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Unlike non-human primates, humans are highly tolerant of out-group strangers, as evidenced by the ethnographic and archaeological records; however, very little research has addressed when and why people build relationships with out-group individuals. What selection pressures might have favored inter-group relationship building in humans? As reducing temporal variation in resource access has been crucial in the human foraging ecology, I suggest that relationships with out-group members may provide access to non-local resources and buffer resource shortfalls striking entire communities. The relevance of out-group relationships is not limited to small-scale or prehistoric contexts either, as out-group members can also provide access to difficult-to-access resources like market items. My research program is focused on the above question; in my dissertation, I address three components of it: Which social and ecological factors favor out-group relationships? What do people look for when picking partners from out-groups? When people value out-group members, will they avoid behavior that would inflict costs on these individuals? Among three populations of horticulturalists in Bolivia, I measured valuation for out-group members using a non-anonymous economic game in which participants could be generous to in-group and out-group strangers. I found that participants were highly generous to both in-group and out-group strangers. Participants invest more in out-group relationships when they have less non-local (i.e., market) resource access, as proxied by their subjective socioeconomic status relative to others in their community. As has been demonstrated in the literature on in-group partner choice, participants prefer strangers perceived to be "good people" (a term associated with cooperative qualities in the Bolivian context). I also expected that out-group partner choice would track opportunities for resource access; indeed, participants also give more to strangers from out-groups perceived to have more market or political resource access. That said, the effect of resource access on out-group valuation and out-group partner choice varied by proxy. In a 55-country sample, I found that participants were less likely to condone corrupt acts, which generate costs for others, when they identified with larger groups of individuals, a proxy for valuation of these individuals. However, there was a caveat: participants with local identities were as opposed to corrupt acts as those with country, continent, or world identities, while those with regional identities were the most willing to condone corrupt acts. Consistent with my suggestion that out-group members buffer actors against variation in resource access, participants experiencing the greatest degree of resource shortfalls were more likely to not find corruption permissible; however, this was also true of those experiencing the least amount of shortfall. In sum, valuation for out-group partnerships does track resource access in three populations of horticulturalists and a sample from 55 counties, but the effect varies by measure in instructive ways. For example, the negative relationship between market items owned and out-group valuation in one population may reflect experiences of discrimination in market contexts, rather than a lack of utility for out-group relationships per se. As discussed in the conclusion, my ongoing and future work capitalizes on these variable effects as it delves further into the nature of out-group relationships in the Bolivian context.

To benefit from information provided by others, people must be somewhat credulous. However, credulity entails risks. The optimal level of credulity depends on the relative costs of believing misinformation versus failing to attend to accurate information. When information concerns hazards, erroneous incredulity is often more costly than erroneous credulity, as disregarding accurate warnings is more harmful than adopting unnecessary precautions. Because no equivalent asymmetry characterizes information concerning benefits, people should generally be more credulous of hazard information than of benefit information. This adaptive negatively-biased credulity is linked to negativity bias in general, and is more prominent among those who believe the world to be dangerous. Because both threat sensitivity and dangerous-world beliefs differ between conservatives and liberals, we predicted that conservatism would positively correlate with negatively-biased credulity. Two online studies of Americans support this prediction, potentially illuminating the impact of politicians' alarmist claims on different portions of the electorate.

This archive contains the complete datasets described in Fessler et al.'s "Political Orientation Predicts Credulity Regarding Putative Hazards", along with the analytic variables and R code employed, each as separate files.

Decades of research conducted in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, & Democratic (WEIRD) societies have led many scholars to conclude that the use of mental states in moral judgment is a human cognitive universal, perhaps an adaptive strategy for selecting optimal social partners from a large pool of candidates. However, recent work from a more diverse array of societies suggests there may be important variation in how much people rely on mental states, with people in some societies judging accidental harms just as harshly as intentional ones. To explain this variation, we develop and test a novel cultural evolutionary theory proposing that the intensity of kin-based institutions will favor less attention to mental states when judging moral violations. First, to better illuminate the historical distribution of the use of intentions in moral judgment, we code and analyze anthropological observations from the Human Area Relations Files. This analysis shows that notions of strict liability—wherein the role for mental states is reduced—were common across diverse societies around the globe. Then, by expanding an existing vignette-based experimental dataset containing observations from 321 people in a diverse sample of 10 societies, we show that the intensity of a society's kin-based institutions can explain a substantial portion of the population-level variation in people's reliance on intentions in three different kinds of moral judgments. Together, these lines of evidence suggest that people's use of mental states has coevolved culturally to fit their local kin-based institutions. We suggest that although reliance on mental states has likely been a feature of moral judgment in human communities over historical and evolutionary time, the relational fluidity and weak kin ties of today's WEIRD societies position these populations' psychology at the extreme end of the global and historical spectrum.

National audience ; The intensifying pace of research based on cross-cultural studies in the social sciences necessitates a discussion of the unique challenges of multi-sited research. Given an increasing demand for social scientists to expand their data collection beyond WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) populations, there is an urgent need for transdisciplinary conversations on the logistical, scientific and ethical considerations inherent to this type of scholarship. As a group of social scientists engaged in cross-cultural research in psychology and anthropology, we hope to guide prospective cross-cultural researchers through some of the complex scientific and ethical challenges involved in such work: (a) study siteselection, (b) community involvement and (c) culturally appropriate research methods. We aim to shed light on some of the difficult ethical quandaries of this type of research. Our recommendation emphasizes a community-centred approach, in which the desires of the community regarding research approach and methodology, community involvement, results communication and distribution, and data sharing are held in the highest regard by the researchers. We argue that such considerations are central to scientific rigour and the foundation of the study of human behaviour.

The intensifying pace of research based on cross-cultural studies in the social sciences necessitates a discussion of the unique challenges of multi-sited research. Given an increasing demand for social scientists to expand their data collection beyond WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) populations, there is an urgent need for transdisciplinary conversations on the logistical, scientific and ethical considerations inherent to this type of scholarship. As a group of social scientists engaged in cross-cultural research in psychology and anthropology, we hope to guide prospective cross-cultural researchers through some of the complex scientific and ethical challenges involved in such work: (a) study siteselection, (b) community involvement and (c) culturally appropriate research methods. We aim to shed light on some of the difficult ethical quandaries of this type of research. Our recommendation emphasizes a community-centred approach, in which the desires of the community regarding research approach and methodology, community involvement, results communication and distribution, and data sharing are held in the highest regard by the researchers. We argue that such considerations are central to scientific rigour and the foundation of the study of human behaviour. ; National audience

The intensifying pace of research based on cross-cultural studies in the social sciences necessitates a discussion of the unique challenges of multi-sited research. Given an increasing demand for social scientists to expand their data collection beyond WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) populations, there is an urgent need for transdisciplinary conversations on the logistical, scientific and ethical considerations inherent to this type of scholarship. As a group of social scientists engaged in cross-cultural research in psychology and anthropology, we hope to guide prospective cross-cultural researchers through some of the complex scientific and ethical challenges involved in such work: (a) study site selection, (b) community involvement and (c) culturally appropriate research methods. We aim to shed light on some of the difficult ethical quandaries of this type of research. Our recommendation emphasizes a community-centred approach, in which the desires of the community regarding research approach and methodology, community involvement, results communication and distribution, and data sharing are held in the highest regard by the researchers. We argue that such considerations are central to scientific rigour and the foundation of the study of human behaviour.

The intensifying pace of research based on cross-cultural studies in the social sciences necessitates a discussion of the unique challenges of multi-sited research. Given an increasing demand for social scientists to expand their data collection beyond WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) populations, there is an urgent need for transdisciplinary conversations on the logistical, scientific and ethical considerations inherent to this type of scholarship. As a group of social scientists engaged in cross-cultural research in psychology and anthropology, we hope to guide prospective cross-cultural researchers through some of the complex scientific and ethical challenges involved in such work: (a) study site selection, (b) community involvement and (c) culturally appropriate research methods. We aim to shed light on some of the difficult ethical quandaries of this type of research. Our recommendation emphasizes a community-centred approach, in which the desires of the community regarding research approach and methodology, community involvement, results communication and distribution, and data sharing are held in the highest regard by the researchers. We argue that such considerations are central to scientific rigour and the foundation of the study of human behaviour.

The intensifying pace of research based on cross-cultural studies in the social sciences necessitates a discussion of the unique challenges of multi-sited research. Given an increasing demand for social scientists to expand their data collection beyond WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic) populations, there is an urgent need for transdisciplinary conversations on the logistical, scientific and ethical considerations inherent to this type of scholarship. As a group of social scientists engaged in cross-cultural research in psychology and anthropology, we hope to guide prospective cross-cultural researchers through some of the complex scientific and ethical challenges involved in such work: (a) study site selection, (b) community involvement and (c) culturally appropriate research methods. We aim to shed light on some of the difficult ethical quandaries of this type of research. Our recommendation emphasizes a community-centred approach, in which the desires of the community regarding research approach and methodology, community involvement, results communication and distribution, and data sharing are held in the highest regard by the researchers. We argue that such considerations are central to scientific rigour and the foundation of the study of human behaviour.