Humans commonly associate physical attractiveness with health and fertility, making it a key factor in mate desirability. Consistent with this, previous research has demonstrated a robust attentional bias towards attractive faces across a range of experimental paradigms. However, how this bias varies across the sexes and whether it depends on the sexual preference and/or relationship status of the perceiver is still poorly understood. Moreover, these studies often rely on undergraduate samples that may not represent the general population. In the present study, we therefore examined attentional biases towards facial attractiveness among a general population sample recruited during a public science festival (n = 102). To do this, we employed an eye-tracking based preferential looking task, where people were presented with pairs of conventionally attractive and less attractive faces of either males or females. We investigated (1) whether men and women differed in their attentional bias towards attractive faces of their preferred and non-preferred sexes, distinguishing between immediate (automatic) and volitional (deliberate) components of attention and (2) whether attractiveness bias was modulated by participants' relationship status. Our results indicate that facial attractiveness primarily influences volitional rather than immediate attention in the current paradigm. Women showed a general, non-sex-specific bias, looking longer at attractive faces regardless of their sex, whereas men exhibited a more selective bias towards attractive faces of their preferred sex, which is in line with previous research. We found no clear effect of relationship status on attractiveness bias towards preferred faces. Together, these findings suggest that attractiveness-related attention is not a general, automatic response to attractive faces, but is expressed mainly in sustained gaze allocation and depends on the sex and sexual preference of the perceiver.
People form distinctive relationships that are close, intimate, or “thick”. Across cultures, these relationships are often characterized by physical intimacy, including actions that involve sharing saliva, such as kissing or sharing foods or utensils. Recent research by Thomas et al. (2022) provides evidence that infants recognize saliva sharing as evidence of a thick relationship: Eight- to 10-month-old infants expect that two characters who share saliva will subsequently respond to each other’s distress. To constrain theories of how knowledge of thick relationships emerges in development, the current studies tested for this expectation in younger infants, who have limited experience sharing food within the family and observing other people doing so. We tested 4- to 6-month-old infants in the same paradigms that Thomas et al. (2022) used to study 8- to 10-month-old infants. We replicated the findings from older infants in this younger sample; when 4- to 6-month-old infants saw a central actor in distress, they looked longer to an actor who had previously shared saliva with the central actor than to another actor who had not. These findings suggest that 4- to 6-month-old infants distinguish thick from other social relationships.
Human mate evaluation prioritizes socially and reproductively relevant visual cues, but whether these attentional patterns are reflected in retrospective reports remains unclear. We compared eye-tracked attention with self-reports from 62 heterosexual men who viewed 10 images of male–female dyads and then ranked areas of interest (AOIs) and participant-generated cues by perceived attentional salience. Female faces received the longest average fixation durations, whereas female bodies received the greatest cumulative viewing time. Male targets also attracted attention, although female AOIs received greater cumulative viewing time. At the AOI level, reported salience was positively associated with average fixation duration, unrelated to total dwell time or initial gaze orientation, and negatively associated with fixation count. This metric-specific dissociation is consistent with selective introspective access. At the cue level, estimated gaze–report match probabilities were higher for facial than bodily cues across female and male targets. These cue- and target-specific discrepancies may additionally reflect imperfect retrospective reconstruction or selective reporting. From an evolutionary perspective, visual attention may facilitate the extraction of mate- and competitor-relevant information, whereas perceived reputational costs may constrain the acknowledgment of some attentional priorities. Eye-tracking and self-report should therefore be treated as complementary rather than interchangeable measures of attention during mate evaluation.
Friendship is often touted for its benefits to physical and mental health, longevity, and happiness. But not all friendships are good, and even the best carry costs (e.g., opportunity costs). Across three studies with U.S. student and online community participants (N = 1267), we explore how people view friendship's up- and downsides. Specifically, participants rated how much four different types of friends—hypothetical ideal, actual close, ambivalent, and former friends—helped or hindered one's progress toward fundamental life goals (e.g., self-protection, mate-seeking). We find: (1) all friendships are seen as exacting costs, but (2) good (ideal and close) friendships are characterized as providing net benefits, whereas bad (ambivalent and former) friendships are characterized as comparatively costly—particularly for status- and mate-seeking; (3) even bad friends are seen as facilitating certain goals (e.g., self-protection); and (4) friendships terminated by one's friends were seen as more beneficial than friendships terminated by participants. Contrary to views that friends fail to keep accounts of costs and benefits, people seem to be tracking the perceived benefits and costs that friends facilitate.
Sexual satisfaction and access to sexual activity outside committed relationships may be associated with individuals' motivation to pursue a long-term partner. We examined whether within-person changes in sexual satisfaction and intercourse frequency were associated with relationship desire among never-married men and women. Using all fourteen waves of the German Panel Analysis of Intimate Relationships and Family Dynamics (Pairfam), individual fixed-effects models linked change between successive waves to relationship desire at the later wave. Increases in sexual satisfaction were associated with lower relationship desire for men (b = −0.024, p < .001) and women (b = −0.026, p < .001), with no significant sex difference. Changes in intercourse frequency were not significantly associated with relationship desire in either sex. From an evolutionary perspective, these findings are consistent with relationship motivation being calibrated to cues about the benefits of long-term pair-bonding relative to other mating opportunities. Greater sexual satisfaction while single may indicate that some mating benefits are obtainable without commitment, whereas sexual frequency appears to provide a less consistent cue.
People frequently experience anger and a desire to retaliate against people who have harmed them directly. They occasionally respond similarly when people harm their friends and kin. Here, we present a psychological model, grounded in the computation of costs, benefits, and welfare interdependencies, which we call the net-cost model, to explain these phenomena. After showing how the model can explain anger and the desire to retaliate in two-party interactions, we show how the same theoretical apparatus offers predictions about the conditions under which people will intervene in other people's dyadic conflicts. This model takes advantage of a concept called the welfare tradeoff ratio. Welfare tradeoff ratios also feature prominently in the recalibrational theory of anger, but the model we propose here uses them in a different way. We review several lines of evidence that lend empirical support for the net-cost model, especially highlighting research on third-party punishment and anger in the context of friendships and other close relationships.
Magic is frequently employed in high-stakes contexts such as healing and divination, which suggests that its users take it to be efficacious. This poses a puzzle: why would broadly rational agents persist in practices that are, by their ostensible aims, ineffective? Existing accounts divide between intellectualist views, which hold that practitioners genuinely believe in the efficacy of magic, and non-intellectualist views, which argue that magical practices are accompanied by non-doxastic attitudes such as imagination, symbolism, or make-believe. We argue that both positions capture part of the truth. Drawing on ethnography, cognitive science, political psychology, and philosophy, we defend a mixed-attitude account according to which individuals within the same culture—and even the same individual over time—can relate to different magical practices with a range of attitudes, from genuine belief to scepticism, expressive endorsement, or mistaken self-ascription of belief. This framework reconciles evidence cited by both intellectualists and their critics and suggests that belief reports about magic, as well as those concerning conspiracy theories and magic in WEIRD societies, should not be assumed to reflect a single, uniform cognitive attitude.
For various reasons, the concept of magic has been disputed for several decades. Argued to be a pejorative assessment of other peoples' religious rites, magic is broadly understood as a vacuous concept without any explanatory value. While critique of former approaches is necessary, it is doubtful that terminological cleansing is helpful, or that dismantling distinctions such as that between magic and religion will make us any wiser.Building on previous work, I will present a bio-cultural approach to magical ritual focusing on its cognitive foundation as well as its functional role in negotiating tension arising between distinct levels of social organization, notably that between a ‘nurture sphere’, the extended family based on intimate-phatic communication, and a ‘community sphere’ consisting of coalitions between such families arbitrated by increasingly abstract, symbolic communication. Taking departure in a short discussion of previous explanatory approaches, I address the cognitive underpinning of magical action in a predictive processing framework. I then argue that magic addresses certain kinds of contingency events (e.g. illness or failure to procure sufficient food) that generate cognitive representations of a special ‘force’, and that magic applies this force to problems inherent to the nurture sphere. As contingency events affecting the survival of extended families potentially unbalance the relation between nurture spheres comprising a community, magic is argued to be part of cultural immune systems aimed to alleviate pressure arising from loyalties divided between family and group in the face of environmental pressures.
This paper examines the extent to which traditional worldviews and mental models of the natural world are related to contemporary environmental attitudes, policy preferences, and outcomes. We extract information from a corpus of traditional folktales to study how nature – such as animals, insects, and plants – is portrayed across societies. Specifically, we construct ethnicity-level measures capturing how frequently natural entities appear in a group’s folktales. Using natural language processing, we also develop syntax-based measures of the extent to which nature is portrayed as possessing agency, distinguishing cases where nature serves as an acting subject from those where it appears as an object acted upon. Our analyses find that traditional depictions of nature, as reflected in folklore, tend to be associated with contemporary attitudes more supportive of the environment and with better contemporary environmental outcomes, namely, biodiversity, forest cover, and seasonal surface water presence. Although the estimates do not establish a causal relationship, they are consistent with traditional cultural values being one factor that influences conservation preferences and environmental outcomes today.
Sexual overperception, the tendency to infer sexual interest from ambiguous cues, is commonly interpreted through Error Management Theory (EMT). EMT explains why asymmetric error costs could favor decision policies that reduce costly missed opportunities. However, an ultimate-level account does not identify the proximate mechanism that produces observed sex differences in sexual-interest judgments. Here, I formalize these judgments using signal detection theory (SDT) and Bayesian decision theory to show that the same apparent overperception pattern can arise from differences in sensitivity, prior belief, utility weighting, reporting policy, or mixtures of these components. A targeted audit of 54 empirical papers showed that existing paradigms rarely measure or manipulate the quantities needed to distinguish these routes: subjective base-rate beliefs, payoff structures, sensitivity, decision criterion, and disclosure incentives. The article therefore proposes modular designs that combine operational signal definitions, hit and false-alarm reporting, signal detection estimation, direct prior elicitation, base-rate manipulation, payoff manipulations, and reporting-policy checks. These designs can help with identifying how EMT-consistent patterns are proximately implemented. Distinguishing these mechanisms is crucial as each implies different developmental pathways, boundary conditions, and intervention targets.
Many people explain disease and calamity as supernatural punishment for immoral behavior, and health and prosperity as supernatural reward for moral behavior. Drawing from theories of religion and cooperation, we tested whether these moralistic supernatural explanations were more common in historical large-scale societies than small-scale societies, the extent to which they involved reward and punishment, and whether they invoked particular kinds of supernatural agents, such as high gods. In a sample of 822 supernatural explanations drawn from 114 historical societies, we found that moralistic supernatural explanations were widespread across societies of all scales. Even among societies in the lowest quartile of social complexity, 72.41% had at least one moralistic supernatural explanation. Social complexity was associated with a greater share of moralistic supernatural explanations, but not with moralistic supernatural punishment. Instead, large-scale societies featured more moralistic supernatural reward beliefs relative to small-scale societies. Across levels of social complexity, both supernatural reward and punishment were attributed to a wide range of supernatural agents, including minor spirits, human practitioners of magic such as witches, shamans, and ritual specialists, and superior gods. When high gods were invoked in supernatural explanations, they were more likely than most other agents to be linked with morality, but they were rarely invoked. Societies more commonly invoked human practitioners of magic, minor spirits, and superior gods in their moralistic supernatural explanations. Our findings suggest that morality was pervasive in supernatural beliefs across historical societies of all scales, that moralistic reward beliefs were linked to social scale, and that supernatural norm enforcement was ascribed to a broad range of supernatural agents.
Cooperation and resource distribution are central properties of human sociality. The long-term stability of cooperative ventures depends on linking obtained benefits to the efforts invested by collaborating partners. Previous studies demonstrated that infants start to both understand and engage in cooperative activities early on and show early sensitivity to how resources are distributed among social partners. It remains unknown, however, whether infants' intuitions about expectable resource sharing are influenced by the cooperative or competitive nature of the social partners' preceding interactions. We examined this issue by presenting 192 thirteen-month-old infants with various “predator-prey” chasing events in which two goal-directed agents interacted either cooperatively or competitively to capture a chasee. Using a violation-of-expectation looking-time paradigm we tested infants' expectations about different patterns of resource distribution (involving sharing vs. monopolizing) the agents engaged in after capturing the prey. Following familiarization to Cooperative Chasing interactions infants looked significantly longer when the obtained goal outcome was consumed by one of the chasers alone than when it was shared. In contrast, after observing Competitive Chasing events infants showed the opposite pattern of expectations looking longer when the captured prey was shared by the two chasers than when one of them consumed it on its own. Together with the control conditions, these findings suggest that 13-month-olds use the cooperative versus competitive structure of a preceding interaction to generate expectations regarding the sharing or monopolization of the obtained resource.
According to immanent justice reasoning, bad and good life events occur for a moral reason, since they are thought of as causally linked to prior bad and good deeds, even if the causal link is physically unlikely or impossible. Children and adults from a great variety of cultural traditions often show immanent justice reasoning, but how this type of reasoning arises in the human mind is still unclear. Here, we assessed whether infants aged 5, 9, and 14 months (N = 180) expect that negative (or positive) events will happen to an antisocial rather than to a prosocial agent. Infants were first shown distributive events in which one agent acted fairly, and another agent acted unfairly, or they were presented with scenarios involving helping and hindering agents. Then they saw that either a harmful or a positive event occurred to the prosocial and antisocial agents. In all age groups, infants looked longer when the negative event happened to the prosocial rather than to the antisocial agents. Consistent with evolutionary views on the origin of moral sense, these results reveal an early emerging bias underlying the development of explicit immanent justice intuitions.
Food taboos and avoidances are widespread across human societies and present a longstanding evolutionary puzzle: why do people refrain from consuming nutritionally valuable foods? Drawing on quantitative data from over 200 BaYaka hunter-gatherers concerning 57 animal species in the Congo Basin, I document the prevalence and explanations of animal food taboos in relation to age, sex, and reproductive status. The findings indicate that food avoidances clustered strongly around illness-related concerns, particularly those involving young infants, and that explanations frequently invoked causal pathways in which salient morphological or behavioural characteristics of animals were believed to be assimilated into infants' bodies, consistent with principles of sympathetic magic. Women avoided more animal foods than men, especially during reproductive ages, with this difference diminishing at older ages. Pregnant and breastfeeding women avoided significantly more animal foods than non-pregnant and non-breastfeeding women of reproductive age, suggesting that observed sex differences were largely driven by reproductive status. Foods avoided by pregnant and breastfeeding women did not selectively target species with higher parasite loads, providing no support for pathogen-avoidance explanations. Likewise, the most tabooed animals were not more threatened than the least tabooed species, offering no support for functional explanations based on species conservation. Taken together, and in light of comparative ethnographic evidence, these findings suggest that BaYaka food taboos are best understood as products of intuitive causal reasoning shaped by vulnerability, misfortune, and cognitive salience, rather than as adaptive responses to pathogens or conservation concerns, or as expressions of social dominance.
We react to Venkataramen et al. on the concept of “Man the Hunter” as a driver in human evolution and summarize an alternative model based on senior women's foraging subsidizing dependent grandchildren so the still-fertile mothers of those dependents could have next babies sooner.
