Despite much research devoted to the causes of sexual violence, less has focused on identifying the defenses women deploy to prevent sexual violence, or ameliorate its costs. We present two studies (N = 582 women) using a convenience sample from a university in the southern United States. Across two studies, we used an act nomination paradigm to identify defenses against five potential perpetrators: strangers, acquaintances, dates, romantic partners, and a general prompt. We created the largest preliminary taxonomy of women’s defenses against sexual violence encompassing over 9,000 spontaneous nominations categorized into 48 tactics and 19 categories. We highlight the variety of defenses, the specificity of some defenses as a function of participant-perpetrator relationship, and discuss future directions.
How do people decide whom to help when information about others is limited? From an evolutionary perspective, personality traits may function as social cues that facilitate evaluations of potential interaction partners. The present study examined whether the Big Five traits of both potential helpers and targets predict helping intentions toward strangers. A total of 120 Japanese adults evaluated 40 experimentally constructed personality profiles and rated both their willingness to help and their liking for each target. Linear mixed-effects models revealed trait-specific patterns. Openness and extraversion showed no significant participant or target effects on helping intentions. In contrast, targets higher in conscientiousness and agreeableness received more help, and significant participant × target interactions emerged for both traits. Supplementary response surface analyses indicated that these interactions were not driven by personality similarity per se. Rather, individuals higher in conscientiousness or agreeableness were particularly responsive to the corresponding traits in targets. Additional mediation analyses showed that the interaction effects on helping were fully accounted for by liking, suggesting that personality traits influence helping primarily through evaluative processes. These findings indicate that agreeableness and conscientiousness function as socially interpretable cues that shape evaluations of potential partners under conditions of uncertainty. More broadly, the results suggest that social evaluation may represent a psychological mechanism through which personality traits contribute to assortative patterns in cooperation.
Though mythologies are sometimes recognized as evolutionarily significant for illuminating the human condition, differences among them may reflect adaptive challenges faced by specific human groups contending with distinct ecological conditions. To explore this socio-biogeographical hypothesis, wherein expansion into different ecologies imposed distinct evolutionary exigencies reflected in myth, we review Indo-European serpent, dog, and horse myths, and then consider ecological, ancestral, and cultural diversity among the biocultural descendants of Chalcolithic and Bronze Age societies. Multiple comparative phylogenetic examinations were conducted to determine the cultural evolutionary dynamics of these animal myths. Inter-rater reliability analyses of animal myths revealed an adequate level of agreement among raters. A Sequential Canonical Cascade model based on the phylogenetic independent contrasts of Y-chromosome haplogroup frequencies, the diversity of venomous snakes, on the rates of serpent, dog, and horse myths reached statistical significance and explained, on average, 62
Borderline personality pathology is closely linked to early life experiences, yet most research has emphasized discrete adverse events rather than broader childhood environments. Guided by life history theory, this research examined whether recollections of childhood socioecological conditions – specifically unpredictability and harshness – are associated with distinct borderline traits in adulthood. Across two U.S. samples and one Israeli sample (total N = 4,993), perceived childhood unpredictability showed robust positive associations with neurotic, antagonistic, disinhibited, and dissociative borderline traits. In contrast, perceived harshness displayed weaker, context-dependent effects that were often reduced or reversed after accounting for unpredictability. Harshness also moderated the effects of unpredictability, which were typically strongest in less harsh environments. Gender moderation was inconsistent and largely limited to externalizing traits.
Life-history theory provides an evolutionary framework for understanding how individuals allocate resources between mating, self-maintenance, and long-term investment, yet it has rarely been applied to body image outside Western contexts. This study examined body image among Arab young adults through a life-history lens, testing how fast–slow life-history strategies relate to appearance evaluation and appearance orientation, and how these associations are shaped by social media use, religiosity, gender, and age. Participants (N = 8,895) completed standardized measures of life-history strategy (Mini-K), body image, religiosity, and daily social media use. Results revealed that slower life-history strategies were associated with greater body satisfaction and higher appearance orientation, whereas faster strategies were linked to poorer appearance evaluations, consistent with greater mating-effort trade-offs. Social media use exerted a complementary effect, predicting lower appearance satisfaction and heightened appearance preoccupation. Gender moderated life-history effects on appearance evaluation, with slow-strategy women showing especially high body satisfaction. Religiosity and age were positively associated with both satisfaction and appearance orientation. Together, these findings extend life-history theory to a non-Western context, showing that body image reflects evolved strategic trade-offs shaped by digital and cultural ecologies.
While previous research has established associations between life history strategy (LHS) and risk-taking behaviors, the underlying psychological mechanisms remain underexplored. Drawing on recent theoretical advances linking temporal cognition to adaptive decision-making, the present study examined time perception as a potential mediating mechanism in the LHS and risk-taking relationship. We employed a two-stage design: first screening 938 Chinese university students using the Mini-K scale, then selecting 50 participants (24 fast LHS, 26 slow LHS) based on extreme scores for laboratory experiments. Participants completed standardized laboratory tasks including a prospective time estimation paradigm measuring time perception accuracy and the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) assessing behavioral risk-taking. Results revealed that fast LHS individuals exhibited significantly underestimated time intervals (F(1, 48) = 55.37, p < 0.001, η² = 0.53) and greater risk-taking behavior (t (48) = 7.08, p < 0.001, Hedges’ g = 1.97, 95
Life history theory has become a popular explanatory framework in psychology to explain individual differences in where one chooses to allocate limited resources toward fitness-enhancing goals. These models propose that humans evolved psychological plasticity in response to their environments in order to optimize allocation decisions. The present studies investigate the structure of potential psychological mechanisms that could affect this change, including their organization in memory and the periods of life to which humans are sensitive. Both subjective and objective estimates of resources, mortality, and mating competition in participants’ previous environments from specific temporal ranges were used to predict sociosexuality, risk-taking, and other life history factors in adulthood. Linear regressions revealed that no relationships exist between participant environments and their adult decision-making preferences, regardless of whether subjective or objective measures were used or which period of life contributed to the model. These results suggest that environmental perceptions are neither semantically nor episodically encoded in memory, and decision-making preferences are not sensitive to previous environmental experiences. This highlights the need for a greater exploration of cognition in the life history literature, using longitudinal methodologies, and a reconciliation with genetic evidence in life history variations.
Contemporary evolutionary biology–including evolutionary psychology–assumes an interactionist framework, recognizing the importance of both biological (nature) and environmental (nurture) influences. Despite this scientific consensus, within women’s studies and gender studies, socialization-only explanations of sex differences in behavior persist. This commentary evaluates a recent prominent example: Anne Fausto-Sterling’s 2025 critique of our 2018 Quarterly Review of Biology thesis that the large human sex difference in overhand throwing partly reflects an evolved male adaptation. Fausto-Sterling (FS) argues that our ancestral selection scenarios are unrealistic and that, based on a qualitative study of ten infants, childhood throwing differences are fully explained by early socialization. We demonstrate that FS’s critique fails in several ways. First, FS’s objections about our evolutionary scenarios rely on flawed characterizations of the hunter-gatherer literature, ignoring our primary focus on ancestral combat and discounting cross-cultural data showing far greater male involvement in hunting. Second, FS erroneously implies that childhood throwing performance is our sole evidence, ignoring extensive data presented on elite athletic performance, cross-cultural consistency, prenatal hormone exposure, and distinct skeletal sexual dimorphisms. Finally, FS treats evolutionary and developmental processes as mutually exclusive, failing to recognize that evolutionary theory predicts that socialization will often mediate and amplify evolved behavioral predispositions. We conclude that the persistence of FS’s socialization-only, Blank Slate perspective can only be maintained by ignoring relevant evidence.
Holding power and having competitive advantages over peers is highly valued in adolescence and associated with adaptive advantages such as greater dating or sexual opportunities, resource control and social influence, and less victimization by peers. Recently, researchers have broadened the range of social power studied in adolescence to include implicit and cooperative aspects such as prestige and coalitional support from friends and allies, which afford mutual benefits without exploiting and harming others. To shed light on the possibility of promoting cooperative alternatives to coercive and competitive power dynamics, we used an evolutionary framework (e.g., resource control theory, reciprocal altruism, indirect reciprocity, information goods theory) to examine the power-enhancing processes or strategies that are associated with different aspects of holding power. Adolescent participants ages 14 to 18 (N = 458; Mage = 15.9, 48
One human universal is people forming lasting intimate relationships, which raises the question of what drives them to do so—a question that the present research aims to answer. More specifically, using qualitative research methods on a sample of 209 Greek-speaking participants, Study 1 identified 104 possible reasons that drive people to form intimate relationships. Using quantitative research methods on a sample of 621 Greek-speaking participants, these reasons were classified into 13 broad categories and two broader main categories. The highest-rated main category was “Emotional fulfillment,” which included reasons such as having someone to provide emotional support, satisfy the need for companionship, and experience positive emotions, followed by “Instrumental reasons,” which included reasons such as relieving social pressure to be partnered and having someone to provide financial support. Our results indicated that men and women closely overlapped in their motivating reasons for forming lasting intimate relationships, but significant main effects of age were found for several of the identified reasons.
Over the past decades, unexpected reductions in fertility have resulted in a growing number of nations facing serious population declines. Experts remain uncertain about which psychological mechanisms contribute to declining reproduction and have not yet identified effective countermeasures. Evolutionary psychology is well-positioned to investigate this problem, yet as a field it has primarily examined sexual psychology in largely non-reproductive populations, leaving an important explanatory gap concerning reproductive psychology, especially among women. This theoretical and synthetic interdisciplinary article addresses that gap in three ways: it identifies a mismatch between contemporary evolutionary research on mating and actual reproductive decision-making; it proposes Young Female Syndrome as a conceptual target for understanding how contemporary environments may impact female reproductive strategies; and it outlines a research program linking macro-level fertility correlates to evolved reproductive psychology. It also argues that broader historical context is important for understanding current fertility decline. Across the past eight centuries, the West’s three sexual revolutions have produced a novel mating environment that may be affecting female sexual strategies, pair-bonding, and reproduction in ways that remain poorly understood. Addressing this challenge requires integrating evolutionary, economic, cultural, and psychological perspectives in order to clarify how major social changes influence human reproductive decision-making.
When navigating their reputations and alliances, women in particular may be more sensitive to social evaluation along some dimensions. Indeed, girls and women perceived as superior, competitive, or striving are often targeted for intrasexual aggression. Moreover, girls and women seem aware this and often act in ways that would preclude such social penalties (e.g. downplaying themselves) (Benenson, 2013, 2019; Cardador, et al., 2021; Maltz Borker, 1982; Sebanc et al., 2003; Simmons, 2002). Across two studies with undergraduate students from a Midwestern university (N = 1,343), we examined women’s awareness of these dynamics by examining how men and women view targets receiving compliments (Study 1) and how men and women intend to respond to compliments from same-sex others along with their expectations of how they would be perceived based on those responses (Study 2). Study 1 revealed that women participants (vs. men participants) judged same-sex others more harshly for immodest responses, perceiving immodestly responding same-sex others as more arrogant, colder, and more unfriendly. Study 2 revealed that women (vs. men) are also aware of these expectations perhaps strategically preferring modest responses to compliments to preclude other women’s negative perceptions of them. Findings have implications for understanding women’s sociality as well as hurdles that women might face in environments where self-promotion is beneficial (e.g., workplaces, academia).
We explored the predictive validity of a psychometric life history measure (i.e., the K-factor, as measured by the Mini-K scale; Figueredo et al., 2006) for academic performance, as measured by grade point averages (GPA), before and after controlling for SAT scores (including SAT total scores and math-verbal ability tilt), “Big Five” personality domains (including aggregating the domains into a general factor of personality, and a novel stability-plasticity tilt measure of personality), and parent education levels. Data were collected from n = 272 university students. Our findings indicate that high K-factor scores are positively related to GPA, before and after controlling for theoretically related variables. These results are relevant to the growing field of applied evolutionary psychology, as they are consistent with the possibility that psychometric life history components may be important non-cognitive predictors of academic success, and could assist in identifying students who may benefit from additional mentoring opportunities and social support to achieve better academic outcomes.
Social attitudes are heritable behavioral dispositions and therefore, evolvable human traits; despite this, their associations with fertility as a crucial marker of evolutionary fitness are rarely examined. We used a publicly available, large intercultural dataset (N = 78754; 72 countries) to empirically explore the associations between conservative social attitudes (i.e., right-wing ideology, a lack of support for gender equality, self-reported religiousness, and preference for religiousness in romantic partners) and fertility, measured as the number of children. The results showed that all examined attitudes positively predicted fertility across countries; nevertheless, considerable variation in regression slopes between the countries was also detected. Small quadratic effects were found, suggesting that individuals with the strongest expression of these attitudes had an additional non-linear increment in fertility. Right-wing ideology and low preference for gender equality were more strongly associated with fertility in women than in men. Self-reported religiousness was strongly associated with a preference for the same trait in romantic partners; furthermore, an interaction between these two traits in fertility prediction was also found, showing that low self-reported religiousness combined with low preference for religious partners predicts additional decrease in fertility. Present findings suggest that conservative social attitudes may be under positive directional selection and could be evolving in contemporary humans, contributing to both human evolutionary ecology and behavioral demography.
Life History Theory (LHT) proposes that early environmental conditions shape individual differences in resource allocation strategies along a fast-slow continuum. This study examined the differential effects of perceived childhood harshness and unpredictability on life history strategies in a non-WEIRD Turkish sample, while also adapting and validating the Turkish versions of the Perceived Childhood Harshness and Unpredictability Scale (CHU) and the Arizona Life History Battery Short Form (K-SF-42). A total of 635 volunteers (aged 18–67; 74.5
This paper provides an overview of the “girlfriend experience” (GFE) from in-person to virtual. Drawing on OnlyFans and AI companion applications as case examples, we examine the rapid success of virtual GFE through the lens of evolutionary psychology. The traditional GFE, where men pay for simulated, one-sided, romantic relationships, has a long history. Disruptive technology, such as OnlyFans, have brought the GFE into the virtual world, creating the online GFE, where users pay content creators to act as online girlfriends via text, voice, and video-mediated interaction. Recently, AI girlfriend applications – chatbot companions that seek to simulate interactions characteristic of romantic relationships – have gained increased public attention and visibility. We formulate hypotheses about how these digital platforms might engage evolved motivational systems by partially satisfying needs for connection in evolutionarily novel contexts. We conclude this article by outlining research avenues to better understand the implications of outsourcing romantic interactions to digital platforms.
Individuals vary in the specific traits they value in a partner, but also in their overall degree of ‘choosiness’ for partner quality. Yet more desirable partners are a limited resource sought by more same-sex rivals, making them harder to obtain. Accordingly, we proposed the novel hypothesis that individuals holding more discerning overall mate preferences would be higher in intrasexual competitiveness (IC). Further, we expected that mate preferences would interact with participants’ own mate value and their sociosexual orientation to predict IC. In online and university student samples, results showed that higher mate preferences predicted higher IC, and (in the aggregate data) that a three-way interaction existed whereby IC was highest among those high in mate preferences, self-perceived mate value, and unrestricted sociosexuality, controlling for age, sex, and relationship status. These findings suggest that IC is a disposition that facilitates achieving mating goals and is highest when those goals are most difficult to satisfy.
An increasing body of evidence, spanning both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, points to the clinical utility of an evolutionarily informed conceptualization of personality disorders. Evolutionarily informed measures and mechanisms exhibit associations with a range of clinical indicators. Concurrently, various theoretical studies and narrative reviews suggest the predictive power of evolution-based models. The aim of this integrative mixed methods meta-synthesis was to investigate the state-of-the-art regarding various forms of evolutionarily informed conceptualization of personality disorders. Following an initial systematic review, 352 papers were screened from PubMed, PsycInfo, and Web of Science. Subsequently, 50 papers were selected, comprising 18 utilizing quantitative methodologies and 32 qualitative. A descriptive quantitative synthesis was employed to map effect ranges and trends within the first set of papers, while an adapted grounded theory methodology was applied to the second. Finally, findings from both analyses were integrated by identifying recurrent interpretive categories, then organized hierarchically into three distinct evolutionarily informed conceptualization models: (i) personality disorder as evolutionary mismatch, (ii) as emergency mode, and (iii) as an extreme of variation. While empirical evidence remains preliminary and further research is needed, the evolutionary perspective on personality disorders appears to offer important theoretical and applied tools for clinicians.
Few emotion recognition studies have been conducted with indigenous, culturally remote populations, and most have focused on well-known groups. Only two studies have systematically used multiple universality criteria (Cognition and Emotion 13:225-266, 1999; Emotion 13:891-904, 2013). This study aimed to test accessibility universality (Psychological Bulletin, 131:763–784, 2005) by assessing several criteria in the Karamojong. An accessibility universal “a) is, in principle, cognitively available to most people in most cultures (it is an existential universal); (b) has the same use across cultures (it is also a functional universal); and (c) is accessible to the same degree across cultures” (Psychological Bulletin, 131:763–784, 2005, p. 772). We assume accessibility universality if five criteria are fulfilled. We compared their emotion recognition rates with Western German culture using material consisting of five basic facial emotions plus contempt, interest, and sympathy, which have rarely been studied in remote cultures. Sixty-two German and 62 Karamojong participants were presented with pictures of eight emotion categories and neutral faces of white and black posers. The results support the hypotheses of better recognition rates in the German (64
Genetic quality may be expressed through many traits simultaneously, suggesting a phenotype-wide fitness factor. In humans, intelligence has been positively linked with potential indicators of genetic quality, including anthropometric characteristics. We conducted an exploratory study of the relationships between fluid intelligence (assessed by the Raven Advanced Progressive Matrices Test – Short Form), sexual promiscuity (assessed by the Sociosexuality Orientation Inventory – Revised), and two measures of male muscularity and body morphology—handgrip strength (HGS) and shoulder-to-hip ratio (SHR)—in a sample of 41 men (ranging 18 to 33 years; M = 23.33; SD = 3.60). We detected statistically significant positive relationships between intelligence and HGS and SHR in young men (but no significant correlations between HGS and SHR). In addition, sexually promiscuous behaviors were negatively associated with intelligence and SHR. We discuss these preliminary results in relation to a phenotype-wide fitness factor and address several limitations of this study.
