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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (14 results)

  • Article
  • Peer Reviewed
UCLA Previously Published Works (2017)
The target article argues that contempt is a sentiment, and that sentiments are the deep structure of social affect. The 26 commentaries meet these claims with a range of exciting extensions and applications, as well as critiques. Most significantly, we reply that construction and emergence are necessary for, not incompatible with, evolved design, while parsimony requires explanatory adequacy and predictive accuracy, not mere simplicity.
    Cover page: Seeing the elephant: Parsimony, functionalism, and the emergent design of contempt and other sentiments
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    UCLA Previously Published Works (2017)
    Contempt is typically studied as a uniquely human moral emotion. However, this approach has yielded inconclusive results. We argue this is because the folk affect concept "contempt" has been inaccurately mapped onto basic affect systems. "Contempt" has features that are inconsistent with a basic emotion, especially its protracted duration and frequently cold phenomenology. Yet other features are inconsistent with a basic attitude. Nonetheless, the features of "contempt" functionally cohere. To account for this, we revive and reconfigure the sentiment construct using the notion of evolved functional specialization. We develop the Attitude-Scenario-Emotion (ASE) model of sentiments, in which enduring attitudes represent others' social-relational value and moderate discrete emotions across scenarios. Sentiments are functional networks of attitudes and emotions. Distinct sentiments, including love, respect, like, hate, and fear, track distinct relational affordances, and each is emotionally pluripotent, thereby serving both bookkeeping and commitment functions within relationships. The sentiment contempt is an absence of respect; from cues to others' low efficacy, it represents them as worthless and small, muting compassion, guilt, and shame and potentiating anger, disgust, and mirth. This sentiment is ancient yet implicated in the ratcheting evolution of human ultrasocialty. The manifolds of the contempt network, differentially engaged across individuals and populations, explain the features of "contempt," its translatability, and its variable experience as "hot" or "cold," occurrent or enduring, and anger-like or disgust-like. This rapprochement between psychological anthropology and evolutionary psychology contributes both methodological and empirical insights, with broad implications for understanding the functional and cultural organization of social affect.
      Cover page: On the deep structure of social affect: Attitudes, emotions, sentiments, and the case of “contempt”
      • Thesis
      • Peer Reviewed
      UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2013)

      Enduring social relationships structured the emergence of human uniqueness and remain the cornerstone of human adaptation across societies. However, there is little systematic comparative data on the patterning of human relationships and the psychological mechanisms underlying their variation. The present research develops a theoretical framework for the functional organization of affect as it regulates social-relational behavior, and tests implications of this framework with quantitative data from 20 months of fieldwork in Yasawa, Fiji. Chapter 1 uses "contempt" as a case study to develop the ASE (Attitude-Scenario-Emotion) model of affect, in which attitudes, as enduring representations of the fitness affordances of other persons, adaptively moderate constellations of emotions as embodied reactions to relational events. I sketch five attitude dimensions that map onto distinct social affordances: love, like, respect, hate, and fear. Decomposing "contempt" in these terms, the core of this cultural model is not a basic or uniquely human emotion but an ancient attitude of no respect and its emotional consequences. This account resolves the "special case" of contempt. Chapter 2 presents a series of interviews that investigate the conceptual structure of the Yasawan affect lexicon. Results suggest that Yasawans use distinct sets of terms to refer to attitudes and emotions; the predicted set of social attitudes anchor the conceptual organization of Yasawan affect; these attitudes differentially and adaptively moderate emotions across social scenarios; and each attitude is emotionally pluripotent. Chapter 3 investigates dyadic social attitudes and relational behaviors within the male social network of one Yasawan village. I describe three relational economic games that integrate recipient identities and other-other tradeoffs while maintaining decision confidentiality. Target need and "chiefliness" drive receiving and buffer against being taken from, while target income drives being reduced at a cost. Attitudes towards targets fully mediate receipt and loss, but not suffering spiteful reduction. These games tap the egalitarian ethos of Fiji, while illuminating the roles of endogenous attitudes and impersonal inequity aversion in structuring Fijian hierarchy. Together these studies advance the comparative endeavor to describe and explain, ultimately and proximately, variation in social relationships as they structure and support human adaptation.

        Cover page: Structures of Sentiment: Mapping the Affective Bases of Social Relationships in Yasawa, Fiji
        • Article
        • Peer Reviewed
        UCLA Previously Published Works (2014)
        Across taxa, strength and size are elementary determinants of relative fighting capacity; in species with complex behavioral repertoires, numerous additional factors also contribute. When many factors must be considered simultaneously, decision-making in agonistic contexts can be facilitated through the use of a summary representation. Size and strength may constitute the dimensions used to form such a representation, such that tactical advantages or liabilities influence the conceptualized size and muscularity of an antagonist. If so, and given the continued importance of physical strength in human male-male conflicts, a man's own strength will influence his conceptualization of the absolute size and strength of an opponent. In the research reported here, male participants' chest compression strength was compared with their estimates of the size and muscularity of an unfamiliar potential antagonist, presented either as a supporter of a rival sports team (Study 1, conducted in urban California, and Study 2, conducted in rural Fiji) or as a man armed with a handgun (Study 3, conducted in rural Fiji). Consistent with predictions, composite measures of male participants' estimates of the size/strength of a potential antagonist were inversely correlated with the participant's own strength. Therefore, consonant with a history wherein violent intrasexual selection has acted on human males, a man's own physical strength influences his representations of potential antagonists.
          Cover page: Men’s Physical Strength Moderates Conceptualizations of Prospective Foes in Two Disparate Societies
          • Article
          • Peer Reviewed
          UCLA Previously Published Works (2013)
          To account for the widespread human tendency to cooperate in one-shot social dilemmas, some theorists have proposed that cooperators can be reliably detected based on ethological displays that are difficult to fake. Experimental findings have supported the view that cooperators can be distinguished from defectors based on "thin slices" of behavior, but the relevant cues have remained elusive, and the role of the judge's perspective remains unclear. In this study, we followed triadic conversations among unacquainted same-sex college students with unannounced dyadic one-shot prisoner's dilemmas, and asked participants to guess the PD decisions made toward them and among the other two participants. Two other sets of participants guessed the PD decisions after viewing videotape of the conversations, either with foreknowledge (informed), or without foreknowledge (naïve), of the post-conversation PD. Only naïve video viewers approached better-than-chance prediction accuracy, and they were significantly accurate at predicting the PD decisions of only opposite-sexed conversation participants. Four ethological displays recently proposed to cue defection in one-shot social dilemmas (arms crossed, lean back, hand touch, and face touch) failed to predict either actual defection or guesses of defection by any category of observer. Our results cast doubt on the role of "greenbeard" signals in the evolution of human prosociality, although they suggest that eavesdropping may be more informative about others' cooperative propensities than direct interaction.
            Cover page: Defectors Cannot Be Detected during“Small Talk” with Strangers
            • Article
            • Peer Reviewed
            UCLA Previously Published Works (2013)
            During conversation, interlocutors coordinate their behavior on many levels. Two distinct forms of behavioral coordination have been empirically linked with affiliation and cooperation during or following face-to-face interaction: behavior matching and interpersonal synchrony. Only the latter form constitutes behavioral entrainment involving a coupling between independent oscillators. We present the first study of the association between spontaneously occurring behavioral coordination and post-interaction economic game play. Triads of same-sexed strangers conversed for 10. min, after which each participant played an unannounced one-shot prisoner's dilemma (PD) toward each co-participant. When dyads had higher language style matching scores (LSM: Gonzales, A.L., Hancock, J.T., & Pennebaker, J.W. (2010). Language style matching as a predictor of social dynamics in small groups. Communication Research, 31, 3-19), the individuals evaluated each other more positively, but they were no more likely to cooperate in the PD. However, when dyads' speech rates (mean syllable duration) converged more strongly from the beginning to the end of the conversation, they were more likely to cooperate in the PD, despite no effect on interpersonal evaluations. Speech rate convergence, a form of rhythmic entrainment, could benefit interlocutors by mutually reducing cognitive processing during interaction. We suggest that spontaneous, temporally based behavioral coordination might facilitate prosocial behavior when the joint cooperative effort is itself perceived as a form of coordination. © 2013 Elsevier Inc.
              Cover page: Convergence of speech rate in conversation predicts cooperation
              • Article
              • Peer Reviewed
              UCLA Previously Published Works (2018)
              Little is known about people's ability to detect subclinical psychopathy from others' quotidian social behavior, or about the correlates of variation in this ability. This study sought to address these questions using a thin slice personality judgment paradigm. We presented 108 undergraduate judges (70.4% female) with 1.5 minute video thin slices of zero-acquaintance triadic conversations among other undergraduates (targets: n = 105, 57.1% female). Judges completed self-report measures of general trust, caution, and empathy. Target individuals had completed the Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy (LSRP) scale. Judges viewed the videos in one of three conditions: complete audio, silent, or audio from which semantic content had been removed using low-pass filtering. Using a novel other-rating version of the LSRP, judges' ratings of targets' primary psychopathy levels were significantly positively associated with targets' self-reports, but only in the complete audio condition. Judge general trust and target LSRP interacted, such that judges higher in general trust made less accurate judgments with respect to targets higher in primary and total psychopathy. Results are consistent with a scenario in which psychopathic traits are maintained in human populations by negative frequency dependent selection operating through the costs of detecting psychopathy in others.
                Cover page: General trust impedes perception of self-reported primary psychopathy in thin slices of social interaction.
                • Article
                • Peer Reviewed
                UCLA Previously Published Works (2020)
                Humans subtly synchronize body movement during face-to-face conversation. In this context, bodily synchrony has been linked to affiliation and social bonding, task success and comprehension, and potential conflict. Almost all studies of conversational synchrony involve dyads, and relatively less is known about the structure of synchrony in groups larger than two. We conducted an optic flow analysis of body movement in triads engaged in face-to-face conversation, and explored a common measure of synchrony: time-aligned bodily covariation. We correlated this measure of synchrony with a diverse set of covariates related to the outcome of interactions. Triads showed higher maximum cross-correlation relative to a surrogate baseline, and 'meta-synchrony', in that composite dyads in a triad tended to show correlated structure. A windowed analysis also revealed that synchrony varies widely across an interaction. As in prior studies, average synchrony was low but statistically reliable in just a few minutes of interaction. In an exploratory analysis, we investigated the potential function of body synchrony by predicting it from various covariates, such as linguistic style matching, liking, laughter and cooperative play in a behavioural economic game. Exploratory results do not reveal a clear function for synchrony, though colaughter within triads was associated with greater body synchrony, and is consistent with an earlier analysis showing a positive connection between colaughter and cooperation. We end by discussing the importance of expanding and codifying analyses of synchrony and assessing its function.
                  Cover page: Body synchrony in triadic interaction
                  • Article
                  • Peer Reviewed
                  UCLA Previously Published Works (2014)
                  Wilson and Daly's Young Male Syndrome thesis seeks to explain why young men are disproportionally involved in both violence and non-violent activities entailing a risk of injury or death. One interpretation of this thesis, which we term the Crazy Bastard Hypothesis, holds that the correlation between violence and other forms of physical risk-taking occurs because the latter behaviors inherently index the general propensity to take risks with one's life. In violent conflicts, individuals who are indifferent to the prospect of injury or death constitute dangerous adversaries, and valuable allies. Voluntary physical risk-taking may thus serve a signaling function such that risk-prone individuals are perceived as more formidable than risk-averse individuals. Prior work has demonstrated that relative formidability is represented using the dimensions of conceptualized size and strength, providing an avenue for testing the Crazy Bastard Hypothesis. In multiple studies conducted in two disparate societies, we demonstrate that physically risk-prone men are envisioned to be larger, stronger, and more violent than risk-averse men. A separate study reveals that such conceptualizations are unlikely to reflect actual correlations between size/strength and physical risk-proneness, and are instead plausibly interpreted as revealing the contribution of observed physical risk-proneness to assessments of relative formidability. © 2014 Elsevier Inc.
                    Cover page: Foundations of the Crazy Bastard Hypothesis: Nonviolent physical risk-taking enhances conceptualized formidability
                    • Multimedia
                    • Peer Reviewed
                    UCLA Previously Published Works (2014)
                    This is the archived dataset to accompany J. Manson et al.'s Subclinical Primary Psychopathy, but not Physical Formidability or Attractiveness, Predicts Conversational Dominance in a Zero-acquaintance Situation
                    • 1 supplemental file
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