17 thinkers, books, and ideas connected to this field.
American psychologist whose research on morbid curiosity — the desire to learn about dangerous, threatening, and disturbing things — examines the adaptive functions of attraction to horror, violence, and death.
American evolutionary psychologist at UT Austin who has spent four decades studying human mating preferences across cultures — whose cross-cultural studies on mate selection, jealousy, and sexual conflict are foundational to evolutionary psychology.
American evolutionary psychologist and researcher whose work on political psychology, moral signaling, and the evolutionary functions of ideology has contributed to the understanding of why people hold political beliefs.
Australian evolutionary psychologist whose research on sexual selection, mate preferences, and hormonal influences on attractiveness contributes to the evolutionary psychology of human mating.
American evolutionary psychologist at the University of Miami whose research on disgust psychology and kinship detection — and her co-authored Objection (with Carlton Patrick) — addresses how disgust shapes moral judgment and the evolutionary origins of ethical intuitions.
Popular science book tracing the evolutionary and cultural history of human mating behavior from ancestral environments through modern dating apps — applying evolutionary psychology to explain contemporary relationship dynamics.
Tucker Max and evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller's guide to male attractiveness — applying evolutionary psychology to practical dating advice.
American author and journalist — author of The Moral Animal (evolutionary psychology), Nonzero (game theory and history), and Why Buddhism Is True — who applies evolutionary biology and game theory to ethics and religion.
Deborah Blum's 1997 examination of the biology of sex and gender — exploring evolutionary, neurological, and hormonal explanations for gender differences — an accessible science journalism account of sex biology.
New Zealand-British psychologist at the University of Nottingham Malaysia whose The Ape That Understood the Universe is one of the best popular evolutionary psychology books.
Steve Stewart-Williams's 2018 book examining what evolutionary psychology and memetics reveal about human nature — written as if an alien scientist were studying humans — covering sex differences, altruism, cooperation, and cultural evolution.
Kevin Simler and Robin Hanson's 2018 book arguing that human behavior is primarily driven by hidden self-interested motives — status, signaling, dominance — that we systematically deny and rationalize as altruistic.
David Buss's 1994 book presenting the evolutionary psychology of human mating — covering mate preferences, the logic of jealousy, short-term and long-term mating strategies, and the conflicts of interest between the sexes.
Robert Wright's 1994 introduction to evolutionary psychology — using Charles Darwin's life as a case study — the most widely read popular account of evolutionary psychology and its implications for human behavior.
William von Hippel's account of human evolution as primarily a social achievement — the 'social leap' from our primate ancestors to large-scale cooperative societies as the key to understanding human psychology.
Australian-American evolutionary psychologist who applies evolutionary theory to social behavior, arguing in The Social Leap that the transition from trees to the ground produced the unique human capacities for cooperation, creativity, and social imagination.
Donald Hoffman is a professor of cognitive science at UC Irvine whose Interface Theory of Perception argues that our perceptual experiences do not represent objective reality but rather an evolutionarily useful interface — like a desktop GUI — that conceals the true nature of the world. He extends this to a radical claim that spacetime itself is not fundamental, and that consciousness may be.