This article examines the utility of the Male-Male Competition Stress Test (MCST), a measure that assesses perceptions of male-male competition stress, in predicting outcomes such as poor body image in males. This is analogous to previous examinations of the utility of the Female-Female Competition Stress Test (FCST), which measures same-sex competition stress in females, in predicting body image and disordered eating in women. Results suggest that the Male-Male Competition Stress Test may be helpful to clinicians as an early indicator of susceptibility to desires for body modification, including excessive weightlifting and steroid use.
Although altruistic actors are generally evaluated favorably, recent studies have shown that altruism that deviates from social norms can receive mixed evaluations. This study replicates previous evidence that norm-deviant altruism is perceived as less favorable than moderate altruism and examines whether the lower assessment of extremely generous actors stems from observers' expectations that such actors will also violate norms in unrelated contexts. Using a vignette modeled on the dictator game, 130 participants evaluated two types of distributors (equal vs. give-all distributors) on (a) liking and respect and (b) the perceived likelihood of engaging in other norm-violating behaviors. Consistent with previous research, the give-all distributor was liked less than the equal distributor, whereas the levels of respect did not differ. Contrary to our hypothesis, the participants perceived the equal distributor as more likely than the give-all distributor to violate other norms. These results support previous findings that altruism can be evaluated unfavorably when it deviates from social norms and suggest that the reputational costs of extreme generosity may not be driven by expectations of broader norm deviance. Public Significance Statement Although people usually view generous behavior positively, evaluations become mixed when generosity transcends what social norms prescribe. Traditional evolutionary theories of cooperation do not fully explain this phenomenon, highlighting the need for further research into how extreme altruism shapes reputation.
In this article, I argue that an interdisciplinary ("consilient") study of the human mind/brain requires the interaction of scientific and humanistic scholarship. I discuss this claim in the context of Judith Ryan's (1991) The Vanishing Subject: Early Psychology and Literary Modernism, an important but largely neglected monograph on the empiricist psychological foundations of modernist literature. The goal of this article is to expand on Ryan's work by reviewing how literary fiction, psychology, and philosophy jointly contribute to human knowledge formation, particularly knowledge of the human mind. I start with a brief survey of psychological empiricism and its influence on modernism. Next, I discuss futurism's elaboration of empiricist concepts, the early psychology of perception, and Kafka's unique work on the notion of space, among other themes. Finally, I address how various modernist authors approached aesthetics, ending with Henry James's lucid display of the social psychological incompatibility of empiricism and pragmatism. I conclude by arguing that literature can provide a complex set of thought experiments, depicting scenarios that help us to understand the scope and limits of distinct paradigms (such as pragmatism vs. empiricism, or behaviorism vs. cognitivism) and an opportunity for testing specific claims about the nature of mind, from imagistic objects to opaque notions like "the self." These interdisciplinary explorations can and should inform scientific research. They can also help to provide creativity for investigations of the mind, assuring the many still-relevant findings of 19th century psychological, philosophical, and literary scholarship are not ignored.
The "novel of ideas" is a literary genre in which authors explore philosophical or scientific ideas through fiction. Novels of ideas reached their popularity in Europe in late 19th century and early 20th century. The authors of psychological novels of ideas wrote fiction to investigate the functioning of the human mind, human behavior, or societal processes in relation to prevailing philosophical or scientific theories, or based on their own observations, insights, and speculations. Interpreting and understanding psychological novels of ideas requires an interdisciplinary "consilient" approach, so that their underlying philosophical or scientific ideas are fully appreciated. In this article, we take this approach and apply it to two authors of psychological novels of ideas, Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) and Elias Canetti (1905-1994). After analyzing the way these two authors represented the human mind and human behavior in their novels, we conclude that whereas Pirandello's ideas did not withstand the test of time, Canetti's insights and intuitions anticipated the discoveries made by psychological and cognitive science several decades later.
What are the evolutionary functions of imaginative-narrative simulation as evident in fiction and other expressions of imagination, and how do they influence psychological wellbeing? We propose an integrative and multifunctional framework for understanding imaginative-narrative simulation—the mental, imaginative simulation of events, sourced from memory and fiction, and structured through narrative—as a key adaptive capacity. Drawing from evolutionary psychology, cognitive science, and media studies, we identify four core functions of this capacity: functions that support (i) planning and future thought, (ii) coping and emotion regulation, (iii) bonding and social needs, and (iv) identity and worldviews. We argue that these functions can importantly support psychological wellbeing, and we review a range of empirical studies that have investigated imagination, fiction, and psychological wellbeing during the lockdown restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic that speak to these effects. We suggest that despite its potential, there is a significant gap in the literature on the adaptive value of imagination and fiction, especially in the context of global crises, and offer concrete directions for future empirical work.
The Gregorian Reform (1050-1200) underpinned the West's First Sexual Revolution, which triggered processes of female empowerment and increasing individualism that are still unfolding. Perhaps the strongest artistic influence on new mating ideals was the epistolary romance of Heloise and Abelard. These intellectuals' illicit affair inspired new thoughts on gender equality, romantic emotions, and self-realization through pair-bonding. In this article, we investigate their desire to free themselves from aspects of their mating nature. Heloise redefines love in a manner that promotes gender equality, portraying reproduction as an intolerable burden for the new, intellectually ambitious Western individual. Her thinking exemplifies how free mate choice should be thought of as separate from reproductive choice. Abelard is sympathetic, but feeling trapped by society's demands on high-status men, he places upon women the responsibility for making possible a mating regime more aligned with modern desires. The couple's reasoning reflects how the 12th century could be seen as an origin point for the hyper-individualistic mating markets that emerged after the Third Sexual Revolution of the 1960s, which today contribute to declining fertility rates. Our analysis of their canonical and "lost" letters illuminates an ancient thread of Western thinking that, with our era's prosperity and effective contraceptives, has arguably become an existential threat. Using evolutionary perspectives to better understand Heloise and Abelard's arguments against being enslaved by nature helps us untangle some of the cultural roots of today's maladaptive mating.
This article develops phantom anxiety theory (PAT), according to which the human anxiety system includes not only responses to current or anticipated threats, but also a tonic, endogenous component of vigilance. PAT leads to a counterintuitive prediction: a decrease in the level of real environmental threats does not necessarily produce a proportional decrease in anxiety, and relative interest in the category of anxiety may be greater where threat is more indirect, informational, and anticipated than where it is direct and tangible. This prediction was tested by using Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, as a natural quasi-experiment. Google Trends data were treated as an indicator of collective attention and labeling practices. After the invasion, there was a strong nationwide increase in interest in Topic “Anxiety” and a rapid reorganization of the front–rear gradient: the largest relative increase occurred in regions farther from military operations rather than in those most directly threatened (TV ≈ 0.25; ρ ≈ −0.54). This pattern emerged immediately after the invasion, persisted across subsequent time windows, and was not observed for numerous control and comparison topics. The findings suggest that a purely reactive model of anxiety does not fully capture the operating principles of the human anxiety system. Alarm arousal may persist despite objective safety and only secondarily organize itself around available objects, helping to explain why a reduction in real threats does not necessarily lead to a proportional decrease in anxiety.
Costly rituals may have evolutionary significance in explaining aspects of human cooperation. However, it is unclear how humans reason about creating "costly" rituals at a cognitive level. Using the phenomenon of hazing (arbitrarily costly induction processes), we present the first cognitive model of the construction and implementation of costly rituals: Fungible Dysphoria. Fungible Dysphoria proposes that hazers primarily use internal estimations of anticipated discomfort as cross-domain proxies for "cost" and then combine these estimations in a roughly additive manner to build costly ritual processes. Across two vignette studies with real-world fraternities, we find some evidence consistent with this model, but we also observe heterogeneous responses that may suggest important interactions between micro- and macro-level intuitions about hazing inductions. Our discussion focuses on refining Fungible Dysphoria as a model and increasing the precision with which we can theorize about hazing.
Recursive mind reading involves representing what others think we think-building higher level metarepresentations. We argue that humans' partner choice ecology is such that it is adaptive to recognize when others' motives are reputational and also to manage one's reputation in view of the fact that others recognize and attend to reputational incentives. This makes recursive mind reading adaptive in a partner choice ecology. In order to substantiate this claim, we tested whether recursive mind reading is efficiently recruited in situations relevant to partner choice. In Study 1 (N = 230), we use hypothetical scenarios from daily life in which a protagonist makes a prosocial choice observed by an audience whose importance varies across conditions. We show that observers make inferences about the reputational motives of the protagonists on the basis of this minimal change. In Study 2 (N = 87), we use an economic game to investigate whether participants anticipate that their reputational motives will be recognized by observers and potentially affect their choice of collaborators, and show that people adapt their strategies to whether their reputational motives are revealed or hidden from observers. Our results suggest that participants go through multiple levels of recursive mind reading to solve the cognitive tasks characteristic of partner choice ecologies: evaluating others' disposition to cooperate and presenting oneself as being so disposed.
The design of sex dolls-unconstrained by biological limitations-offers a unique window into human mate preferences and contributes a novel source of evidence toward several debates in evolutionary psychology. First, do men's preferences align more closely with cues of nubility rather than current fertility? Second, are men primarily attracted to a slim waist rather than a low waist-to-hip ratio per se? Finally, do sex dolls, like other artificial depictions of the female form, exhibit dimensions that enter the realm of supernormal stimuli? Drawing on a publicly available data set of 793 sex dolls, this study tests these hypotheses. Results show that sex dolls have significantly lower waist-to-hip ratios (M = 0.62) than real women (d = 3.23), supporting the nubility hypothesis. Sex dolls exhibit 52% more variability in hip size than waist size, and waist size remains stable across bust increases, while hip size scales up more proportionally. This suggests that waist narrowness, specifically, is a nonnegotiable feature in sex doll design. Compared to male sex dolls, female sex dolls have small feet relative to height, again consistent with the nubility hypothesis. Almost half of female sex dolls have breast cup sizes E-O, which far exceeds the natural range observed in real women, further supporting the hypothesis that men's mate preferences, when unconstrained, extend into supernormal stimuli. Contrary to predictions, both male and female sex dolls were significantly shorter than their human counterparts, perhaps indicating that logistical constraints, rather than mate preferences, influence height proportions in sex doll design.
We review evidence that humans are undergoing a major evolutionary transition (MET). We show that the modern period satisfies diagnostic criterion for a MET and then describe the major changes in ideological and cognitive forms that culturally facilitate the current transition. The current MET appears to be moving toward a panhuman, planet-wide superorganism characterized by new forms of social cooperation and a new form of cognition we designate as techno-biotic cognition. We show how forms of 21st century technology such as artificial intelligence are shaping and being shaped by the MET and are in turn influencing human evolution and culture. We suggest that accelerated development in areas of the brain unique to humans might be coevolving with new forms of human cognition that characterize the current MET.
In recent years, the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and psychology has garnered unprecedented attention, particularly following the advent of generative AI tools in 2022. These tools, capable of producing human-like text, images, and even deepening our understanding of cognitive processes, have not only captured the public imagination but also sparked new concerns and debates within the psychological community. While AI has been a subject of research for decades, the emergence of its generative capabilities has truly thrust AI into the spotlight. This article explores how these advancements are reshaping our understanding of human cognition and behavior, as well as their potential implications for psychological practice and research. Through a critical examination of current AI technologies and their psychological impacts, we aimed to bridge the gap between technological innovation and the intricate workings of the human mind.
The COVID-19 pandemic led many to rely on videoconference software to continue working and learning. Although videoconferencing carries many benefits for communication, some question whether videoconferencing may increase attention to and concerns about physical appearance. The current research aimed to bridge this gap by using an experimental paradigm to examine the impact of videoconferencing and typical in-person pandemic contexts on college students' appearance-related attitudes. Furthermore, we explored the potential influence of these appearance-related attitudes on students' performance on cognitively challenging tasks (i.e., Graduate Record Examination quantitative problems and anagrams). The results revealed that college students in the videoconference (vs. in-person) context reported greater attention to-and surveillance of-their appearance and lower state appearance self-esteem. Contrary to our predictions, we found no significant differences in task performance based on participants' context nor did appearance-related attitudes predict task performance. Together, the current study highlights striking results-videoconference contexts significantly elevate college students' concerns about their appearance, but these concerns do not impact their performance.
Evolutionary mismatch caused by environmental changes from the use of cultural and technological solutions is a well-established and extensively studied area. Despite the well-intended purpose of developing technologies to align the environment with and thus meet our adaptive needs, it is interesting that evolutionary matches-the natural conceptual counterpart to evolutionary mismatch-are seldom mentioned, whereas mismatches are discussed in abundance. We offer a definition of evolutionary match and propose several reasons why matches in the long run are unlikely given an extended period of technological consumption and reliance. Specifically, technologies embedded in culture lead to problems of an oversupply of solutions, as well as hyperstimulation and hypostimulation of evolved human adaptations, all of which drive the creation of more novel remedies to deal with these new problems in a never-ending cycle. Possible solutions to the inherent and inevitable problems of using culture and technology to satisfy our needs are proposed, in addition to discussing whether new technologies provide much evolutionary match at all as we move toward the future.
Styles of traditional decorative art vary substantially across cultures. While early theorists attributed this variation to differences in environment, scholarship has long focused on decorative artworks as vehicles of social information and stylistic variation as a consequence of social factors. However, if the capacity to create and consume art evolved as a mechanism to shape shared attention, it is possible that environmental factors may indeed play a role in variation of decorative style. We tested this hypothesis by characterizing the compositional structure of 198 textiles from eighteen cultures across the globe using the complexity-entropy plane. Entropy and statistical complexity have previously been used to characterize changes in the compositional structure of paintings of the Western canon over the last millennium. We observed that complexity and entropy are useful measures for characterizing traditional textile designs: high-entropy/low-complexity samples feature dense repetitions of small Euclidean shapes, while low-entropy/high-complexity samples feature large, single-color fields with bold borders. We observed weak-but-significant associations between these measures and three environmental variables: absolute latitude, Koppen climate classification, and a composite variable representing subsistence mode. Interestingly, we observed a significant difference between works from Afro-Eurasia/Oceania and the Americas. Controlling for this and other factors related to social transmission improves the strength of the relationship between compositional structure and subsistence mode. We propose that aesthetic preferences may be affected by subsistence mode as well as cultural factors, and suggest that further studies with more granular environmental data are necessary. We further discuss potential explanations for the observed difference between "hemispheres."
Intrasexual selection is a mechanism of evolution that explains same-sex competitive behaviors. For women, the use of nonphysical competitive strategies is thought to be selected for due to the high cost associated with direct physical competition. Women incorporate competitive strategies, such as verbal and indirect aggression (i.e., gossiping and rumor spreading), to be able to target and compete with same-sex counterparts. Nonetheless, dark personality traits also correlate with competitive sexual behaviors, as individuals who score higher on psychopathy and Machiavellianism are more likely to engage in intrasexual competition due to their reliance on the use of manipulation and derogative behaviors. The current study investigated women's use of aggressive strategies in a Hispanic sample. Women (N = 136) completed the Intrasexual Competition Scale, Dark Tetrad (i.e., psychopathy, sadism, narcissism, and Machiavellianism), and Direct/Indirect Aggression Scale (Mini-DIAS). The findings showed that psychopathy predicted women's use of physical, verbal, and indirect aggression, while sadism predicted the use of verbal aggression. These findings add to research on the type of aggressive strategies that women utilize in intrasexual competitive contests and account for the unique role of dark personality traits.
There are relatively consistent findings showing a negative association between the basic trait Openness to Experience and fertility. This research aimed to investigate this relationship, providing insights into possible selection processes affecting Openness and exploring mediating factors linking it to fertility (specifically the number of children). Participants were recruited online and completed the Openness scale from the Mini International Personality Item Pool-6 personality inventory, as well as scales measuring positive and negative childbearing motivations, the number of sexual partners, the duration of the longest romantic relationship, and the age of first reproduction. The sample comprised 1,024 individuals (53.22% females) with an average age of 32.3 years (SD = 9.25). A negative link between Openness and fertility was detected in the present data as well. Significant mediators of this association included a higher age of first reproduction, a shorter duration of the longest relationship, and lower positive childbearing motives. The observed data suggest that negative directional selection may act on Openness, potentially leading to a decrease in phenotypic levels of the trait over generations and a reduction in its variation. The relationship between Openness and fertility, as assessed in this research, reveals reproductive mechanisms that mediate their connection.
Kin selection can explain why so few people donate organs, and why those who do often help relatives over others. Organ donation is a useful topic because it involves costly altruism, to which the kin selection theory predicts a strong relationship to relatedness. A challenge to this area of study, however, is that relatedness assessments are often entangled with assessments of emotional closeness and ability to reciprocate help. Study 1 (n = 208 college students) used an organ budgeting task and more standard replication to collect hypothetical decisions for varying donations (blood, plasma, marrow, kidney, liver, or lung) and recipients (full sibling, first cousin, second cousin, grandparent, step sibling, aunt/uncle, niece/nephew, best friend, or acquaintance). Emotional closeness, both in general and specifically for a casual acquaintance target, was also assessed. Main effects of organ, relation, and experienced oneness with others were found. Study 2 (n = 276 college students) utilized a smaller study design and forced-choice organ donation paradigm to better investigate potential interactions. The main effects of donation and relationship types were replicated, but with no interactions and no effect of emotional closeness measures. Results support and extend findings on the role of perceived cost as well as genetic and emotional closeness in helping decisions, with both theoretical and practical implications.
