Stranger Danger: Parenthood and Child Presence Increase the Envisioned Bodily Formidability of Menacing Men

Due to altriciality and the importance of embodied capital, children’s fitness is contingent on parental investment. Injury suffered by a parent therefore degrades the parent’s fitness both by constraining reproduction and by diminishing the fitness of existing offspring. Due to the latter added cost, compared to non-parents, parents should be more cautious in hazardous situations, including potentially agonistic interactions. Prior research indicates that relative formidability is conceptualized in terms of size and strength. As erroneous under-estimation of a foe’s formidability heightens the risk of injury, parents should therefore conceptualize a potential antagonist as larger, stronger, and of more sinister intent than should non-parents; secondarily, the presence of one’s vulnerable children should exacerbate this pattern. We tested these predictions in the U.S. using reactions to an evocative vignette, administered via the Internet (Study 1), and in-person assessments of the facial photograph of a purported criminal, collected on the streets of Southern California (Study 2). As predicted, parents envisioned a potential antagonist to be more formidable than did non-parents. Significant differences between parents with children and non-parents without children in the threat that the foe was thought to pose (Study 1) were fully mediated by increases in estimated physical formidability

Foundations of the Crazy Bastard Hypothesis: Nonviolent physical risk-taking enhances conceptualized formidability

Wilson and Daly's Young Male Syndrome thesis seeks to explain why young men are disproportionally involved in both violence and non-violent activities entailing a risk of injury or death. One interpretation of this thesis, which we term the Crazy Bastard Hypothesis, holds that the correlation between violence and other forms of physical risk-taking occurs because the latter behaviors inherently index the general propensity to take risks with one's life. In violent conflicts, individuals who are indifferent to the prospect of injury or death constitute dangerous adversaries, and valuable allies. Voluntary physical risk-taking may thus serve a signaling function such that risk-prone individuals are perceived as more formidable than risk-averse individuals. Prior work has demonstrated that relative formidability is represented using the dimensions of conceptualized size and strength, providing an avenue for testing the Crazy Bastard Hypothesis. In multiple studies conducted in two disparate societies, we demonstrate that physically risk-prone men are envisioned to be larger, stronger, and more violent than risk-averse men. A separate study reveals that such conceptualizations are unlikely to reflect actual correlations between size/strength and physical risk-proneness, and are instead plausibly interpreted as revealing the contribution of observed physical risk-proneness to assessments of relative formidability. © 2014 Elsevier Inc

Datasets to accompany Fessler et al. Dressed to Kill

This file contains the complete data for the studies reported in Fessler, Holbrook, & Dashoff's "Dressed to Kill? Visible Markers of Coalitional Affiliation Enhance Conceptualized Formidability

Datasets to accompany Fessler et al. Dressed to Kill

This file contains the complete data for the studies reported in Fessler, Holbrook, & Dashoff's "Dressed to Kill? Visible Markers of Coalitional Affiliation Enhance Conceptualized Formidability

Dataset to accompany Fessler, Pisor, & Navarrete's The Spirits Are Not Your Friends

This file contains the complete datasets collected in the studies described in Fessler, Pisor, & Navarrete's The Spirits Are Not Your Friend

Datasets to accompany Murray et al.'s "Kiss of Death"

These are the three datasets employed in Murray, D., Fessler, D.M.T., Kerry, N., White, C. & Marin M. "The Kiss of Death: Three Tests of the Relationship between Disease Threat and Ritualized Physical Contact within Traditional Cultures

Return of the lost letter: Experimental framing does not enhance altruism in an everyday context

Debate surrounds interpretation of prosocial behavior in experimental games. Skeptics of the thesis that evolution produced a propensity for noncontingent altruism speculate that such results reflect the presence of information suggesting reputational consequences, including awareness that one is participating in an experiment. To examine the effects on prosocial behavior of awareness that research is being conducted, return rates were measured on 'lost' envelopes, some of which carried the message that they were dropped as part of an investigation. Return rates were not enhanced by such messages, indicating that awareness that one is in an experiment does not increase prosocial behavior.Altruism Anonymity Experimental methods Lost letter technique

Dataset to accompany Holbrook et al.'s "Gulliver’s politics"

These are the complete datasets to accompany Holbrook et al.'s "Gulliver’s politics: Conservatives envision potential enemies as readily vanquished and physically small