 |
Evolutionary social psychology | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Project Description Research Interests Evolutionary social psychology is my main focus, especially the study of human mental adaptations for judgment, decision-making, strategic behavior, and communication in social and sexual domains. This includes work on mutual mate choice and sexual selection theory, analysis of human mental traits as fitness indicators (reliable cues of underlying phenotypic traits and genetic quality), analysis of social attribution heuristics as adapted to the statistical structure of individual differences (including genetic and phenotypic covariances), and analysis of animate motion perception mechanisms as adapted to typical patterns of intentional movement. Also, consumer behavior: applications of evolutionary psychology in product design and aesthetics, marketing, advertising, and branding (book in progress on this topic); use of genetic algorithms for interactive online product design. Clinical interests: Applications of fitness indicator theory to understand symptoms, demographics, and behavior genetics of schizophrenia and mood disorders. Other interests: origins of human preferences, aesthetics, and utility functions; human strategic behavior, game theory, and experimental economics; ovulatory effects on female mate preferences; the intellectual legacies of Darwin, Nietzsche, and Veblen. Eligibility | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
