Christophe Heintz

Language exemplifies Singh’s super-attractor concept while testing the explanatory limits of subjective selection, which is just one of the processes of cultural evolution. Subjective selection explains many linguistic features through speakers’ instrumental goals. However, other types of processes also shape language evolution: some, related to learning and perception, for instance, will not involve intentions or conscious selection. Others involve intentionally creating and transforming linguistic constructions rather than merely selecting them from random mutations.

Across the world, women routinely perform more household labour than men, and yet most women judge the arrangement fair. We review three evolutionary accounts of the human sense of fairness for their ability to explain such judgments. These accounts trace the human sense of fairness to evolved preferences for, respectively, norm abidance, equitable distributions, and equal distributions. They fall short, because they all assume that only impartial distributions can be judged fair. We argue instead that divisions of household labour are judged fair when they are justified by a shared ideology that specifies social roles and their associated tasks — in the case of household labour, a gender ideology. Such an ideology gains cultural currency by solving the complementary coordination problem that household members face: partners must perform complementary tasks that fit together. Among the ideologies that could solve this problem, however, only those whose prescribed distribution leaves no party worse off than their outside option achieve cultural success. Fairness judgments, we propose, arise from the interaction between two evolved preferences — an aversion to frustrating others' expectations and a concern for acting in ways one can justify — and a cultural history of ideologies that serve as coordination devices.

We present evidence that people rely on counterfactual reasoning when assessing the responsibility of agents who unknowingly produce negative consequences. We show that people spontaneously produce different counterfactuals to identify the various reasons agents might have for remaining ignorant and to determine responsibility, and that this thought process is sensitive to manipulation of salience. We explore the relationship between counterfactual salience and responsibility ascription in three experiments. In Experiment 1, we asked people to spontaneously produce counterfactual alternatives to a vignette they read. We manipulated whether agents who produced harm knew the relevant information beforehand and what the reasons for the possible ignorance were. The epistemic condition participants were presented with influenced the type of counterfactual thoughts they spontaneously produced, which in turn influenced their responsibility rating. Experiments 2 and 3 investigate the causal connection between counterfactual types and responsibility ascription. In particular, we show that guiding people to consider alternative perpetrators' actions leads to a greater tendency to ascribe responsibility than guiding them to consider the victim's actions. On the other hand, guiding people to consider the effect of external factors does not seem to affect people’s judgments of the perpetrator’s responsibility. Together, our results indicate that considering an agent’s alternative epistemic action and its counterfactual consequences has a causal effect on responsibility ascription.

This paper examines how culture can be studied from an evolutionary psychological perspective. We review the integrated causal model proposed by Tooby and Cosmides and examine the ways in which it differs from other approaches to culture. We discuss three aspects of the model that require further discussion and elaboration: how such varied cultures can arise from a species-typical mind; how cultural content can come to be transmitted between individuals; and how culture can acquire normative force. We present three case studies of research into cultural patterns that exemplifies the integrated causal approach: kinship terminologies, punitive justice institutions, and fertility patterns. We emphasize the non-reductive nature of the evolutionary psychological approach, and its generative benefits in stimulating enquiry into both the commonalities and specificities of human cultural forms.

Disinformation strategies are often deployed by professionals to elicit confusion rather than to persuade. One key method for this is “flooding”: inserting in the communication environment a large number of incongruent propositions in an attempt to prevent people from identifying reliable information. We assess the effect of this strategy with two pre-registered experimental studies (N = 2607) on the topics of sunscreens and GMOs. We pitted a flooded versus a non-flooded information environment against each other, with varying levels of false and true information. Our findings suggest that flooding makes the perception of reliable information more uncertain, while increasing subjective feelings of information overload. The effect of flooding was observable even in cases when participants had strong positive prior beliefs about the topic. Our results suggest that flooding may spill over to alter the perception of entire communication environments, and the detrimental effect it may have on democratic decision-making.

Gendered division of household labour is marked by its pervasive inequality, in that women routinely do more housework across the world. But still, most women continue to find it fair, even if they are systematically contributing more. How can evolutionary accounts of fairness explain that fact? We review three major accounts focusing on their psychological claims, discussing what evidence in support of their account and how well they can explain perceptions of fairness about gendered division of household labour. These are three distinct accounts which describe fairness judgements a) arising from the following of local social norms (Henrich and colleagues), b) a sense of equity which evolved in a partner choice ecology (André, Baumard and colleagues) and c) as a sense of egalitarianism, which evolved in response to human coordination problems (Binmore). We find that none of these accounts are fully compatible with observations of gender inequalities in households, though each contain important insights, which can be integrated into a more comprehensive theory. We end our review by providing an outline of what such a comprehensive theory might look like and provide a tool for researchers to enable seamless exploration of multiple factors underlying fairness judgements.

This paper focuses on a historically documented tactic that deceivers rely on: presenting inaccurate propositions together with accurate ones. Historical sources often point to this as a textbook-method to make inaccurate claims look more believable, but there has been no experimental research on its effectiveness and background psychological processes. In three pre-registered online experiments (N = 817), we found evidence for the existence of the dressing-up effect: the mere presence of accurate information accompanying a target implausible claim on the same topic makes it more believable. The effect was not sensitive to the length of the message or the order in which accurate and inaccurate claims were presented, but it disappeared when the accurate dressing claims and the inaccurate target claim were communicated by different sources. Importantly, the effect persisted even when the participants’ accuracy motives were stimulated using a monetary reward. We tested rational models that integrate the need to update beliefs both about what is communicated, given that it has been communicated, and about the trustworthiness of the source, given what they communicated. We observe that these models do predict dressing-up effects, especially when the audience is initially uncertain about the trustworthiness of the source. We conclude that people who are epistemically vigilant can nonetheless fall for the dressing-up tactic. What is needed to counter it, is more independent information about the trustworthiness of the source.

How do people determine who owns what? While existing research has identified a number of psychological and behavioral sources of ownership judgments, the role of mental state attribution has received less attention. We conducted three online experiments (N = 1246) examining if ownership judgments rely on mind‐reading: the capacity to infer others’ intentions, beliefs, and knowledge states. Using vignettes, we tested if ownership judgments are sensitive to variations in contextual cues (Study 1), beliefs about the permissibility of taking items (Study 2), and knowledge about social norms (Study 3). We also tested if the moral aspects of a scenario affect judgments of rightful ownership transfer. Our findings indicate that ownership judgments indeed vary in response to these factors, and that they do not vary on par with moral judgments. These findings are best explained in terms of mind‐reading and support the argument that ownership is fundamentally a social phenomenon: not a relationship between people and resources but rather between people about resources.