Evolution and Human Behavior最新文献

Why are women underrepresented in positions of leadership? According to the “think manager-think male” model, leaders are stereotyped as male—and, in turn, as dominant—and this stereotype translates into preferences. However, status and leadership can be attained not only by dominance but also by prestige—a less sex-typed pathway. Five studies explored the relationship between leader stereotypes and preferences. University students spontaneously imagined both dominant and prestigious leaders as men (Study 1A, N = 148)—and this generalized across occupational domains (Study 1B, N = 220). However, they preferred women and prestigious leaders over men and dominant leaders. Study 2 (N = 2692) found this preference for female over male leaders using a large nationally representative U.S. sample from the Pew American Trends Panel. Study 3 (N = 461) experimentally replicated the preference for prestigious female over dominant male leader candidates among university students. In Study 4, (N = 952) online MTurk participants judged politicians from face photographs and again showed a preference for women, which may have partially been due to the inference that women are more likely to use prestige- over dominance-based leadership strategies. Collectively, findings suggest that the belief that people prefer “alpha male” leaders, which might discourage women from pursuing leadership roles and others from nominating them, needs to be updated.

Occupation of the foraging niche requires an extensive body of ecological knowledge, and humans rely heavily on social learning to master this curriculum in a safe, efficient, timely manner. This presents a formidable information management problem: In the absence of writing, how did ancestral hunter-gatherer societies accurately store and transmit their accumulated knowledge from generation to generation? Pronounced patterns in forager oral story corpora suggest a partial answer. Cross-culturally, these stories exhibit similar themes, genres, and characters, which in turn map onto critical domains of ecological knowledge. These stories also exhibit pronounced consistencies in their formal properties, predictably utilizing strategies that engage attention (e.g., ostensive communication) and facilitate memorization (e.g., repetition, rhythm, imagery). These patterns suggest that storytelling is an information technology that addresses key problems posed by our entry into the information niche: in conjunction with other forms of symbolic behavior (e.g., ritual, visual art, song, dance, games) storytelling provides a mnemonic framework for encoding accumulated knowledge, rules for faithfully copying it, and regular occasions for refreshing and transmitting it. Collectively, these behaviors may have been instrumental in the emergence of cumulative culture.

The tendency for women, relative to men, to more strongly prefer mates with good financial prospects has been reliably documented across a variety of cultures. Malovicki-Yaffe et al. (2018) provided data to the contrary, demonstrating that Haredi women of the ultra-Orthodox community in Israel care little for a wealthy partner. They reported no significant sex difference in ratings of a partner's economic prospects, and a reversal for trait rankings, such that men rated a woman's earning capacity as more important than women did. These findings illustrate that status is culturally determined. The most conservative members of the ultra-Orthodox community in Israel endorse a sociocultural agreement in which women enter the workforce as the breadwinner to enable men to devote their time to religious pursuits. As a consequence, little power can be earned by men for their wealth, but is instead presumed to be conferred by their status as a religious scholar. Women's preferences follow suit, with a strong desire to acquire a highly intelligent and educated religious scholar as a mate. This sociocultural arrangement is still practiced within the ultra-Orthodox community, but recent shifts toward modernization in religious beliefs among some sects provide an opportunity to build on past research in three ways (1) replicate the reversed sex difference in mate preferences for economic prospects with a larger and more religiously varied sample (N = 1414 via an online Haredi Panel, Study 1), (2) examine whether the sex-reversed effect is weaker among those who have shifted to more modern religious beliefs (Study 1), and (3) validate the underlying assumptions made by past work with respect to how Haredi men and women earn power (N = 949 via online convenience sampling, Study 2). The results document a sex reversal in mate rankings and ratings for economic prospects, demonstrate that this effect is strongest among the most religiously conservative Haredi people, and confirm that men's strongest source of power in the ultra-Orthodox community is their role as a Torah scholar—eclipsing the impact of wealth. Additionally, we demonstrate the stability of men's preferences for a young and attractive partner, and explore whether women's role as an economic breadwinner translates into power in the home or community.

Human society rests on communicated information, much of which is shared without an expectation of reward. We suggest that, like other forms of prosociality, this type of information provision is fueled by gratitude. To reflect the fact that information differs in some ways from other goods, we call this form of gratitude epistemic gratitude. In a first experiment (all preregisterered, with US participants), we show that participants are more grateful for information that provides more benefits, at a greater cost to the sender, that was sent intentionally, and gratuitously. Experiment 2 shows that information shared with a large audience generates less gratitude in individual audience members. Experiment 3 shows that information that can be further passed on to others elicits more gratitude. In the supplementary materials, we also report a series of inconclusive experiments testing whether gratitude increases when an initially doubted piece of information is confirmed, and whether participants think others communicate in a way that maximizes gratitude in the audience. In conclusion, we speculate on the consequences of epistemic gratitude—in particular, which type of information is more likely to elicit epistemic gratitude—for diverse cultural phenomena, from personalization in marketing to rumor diffusion.