Douglas T. Kenrick

Humans rely on a suite of fundamental social motives to navigate recurring adaptive challenges. Using data from 14 532 participants across 42 societies, we examine sex similarities and differences in the strength of these motives across adulthood and sociocultural contexts, employing generalized additive models that account for spatial autocorrelation. Across societies, women reported stronger motivation for threat avoidance, long-term pair bonding and caregiving, while men reported stronger motivation for status and mate-seeking. These sex differences were largest among individuals in committed partnerships without children but were smallest—approximately halved—among parents. Men who were fathers reported motivational profiles more oriented towards protection and caregiving, aligning more closely with women’s profiles in ways suggesting a shared parental care strategy. However, fathers also reported amplified status motivation relative to mothers, suggesting a sex-differentiated strategy that may complement caregiving through resource provision. Notably, sex differences in motive strength are maintained or even amplified in societies with greater gender equality, suggesting that such contexts may facilitate fuller expression of sex-linked motivational patterns. These findings highlight how fundamental social motives reflect sex-specific calibration and vary across life phases and sociocultural conditions that shape human social behaviour.

Decades of research support the generalization that human males tend to be more aggressive than females. However, most of that research has examined aggression between unrelated individuals. Data drawn from 24 societies around the globe (n = 4,013) indicate that this generalization does not hold in the context of sibling relationships. In retrospective self-reports, females report being at least as aggressive as males toward their siblings, often more so. This holds for direct as well as indirect aggression, and for aggression between adult siblings as well as aggression that occurred during childhood. Consistent with prior research on sex differences, males reported engaging in more direct aggression toward nonkin than did females in the majority of societies. The results suggest that the dynamics of aggression within the family are different from those outside of it, and ultimately that understanding the role of sex in aggressive tendencies depends on context and target.

We do not live in a vacuum. Everything humans do, think and feel is embedded within geography, which itself is interpreted, understood and modified by humans. Although it is thus conceptually obvious that psychology and geography need one another to fulfil their mandates, integrating them has been empirically challenging. To remedy this, we propose the unifying Geographical–Psychological Interactionist Framework. This framework features three axes (that is, geography, psychology, and geography–psychology interactions). Each axis hosts overarching classes (for example, human, physical and spatial geographical variables) and specific instances thereof (for example, climate and distance). As such, our framework provides: (1) a systematic taxonomy of the general interplay between geography and psychology; (2) a precise vocabulary with which to categorize specific interactions; and (3) a straightforward tool to inspire concrete and testable hypotheses. We conclude by positioning our conceptual framework in relation to existing theories and discuss next steps towards an interdisciplinary future at the nexus of psychology and geography.

An article published in Current Directions a decade ago introduced the fundamental-motives framework and reviewed initial promising findings using this general approach. According to this framework, a recurring set of challenges and opportunities during human evolution gave rise to overarching motivational systems in the domains of self-protection, disease avoidance, social affiliation, status seeking, mate acquisition, mate retention, and kin care. When activated, fundamental motives influence psychological processes by directing cognition and behavior in distinct and functionally relevant ways. In the intervening years, the approach has been expanded to a broader range of motives, individual and cultural variations in those motives, and the physiological correlates of activating different motives. In this article, we review a decade of research applying the fundamental-motives framework and point to promising new research directions.

Friendships can foster happiness, health, and reproductive fitness. However, friendships end-even when we might not want them to. A primary reason for this is interference from third parties. Yet, little work has explored how people meet the challenge of maintaining friendships in the face of real or perceived threats from third parties, as when our friends inevitably make new friends or form new romantic relationships. In contrast to earlier conceptualizations from developmental research, which viewed friendship jealousy as solely maladaptive, we propose that friendship jealousy is one overlooked tool of friendship maintenance. We derive and test-via a series of 11 studies (N = 2,918) using hypothetical scenarios, recalled real-world events, and manipulation of online emotional experiences-whether friendship jealousy possesses the features of a tool well-designed to help us retain friends in the face of third-party threats. Consistent with our proposition, findings suggest that friendship jealousy is (a) uniquely evoked by third-party threats to friendships (but not the prospective loss of the friendship alone), (b) sensitive to the value of the threatened friendship, (c) strongly calibrated to cues that one is being replaced, even over more intuitive cues (e.g., the amount of time a friend and interloper spend together), and (d) ultimately motivates behavior aimed at countering third-party threats to friendship ("friend guarding"). Even as friendship jealousy may be negative to experience, it may include features designed for beneficial-and arguably prosocial-ends: to help maintain friendships. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

What motives do people prioritize in their social lives? Historically, social psychologists, especially those adopting an evolutionary perspective, have devoted a great deal of research attention to sexual attraction and romantic-partner choice (mate seeking). Research on long-term familial bonds (mate retention and kin care) has been less thoroughly connected to relevant comparative and evolutionary work on other species, and in the case of kin care, these bonds have been less well researched. Examining varied sources of data from 27 societies around the world, we found that people generally view familial motives as primary in importance and mate-seeking motives as relatively low in importance. Compared with other groups, college students, single people, and men place relatively higher emphasis on mate seeking, but even those samples rated kin-care motives as more important. Furthermore, motives linked to long-term familial bonds are positively associated with psychological well-being, but mate-seeking motives are associated with anxiety and depression. We address theoretical and empirical reasons why there has been extensive research on mate seeking and why people prioritize goals related to long-term familial bonds over mating goals. Reallocating relatively greater research effort toward long-term familial relationships would likely yield many interesting new findings relevant to everyday people’s highest social priorities.

An evolutionary perspective on human motivation provides a means of identifying conceptually distinct motivational systems (including motives pertaining to self‐protection, disease avoidance, affiliation, status, mate acquisition, mate retention, and parental care), each of which has unique implications for affect, cognition, and behavior. We provide an illustrative summary of some of these empirically documented implications—including those pertaining to individual differences in chronic motivational tendencies, as well as additional implications that follow from temporary activation of these motivational systems. We also summarize a variety of broader implications—both conceptual and practical—that follow from this framework.

Proximate selfish goals reflect the machinations of more fundamental goals such as self-protection and reproduction. Evolutionary life history theory allows us to make predictions about which goals are prioritized over others, which stimuli release which goals, and how the stages of cognitive processing are selectively influenced to better achieve the aims of those goals.