossibly contradictory beliefs, vacillations bet…
Best Friends: Alliances, Friend Ranking, and the MySpace Social Network
Like many topics of psychological research, the explanation for friendship is at once intuitive and difficult to address empirically. These difficulties worsen when one seeks, as we do, to go beyond "obvious" explanations ("humans are social creatures") to ask deeper questions, such as "What is the evolved function of human friendship?" In recent years, however, a new window into human behavior has opened as a growing fraction of people's social …
Hamilton vs. Kant: Pitting adaptations for altruism against adaptations for moral judgment
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…
What predicts religiosity? A multinational analysis of reproductive and cooperative morals
Disgust: Evolved function and structure.
Interest in and research on disgust has surged over the past few decades. The field, however, still lacks a coherent theoretical framework for understanding the evolved function or functions of disgust. Here we present such a framework, emphasizing 2 levels of analysis: that of evolved function and that of information processing. Although there is widespread agreement that disgust evolved to motivate the avoidance of contact with disease-causing …
An opportunity cost model of subjective effort and task performance
Why does performing certain tasks cause the aversive experience of mental effort and concomitant deterioration in task performance? One explanation posits a physical resource that is depleted over time. We propose an alternative explanation that centers on mental representations of the costs and benefits associated with task performance. Specifically, certain computational mechanisms, especially those associated with executive function, can be de…
Psychology (30 works) · Social Psychology (27 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (13 works) · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior (12 works) · Computer Science (11 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (11 works) · Cognition (10 works) · Cognitive psychology (10 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Political science (10 works)