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Publications

Family Still Matters:
Human Social Motivation
during a Global Pandemic

Evolution and Human Behavior (2022)

The COVID-19 pandemic caused drastic social changes for many, including separation from friends and coworkers, enforced close contact with family, reductions in mobility, and a number of other health-related precautions. Here we assess the extent to which people’s evolutionarily-relevant basic motivations and goals—their fundamental social motives—might have been affected.

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Fundamental Social Motives 
Measured across Forty-two Cultures in Two Waves

Scientific Data (2022)

How does psychology vary across human societies? The fundamental social motives framework adopts an evolutionary approach to capture the broad range of human social goals within a taxonomy of ancestrally recurring threats and opportunities. 

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Weight location moderates weight-based self-devaluation and perceived social devaluation in women

Social Psychological and Personality Science (2022)

Overweight and obese people devalue themselves because, it has been proposed, they are socially devalued. However, for women, social valuation depends not only on how much weight they carry but where on their bodies they carry it. Here, we investigate whether weight-based self-valuation and perceived social valuation also depend on body shape. 

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Lay beliefs about gender and sexual behavior: First evidence for a pervasive, robust (but seemingly unfounded) stereotype

Psychological Science (2021)

Although casual sex is increasingly socially acceptable, negative stereotypes toward women pursuing casual sex appear to remain pervasive. We find that both men and women stereotype women (but not men) who have casual sex as having low self-esteem. However, these same participants’ sexual behavior is uncorrelated with their own self-esteem.

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The Society of Personality and Social Psychology  2020 Outstanding Research Award
(Graduate student award)

What motives do people prioritize in their social lives? Examining varied sources of data from 27 societies around the world, we found that people generally view familial motives as primary in importance and mate-seeking motives as relatively low in importance. We address theoretical and empirical reasons why there has been extensive research on mate seeking and why people prioritize goals related to long-term familial bonds over mating goals.

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Given the centrality of physical attractiveness in women's mate value, we predicted and found that mating motivation increases the importance attached to and sensitivity towards physical attractiveness in appraising happiness among women. The current work suggests a novel evolutionary function of happiness, namely, to signal progress toward adaptively important goals.

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Here we use two common paradigms to show that participants have difficulty disengaging attention from angry faces relative to happy faces. This suggests that when seen, they engage attention for longer time, but they do not have the preattentive features that would allow them to pop-out. 

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Invited Revision

Functionally Calibrating Life Satisfaction: The Case of Mating Motives and Self-Perceived Mate Value

Accepted with minor revision

We propose that life satisfaction functions to indicate progress toward active, fitness-relevant fundamental goals; the more one perceives oneself moving effectively towards such goals, the more satisfied one should be with one’s life.

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Responses to Political Partisans Are Calibrated by a COVID-sensitive Disease Avoidance Psychology.

Invited revision

How do natural changes in disease avoidance motivation shape thoughts about and behaviors

toward ideological ingroup and outgroup members? Using a nationally representative six-wave longitudinal panel survey of Americans, we investigated the functional flexibility of the behavioral immune system. The current findings provide evidence of an ecologically-attuned, within-person calibration of disease psychology—a process long presumed and now demonstrated.

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