Daniel Fessler | University of California, Los Angeles (original) (raw)
Papers by Daniel Fessler
PloS one, 2018
Conservatives and liberals have previously been shown to differ in the propensity to view sociall... more Conservatives and liberals have previously been shown to differ in the propensity to view socially-transmitted information about hazards as more plausible than that concerning benefits. Given differences between conservatives and liberals in threat sensitivity and dangerous-world beliefs, correlations between political orientation and negatively-biased credulity may thus reflect endogenous mindsets. Alternatively, such results may owe to the political hierarchy at the time of previous research, as the tendency to see dark forces at work is thought to be greater among those who are out of political power. Adjudicating between these accounts can inform how societies respond to the challenge of alarmist disinformation campaigns. We exploit the consequences of the 2016 U.S. elections to test these competing explanations of differences in negatively-biased credulity and conspiracism as a function of political orientation. Two studies of Americans reveal continued positive associations be...
Psychological science, Jan 25, 2018
Laughter is a nonverbal vocalization occurring in every known culture, ubiquitous across all form... more Laughter is a nonverbal vocalization occurring in every known culture, ubiquitous across all forms of human social interaction. Here, we examined whether listeners around the world, irrespective of their own native language and culture, can distinguish between spontaneous laughter and volitional laughter-laugh types likely generated by different vocal-production systems. Using a set of 36 recorded laughs produced by female English speakers in tests involving 884 participants from 21 societies across six regions of the world, we asked listeners to determine whether each laugh was real or fake, and listeners differentiated between the two laugh types with an accuracy of 56% to 69%. Acoustic analysis revealed that sound features associated with arousal in vocal production predicted listeners' judgments fairly uniformly across societies. These results demonstrate high consistency across cultures in laughter judgments, underscoring the potential importance of nonverbal vocal communic...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, Jan 19, 2018
Currently, disgust is regarded as the main adaptation for defence against pathogens and parasites... more Currently, disgust is regarded as the main adaptation for defence against pathogens and parasites in humans. Disgust's motivational and behavioural features, including withdrawal, nausea, appetite suppression and the urge to vomit, defend effectively against ingesting or touching sources of pathogens. However, ectoparasites do not attack their hosts via ingestion, but rather actively attach themselves to the body surface. Accordingly, by itself, disgust offers limited defence against ectoparasites. We propose that, like non-human animals, humans have a distinct ectoparasite defence system that includes cutaneous sensory mechanisms, itch-generation mechanisms and grooming behaviours. The existence of adaptations for ectoparasite defence is supported by abundant evidence from non-human animals, as well as more recent evidence concerning human responses to ectoparasite cues. Several clinical disorders may be dysfunctions of the ectoparasite defence system, including some that are p...
Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.), Jan 18, 2018
The perceived support of supernatural agents has been historically, ethnographically, and theoret... more The perceived support of supernatural agents has been historically, ethnographically, and theoretically linked with confidence in engaging in violent intergroup conflict. However, scant experimental investigations of such links have been reported to date, and the extant evidence derives largely from indirect laboratory methods of limited ecological validity. Here, we experimentally tested the hypothesis that perceived supernatural aid would heighten inclinations toward coalitional aggression using a realistic simulated coalitional combat paradigm: competitive team paintball. In a between-subjects design, US paintball players recruited for the study were experimentally primed with thoughts of supernatural support using a guided visualization exercise analogous to prayer, or with a control visualization of a nature scene. The participants then competed in a team paintball battle game modeled after "Capture the Flag." Immediately before and after the battle, participants comp...
Evolution, medicine, and public health, 2018
Grief is characterized by a number of cardinal cognitive symptoms, including preoccupation with t... more Grief is characterized by a number of cardinal cognitive symptoms, including preoccupation with thoughts of the deceased and vigilance toward indications that the deceased is in the environment. Compared with emotional symptoms, little attention has been paid to the ultimate function of vigilance in grief. Drawing on signal-detection theory, we propose that the ultimate function of vigilance is to facilitate the reunification (where possible) with a viable relationship partner following separation. Preoccupation with thoughts about the missing person creates the cognitive conditions necessary to maintain a low baseline threshold for the detection of the agent-any information associated with the agent is highly salient, and attention is correspondingly readily deployed toward such cues. These patterns are adaptive in cases of an absent but living partner, but maladaptive in cases of the death of a partner. That they occur in the latter likely reflects the intersection of error-manage...
Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 2018
The emotion disgust motivates costly behavioral strategies that mitigate against potentially larg... more The emotion disgust motivates costly behavioral strategies that mitigate against potentially larger costs associated with pathogens, sexual behavior, and moral transgressions. Because disgust thereby regulates exposure to harm, it is by definition a mechanism for calibrating decision making under risk. Understanding this illuminates two features of the demographic distribution of this emotion. First, this approach predicts and explains sex differences in disgust. Greater female disgust propensity is often reported and discussed in the literature, but, to date, conclusions have been based on informal comparisons across a small number of studies, while existing functionalist explanations are at best incomplete. We report the results of an extensive meta-analysis documenting this sex difference, arguing that key features of this pattern are best explained as one manifestation of a broad principle of the evolutionary biology of risk-taking: for a given potential benefit, males in an eff...
Evolution and Human Behavior, 2016
Psychological science, 2017
To benefit from information provided by other people, people must be somewhat credulous. However,... more To benefit from information provided by other people, people must be somewhat credulous. However, credulity entails risks. The optimal level of credulity depends on the relative costs of believing misinformation and failing to attend to accurate information. When information concerns hazards, erroneous incredulity is often more costly than erroneous credulity, given that disregarding accurate warnings is more harmful than adopting unnecessary precautions. Because no equivalent asymmetry exists for 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 people who believe the world to be more dangerous. Because both threat sensitivity and beliefs about the dangerousness of the world differ between conservatives and liberals, we predicted that conservatism would positively correlate with negatively biased cr...
Evolution and Human Behavior, 2016
Evolution and Human Behavior, 2017
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Jan 28, 2016
Intent and mitigating circumstances play a central role in moral and legal assessments in large-s... more Intent and mitigating circumstances play a central role in moral and legal assessments in large-scale industrialized societies. Although these features of moral assessment are widely assumed to be universal, to date, they have only been studied in a narrow range of societies. We show that there is substantial cross-cultural variation among eight traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and two Western societies (one urban, one rural) in the extent to which intent and mitigating circumstances influence moral judgments. Although participants in all societies took such factors into account to some degree, they did so to very different extents, varying in both the types of considerations taken into account and the types of violations to which such considerations were applied. The particular patterns of assessment characteristic of large-scale industrialized societies may thus reflect relatively recently culturally evolved norms ...
The Quarterly Review of Biology, 2016
Aggressive Behavior, 2016
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2016
Xxxx, Jul 1, 2015
Author(s): Fessler, Daniel M.T.; Holbrook, Colin; Dashoff, David | Abstract: Complete datasets fo... more Author(s): Fessler, Daniel M.T.; Holbrook, Colin; Dashoff, David | Abstract: Complete datasets for Study 1 and Study 2
Cognition, Jan 30, 2015
The imagined support of benevolent supernatural agents attenuates anxiety and risk perception. He... more The imagined support of benevolent supernatural agents attenuates anxiety and risk perception. Here, we extend these findings to judgments of the threat posed by a potentially violent adversary. Conceptual representations of bodily size and strength summarize factors that determine the relative threat posed by foes. The proximity of allies moderates the envisioned physical formidability of adversaries, suggesting that cues of access to supernatural allies will reduce the envisioned physical formidability of a threatening target. Across two studies, subtle cues of both supernatural and earthly social support reduced the envisioned physical formidability of a violent criminal. These manipulations had no effect on the perceived likelihood of encountering non-conflictual physical danger, raising the possibility that imagined supernatural support leads participants to view themselves not as shielded from encountering perilous situations, but as protected should perils arise.
Evolution and Human Behavior, 2016
We hypothesize that, paralleling the evolution of human hierarchies from social structures based ... more We hypothesize that, paralleling the evolution of human hierarchies from social structures based on dominance to those based on prestige, adaptations for representing status are derived from those for representing relative fighting capacity. Because both violence and status are important adaptive challenges, the mind contains the ancestral representational system as well as the derived system. When the two representational tasks conflict, owing to the exigent nature of potential violence, the former should take precedence over the latter. Indeed, separate literatures indicate that, despite the fact that threatening traits are generally deleterious to prestige, both threatening individuals and high-status individuals are conceptually represented as physically large. We investigated the interplay between size-based representations of threat versus prestige by examining racial danger stereotypes. In three studies, we demonstrate that (a) judgments of status only positively correlate with envisioned body size for members of groups stereotyped as safe, (b) group-based inferences of interpersonal threat are mediated by representations of physical size, (c) controlling for perceived threatening aggressiveness reduces or reverses non-positive correlations between status and size, and (d) individuating information about relative threat or status attenuates the influence of group danger stereotypes. These results support our proposal that ancestral threat-representation mechanisms and derived mechanisms for representing social rank coexistand sometimes competein the mind.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2015
PloS one, 2018
Conservatives and liberals have previously been shown to differ in the propensity to view sociall... more Conservatives and liberals have previously been shown to differ in the propensity to view socially-transmitted information about hazards as more plausible than that concerning benefits. Given differences between conservatives and liberals in threat sensitivity and dangerous-world beliefs, correlations between political orientation and negatively-biased credulity may thus reflect endogenous mindsets. Alternatively, such results may owe to the political hierarchy at the time of previous research, as the tendency to see dark forces at work is thought to be greater among those who are out of political power. Adjudicating between these accounts can inform how societies respond to the challenge of alarmist disinformation campaigns. We exploit the consequences of the 2016 U.S. elections to test these competing explanations of differences in negatively-biased credulity and conspiracism as a function of political orientation. Two studies of Americans reveal continued positive associations be...
Psychological science, Jan 25, 2018
Laughter is a nonverbal vocalization occurring in every known culture, ubiquitous across all form... more Laughter is a nonverbal vocalization occurring in every known culture, ubiquitous across all forms of human social interaction. Here, we examined whether listeners around the world, irrespective of their own native language and culture, can distinguish between spontaneous laughter and volitional laughter-laugh types likely generated by different vocal-production systems. Using a set of 36 recorded laughs produced by female English speakers in tests involving 884 participants from 21 societies across six regions of the world, we asked listeners to determine whether each laugh was real or fake, and listeners differentiated between the two laugh types with an accuracy of 56% to 69%. Acoustic analysis revealed that sound features associated with arousal in vocal production predicted listeners' judgments fairly uniformly across societies. These results demonstrate high consistency across cultures in laughter judgments, underscoring the potential importance of nonverbal vocal communic...
Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, Jan 19, 2018
Currently, disgust is regarded as the main adaptation for defence against pathogens and parasites... more Currently, disgust is regarded as the main adaptation for defence against pathogens and parasites in humans. Disgust's motivational and behavioural features, including withdrawal, nausea, appetite suppression and the urge to vomit, defend effectively against ingesting or touching sources of pathogens. However, ectoparasites do not attack their hosts via ingestion, but rather actively attach themselves to the body surface. Accordingly, by itself, disgust offers limited defence against ectoparasites. We propose that, like non-human animals, humans have a distinct ectoparasite defence system that includes cutaneous sensory mechanisms, itch-generation mechanisms and grooming behaviours. The existence of adaptations for ectoparasite defence is supported by abundant evidence from non-human animals, as well as more recent evidence concerning human responses to ectoparasite cues. Several clinical disorders may be dysfunctions of the ectoparasite defence system, including some that are p...
Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.), Jan 18, 2018
The perceived support of supernatural agents has been historically, ethnographically, and theoret... more The perceived support of supernatural agents has been historically, ethnographically, and theoretically linked with confidence in engaging in violent intergroup conflict. However, scant experimental investigations of such links have been reported to date, and the extant evidence derives largely from indirect laboratory methods of limited ecological validity. Here, we experimentally tested the hypothesis that perceived supernatural aid would heighten inclinations toward coalitional aggression using a realistic simulated coalitional combat paradigm: competitive team paintball. In a between-subjects design, US paintball players recruited for the study were experimentally primed with thoughts of supernatural support using a guided visualization exercise analogous to prayer, or with a control visualization of a nature scene. The participants then competed in a team paintball battle game modeled after "Capture the Flag." Immediately before and after the battle, participants comp...
Evolution, medicine, and public health, 2018
Grief is characterized by a number of cardinal cognitive symptoms, including preoccupation with t... more Grief is characterized by a number of cardinal cognitive symptoms, including preoccupation with thoughts of the deceased and vigilance toward indications that the deceased is in the environment. Compared with emotional symptoms, little attention has been paid to the ultimate function of vigilance in grief. Drawing on signal-detection theory, we propose that the ultimate function of vigilance is to facilitate the reunification (where possible) with a viable relationship partner following separation. Preoccupation with thoughts about the missing person creates the cognitive conditions necessary to maintain a low baseline threshold for the detection of the agent-any information associated with the agent is highly salient, and attention is correspondingly readily deployed toward such cues. These patterns are adaptive in cases of an absent but living partner, but maladaptive in cases of the death of a partner. That they occur in the latter likely reflects the intersection of error-manage...
Emotion (Washington, D.C.), 2018
The emotion disgust motivates costly behavioral strategies that mitigate against potentially larg... more The emotion disgust motivates costly behavioral strategies that mitigate against potentially larger costs associated with pathogens, sexual behavior, and moral transgressions. Because disgust thereby regulates exposure to harm, it is by definition a mechanism for calibrating decision making under risk. Understanding this illuminates two features of the demographic distribution of this emotion. First, this approach predicts and explains sex differences in disgust. Greater female disgust propensity is often reported and discussed in the literature, but, to date, conclusions have been based on informal comparisons across a small number of studies, while existing functionalist explanations are at best incomplete. We report the results of an extensive meta-analysis documenting this sex difference, arguing that key features of this pattern are best explained as one manifestation of a broad principle of the evolutionary biology of risk-taking: for a given potential benefit, males in an eff...
Evolution and Human Behavior, 2016
Psychological science, 2017
To benefit from information provided by other people, people must be somewhat credulous. However,... more To benefit from information provided by other people, people must be somewhat credulous. However, credulity entails risks. The optimal level of credulity depends on the relative costs of believing misinformation and failing to attend to accurate information. When information concerns hazards, erroneous incredulity is often more costly than erroneous credulity, given that disregarding accurate warnings is more harmful than adopting unnecessary precautions. Because no equivalent asymmetry exists for 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 people who believe the world to be more dangerous. Because both threat sensitivity and beliefs about the dangerousness of the world differ between conservatives and liberals, we predicted that conservatism would positively correlate with negatively biased cr...
Evolution and Human Behavior, 2016
Evolution and Human Behavior, 2017
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Jan 28, 2016
Intent and mitigating circumstances play a central role in moral and legal assessments in large-s... more Intent and mitigating circumstances play a central role in moral and legal assessments in large-scale industrialized societies. Although these features of moral assessment are widely assumed to be universal, to date, they have only been studied in a narrow range of societies. We show that there is substantial cross-cultural variation among eight traditional small-scale societies (ranging from hunter-gatherer to pastoralist to horticulturalist) and two Western societies (one urban, one rural) in the extent to which intent and mitigating circumstances influence moral judgments. Although participants in all societies took such factors into account to some degree, they did so to very different extents, varying in both the types of considerations taken into account and the types of violations to which such considerations were applied. The particular patterns of assessment characteristic of large-scale industrialized societies may thus reflect relatively recently culturally evolved norms ...
The Quarterly Review of Biology, 2016
Aggressive Behavior, 2016
Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2016
Xxxx, Jul 1, 2015
Author(s): Fessler, Daniel M.T.; Holbrook, Colin; Dashoff, David | Abstract: Complete datasets fo... more Author(s): Fessler, Daniel M.T.; Holbrook, Colin; Dashoff, David | Abstract: Complete datasets for Study 1 and Study 2
Cognition, Jan 30, 2015
The imagined support of benevolent supernatural agents attenuates anxiety and risk perception. He... more The imagined support of benevolent supernatural agents attenuates anxiety and risk perception. Here, we extend these findings to judgments of the threat posed by a potentially violent adversary. Conceptual representations of bodily size and strength summarize factors that determine the relative threat posed by foes. The proximity of allies moderates the envisioned physical formidability of adversaries, suggesting that cues of access to supernatural allies will reduce the envisioned physical formidability of a threatening target. Across two studies, subtle cues of both supernatural and earthly social support reduced the envisioned physical formidability of a violent criminal. These manipulations had no effect on the perceived likelihood of encountering non-conflictual physical danger, raising the possibility that imagined supernatural support leads participants to view themselves not as shielded from encountering perilous situations, but as protected should perils arise.
Evolution and Human Behavior, 2016
We hypothesize that, paralleling the evolution of human hierarchies from social structures based ... more We hypothesize that, paralleling the evolution of human hierarchies from social structures based on dominance to those based on prestige, adaptations for representing status are derived from those for representing relative fighting capacity. Because both violence and status are important adaptive challenges, the mind contains the ancestral representational system as well as the derived system. When the two representational tasks conflict, owing to the exigent nature of potential violence, the former should take precedence over the latter. Indeed, separate literatures indicate that, despite the fact that threatening traits are generally deleterious to prestige, both threatening individuals and high-status individuals are conceptually represented as physically large. We investigated the interplay between size-based representations of threat versus prestige by examining racial danger stereotypes. In three studies, we demonstrate that (a) judgments of status only positively correlate with envisioned body size for members of groups stereotyped as safe, (b) group-based inferences of interpersonal threat are mediated by representations of physical size, (c) controlling for perceived threatening aggressiveness reduces or reverses non-positive correlations between status and size, and (d) individuating information about relative threat or status attenuates the influence of group danger stereotypes. These results support our proposal that ancestral threat-representation mechanisms and derived mechanisms for representing social rank coexistand sometimes competein the mind.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 2015