Cross-Cultural and Cross-Organizational Evidence for an Evolved Hazing Motivation.

We report the first cross-cultural and cross-organizational evidence for an evolved hazing motivation. Using experiments performed in the United States, Japan, and among members of a hazing and a nonhazing organization, we demonstrate an invariant set of core hazing predictors. In particular, we show that the perception of near-term group benefits, which would have been ancestrally exploitable by new group members, substantially increases desired hazing severity in all samples. Results are discussed in light of human organizational psychology and the difficulty of reliably suppressing hazing behavior.

Merely opting out of a public good is moralized: an error management approach to cooperation.

People regularly free ride on collective benefits, consuming them without contributing to their creation. In response, free riders are often moralized, becoming targets of negative moral judgments, anger, ostracism, or punishment. Moralization can change free riders' behavior (e.g., encouraging them to contribute or discouraging them from taking future benefits) or it can motivate others, including moralizers, to avoid or exclude free riders; these effects of moralization are critical to sustaining human cooperation. Based on theories of error management and fundamental social domains from evolutionary psychology, we propose that the decision to moralize is a cue-driven process. One cue investigated in past work is observing a person illicitly consume collective benefits. Here, we test whether the mind uses a 2nd cue: merely opting out of contributing. Use of this cue creates a phenomenon of preventive moralization: moralization of people who have not yet exploited collective benefits but who might-or might not--in the future. We tested for preventive moralization across 9 studies using implicit and explicit measures of moralization, a behavioral measure of costly punishment, mediation analyses of the underlying processes, and a nationally representative sample of almost 1,000 U.S. adults. Results revealed that merely opting out of contributing to the creation of exploitable collective benefits--despite not actually exploiting collective benefits-elicited moralization. Results further showed that preventive moralization is not due to the moralization of selfishness or deviance but instead follows from the uncertainty inherent in moralization decisions. These results imply that even people who will never exploit collective benefits can nonetheless be targets of moralization. We discuss implications for social and political dynamics.

On the Perception of Newcomers: Toward an Evolved Psychology of Intergenerational Coalitions.

Human coalitions frequently persist through multiple, overlapping membership generations, requiring new members to cooperate and coordinate with veteran members. Does the mind contain psychological adaptations for interacting within these intergenerational coalitions? In this paper, we examine whether the mind spontaneously treats newcomers as a motivationally privileged category. Newcomers-though capable of benefiting coalitions-may also impose considerable costs (e.g., they may free ride on other members, they may be poor at completing group tasks). In three experiments we show (1) that the mind categorizes coalition members by tenure, including newcomers; (2) that tenure categorization persists in the presence of orthogonal and salient social dimensions; and (3) that newcomers elicit a pattern of impressions consistent with their probable ancestral costs. These results provide preliminary evidence for a specialized component of human coalitional psychology: an evolved concept of newcomer.

Exploring the evolved concept of NEWCOMER: experimental tests of a cognitive model.

Enduring human coalitions face the adaptive problem of integrating new members. Although newcomers can provide benefits (e.g., additional labor), newcomers can also create costs (e.g., by free riding). Due to the unique adaptive problems they pose, we hypothesize that the mind contains an evolved concept of NEWCOMER. We test the design of this concept experimentally and show that the activation of the NEWCOMER concept elicits a variety of anti-free rider responses (e.g., a decrease in trust) with adaptively-targeted exceptions (e.g., a minimal increase in exclusion sentiment). These results support the hypothesis that the mind contains specialized concepts for understanding, creating, and sustaining intergenerational coalitions.