VALUE COMPUTATION

Previous research has shed light on the values that people across cultures hold—security, autonomy, and self-transcendence, among others. In addition to these abstractions, however, people also value a vast number of specific things: water, rice, honey, obsidian, harpoons, fire, feasts, analgesics, reciprocating saws, double-entry bookkeeping, the Pilgrimage of Compostela, sleeping, explanations, friends, mates—the list goes on more or less ad infinitum. How do we come to value the things that we value? We produce information-processing models of the psychology that supports value computation in humans. We ask questions such as: What is a value that the mind would have evolved to represent it? What design features does a mind need to be equipped with in order to value things, events, states of affairs, and social partners the human way?

Representative publications

Sznycer, D. (2022). Value computation in humans. Evolution and Human Behavior, 43(5), 367–380. 

Sznycer, D. & Lukaszewski, A. W. (2019). The emotion–valuation constellation: Multiple emotions are governed by a common grammar of social valuation. Evolution and Human Behavior, 40(4), 395-404.

Sznycer, D., De Smet, D., Billingsley, J., & Lieberman, D. (2016). Coresidence duration and cues of maternal investment regulate sibling altruism across cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 111(2), 159–177.

EMOTION

Are there specialized emotion programs in the human mind-brain? What are the adaptive functions of shame, pride, gratitude, anger, envy, and other social emotions? And how do these emotions work? Emotion systems appear to coordinate the operation of multiple adaptations in ways that would have solved adaptive problems faced by our human ancestors—shame, to avoid the spread of negative information about the self and being devalued by others; pride, to attain socially valued achievements and cultivate enhanced valuation from others; and so on. Using this theoretical framework, we have searched for and found regularities in emotion across industrial and small-scale societies and throughout history.

Representative publications

Sznycer, D., Sell, A., & Lieberman, D. (2021). Forms and functions of the social emotions. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 30(4), 292–299.

Sznycer, D. et al. (2018). Cross-cultural invariances in the architecture of shame. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 115(39), 9702–9707.

Sznycer, D., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (2017). Adaptationism carves emotions at their functional joints. Psychological Inquiry, 28(1), 56–62. 

COMMUNICATION

Humans communicate with fellow humans to inform them about the state of the world, to promise things to them, to request things from them, to apologize to them, to bond with them, and so on. Human communication capitalizes on evaluative, emotional, and inferential mechanisms shared by senders and receivers. These mechanisms afford the communicating parties a common protocol which enables them to form a map of their respective mental states from speech and other vocalizations, bodily postures, and other percepts, even when their interests clash. We study human verbal and non-verbal communication from an adaptationist perspective. We research such topics as emotional tears, the shame display, and the logic that regulates the issuance of confessions, the sharing of information, and anger-based arguments.

Representative publications

Sznycer, D., Schniter, E., Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2015). Regulatory adaptations for delivering information: the case of confession. Evolution and Human Behavior, 36(1), 44–51. 

Sznycer, D., Gračanin, A., & Lieberman, D. (Under review). Emotional tears: What they are and how they work. https://psyarxiv.com/fht2g.

Landers, M. & Sznycer, D. (2022). The evolution of shame and its display. Evolutionary Human Sciences, 4, e45. 

MORALITY AND INSTITUTIONS

Moralized things are shot through with value. And with emotion. Many complex n-person moral games can be modeled as simpler two-person games of valuation and emotion. A similar logic can be used to reduce complex institutions (e.g., markets, the criminal justice system) to games of valuation. For example, the flow of goods (e.g., wages, awards) and bads (e.g., prison sentences) in human societies is regulated to an important extent by the things and activities that people value or disvalue. If morality and institutions are generated in part by the interpersonal psychologies that regulate sharing, trading, bargaining, competing, punishing, communicating, and so on, then knowledge about the latter may shed light on the former. We use this approach to investigate topics such as economic redistribution, criminal law, workers' compensation law, the implicit rules of combat, decision-making in moral dilemmas, and the concept of fairness.

Representative publications

Sznycer, D. & Patrick, C. (2020). The origins of criminal law. Nature Human Behaviour, 4(5), 506-516. 

Sznycer, D., Lopez Seal, M. F., Sell, A., Lim, J., Porat, R., Shalvi, S., Halperin, E., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (2017). Support for redistribution is shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(31), 8420–8425.

Guzmán, R. A., Barbato, M. T., Sznycer, D., & Cosmides, L. (2022). A moral trade-off system produces intuitive judgments that are rational and coherent and strike a balance between conflicting moral values. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 119(42), e2214005119.