Increased cooperation in groups that are allowed to communicate (engage in "cheap talk") has been attributed to reputation-building and to cultural norms or culturally normal behavior. We tested these two theories by exposing groups of undergraduates to a public-goods social dilemma. Five groups were permitted to communicate via anonymous written messages that were read aloud. The groups with m...

Synthesizing existing work from diverse disciplines, this paper introduces a culture-gene coevolutionary approach to human behavior and psychology, and applies it to the evolution of cooperation. After a general discussion of cooperation in humans, this paper summarizes Dual Inheritance Theory and shows how cultural transmission can be brought under the Darwinian umbrella in order to analyze ho...

intergenerational gap refers to the disturbance and crisis in the cultural sequence of generations, which leads to conflict in terms of values and norms between parents and children. until recently, this phenomenon has not been considered a serious issue in iranian society and the continuation of similar thought patterns through the generations has prevented the emergence of distance and variou...

road traffic crashes (rtcs) account for great mortality and morbidity rates worldwide, resulting in substantial global burden. factors contributing to rtc generally fall into three categories: environmental, vehicle, and human, with the human factor being by far the leading determinant. obtaining an in-depth exploration of driving behavior and factors underpinning risky driving could be of part...

This paper investigated the ways Iranian B.A and M.A students of English language and their professors represent themselves linguistically in their e-mails in general, and the ways they construct and negotiate power with regard to social and cultural norms in particular. It examined 84 e-mail messages students and professors exchanged in 2012-2013 academic year through Halliday`s Systemic Funct...

Beliefs about the causation of life and death, fortune and misfortune, and good and evil change over time. Often, these beliefs are based on different concepts of human agency—concepts that have important implications for views on responsibility, culpability, and liability. As normative orientations change, societies undergo periods of profound transformation, and social and interpersonal tensi...

Cultural evolutionary theory and human behavioural ecology offer different, but compatible approaches to understanding human demographic behaviour. For much of their 30 history, these approaches have been deployed in parallel, with few explicit attempts to integrate them empirically. In this paper, we test hypotheses drawn from both approaches to explore how reproductive behaviour responds to c...

The varied islands of the Pacific provide an ideal natural experiment for studying the factors shaping human impact on the environment. Previous research into pre-European deforestation across the Pacific indicated a major effect of environment but did not account for cultural variation or control for dependencies in the data due to shared cultural ancestry and geographic proximity. The relativ...

The purpose of this research is to test whether descriptive norms, or cognitions about typical beliefs, values, and behaviors of one’s group, can explain cultural influence in the domains of blame attribution and harm perception. In Study 1, using participants from the United States and South Korea, the authors find that individuals with lower (vs. higher) collectivistic descriptive norms ascri...