Inter-group Relations with Anne Pisor
2025-10-28 12:00:00.000 +00:00

Uh David, what is this podcast? It is Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast, and what is the tagline? Actual Evolutionary Psychology by Actual Evolutionary Psychologists, and let's get right into it. All right. David, today we have a fantastic guest, Anne Opizel. Yes, Anne is a wonderful scholar, brilliant thinker, doing absolutely uh a cutting edge research into the nature of group psychology and intergroup relations, overturning our understanding of what intergroup uh animosity is and and and also flipping it on its head and showing uh ways in which people can and do uh interact uh and cooperate across group boundaries. Um yeah, and I think the theme of this episode is connections, because in two ways, one is

uh Anna's talking about all of the ways in which the evolved psychology makes connections across and between groups to sort of shore up against risk and uncertainty. But then also this conversation itself, I feel like was a super great example of Anne just knows so much uh in the literature and was making connections and we were all sort of really riffing in in a wonderful way and really uh crossing a lot of different topics and making connections. I certainly learned a lot um in this um in this episode and I think people will uh enjoy it very much. Yeah, this was this was a really fun one and I think you'll enjoy listening. So without further ado, here is Ann Pizor. Today we have Ann Pizor. Did I say that right?

Pizer? Pizer. You did. Yeah. Pizer, Pizer. Okay. Yes. I have a difficult P last name too. Um, so yes, we got three P's on the call right there. Hey. Um, so uh Ann, you are at um you run the Sociality Lab, um, and that's at Penn State in the Department of Anthropology. Is that right? That's right. That's right. I co run it with Chris Smith, who's at Washington State. Ah, fantastic. And Chris Smith was we've we've talked about Chris on the podcast. We we need to have him on. Was he a student of yours? He was my postdoc for a few years. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, Chris is great. We should friend of the podcast, as they say. Indeed. Um, and and you study um, I know you've you've been doing, I think, different

things, but one of the things most recently, at least for me, um, is group relationships that are sort of cross traditional group boundaries, which I really like and I really want to get into because for me, coming from a social psychology background, people have this idea that groups, to the extent they exist, really are boundaries of interaction. And, you know, I think there's this idea from like archaeology, you know, you find like physical, like pottery from distant lands, and you have this idea, well, maybe people tolerate like trade. You know, if this shiny thing is really attractive, yeah, I'll, you know, we'll we'll let the traders do that. But otherwise, it's very much this sort of nature-red tooth and claw view of group

boundaries. Um, and so uh, I mean, we can start anywhere, but I'm just wondering, sort of, you seem to be maybe interjecting a bit of sophistication into that view that groups are not these sort of concrete walls between people. And there actually can be somewhat strong ties between people. And you're also looking at sort of why people do that and what benefits there are. Is that a fair characterization? That is a fair characterization. Yeah. So I'm going to go into story time a little bit here, if I may, when it comes to groups. Yeah. So so as you know, and as the listeners know at this point, there's a tradition of thinking about groups in evolutionary anthropology and in evolutionary psychology, where we're often

thinking about groups as kind of boundaries, as containers for cooperation. And humans are really social, and they certainly are extremely important. And I think also of your work, Dave, on that as well, in terms of what one can do with groups. And so when I first started doing research, when I was thinking about cooperation, working with Mike Irvin at Santa Barbara, I was thinking a lot about group dynamics in Bolivia. So you have this kind of through line in training where we're all thinking about groups and how groups structure cooperation, regardless of our intellectual tradition and evolutionary behavioral sciences. And then at the same time in Bolivia, it was really interesting. It was this era with a new constitution where there were 36 different pueblos indigenes,

different indigenous groups. And so even the political discourse in Bolivia was really heightening the salience of groups and group boundaries. And so when I started doing research in Bolivia, I was just really thinking in terms of groups. And what ended up happening, of course, is as I did more and more of that research, I realized that groups weren't really stopping anybody from cooperating. They were often salient in certain contexts. You could certainly activate group boundaries, as we know so well from psychology, and that would change cooperation. But a lot of the time, folks are just trying to get stuff done. And things like ethnic group boundaries were really flexible at the end of the day.

So yeah, I'd say it's fair to say that my thinking about groups has has shifted over time. And then also the story that I've been telling about groups and the research I've been doing on groups has shifted along with it. It might be worth getting into what defines a group, what a group actually is at the end of the day, because if it's not a container for cooperation and if it's not preventing me from cooperating or interacting with or having relationships with people in the other group, then what is it actually doing? What is it? Is there a boundary there at all? Is there a group at all? Like what are we talking about here? No, exactly. And this, I have to actually cue this up right because I've actually been teased by

students for putting my hands on the desk at this point and saying, what is a group? And turning the question back. It's one of my favorite questions. So there are two kind of through lines on what a group is that I think are somewhat implicit in the evolutionary behavioral sciences. So one is this idea of groups that's coming through, say, the primatology literature or the behavioral ecology literature, where it's the idea of who isn't proximate to to who else for the most amount of time. And so that makes things easy for primatologists in terms of talking about one male units or talking about nested groups or thinking about um kind of multi-level structures and primates. So this is one kind of group.

Group as a spatiotemporal cluster. That's it. Exactly. And that's where we get some of the terminology, like fission fusion dynamics, for example, instead of groups, because there's kind of this soft boundary about how much time individuals have to spend together before we start calling them a group that's in reliable association with one another. So that's that's one definition of group. And then on the other side, when we're coming from social science, we're often talking about identity groups, or we're assuming identity groups where there aren't any, which is also a really interesting one. And so identity groups are something that humans do really well. It also ends up that you can see identity groups popping up in the animal world as well.

If we're looking at certain species of ants, for example, identity groups become salient. So what what is an identity group then? yes. So this is where my anthrop comes out. It depends on who you ask, right? Okay. Um, so so let me give you what I would consider to be a working definition of an identity group. And I'm gonna pull a little bit on Dave's research here. So other folks recognize us as being in a group, and then it's part of my own identity in terms of who I see as, say, a reliable cooperator. That might be one way that we have a working definition of an identity group. Another one might be to say that I recognize other individuals as kind of being folks who share something with me that makes it easier to coordinate, whether that's for cooperation

or otherwise. Those are often what we see as identity groups. We often talk about identity, of course, is just the sense of self. I think it starts to get a little squishy in there, but there's something to that that humans are doing. And I think what often happens is we end up conflating the two things. So we're thinking about group identity and bounded groups and groups in the mind, as it were, um, and that are recognized by by others around us, and then also who we're spending time with. And those two I those two group definitions can overlap, but they don't have to. Mm-hmm. So is this different from having a label for a group? So that's sort of what I think of in terms of identity. So like I am white, I'm a Californian, I'm an American.

Um these are label or uh you know a Democrat, whatever. I I can put these labels on me in terms of my, you know, partisanship, religion, you know, ethnicity, socioeconomic status. Um, but that's different from what you're talking about. Um, and that if uh what you're talking about is is uh uh similarity to a group of people, willingness to cooperate with a group of people, uh uh common knowledge that we're all similar and good cooperative partners, that kind of thing. But that doesn't necessarily need to correspond with a particular label. And you you could have the reverse where you have a label, but the the people who share that label don't actually see each other as as cooperative partners and don't see uh each

other as as similar. So how does the label fit in? Is that a a third way of thinking about groups? Yeah, so this is where I'm going to pull a little bit on Christina Moya, who actually has a really nice paper on this and has been on the show as well. And so what Christina did is I thought broke this down really nicely, is it's basically kind of what is a group? She has a table on it in a paper, and a table, it does a lot of work for this, actually. And what she kind of pulls apart is whether things like gender, ethnicity, um, the kind of job you hold, how frequently those are things that people actually tap into in terms of forming cooperative groups and kind of using the labels to scaffold cooperation.

And it ends up that humans could pretty frequently will do that with ethnicity, which of course is a slightly different meaning than race when we're talking to anthropologists, right? We're talking about a shared history that we recognize. And those identity markers again kind of come into play there. And so it seems that there are certain kinds of labels, if you will, to pull on your language here, that are more reliably used to scaffold cooperation. But as we know from research coming out of the Center for Evolutionary Psychology, for example, at Santa Barbara, is that you can actually move around which labels structure cooperation and which labels are recognized by others as being something that is unifying

for people. And so I think sometimes we have kind of three different ways of thinking about groups that are somewhat conflated. So one is the assumption that things like gender, you which you mentioned, scaffold cooperation or scaffold groupishness and it really depends on the situation. Are there affordances to cooperating along gendered lines, for example, that can actually elicit groupishness but doesn't have to. Then you have this through line as well of just identity groups that people self-ascribe, which sometimes we miss when we're doing scientific um social scientific research is we'll forget to ask people what they ascribe as, which I think is really important. And then additionally, we have this idea of groups coming in also from ecological research,

which is just individuals and association. And so sometimes I think those three are kind of getting mixed up in the work we're doing. And I think it behooves us to pull them apart. That's great. And I think there's even an additional complication and maybe this is leading into the research, which is that groups are a social coordination or convention. And so we've talked a little bit about, and I know, Ann, in your work, the idea that sort of, you know, and again, this comes back to sort of a more complex view of human nature and our evolved psychology, but it's not sort of that we're just sponges for soaking up the existing groups. And clearly kids are. And there's interesting developmental work on that.

Like, for example, that kids learn labels really easily, especially applied to groups of people, which is actually just as an aside important for how you talk about people with your kids. So maybe we can talk about that a little bit. But um but uh but in addition to that, at a certain point, you just sort of look around, and you know, adolescents and even young kids do this too, where they're just looking around and they're like, okay, adults, I don't like what you're doing here. I'm going to do something different and make kind of go my own way. And that then cashes out also in the group context where groups are also, you know, you create a group identity like evolutionary psychology, right?

Like that didn't exist 30 or 40 years ago or something. And, you know, people just started using that word and said, I'm an evolutionary psychologist. And now, like, that's a group, right? Um, and that's just one example of there's just a time course too, where people are negotiating. And for some people, it's a benefit to be a group member, be seen as a group member, and they want to promulgate that identity. And then there's the opposite where sort of, you know, and a good example would be like colonialists sort of just coming in and like, you know, massacring the natives, and they're just viewing everybody as like, oh, the rebels, right? When it's in fact like a very small group of people, but then they just broaden that

category to everybody because they don't know the ethnography of the area. And so both in terms of like co mission or omission or aggression or defense, there's all these negotiations of group identities as sort of entrepreneurial coordination things. And so I think it's even more complicated than just those three things. It's sort of like by design, uh there's motivation to sort of for some people to want new groups to exist, or for some people for existing groups to not exist. And it's interesting too, it comes back to this idea as well about what's sometimes called structure versus agency and the social sciences, if I can bring that up, in the sense that any individual will actually, for example, as you said,

maybe try to negotiate for certain groups to exist. But then you also have the structure, which is basically all what everyone else is trying to do in terms of their group coordination and what they would like to see happen to your point. And so I think this actually pops out again and again in the social sciences, but sometimes we're actually not thinking, as you said, about the whole space when it comes to coordination problems, when it comes to motivations that different folks have, and thinking about both the psychology and then the interpersonal dynamics of it all at once. Yeah, no, it's a really, it's no surprise that, you know, it's this thing of like groups are hard enough to measure, the individual psychology is hard enough to measure.

And then when you get this dynamic of it's like that's, you know, very agent-based model-y kind of thing where it's sort of, or or game theory, um, you know, which I know David's been thinking a lot about too, which is just sort of you have all these coordination games, there's conflicts of interest, and so it's just it's it's no wonder that studying these things has been difficult and that we've often sort of oversimplified them. So how how are you? So let's let's try to make the rubber meet the road in terms of actually going out into the world and seeing how it works and measuring things and and observing things. So how are you uh wading into this morass of of definitional confusion about what a group

is? And how are you getting in there and how are you operationalizing what it means to be a a member of a group? Yeah, it's a great question. So one thing that's really fun, I was actually listening back to Shane Lou Levy's uh interview with y'all. Um, and one thing that she mentioned that really resonated with me that I actually want to just bring back for listeners too, is this idea of storytelling and then also about revising and being wrong and talking a bit about our process in the literature. So so when I started out thinking about groups, let's let's go back. So y'all might know, um, some of you listening and definitely both of you, David and David, um, that I started out working in Bolivia.

So I was working in Bolivia in the Bolivian Amazon with Mike Irvin, Chris Von Ruden, and others that you know. Um and I was working there from 2010 to 2018. And as I mentioned, I had a lot of assumptions about what groups were up to. One of the things I was really interested in, right, is that groups as kind of containers for cooperation, because they often are, as you mentioned earlier, David. So to come back to that. And that who is in and who is out might be shifting as people are participating more in market economies. That maybe the notion of who's in is expanding, which then makes cooperation easier when it comes to, say, getting a job, sending your kid out of college, lots of different things

that folks are trying to achieve in Bolivia in the 21st century. And so what ended up happening, of course, is I had to take a big step back because I first found out by doing the field work, by by talking to folks that groups really mattered, but in very specific ways. So they certainly mattered for discrimination, right? So when working with Chimane people, for example, and then working with other groups in Bolivia, I would often hear that Chimane were considered to be groups, you know, members of a group that were discriminated against, that sometimes were considered to be out in the woods and kind of not knowing anything, right? So you get some really kind of strong through lines of discrimination there.

And then additionally, you would hear from folks who identified as Chimane that as well they were experiencing that from the other side. And so really starting to unpack who was in and who was out was important to me. So one of the first things I started to do to understand this a bit more was to use a very similar kind of scale to something Dan Hushka was using at the time, which is this idea of closeness. So actually having people tell me by using physical space how close or far they felt to one group versus another. So you can see this kind of feltness popping out here, right? Those identity groups, people actually kind of opting in and telling me a bit about who's in and who's out for them.

And so then I was starting to write papers about when folks made these intergroup connections. And what I was starting to realize is that groups were not always salient to folks. And so what I did ended up doing later in the day is with Cody Ross, I ended up writing a paper where I said, you know, I think there's two different things going on here. One thing is groupishness and groups as containers for cooperation and also groups as structure, if you will. So in Bolivia, when they're central to the discourse, they kind of become reified, right? They become things that are salient to interactions. And then at the same time, though, people are trying to manage things that are very distance bound in Bolivia.

So if you need a connection in the city so that your kiddo can get a job, you need to know someone in the city, and it doesn't really matter which ethnic group they're in. And if you need to sell your lumber to someone, you need to have someone who's able to engage in trade. This is something you alluded to at the top, Dave. And so what I started to realize is that we actually need to split these things apart, right? So when we're thinking about cooperation, people are trying to solve multiple problems. Some of them are group bound, some of them aren't. And even when they are group bound, it ends up that people are very creative and there's often ways to find ways around boundedness. One thing I often think about for pastoralist groups in Africa, especially, is that you

have things like stock friendships that can often go across ethnic boundaries. And if you have one of those friendships, you're often given a free pass to visit, even if your two groups are kind of at war or just even just tense with one another. So I start to kind of insert myself into this conversation by saying, let's take this step back. Let's start thinking about the kinds of problems people are trying to solve with cooperation and when groups would actually be something that's relevant to that situation versus something that can either be a not thought about in a particular study. Maybe we're talking about distance and that the groupishness is not really putting a container on that, as it were.

Or two, that people are finding ways around. And those ways around are either individual or they're something that can also get baked in over time to cultural practices in terms of say stock friendships being a way to make a connection. And so this eventually leads me to kind of start going back to the literature and say we need to even rethink concepts like parochial altruism. So this idea of in-group favoritism and out-group animosity and actually start to kind of pull apart the conditions under which we would actually expect to see that happen. So nature, again, not always red in tooth and claw, but what about nature would actually say lead to red and tooth and claw versus not? So that's my long-winded kind of background story there, David, about how I ended up

starting to insert myself into this conversation and actually go a bit from my own assumptions about groupishness and the way it should be playing out in the research world and in the lived world in Bolivia to where I am now. And how do you actually, like on the ground, study that? Because that seems like it would be difficult. Like, so what does that actually look like? Yeah. So this has been something I've been iterating on over time. So a couple things. First, right, is to start asking folks who's in and who's out. So I started to do that. And it's always from the individual's perspective, right? So they're the ones telling me who's in and who's out. Although one can make inferences on a larger scale from those data.

Then additionally, one thing I started to do is doing what a lot of what we call lab in the field. So I was doing economic experiments in the field, having folks allocate money to strangers who are in-group or out-group members and identified as such. It ends up that those games are pretty powerful, but design really matters. And so this ends up being something I thought through with Cody Ross, Ben Persicki, Matt Gervais, and others about how we can actually use things like economic experiments to really give us purchase on particular questions about groupishness, cooperation, et cetera. And then another thing, of course, is actually to just ask people the questions. So I found out over time, of course, is if you ask who's in and who's out, and you get a

sense of how people are kind of negotiating this in real time, just actually having conversations about it makes a big difference. But again, at the end of the day, you come back to a lot of this is is a bit squishy. So you actually have to triangulate across different sources. At least this is the way I've been doing it to figure out what a group is, how it's structuring cooperation, when people are using it and when they're not. Yeah. And is it like showing photos of people or names? Or how do you do that? Because I mean, as David mentioned, you know, labels may not, there might not be labels. Like you, the three of us might have lots of group identities that were all common knowledge for us, but we we don't even think about them in that way because we don't have a

label for them. So how do you is it photos or pup in individual identities or or how do you do it? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I started out with photos. So originally, right, I was thinking that I could just describe an in-group and an outgroup member. I really liked the idea of using photos because it made things more real. And this has been a kind of movement in the lab and the field space for folks who are doing this kind of work is to increasingly use photos. Cody Ross has done a lot of work on this. He's at the Mox Planck Institute. And basically, what we start to do is use these photos to basically simulate a first-time interaction or to get additional information, even about known alters, known

other people as well, in terms of, okay, so tell, tell me a bit about how you'd like to allocate money or take money from other individuals, tell me the story of how you made that decision and to add some richness there. The thing that's complicated, as y'all might guess, including folks listening who know a bit about evolutionary psychology, as I know you do, is that you have to think about what's in a face and you have to think about what's in the background and you have to think about what's on the body. There's a lot of things that go into a photo. And so it's something that we've been kind of trying to find that happy medium on as we've been using photos in field contexts, across continents, across evolutionary

psychology, evolutionary anthropology and beyond. What is what is in a photo? What is it telling us? What are people seeing there that they're that we're not able to capture as outsiders, to your point, David. And so it's been interesting. I started out kind of trying to elicit categories that people were paying attention to and then actually introduced the strangers in the photos with those categories. So name, age, and whether they were saying a religious in-group or outgroup or ethnic in group or out group. But again, that is still only capturing a fraction of the variation. And when I asked people back afterwards, how did you make the decision? They would actually tell me things about like wealth that they were inferring from how the

person's face looked or what was in the background of the photo. Oh wow. So there's a lot going on there. It's a fun method, but yeah, it's always that trade-off we're making between that kind of contextual richness and the control that we can get in a in a lab space on campus. Yeah. So what what percent? So when you show someone a photo, what percent of the time do they actually know the person in the photo and what and what percent of the time is it just a stranger? Yeah. So in Bolivia, I tried really hard to make it be stranger. So I actually collected a bunch of photos for my dissertation work before I showed them back to everyone. And I would ask everyone if they knew anyone in the photos.

And if they did, I would swap it out. Okay. It does end up that some folks would say that they didn't know anybody and then they actually did. And then that would drive their decisions. So I was able to, in some circumstances, at least kind of elicit that afterwards and kind of a confessionary follow-up and then deal with those data accordingly, put a little flag on them in the analysis. But yes, that was the that was the plan. But it takes a lot of work to do that, it ends up, especially if you're working in an environment, say, where you're saying these are in group members, these are other folks who I identify as chimane or Mosaten or Intercultural different groups in Bolivia. But then at the same time, you know, at the time there were 16,000 people identifying as

Chimane, every once in a while you would try to present someone with a stranger and they would they would not be a stranger. So lots of little layers here. Got it. Okay. So you have uh you so you're bringing people in to to run the experiment. You show them a you know picture of someone who's in a different group and then presumably you you have some kind of economic game where they could divide a sum of money with this person from the other group. So you're doing this uh many, many times. Um what are what are the results? What are you discovering? So, what I thought was really interesting is at first, right, remember, I'm thinking about market participation. And one thing that folks may not be familiar with is that there's a through line of work in

the evolutionary behavioral sciences about how cooperation changes with market participation. So the idea is that as people participate in markets, social worlds expand and there are more and more strangers in them. Now it ends up that this is not a nuanced necessarily interpretation of the world. So when we go back and look at data from, say, uh Kim Hill and colleagues, uh, my colleague here, Doug Bird, and Rebecca League Bird here at Penn State, my colleagues here, know that social worlds are actually quite large, even for folks who are living in what we would call, say, a small-scale society. And so there are sometimes strangers, and that's not unusual, right? But the idea is that you just get strangers at this just huge level once you start

participating in market economies. There's just so many strangers around. So how is it changing people's behavior with respect to strangers? And is that behavior with strangers scaffolded in any way by group membership? And so what you see is that looking at three different groups of let me not use the word group, three different pueblos indigenas, so three different ethnic groups in Bolivia. So Mosetenes, Interculturales, and the Chimane as well. In Bolivia, what you see is that Chimane were giving a lot less money in these games, this kind of open and cooperative move to outgroup members relative to folks who identified as Moseten or Intercultural. And of course, one might say that's actually the market economy, right?

So Mosatenis and Interculturales are participating a lot more in the market economy. Maybe that's what we're seeing there. But when you actually kind of talk back to people afterwards, after the game, and you ask them how are they making the decision? Who would how are they deciding who gets money and who doesn't? Shamani participants would really regularly say, I am never treated well by members of those groups. They're never good to me. Why would I be good to them? And you really get this sense of kind of the not only the affordances, but also the discrimination. And I think those two things overlap pretty substantially, right? In terms of, am I going to invest in one of these relationships?

And also, these aren't really, in some ways, first-time interactions if you're activating group membership. People are often thinking about this group as an entity and as having a value to them as a potential, say cooperative partner, right? This is often getting ascribed. And so Shimani participants would often say, it's just not worth it to me. And so what's really popping out, there could be a market integration story, but I think it's also a story about the haves versus have-nots and how that's actually mapping onto how people are being treated in Bolivia and to some of the bits of discrimination that were often popping out when I was talking to people. sorry, go a go ahead, Ann. Yeah. No, no, I'm I I would like to hear what you're saying.

Oh yeah, I was just gonna say that's really interesting because I mean I think you know there had been work in social psychology on sort of warmth and competence. So um Cuddy and Fisk and those folks. Um and the idea is that uh when you represent groups or collections of people, um, there's sort of a a deep software structure. I don't think they would have called it evolved design at the time. I think nowadays they might, but you know, for sort of like is this person or group of people competent um to like actually carry things out? Um and then the other one is sort of warmth, and that's sort of a kind of fuzzy word for sort of like how are they treating me? And I like what I'm hearing you say is that really there's the valve

design for when when a group or collection of people are represented, just intrinsic to that is sort of how are they treating me. And that makes complete sense from an evolutionary perspective. And I don't think we've emphasized that enough that there's a valve design, not only for individuals, right? Like it it's intuitive for an individual. Like, you know, if you if you imagine the the evolved software for an agent file for a person, one of the most important things aside from sort of what do they look like for each person would be like how do they treat me? Is this somebody who I love who takes care of me or I need to take care of? Is it my child? Is it my um partner? Is it a family member?

Is it an enemy? Or is it somebody who dislikes me or treats me poorly? That's obviously really important. And then it just extends up to um this category level thing. So if I've been treated poorly by this one member of this group, I will infer that the next time I encounter a member of that group, they don't. And that's I think that's really important in what you said. And I think our literature, even till this day, hasn't really emphasized that evolved design enough that there's this evolved design that sort of intrinsically there's sort of a slot for like how do they treat me? No, agreed. And I think it pops out nicely from some of the literature, but could be emphasized more. Um, one of my favorite papers on this is actually a paper that that John Tuby led.

Uh, it's a book chapter, I believe. And it's kind of focused on these end-person coordination problems. I know you know this paper well, Dave, too. Is it the groups in mind? Groups and mind. Yes, it's the groups in mind paper. And and what I what I like about it as well is just kind of thinking about how one can represent kind of the group as an entity. Sometimes it's called entitativity coming out of social psychology. And it seems to just kind of be this rule of thumb that makes things more straightforward. But also in thinking about this in terms of risk management, I mean, if you are in an environment where groups actually could be sources of harm and you don't know who folks are, and we do know that social worlds have been very large for humans in the past, not

only in the present, is that again, as exactly as you said, having that feature of the mind that's paying attention to groupishness and using that as a first pass, it shouldn't surprise us. What kinds of groups get mapped onto it kind of harkens back to the earlier part of our conversation. And there are certain ones that seem to scaffold that more readily than others, but it's not a hundred percent of the time. Again, it as you said, it depends on the environment. Kids are often renegotiating this, et cetera. And what I just heard you mentioned get into is sort of this idea of part of groups is uncertainty and then also risk. Um, and I know you've been thinking a lot about that. Can you talk a little bit about that, either in the context of what you were just talking

about a second ago or what you've been studying with your students? Yeah, absolutely. So a lot of the work we're talking about actually emerged from my dissertation, which is probably longer ago now than I care to admit. But basically, I spent a lot of time focusing on groups, market integration. And as I mentioned earlier, that led me to think a lot about distance. So humans, omnivorous, really high energy throughput, especially little kiddos, right? You know, I think about we we all have little kids, and three year olds are often spending 50% of their calories every day just on their brain, right? So yes, yes. So yeah, that that's amazing. Yeah. It's amazing. It maybe explains some behavioral things we encounter.

I have an old five year old. Yeah, it explains the love of popsicles. Yeah. The love of popsicles, the in the very deep grumpiness, and also potentially the aversion to certain certain foods as well, right? Which of course is a whole nother tangent. Um, but so you have this really high energy throughput that humans have. And we're omnivorous and we're moving around quite a bit. There's a big through line of mobility, of course, over the course of human history. And so a lot of the problems we had to solve were inherently spatial problems. They were problems of accessing really key resources that could never be obtained locally. So things like salt, for example, in the Amazon basin, they, it occurs in certain areas.

You need it, you have to figure out how to get it. And then also, we have these past and present, these experiences of these really correlated risks. If you have a flood, it hits everyone on the floodplain. If you have a big drought, it can be even wider scale than that. And so the risks that humans have faced have been kind of inherently tied up in space, in space and in time. And one thing I think we miss, and this came up a bit earlier for us when we were chatting, was this idea of who's in and who's out, and thinking about warmth and thinking about family, and that kind of helps us guide in our behavior. Oftentimes we we focus on those more immediate things in the evolutionary behavioral sciences.

We're thinking about family. Maybe we're thinking about neighbors. But are we thinking about the escape valve when things get really rough locally? Or are we thinking about that salt trade or that trade for medicine when you really need something that you can't get locally and you maybe only need it once or twice a year, but then you have to figure out how to get it. And so being able to study that has been key. It's been the focus of my research program largely now for about five or six years, really moving in that direction. And so inherently, it's a risk management problem. It's a risk management problem that comes from the kind of lifestyle we lead and is solved through cooperation. So it's kind of a continuation of my previous work.

And that work on groups is what got me here, right? It's thinking about the these different problems that are being solved. And so today, what's interesting, right, is that when you talk to folks about what are these big risks that they're solving that are in fact, you know, correlated in space or that have to do with accessing resources that are often not locally available, things that really come up are things like climate change, for example, right? So people are experiencing these increasingly long, intense, sometimes highly correlated things like large-scale droughts. And then additionally, also things like natural resource management. So, what strategies are people using to manage resources that are often very large that

require cooperation across distances? It ends up that this kind of perspective applies really well to both of those contexts. That's uh stuff that we're we are all dealing with. Uh, and that's it feels like a big theme. And just to hear to make sure I'm understanding. So in the old literature, there were things about like risk buffering with cooperation, even just something like sharing food. So, like if you're in a context where you don't have modern technology and you can't store food in a refrigerator, then you store the food in your neighbor, right? Because if you provide them with food one day, then they'll give you food the next day. And it sounds like this sort of idea is extending in your thinking and in your work to

groups, in the sense of groups are also sort of a way, or maybe groups is the wrong word, but sort of large scale or larger scale and spatially larger relationships are sort of key for risk buffering or risk management. That's right. And I think it's actually there in the literature before, but it wasn't a focus and it it kind of pops up more as fun anecdotes and less as a through line. So thinking, for example, about Harrow exchange among San people. This is something that pops out in the ethnographic literature. It's spelled H-X-A-R-O for folks who are curious. And it often is something we learn, say in anthropology 101, is we we talk about exchange relationships that are built over time. They're often inherited across generations.

And then when times get rough for San people, they're traditionally very mobile people, sawn people would kind of scatter to the winds, as it were, and go to different places where they could get access to water. And so that shows up there. We even see thinking about Argonauts of the Western Pacific, right? Thinking about Malinowski, we see this examples from the cooler ring, where you maintain relationships from trading over long periods of time that can be important escape valves. So those are there. I think where we often miss them is that really getting down to the brass tacks of what it means to be human and how humans cooperate and how the human social niche is something that enables us to be human and to understand evolved human psychology is something we really

kind of needed to drill into and really structured a lot of the work that we've been doing from 1980s, 1990s, the 2000s. But then to actually kind of come back to some of those things we knew from before and to broaden it out. It's something that that we've known in that ethnographic literature. It's something archaeologists have known for quite a bit of time. And so thinking about how that is structuring human life over the course of human evolution, but then also, of course, the mind has been something that's been interesting for me to kind of retackle and pull together these different threads. Yeah. Do you I I wonder, I mean, I wonder if you've thought of I mean I'm just thinking of this now and I'm sure you've thought of this, where sort of I wonder if some of the de emphasis

on this is also sort of just rhetoric or in David's terminology propaganda in the sense of one could view certain kinds of relationships as disloyal. And so I wonder too if you're talking about, you know, people coming from a particular cultural background doing the science, it's sort of this thing of there's a narrative of what groups exists and loyalty to the group is really important, especially if you're talking to the people sort of whose interest it is to sort of reify the groups. And so I wonder if the reality of actually there's lots of relationships that cross cut groups is sort of um uh it's very uh rebellious in a way to sort of hierarchical relationships or impose group boundaries.

And I wonder, I I don't know if if that's something you've come across or or if that's true, but I'm just sort of thinking real time about that. No, it it's definitely something that's come across. It's it's interesting. I think sometimes folks talk about the science of science and thinking about who's doing the science. And just to give an example, one can see if one's say looking at the literature on war and peace, which is something that is alive and well in thinking about that in the evolutionary behavioral sciences, is that you can see kind of upticks and declines in whether people have been studying warfare or intergroup aggression Western science over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries.

And you can see upticks and downticks that probably track people's own experiences. So big uptick after World War II in terms of folks who were actually involved in World War II, in terms of studying intergroup dynamics and tensions. Funding drives it up and drives it down as well. So you can see funding interest in it over time in terms of where the money's coming from. And then I think also what we do, of course, is we create cultures of research, right? So again, earlier I mentioned this a bit, but I kind of came up in this time where we were thinking a lot of intergroup dynamics in the evolutionary behavioral sciences. And so it was almost my assumption that that is how the world was going to function.

And when it didn't function that way, when there were nuances, when it when it depended, that was news and that required some rethinking. So I think you're right. I think there may be different incentives involved. I think they come from multiple different directions. I also think they come from the experiences of the researchers themselves. And so Cody Ross and I have a paper on parochial altruism. Again, that's in-group favoritism and out-group animosity being paired. So you actually, when you get the two of those things together. And what's interesting is that we actually caution in that paper that we should be sensitive to our own kind of preconceptions about what we're gonna see out there in the

world, which is easier said than done for scientists, right? Requires a lot of unpacking. I've had to do that work myself. I'm still not perfect. Um, but I think it helps, I think it helps ultimately to to have that perspective, to take that step back, because it ends up this is one of the thing I think things I think I can say with with pretty good confidence. Humans are extremely flexible when it comes to our sociality. And I think sometimes we don't give humans the credit that we're due for how we make things work. Right. Yeah. I think that's uh and giving people humans credit, I think is one of the areas that get an evolutionary approach sort of always, and I'll speak for myself, even. I I thought as an evolutionary social psychologist, for example, well, I'm giving people

much more credit than many people who don't take an evolutionary approach, but even I wasn't giving people enough credit. And like the data I would get, you know, every time it's sort of like people are really smart, as you said. The d their evolved psychology is very smart. And I think like our prior should always be that there's even if it's a bad reason, there's a smart reason why people are doing something. So I won't get into this this paper on parochial altruism. It's a really interesting uh paper and set of ideas. Um I I wonder if you would accept um a substitute term for parochial altruism, just tribalism. Uh and that, you know, uh you know liking the in-group and and and disliking the outgroup,

we we sort of colloquially think of that as as tribalism. Uh would would you accept that uh substitution? Hmm. So I I would have two little areas of pushback. I would think just in terms of discourse right now, even thinking about the way folks are talking about these dynamics um in the United States and beyond at this moment. Tribalism is very commonly used and I think very easily recognized. The only just for the listeners, just a couple cautions about why I have some hesitations about the word tribalism. One is that it kind of assumes that tribe and tribalism equate. And so, of course, tribes then often are thought about in group and outgroup, and there's almost kind of an implicit through line of aggression and intergroup aggression there for

tribes, for native groups. And so that's my one little bit of pushback on that term. The other one is actually that parochial altruism has a specific meaning that comes out of early 2000s research, thinking especially about work by, for example, Sam Bowles and colleagues about 20 years ago, and this idea that these two things would coevolve, that you would get in group favoritism co evolving with outgroup animosity. And it's a little bit stronger even than just not liking the outgroup. It's actually kind of it's an us versus them, a really strong thing. Now, yes, other than those two things, yes. I mean, tribalism, we're talking roughly about the same thing. So when folks hear that in the news, we're we're in the same genre.

Yeah. Okay. Well I'll I'll I'll st I'll stick with parochial altruism then because it's a little more um accurate to to what you're talking about. I'll be and then listeners can, you know, understand that it's roughly tribalism, but but not quite. So uh in thinking about parochial altruism, um uh you you go through what I think is the million dollar question, which is what pushes it up and what pushes it down. I mean, this is this is what we all want to know uh as citizens of the world. We see uh tribalism for lack of a better term all around us. We want to know what causes it and what decreases it. Um and I think your your paper has some really interesting insights into that million dollar question.

So so what are some of the um the the mechanisms that can uh push push that up or down? Yeah. So there's three key ideas that we go over in this paper. And I want to rehash these a bit. And they're actually coming from different sides of the evolutionary behavioral sciences. So one of course is resource competition. And in fact this pops up as a really strong through line when we're doing comparative work on on humans and say non-human primates, thinking about the primate order more broadly, is that it ends up when there's incentives for resource defense, when resources are very clumped in one particular place. What you can often see is that you get this these groups cohering around those resources

and often defending them against other individuals, especially if you have to go a long distance before you can find additional resources. So that's something that's popping up in non-human primates. It's something we see in humans too. And for listeners, for example, if you think about uh discourse that involves resources and who has what and who's taking what, you can see how that's kind of kind of clearly activated as well in our own psychology today. The second one is thinking about institutions. What's an institution? Well, it's a collection of norms for how to do things, as the simplest way to put it. And institutions are cultural. And so what's interesting about institutions when it comes to something like parochial

altruism, in-group favoritism, and out-group competition or out-group aggression is that that can actually be structured by culture. And so you can have expectations set about who's in and who's out, who's a reliable cooperator and who's not. That doesn't just come from individual experience, but also from, say, transmission from other individuals. Well, they said that this group isn't a reliable cooperator, or where a boundary is actually set for you that you actually can't talk to those folks. I think you alluded to this earlier, Dave, when you said, you know, if you go over there, are you being disloyal? That itself is an institution, right? This is an expectation about behavior that's kind of coming down and affecting us.

And then this third component is coming a lot from social psychology and it's thinking a bit about valence. So we're talking earlier a bit about warmth, for example. One can, from past interactions, have positive and negative valences towards members of other groups. I feel more warm to them or I feel more cold to them. That's kind of an easy way that often translates across cultures, this idea of warmth. And so what ends up happening is you basically have this updating of uh internal bookkeeping about whether groups are kind of worth the time, whether they're going to cause you harm, et cetera. Those three components are the ones we really hone in on in terms of how we can think about parochial altruism and what moves the needle.

Yeah. That's fantastic. It's a lovely like core um d distillation. Yeah. Um yeah, I mean I I I I like that way of thinking a lot. Um it it sort of ties into the way that that Dave is thinking about groups. I mean, just the mere fact that um we can ascribe an attribute like warmth or competence to an entire group of people as opposed to an individual presupposes that um if one person is is warm toward me, then everyone else in that subset is also going to be warm to me. That inference is itself part of the underlying group psychology, that I can validly generalize this trait from this individual to this other individual by virtue of the fact that they share the group label. And you could imagine that inference not being made.

You know, if someone from another group is mean to me, I don't necessarily have to infer that everyone else from that group is also going to be mean to me. And so what is is driving the mind to make that kind of inference, that if one member does it, then the others have to do it as well, as opposed to not generalizing that inference. When I'd be curious to hear Dave's follow-up on this as well. One thing that I often think about here is the cost of the downside, the cost of being wrong. And partially one would say that would depend on the ecology. So I'm gonna use the word ecology pretty broadly here, but it depends on the social environment. So who's around you? And it also depends on if you're wrong about someone else, does that mean that you're not

going to have a meal? Does that mean that you're not going to have a place to sleep? What are the costs of being wrong? And what's interesting, of course, is that different ecologies can increase or decrease the cost of being wrong. Now, I'm curious, I'd be curious to hear Dave's thoughts about whether the mind kind of defaults to there being a high cost of being wrong or whether that's actually kind of updating in real time with ecological uh context, because I bet you have some thoughts about that. But in general, I think that if there are cues, that the costs of being wrong are high. And those cues can come from a lot of things, they can be socially transmitted. When I say so socially transmitted, that can include the media, right?

So if we're talking about things that are that we're seeing on TikTok, et cetera, social transmission is happening, right? So we're getting cues. So if the costs seem like they are high of being wrong, then if you have one interaction and it goes poorly, you would imagine that the updating would go very quickly. Okay, not worth it. That members of that group, whatever salient identity that person is in, are now folks who are high cost. And again, salient identity here could be lots of different things. I'm sitting in the middle of Pennsylvania. It could be whether you're wearing an Eagles or a Steelers jersey, for example. There's lots of things that could be salient in that. But if you've got those two things, that salient identity and that high cost, and then a

bad interaction happens, you very quickly get that kind of down regulation of interest. Dave, what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I mean, I agree everything with what you're saying. And I think I would even just add to it by putting it back in the language that you provided us, these three factors of sort of one resource competition, to boundaries. I like the idea of sort of boundary propaganda. You've talked about institutions. So one is resources, two is boundary propaganda, and three is valence. So how do you experience? And so just to make it concrete, I would, and this is the idea of costs, is like, let's say start with valence. Like if I have, if we all have a negative interaction from an individual person, right,

then there's sort of a market for, well, what's the story? Is that one person just like an asshole? Or is there like a group of people who are out to get me? And that is a function of sort of the marketplace of boundary propaganda. And then what's the function of boundary propaganda includes competition over resources. So if there is competition over resources, or there's just sort of this market of what are the social groups? am I a winner or a loser? Which ideas stick in this in this kind of coordination of group identities around power and resources? Then if if there's low um competition for resources among boundary propaganda, then we'll just be like that person's an asshole, roughly. But if there is competition for resources and there's the boundary propaganda that's sort

of enough people are sort of buying into and we buy into, they're like, oh, that's an X. And boy, those X's, those are really bad people. And this is an example of X's being bad people. And the next X I see, I'm justified to assume they're gonna that they're gonna be bad too. And I'm justified in taking their stuff. So I view it as like the the three factors you listed is just a beautiful um distillation of the of this dynamic. That's so it's it's it's the cost answer, but that's I'm just kind of making it concrete uh based on what you just said. Interesting. Uh in terms I mean I uh it seems like the the resource competition um aspect of it is sort of like the the source of a lot of the hostility.

So that will so if there's resource competition, there's going to be um boundary propaganda, as Dave put it, to uh uh make the the competing group seem negatively valenced so that we can more effectively outcompete uh that group, right? And so the resource competition is fueling the animosity um in in that case, and it's also fueling the the boundary uh uh uh propaganda as well and the institutions that form around you know who's in and who's out of the group. And to to a certain extent it's it's framing the the valence aspect of it as well. That if we view these people as competitors, we're gonna be more likely to focus on information that frames them in a negatively valenced light. So given that uh resource competition is often at the base of a lot of this stuff,

would you take a broader view of what resource competition is? Is it just physical resources? Or would you consider things like social status or political power to also be resources that lie at the heart of these issues? They absolutely are. It's a great question. So so thinking about status, thinking about what matters, what translates into increased something for folks. We can talk about proxies of fitness. I assume y'all have talked about fitness before on the show, Ms. Mitch. Just a little bit. I don't I don't know. David was sending I actually don't think I don't actually don't like the idea of fitness in the sense of like when when I when you teach early or like new people, because it kind of

essentializes I don't I don't want to go into this, but like, but anyway, but the point is yes, like we've talked about like what gets selected for, I think, and you know, things that would be beneficial from a gene's eye view. I think we've talked about that. Yeah, but we've never we you're right. We haven't directly tackled the issue. We probably should actually, but um, but but yeah, fitness, inclusive fitness, um, you know, uh survival, reproduction, reproduction of kin. That's what that's sort of thing we're talking about. We're talking about fit fitness proxies, we're talking about things that were reliably correlated with fitness in ancestral environments and things that presumably the mind

evolved to uh pursue and and to find uh appealing and and motivating. So with that in mind, uh can continue and who's running this podcast? It's like, what are we 18 episodes in and we haven't even talked about fitness? Like, what's evolution? I don't know. Sorry, Ann. Yeah. You're good. Well so we can talk about about proxies. You've talked about proxies. So that that's that's a great way to think about it. So what are what are the proxies that basically bring well-being? We'll use again kind of a gloss here about you know things that matter for folks. Um, and that could be, for example, that you have well-being in the sense that I mentioned before, you have a place to sleep, you have food, you have you have a job.

Um, these are things that matter for folks. Uh, even things like having health and well-being also matters, right? These are all different things that kind of factor into us doing well, which again, in an ancestral environment would would matter quite a bit. And I'm gonna argue it matters still quite a bit today. And so what what happens, I almost got a little derailed there. So let's see if I can come back to your question. No, you're good. It was fun. Um is again thinking about what what is a resource, we think about what is it that matters? And some of that stuff is, I would, I dare say, uh, attractors, right, for our evolved psychology in the sense that if it is something that is about um often often land,

or if it's about something like food, that is extremely salient to people. And it's actually really easy to get that. I again think about Christina Moya was thinking about on what can one build groupishness. And there's certain things that are easier and that are more commonly used. I think about the same thing when it comes to resources. There are certain things that are just more salient to people. And I think, I think power and I think status is also one of those things that really pops out for folks. Now, does other stuff matter like ability to say get a job, which I alluded to? I I think it does as well, but I think it's actually even tied up, almost scaffolded on some of those other things that the mind is paying a lot of attention to, like social

relationships. We know at the end of the day that a lot of times social relationships are what get you jobs, even in 2025. And so again, that's a bit of a meandering answer, but I agree with you. I think that resources are more than one thing. And I think there are certain resources that are just more salient to people in pretty predictable ways. Yeah. Can I just clarify? So to make sure I understand what you're saying, the idea would be that there's sort of some privileged categories because they've just been so evolutionarily important. So just like to make it really concrete, like if there's a kid growing up and there's sort of like arbitrary groups like the yellows and the blues. And the blues just have more stuff or have more territory, like that, like

having stuff, or having just like territory or land, like just at a very like quote unquote primitive level or very simple level, is sort of a privilege thing that feeds into um uh both sort of the spawning of group differences, but also it's sort of implicitly opening an entry for there's a difference in power here. Um, just because it's so always correlated, you know, in like or think like access like who's eating, who's hungry, who's not, who has stuff or not. I mean, like, as we all know, like toddlers get this, you know, like space, food, just having stuff. Like these are very basic, easy to see things. Um, is that what you're saying? That these are they're sort of like privileged categories in a way, or cues.

They are they are. And I confess in some ways I'm thinking through some of these as as we're talking. Um, but I I think that's the case. I think there are certain ones that are are just more salient, and I think that's why, even say for for listeners of the podcast, thinking back to um previous guests, for example, why things like like leadership and power kind of pop out, why we say uh see certain salient things when it comes to social learning, for example, kiddos are coming into the world and they are paying attention to who's who the haves are and who the have nots are. And what what is had will vary of course across space and time. But things like food and power, I think, are generally quite salient to humans for again,

the exact reasons you specify. I mean, uh, it makes me think that there should be um a theoretical paper on the psychology of a resource or what a resource is and what are the salient attractors for the for the mind to categorize something as a resource um that is worth fighting over, um, and what things are not put into that category. Um it's a very interesting concept. I I would think that um one of the main factors that would cause something to be categorized as a resource is the degree to which it is zero sum or monopolizable, such that the more of it you have, the less of it I have. So land in that case is very salient in terms of a zero-sum resource. The more space you have, uh, the less space I have.

Um, food is uh is kind of a a tricky one. In some cases, um, the more food you have, the less I have if there's like a fixed amount of food here. Um, but in terms of uh food being the product of collaboration, uh uh and and coordination, uh you know, you could work really hard to get food and we could work really hard to get food. And it's not necessarily the case that, you know, there's like a fixed amount of food, and the more food that that group has, the less food uh my group has. Um and so maybe food is is sort of a blurry one, where in some cases it could it could be limited if there's like a specific, say, patch of land, for instance, that produces food, like in an agricultural setting, or if there's a specific body of water where animals tend

to congregate, we want to defend that specific patch of land that gives rise to food. But in other cases, it might not be viewed as a zero-sum resource. On the other hand, political power, I think, is a very strongly uh zero-sum resource. You know, the more power, uh, the more seats in Congress, say the Republican Party has, the less the fewer seats the the Democratic Party has. Um the more control they have over legislation, the less control uh we have. Uh who you know, if if they're in the White House, we're not in the White House. I mean it's it you know is is the space metaphor as well. They're in the physical space of the White House and we are not in that space. Um so I'm curious how you think the the zero-sumness of of

the resource feeds into this and in in what context do we view a resource as zero sum uh uh or not? I actually think this is great. Partially I feel like we're actually writing the paper while we're talking. So that's also fun because this pushback is useful. So as you you brought out, for example, with food, food is not necessarily zero sum. If it is communally produced, I think about um, for example, collaborative hunting, for example, or the way that food can get shared out, then of course it's not it's not zero sum. Same thing with land, right? So if we think about um, for example, traditional landholders thinking about notions of country or landess capital, which is a term coming out of archaeology, there's often an

idea as well that that of course, if land is kind of being co-managed, that people are actually are not experiencing a zero-sum environment when it comes to land. Everyone can use it. I think about the experience of Mardu people, for example, in Australia. And then thinking also about power. That's an interesting one. And I'm sure folks in the audience have thoughts too, but I think it also depends. I think about contexts in which allies, for example, thinking about non-human primates, oftentimes allies can actually depose, for example, an alpha. So if I'm thinking about, say, chimpanzee society, for example. And so, um, and again, that's not a one-to-one with humans, but again, just kind of thinking here about when one would expect to get the notion of a resource and the notion of

a resource that is worth fighting over. I think your zero stumness is hitting on something here, because even then, um, if one's thinking about food, and of course we know toddlers think a ton about food, for example, we know that all too well. Um, at the same time, is food limited? And so it I think your point is is well taken on the zero-sumness. Yeah. I also think about food a lot. Can I push back a little bit, David? Like let me let me challenge the idea that power is zero-sum in the sense of if somebody is um uh in the uh in power, it's not zero sum if I view them as an ally, or if even if I view them as like kind of an outgroup, if I do think like there's a broader social identity that that we sort of have in common.

So it's sort of like nested sets of like, how much do they care about my interests? And I think there is rhetoric now of like, you know, if the Republicans are in power, the Democrats are in power, like you're gonna get nothing. They're the enemy. It's literally zero sum. But I think historically, you know, it's this thing of, well, yes, like we disagree about some issues, but then there's a larger set that we all agree on, and of course we're all together if there's another issue. So I don't know if that's a a devil's advocate position. That might be a too strong articulation. But do would would that view challenge this idea that political power is zero sum? I don't know, actually. I'm I'm just asking both of you.

I yeah, no, it's interesting. I I so maybe there's a caveat there that um it's only zero sum in cases of conflicts of interest. So where there are different groups with different interests, then then it's zero sum, where more more power goes to one group to advocate for those interests. Yeah. But but if there are if there are no conflicts of interests, um then it's not necessarily zero sum. Um if we all have the same interests. Yeah. Um I like that. Yeah. And and this also there is like a little bit of what you talked about in the Pascal Boyer paper. We should have Pascal on in his psychology of ownership, um, where it's sort of uh I think in that paper he's he's he's alluding to the sociality of resources, uh, which

is a really cool idea, right? Wait, this is the idea like David that you're saying you're saying is like we don't really consider oxygen a res or like, you know, air a resource right now. But boy, if David had it all and and you and I didn't have any, you know, we we immediately would, right? Uh and we'd be knocking on your door, David. Um so if we're out in space, all of a sudden air is, right? 'Cause like some people have it, some people don't, and like tanks or something, right? So it's it's it what counts as a resource is not an objective feature of the world. David, I really like that you pointed that out. And I do think like the Pascal paper starts to get into it. But that's that's such a cool sort of unlifting of like the matrix programs, as John Tuby

would talk about. Like it's that we just think resources just exist, but really it's kind of like groups. It's the same principle, right? Like both groups and resources, they're so obvious, but that obviousness is instinct blindness to like there's actually a lot of calculation going on. And the idea that like what counts as a resource is is social is such a weird, cool idea that I agree is just starting to be thought of, David. I think that's a really nice thought. And I mean, and I think that's a lot of what your work is also looking at. If if, you know, you can tell me if you're wrong, but basically it's this idea that sort of even what groups exist is sort of a function of these resources.

As you talked about, like one of the drivers is resource competition, as we talked about earlier. There's an old paper by Liz Cashton that is like, and we're gonna have Liz Cashton on it at some point. I'm going back and forth with her scheduling, that's incredible. That talks about, and Annie, I saw you nodding your head. I'm sure you know this paper even better than I do, which is that she found that the density of ethnic groups across the globe is a function of basically what she discovered was sort of like the density of resources. So, for example, if you're in a really high-latitude area where you have to travel very far to just get enough stuff to keep a small number of people alive, because you got to go get

a polar bear or you know you've got a fish, then the the spatial scale of a group identity will be very large. But if you look at like very much lower latitude areas where there's like rainforests and density of food and you can just go to the river really close by or go to trees really close by and get everything you need, then the number and density of sort of group identities increases. And for me, that was just mind blowing. And it's exactly like in in accordance with with Anne with your what you're saying here, which is that, you know, sort of what gr drives these containers of cooperation ultimately, as David put it, is sort of this engine of of group of of resource competition or or corpor cooperation or competition for resources.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I I love this uh this this train of thought. I mean, uh one interesting aspect that I I throw in just because we're um we're spitballing in an interesting area is um jobs as a resource. Um what's interesting about jobs is that they're kind of they're they're somewhat unprecedented. I uh there were there and that there wasn't really a market economy in ancestral environments, although certainly we had roles and division of labor, but we didn't really have uh quite formalized jobs the way we do now. and um it seems like a lot of people think of jobs as a resource. You know, there's rhetoric, uh anti-immigration rhetoric that you know they're taking our jobs. Um and what's interesting is that economists will tell us that they're actually not a

zero-sum resource. That when when immigrants come in, uh, you know, yes, uh they might take some jobs, but they also produce more jobs because they're there are more consumers to uh consume resources which creates more jobs and then they they work and they grow businesses and they create more products to sell and and you know they add more mouths to feed which creates more money and so when you so when you think about it in terms of uh you know the economic system the uh there isn't really like a fixed amount of labor right there's known as like the lump of labor fallacy where you know less few fewer jobs for for you means yeah or more jobs for you means fewer jobs for me that's really not how it works in the economy and yet

there's something about it that we we sort of think of uh jobs as like a a fixed resource. It's it's sort of an attractor for the mind. Um and I'm wondering, you know, you you mentioned Ann that you were working with with societies that were just starting to integrate into a a market economy if if you have if you've caught wind on any of this psychology of of of whether job is is is is seen as a resource or not. That's a really interesting question. Is it seen as a resource? My so my brain's going in a couple different directions. I'm going to start to answer the question to see where it gets us because I actually haven't thought about this before. So, first line: one thing that we know is that households are

basically at the end of the day, if we think about the household as a unit, risk diversification is kind of a through line of household decision making. And one thing that we see again and again, whether it's planting more diverse crops for agriculturalists, whether it is pursuing different kinds of game if you're if you're hunting, whether it's having different income streams from different sectors if you're participating in markets, is that households are diversifying. We see that kind of pop up again and again, whether we're, you know, economists, whether we're uh anthropologists, et cetera. And so when I think about resources in this context, about what a job is, I think about it as kind of a reliable source of diversification.

So that's kind of answer number one there is that it's kind of part of a portfolio from the household perspective, which I think is really salient for folks. And then additionally, when you add to that, that that particular avenue of resource access can be outsized in terms of how much it's bringing into the household. I think that, again, thinking about this kind of zero-sumness, what is the magnitude of that pathway when it comes to household diversification. And I think here we're thinking a bit about concepts that show up in something like human behavioral ecology when it comes to making decisions about how to invest one's time, what are the average returns versus the variance, and that really will affect decision making.

It's something we also see when we're talking about household decision making. If we're talking to a labor economist or talking to an agricultural economist, is thinking about those trade-offs again when it comes to mean versus variance. And so what I'm hearing here a little bit when I'm thinking about jobs is people are often talking about high paying jobs. And high paying jobs are as salient in the US right now as they are in rural Bolivia right now is how do I get a high paying job? When people talk to me about long distance relationships, they're often talking about that resource as the key thing. How do I find a good job, a high paying job that pays well is something that's really salient.

And so I think what ends up happening then is that if there's not just competition over jobs, but there's competition over that one job that is going to be the high mean, low variance job that's going to be coming into the household and it's going to just really expand our options when it comes to thinking about diversification portfolio, that's when I would expect that competition to arise. Interesting. Yeah, no, I like that distinction a lot because you know jobs as an abstract category don't really make much sense to it doesn't make sense to think of them as as zero sum or as limited, um, because you know they grow as the economy grows. Uh but one job is a zero-sum resource. If you, you know, if we both want the same job, if you get it, then I don't get it.

You know, uh, you know, if the president, that is one job, you know, if uh if the Republicans get that job, then the Democrats don't. Right. Um, and so that's that's an interesting way of thinking about it. Um, that it's it's not necessarily jobs as an abstract category, but a a particular job or particular type of job um that that might be driving um this this kind of psychology. Um cool. I like that too, because I mean it reminds me, coming from like a social dynamics perspective, where um there's a lot of situations where people do really sort of horrible things, like they have a job that involves, like, I mean, like at the extreme version, you know, like working in a concentration camp. Like, actually, what you're describing reminded me of when I visited one, where it was sort

of like, why would somebody ever who's sort of in the victim category ever have one of these jobs? Or why would they ever do one of these jobs that sort of is like helping the machinations of the camp? And it was because there was a finite job. And it was basically, am I better off having it? Do I get more food or not? And if I don't take it, someone else will. And so it's not like I have the power to change the fact that the jobs exist. Like I don't want the job to exist, but like it's just basically like, do I have enough food for me and maybe the person I love over on the other side of the camp and I can give them a little more food? And I think that's an extreme version, but I think this happens a lot where like a job,

just as David put it, just like there's this thing of like, here's the package, like, take it or leave it. And if you leave it, someone else will take it. I think that's a really powerful decision. And I think there's lots of people who have jobs. There's aspects of them they don't like, but institutionally it's sort of like it's a package deal. And it's just the question of like, is it better for me to take it or leave it. And I think a lot of sort of negative externalities are a consequence of people making what what are pretty rational decisions in that context of saying, well, take it. Right. Um, yeah. I wonder, does that happen in the market integration thing where people who are going in

sort of don't like aspects, but the old package deal is sort of, well, I can't beat this as a resource package. Like, is that something you've encountered? Hmm. That's interesting. Yeah. So um I can talk about the larger literature, but let me start with some some stories here. So um we can start in Bolivia. I work in in Kenya mostly now, Kenya and and a little bit in Tanzania with Chris. And what what often happens is that people will take relatively um low-skill wage labor jobs. They're a bit precarious. I mean, again, if one had the entire range, as you say, of options of jobs, then one could pick and choose. But if there's a really limited choice set, um, and there's fewer, there's few outside

options, again, I'm thinking here about a lot of the language that pops out of things like um behavioral ecology or even optimal decision-making in the context of evolutionary psychology, the choice set's very small. It's often constrained. It's a constraint for folks like say Shimane laborers. It's constrained for folks who are migrants, often moving between country and country. There's often a really constrained labor market from which to choose. And then within that set, one may just take the best of a bad deal, as it were. And it it might be again that it's better that one has it home or it diversifies options for the family because families are actually often part of the decision making in terms of

job taking. And so I think that's to your point, partially what we're seeing here. And that's what we definitely see, I was seeing in Bolivia as well, is that having that wage labor job, it it wasn't perfect. The hours were long, you were away from your family for long periods of time. Sometimes folks would take advantage of you. it was an income. Right. Yeah, and that's a really powerful, I think, way to think about this as jobs, there's resources, and then that there's just what's the market and what's the choices. I think that's a really and I don't know. I mean, I'm not an expert in this either, but I I don't know if this has been looked into enough. Yeah. You know, I think there might be a bit.

I know Pascal Boye has a a paper on folk economic beliefs. There might be something there about jobs as a resource, I forget. Um but certainly there are a lot of you know folk intuitions we we bring to bear in in into a market economy um that that economists might um scoff at. Um so uh uh related to this uh discussion of of of jobs uh is is inequality. Um so I'm curious what your thoughts are on uh how uh what what the role of inequality is in in parochial altruism. Yeah, and I assume here thinking kind of a bit about in between group inequality and how that can reify over time. So what's interesting, and this is popping a bit out of social psychology, is this idea of the relative difference between two different groups.

So let's just say for the for the sake of argument that one has two different groups that are salient, that people recognize, maybe they're ethnic groups, for example, could be something else, could be just social classes. And one group has a lot and the other group has very little. It ends up that, at least the data show, and I'm gonna channel this here, that if that difference is very large, you actually can sometimes get what's called magnanimity going from the group that has to the group that doesn't have. So thinking about donations to the poor, for example, or thinking about charitable giving more broadly. But what ends up happening is that if the distance between those two groups shrinks in

terms of the power dynamic, let's say power is a resource here. If it's uh thinking about money, if that's what it is, again, these are all things that could matter to folks, and that distance starts to shrink, then the behavior of the group that has more is going to change. And it partially depends again on whether there's some zero-sumness involved, right? So I have power, and then this other group is looking like they may also be vying for power here, and that that distance starts to shrink, or it's money and that distance starts to shrink. That's when that charitable giving is at risk of going away. That's when you tend to see more between group tensions. What I think is really interesting here, and again, this is coming as an anthropologist

who's often thinking about humans in this larger context of primates, is that when you start to decrease the power distance between non-human primate apes as well, thinking about say chimpanzee groups, for example, is that that is also when you start to get a lot of intergroup tension. So it can be numbers. Um, you kind of have very similar numbers between two groups. That usually signifies that they're similar threats, they have similar potential to hold on to resources between two different groups. That's also when you see tensions rise. You might not see an attack, but you might see those tensions go up. And so I think it's an interesting through line. And I believe that's the thrust of your question is what happens with inequality.

And I think it actually just depends on how extreme the inequality is. And you actually see different behaviors from this group to this group. Now, just to quickly clarify here at the end, I'm thinking a lot about the group who's being threatened. If you think about the group who is actually the have not position, if there's a big distance between those two groups, that that doesn't mean that folks in the group who don't have anything aren't going to clamor for more as well. So the experience of being in those two groups is going to be quite different. That's that's uh a really fascinating way of putting it. Um it it it it's somewhat counterintuitive in that, you know, uh from a naive perspective,

you might expect, you know, the greater the inequality, the greater the animosity. You know, if if this group is really powerful and really dominating the other group, then that's gonna that's gonna be the worst situation um for for um for the lower group. Um but what you're saying is it's actually more complicated than that. That um it's not so much with the with the inequality is greater you see more conflict, but but it's when it's smaller, uh actually fascinatingly you you see more tensions. Uh and so I'm curious, you know, how how would you explain that from an evolutionary perspective? You know, why why when the power differential decreases you see more tension? What is the evolutionary logic there?

Yeah. And I will note too a couple things. So, so first, just to kind of give a wave here to political science, is that oftentimes when it comes to things like ethnic tension or political tension, one of the worst things you can have is two groups that are about 50 50 in terms of their size. Yeah. That is really hard in terms of getting things done when it comes to collective action, to governance, etc. Actually, if you have smaller groups with different amounts of power, it's actually less bad. So food for thought there. But when you I think the key thing here, and that you alluded to, David, I want to I want to pull it back up, is that it's not when you start to get these tensions, is actually when

distance is shrinking. So if there's actually movement in statuses, that's when you start to see this pop out. And again, I'm channeling other folks' work here right now, so this isn't my own, but that is what I think is where we start to see threat kind of pop out. So if we're going back to thinking earlier about groups, about boundary pop propaganda, which I thought was a really interesting term, Dave, that I would like to borrow. It's David's. Oh, there we go. I'm sorry, whoever brought it up earlier. No, no, I brought it up, but I'm I'm giving credit to David because that's baked into a lot of David's um pol political idea his idea of like political discourse is all propaganda. I love that David is bringing back the idea of propaganda, which you know, it just lays

bare. You know, the idea of rhetoric is just very sort of like fuzzy and like propaganda, it's much more direct. So I just like this. So that's so that's very much a David term, but I did say it. You're right. So I'm just yeah, yeah. You added the word boundary to it. And so I did, I did, I did it. Yes, exactly. Yes, boundary propaganda. I do like boundary propaganda. I should put that on a t shirt. Yeah. Yeah. We need to do that. Well, and I think that again, thinking about those three things mutually reinforcing, which is I I think a key thing emerging from our conversation earlier and from this larger understanding that we have in evolutionary behavioral sciences and in the social sciences

and ecological sciences more broadly, because we're really kind of playing with all those ideas here today, is this idea that when you start to see that threat, is that that's when you should start to see things pop out like sudden resource salience, like uh boundary propaganda, like the valence shifting about warmth, for example, that these things are kind of moved together in a way that that y'all laid out really nicely earlier. And so it's that closing of the gap that seems to be something that's really salient for folks. Do you think that that's because of like coordination? So, in the sense of like if the large group in the small group, the small group is sort of like, look, we're not, we're not gonna, we might, if we're

integrated into this group, let's say, you know, we might become like a subgroup or sub-identity, but there's no way we can like just take over the coordination or cultural norms. And I think there's even an analog in the animal conflict literature where like you don't get fighting. Like fighting is very costly, right? So there's this whole literature of the asymmetric or of attrition, which is sort of jargony for just this idea that if you have a huge lion and a very small lion, they just look at each other and they don't fight, right? Because the small lion's like, well, I know it's gonna happen. The big lion's like, I know what's gonna happen. And so the small lion just backs off. There's a complication, right?

Which is of course, if the small lion is starving and the big lion is sated, then there might be right escalation, but all sequel there, they're the same. But then if the lions are equally matched, they'll escalate and they might like stalk back and forth. And what they're trying to do is evaluate if there was a conflict, who would win. And if they can both arrive at that, that knowledge, then they will not even touch each other. And it's only when there's still ambiguity that there's an escalation to actually sometimes ritualize conflict, which you know, for rattlesnakes, they like wrestle. They don't actually bite each other, like they're coordinated about this, right? Um, and it's only when there's really a matched thing that the conflict escalates.

So it almost, I wonder if it's this thing of um that it's sort of obvious who the winner and loser is. And it's only when it's so equally matched that it just drives that you never reach this thing of like, well, it's obvious who would win in a conflict over coordination, more or less, right? Um, of sort of whose norms wins out. And then that would be why it it escalates. Um I don't know what you what you think about that. I think that's interesting as I'm hearing kind of two different ideas there. So one is the the norm and the coordination perspective, and the other one is just the physical harm perspective as well in terms of taking that on. Yeah. And I think I think what's interesting here is that one might make two slightly different

predictions about that. So the harms thing in terms of numbers, I think is very salient. As you said, across the animal world for humans as well, There are workarounds to that in terms of initiating conflict in humans and otherwise. But yes, I think numbers matter a lot in terms of how things are structured when it comes to those intergroup tensions. Thinking again about chimpanzees, sizing up group size, often through vocalizations. A lot of times when when you have um lots of intergroup tension in in primates, vocalizations are really key for actually hearing group size. And then also here thinking about norms and what would what would take hold and whether coordination would actually be something that would be more challenging for me as a

member of a smaller minority group in the context of of coordination if there was more involvement. I'm thinking here I'm in a riff a smidge and then I want to see if I'm on base with where you were headed with this Dave. So I'm thinking about work done by John Bunce. I was for a while, I mentioned the Mox Planck Institute earlier, Mox Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology. I did my postdoc there with Richard McElwreath and crew. And in that space, John Bunce was working a lot on with Machiganga people in Peru and with Mestizo people in Peru, who are a numeric majority and who had a settlement very close to the Machaganga community, which Machigenga people, for reference, are living in the Amazon, have been living there traditionally for quite a

long time. And so then the question is, is what happens at the boundary, right? When you have these two different norm systems, one group is much bigger numerically. what is going on? And when do you actually say get norm displacement across those boundaries? Are those boundaries actually sources of really strong norm differentiation? And again, for listeners who have heard your conversation with Christina Moya, a lot of this will sound familiar. And so what's interesting is that it partially depends on the incentive for the minority group to hang on to those norms. And there's lots of different contexts we can think about this today, thinking about indigenous people, for example, and the continuity of traditional ecological knowledge.

We can think about incentives to hang on to traditions for folks. Even I'm sitting in Pennsylvania right now, I think about plain communities, for example, so Amish communities, for example, hanging on to norm systems. And I think it partially depends on the perceived incentives for hanging on to that. And it, including for the purposes of coordination within the smaller community and what those affordances are. Again, that's a meandering answer to your question just because I thought it was interesting. But that's where my brain went. Yeah, no, that makes a lot of sense. I think that also explains generational things, right? Like if you're a more senior Amish person, just for example, I mean, you could use any

example, but it's just in a minority uh numerically or norm in a norm sense. Um, you know, if you're a senior person and that's your status, you've kind of locked into that's your status scheme to to Riff on David, then, you know, you're incentivized to sort of stick with it. But you're if you're a kid, you know, like then maybe you're looking around and you're like, well, maybe there's other ways to make a living in this this world that doesn't involve, you know, sitting in a buggy. I mean, I I I love horses, so you know, but I'm just so nothing personal against that. But just so but I think that might explain like kind of intergenerational conflict of sort of like, you know, the market. And maybe you mean Adam, you can tell me better than most people.

I mean, is it true that like a lot of times the market integration is driven by kids and sort of, you know, like the the older folks are sort of, you know, I mean, they're not, they're not necessarily locked in. They're not necessarily Leadites per se, but I mean they they probably are all all sequel, a little more locked into the status game or their way of making a living than the young people who are sort of still flexible and figuring out what what they can and want to do. Is that fair? Like, do you find generational effects like that? Yeah. And this, so I'm going to switch literatures in my head here. And again, I'm going to be channeling other literatures out there, thinking a little bit

about econ, thinking a little bit about anthropology. But in general, when we start to see folks pick up a new trade, leave their community, for example, engage in wage labor, they often tend to be younger. Part of that is a life stage thing, for example, right? So oftentimes folks are unmarried. It's actually easier to pick up and move. And so that's often when we see it. And sometimes then that we'll actually come home to marry and either go back to the same trade or et cetera. So I think part of it's a life stage thing. I also think it's interesting to think about the evolved psychology here. So again, you'll have Liz Cash and once another opportunity to talk about um spatial experiences among young folks and moving around and the opportunities to find mates among

jobs and everything else. It's a little riff right there. But I think that you're also right in the sense that A, there's you haven't invested much. There's not a lot of sunk cost in terms of investing into the status game in a particular community if you're if you're leaving early. That's a really interesting point. I think another one of them, as you said, is kind of the reskilling. You're not reskilling if you're 40 years old and shifting to a new sector versus you're actually kind of coming up in that sector. And I do think kids have their eyes open, right? They're able to see what's out there. They're often, when we when we talk about cultural change, they're often the prime movers, right?

So they're often the ones who are picking up the fresh languages, they're picking up the new norms, they're the ones who are changing languages or changing cultural practices. And sometimes older folks in communities have some thoughts about that because that often has something to do with with cultural loss that happens further down the line. Um, including in Bolivia, where say traditional languages are being spoken less and less as the affordances of speaking Spanish and even English are greater and greater. So I think there's a few different things going on there. But I think you're right in terms of I'm if I'm hearing this correctly, almost like the games we play when it comes to status, when it comes to investment in reputation, and also

investment in different social networks who are going to be, again, bringing that cooperation back, opportunities for for mutual support. Where is that going to be? Where are you going to put your roots down? What's what's in the best interest for self and family? And there's a lot of decisions I think that are going on there that could be could be unpacked even further. It's an interesting question. Yeah, that's really interesting. I think what you just said, I think summarizes so much of the dynamics, like even with in modern culture, right? Like of like there's competition for sort of getting kids. Like I'm I'm thinking even, I remember um, you know, I I grew up kind of religious and I always have a little bit of an ear to like how do these religions or like, you know,

religious proselyte work, proselytation, religious proselytation work works, excuse me. Um and there's this thing of like get them while they're young um thing. And I think it's a very, it's the expression, I think, of a very similar thing, right? Where um and and in in other contexts too, where it's sort of like education is important. We set kids on a trajectory to either be like pro social, antisocial from the perspective of the society, right? So like that's why we have after school programs or like teach them a trade or a skill so they stay out of trouble. You know, there's these all these things. And it's it's you know, from a m a stepped back perspective, if you drop the morality out, it's really just about it's it's just you're providing there's competition for sort of

what's my status scheme I'm gonna play. And it's sort of this institutional acknowledgement that a lot of times kids, exactly as you said, their their eyes are open and they're sort of they're the ones shopping because the uh the switch costs are low. And I love what you said. Those are I think those are really great points. Yeah. Really interesting. I mean, it i it brings to bear um that, you know, back to this conversation about resources, it it may be that um the local packet of of norms and linguistic practices, um that that this is itself a kind of uh uh resource that people fight over. And that, you know, if I'm in the older generation and I grew up speaking a certain language and the younger generation is starting to speak a different language, well, that's

a huge threat to me. If if if everyone else is going to speak this language that I don't know how to speak, um, that's going to exclude me from social opportunities, from social networks. It's going to lower my social status because I don't know how to speak the reigning language. So I might really have an incentive to rebel against this cultural change that puts me on the losing end of this new status game. And you could imagine similar dynamics arising from other changes in local norms and status games. You know, there are going to be uh um some people who win out from those changes and some people who really lose from those changes. So culture itself can be a battleground with winners and losers.

Uh and and there can be a zero-sumness to that uh as well. Yes, I it agreed. And I think what's really interesting about culture too is that it emerges from lots of individual decision making. You can be in a position of power and have an outsized influence on what happens with cultural practices, but there's a lot of negotiation coming all the time. We're not, of course, blank slate. I know y'all have talked about that. We're not just here to receive culture and not negotiate a bit and actually kind of be pushing back and looking at that, looking out for for what's good for us. And and I think that's interesting in terms of, you know, thinking about how that negotiation's happening in in real time.

So yes, to your point. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, in in in a way, we're trying to change the status game in the social sciences to, you know, to privilege evolutionary perspectives, which, you know, we win out from that because we've invested a lot of time and energy into learning uh evolutionary ideas. And the people who lose out from that are the people who have not invested time and energy in learning evolutionary ideas, and their status is going to fall if we end up winning, which, you know, who's to say whether we will or not? But yeah, uh every cultural change has winners and losers. Um, and I think that that sheds light on why you know we have things like culture wars, wars over culture itself.

Um Yeah. That's great. Um and if you're listening, you are learning, so you're not the losers. Yeah, exactly. You'll be on the winning side of the cultural work. Because you're a learning side. Um and uh we can we can sort of I uh this has been an incredible conversation and it's wonderful. Um I'm gonna just ask this question now because we need to get to it and we can see how far we we are we are reaching the end here. But is there anything we should have asked you? Um and one of the questions, uh maybe or one of the options, and you can just, you know, say whatever you want. We we've gotten away from asking people how they got into stuff because you know, people also said like I don't some people said they didn't care but I am I am curious sort of like

you know um if uh so yeah one is what should we we should have asked you and number two um if you do have sort of uh if you want to share sort of like what your background was or how you got into doing this especially for me and I think I have talked to people who are very interested in like especially people who decide to go to the field you know because you know as as as we've all heard from people who are in the field, you know, there's there's there's lots of things in the field. Um and that's quite a hardship, but it's also a really exciting and interesting place to be. Um and I think at least for those of us who just stay in the lab, um, sometimes it feels like it requires an explanation, fair or not.

Um but like how did you get to that point? Um or any other question you think we should have asked you. Yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting. Well, I want to talk a little bit about kind of uh that background and how I've ended up where I am now, which will also open up for for folks who are listening if they want to follow up with me and talk about um the kind of applied work I'm I'm doing now combined with with some of the basic science that I do. Um so the short story is that I was in undergrad and I loved psychology, anthropology, I loved ecology and I loved international relations. And I was sitting in a social psych class one day, and there was a single paragraph in my textbook about evolutionary psychology.

I was at UCLA. And so I Googled evolutionary psychology, UCLA, and found Dan Fessler, who was my undergraduate advisor. And so that's actually how I ended up in the evolutionary behavioral sciences, is it checked all of my boxes. And so when you hear that story, what you'll also hear is you'll hear kind of the international relations, that kind of global perspective. And that is the the bug that's been sitting in there the whole time that got me to the field. So if you are listening and you are like, I could I could never do field work, that was me. Um I was scared of everything. I have a five-year-old she's turning five tomorrow and she is afraid of some very predictable things that we we know about from studying evolutionary

psychology, things like the dark things like monsters. Shout out to Clark Barrett here as well, and things big dangerous animals are very salient. And so I was afraid of all those things as an adult. And here I was living in the Amazon with no electricity. Um, there were lots of bugs. We were, you know, getting sick all the time. And this is the life that folks live in the Amazon every single day, right? It was just me experiencing it for the first time as an outsider. And what I really liked about it is first of all, I felt like I could do anything, which was really nice. It made any things that came after seem less challenging to do, which is nice. The other thing also that I've really enjoyed about it is I love thinking hard about the

mind. I love thinking hard about human sociality, about why it is the way it is. And I also really love the opportunity to apply that. And one of the reasons I caught that particular bug is by living with folks and seeing what was salient to them. Climate change came up a ton when I was working in Bolivia. People were experiencing huge floods. A big flood came in in 2014 and really affected everyone. And I was there in the aftermath. And so that was an opportunity to also think for me how can I continue to do the work that I love doing when it comes to thinking hard about human evolution and human sociality, and at the same time, actually apply that to the context of climate change or apply that to the

context of natural resource management. And so what's really fun now is I do my job in terms of doing that hard thinking and also doing the applied work and pairing the two. And I think what's interesting too, speaking of the incentives offered by granting agencies that is ebbing and flowing in real time in the United States, but in a broader global perspective, when it comes to the granting landscape, there's still a lot of interest in how to go from that basic to the applied when it comes to things like climate change. So I'm always happy to talk about that more, but that's kind of how I landed at where I am now. And how you'll hear me in one conversation talk about parochial altruism. And then in the next c conversation, I might be talking about how people are migrating in

response to certain climate shocks and not others and what leads people to move. Uh, those are all parts of my purview today. That's great. Yeah. I think a lot of people, um, as they get um far enough along that it's not desperate um in their career, they want to do something and make an have an impact too. And I think that's that's wonderful that you're able to to do that. And uh um yeah, I uh that's just that's fantastic. Yeah. Well I think we're um getting to that time in the episode where we ask our uh our typical question which is uh is there anything we should have asked you beyond that um the the really funny thing, and I'll say this because it came up recently, is someone said to me, uh, are you leaving academia?

And I say this because I actually spend some time, these are for folks who who end up looking me up after this. I spent some time with a foot in industry and a foot in academia. And David, I see you here. And one of the reasons I really like it, and maybe, maybe you too, is that I get the best of both worlds. I actually think I heard you mention that when you were talking about your your story, is that I get to spend time kind of helping folks figure out how they can help other people, what what folks need, how to better serve a community or a customer. It's a lot of fun. And then I also, of course, do my full-time job faculty at Penn State. And so I really love that. I actually love academia for that reason.

So here's a little plug for academia for folks who are thinking about the compare and contrast is that in my academic life, I'm actually rewarded for doing research and then also contributing to things like professionalization and contributing to things like placing our students in other sectors. I think it's really fun and it's another opportunity to think about how our work translates beyond just the academic realm. So that would be the question to ask me. Answer is no, I actually love my job. And I love my job for that specific reason because it actually is mutually compatible with doing that kind of work. Well yeah, no, it's uh it's it's a great I mean it's it's wonderful to to be in in that to

have that privileged position of of of getting the best of both worlds and and uh and you know being in both sectors. I will say, you know, I do have a blog and I can write stuff that, you know, thousands of people will will read, but um uh it's not it doesn't give me the same fulfillment as, you know, you know, having a a a a theoretical insight and and writing an academic paper about it, even though, you know, maybe ten, twenty people will read the academic paper um compared to thousands on the blog. Still, those ten twenty people will take that idea and they will, you know, maybe they'll amend certain things to it, maybe they'll elaborate on it, maybe they'll criticize certain parts of it and they'll build off of it.

Um and it will lead to intellectual progress. Um and you don't get that with the blog post. Um people will read it and then they'll just go on about their day and then maybe they'll forget about it next week. But if you write an academic paper, you are contributing to intellectual progress in a in a meaningful way. Um and so that for me is is the is the thing that keeps me uh uh going uh in in that direction. Uh just the the the thrill of of uh intellectual progress and and contributing to it. Um so thank you for uh contributing to our intellectual progress and and the intellectual progress of our of our listeners. Um and uh yeah, this was a wonderful conversation. We really appreciate having you.

Yeah, thank you for your time. Yeah, this was super fun. I feel like um you know we we covered a lot of ground. Um I'm certainly gonna have to listen to this to catch everything, so uh But it was it was wonderful. Thank you, Ann. And I know we've taught we've hit on a lot of people, some that we've had on before, some we haven't. Um, and uh, and you know, you you have created and part of a wonderful social network of people moving the um the knowledge forward and intellectual progress forward. And so thank you for that. Um and we look forward to having you back and having some of your uh academic lineage um in both directions on as well. So thank you for being part of the evolutionary behavioral sciences.

And I think your your ability to sort of articulate and even like source a lot of that. I think for a lot of people, especially who might be outsiders, you you have really articulated the connections between areas so so well in this in this session. So thank you for doing that too. Absolutely. Yep. Study human society and love it myself. So happy to do it. Thank you for having me. It's been a great conversation. And also shout out to Pascal Boyer for writing the paper that we were all thinking about writing. And I realize that he's gotten there before us. Well, I think it I think it's a paragraph. We have to see. I feel like we should call Pascal up and dial a friend here. And uh, but we'll have to have him on, or we can all four talk about it.

so um in a in a later episode. But yeah, thank you again, uh Ann, and uh and thanks everybody for listening. So David, uh this is the end of the podcast. People made it through. Um and uh I don't have my This is the part where we say, uh, you know, uh leave us a kind review, visit us on Patreon. Uh honestly just talk to us, reach out to us on social media, or send us an email. Like we we love to hear from you if you have any questions, topics you want to get covered, ideas for episodes. We uh we're we're very uh friendly and and pleasant to talk to. You know, I don't think I have we've ever linked the email. We should put that link in the show notes. I'll do that. yeah, that's we should probably do that.

That'll be an oversight. So send us an email, but we won't tell you what the email address is. We'll we'll put that in. One of our mem many bumbling mistakes. Exactly. Okay, good. Well thanks everybody for listening. Have a good week.