(Some of my recent research is described here, along with some links to media coverage)
The origins of prosocial obligations (or, what makes us good citizens)
Why do
some people feel obliged turn up for jury service, are willing to pay more tax to improve
society’s healthcare, and feel the need to go beyond the call of duty in their job? In a recent study we looked at effects
of both the genes and the environment in almost 1000 twin pairs on these
important social obligations. Two key observations emerged from these analyses:
Firstly, individuals’ levels of civic, welfare, and work dutifulness were all
strongly associated with each other indicating a common influence to prosocial
obligations; Secondly, while environmental experiences
influence such feelings of prosocial obligation, genes affect who helps society
as well, especially in women. These results suggest that interventions that
encourage socially conscious behaviours may be useful, but that some
individuals may be more instinctively prosocial than others. NB: these results do not indicate that women are 'nicer' than men, as some news outlets have incorrectly reported. Rather our results show that of the reasons that individuals differ from each other in their sense of prosocial obligation, genetic factors are important in explaining these differences in females, but much less so in males.
(some media)
Montreal Gazette - a nice summary piece by Marlowe Hood
Ingroup favouritism (us vs. them)
Ingroup favouritism is that ubiquitous phenomenon of treating members of your ingroup preferentially (think football supporters, high school cliques, etc.). Lots of research has demonstrated that favouritism is likely to emerge when resources are scarce and competition increases; however, even in the absence of such competition favouritism is observed, suggesting that we may have evolved mechanisms to align ourselves with group members. This evolutionary perspective makes some sense; after all, a group is far more able to survive than lone individuals and so a psychological mechanism able to support such affiliative behaviour would have been likely to come under selection. However, what kind of favouritism did evolution bestow upon the human mind? Some have argued that "essentialist" features such as ethnicity and race are automatically processed and are underpinned by specific mental machinery. This perspective has been supported by a range of work by social psychologists documenting the existence widespread implicit race biases, and from social neuroscientists demonstrating race-linked brain activation patterns in a number of neuroimaging experiments. Others have suggested that the mind instead possesses a general purpose affiliation mechanism, and that race and ethnicity simply get mapped onto this mechanism by virtue of historical contingency and/or the salience of skin colour/ethnic markers (clothing, behaviour, etc.).
We have taken a novel approach to this question by utilising behaviour genetic techniques to ask whether common genetic variance underpins ingroup favouritism across different kinds of favouritism (indicating that general affiliation is an intrinsic human psychological feature), or whether genetic influences act on specific, essentialist categories, such as shared beliefs (religious ingroup favouritism) and/or shared descent (ethnic and race ingroup favouritism). Our findings suggest that genes influence both a common affiliation mechanism (CAM), as well as favouritism at the level of the essentialist traits. However, while the CAM appears to represent the evolved human mechanisms to bind to groups, the unique genetic influences are perhaps less interpretable; it may be that more general traits underlie such observations, such as general conservatism and/or obedience.
Association for Psychological Science blog - a great summary by Wray Herbert
BBC online
More research areas to follow...
