This View of Life

TVOL's first podcast with Michele Gelfand explored an axis of cultural variation from "tight" (strong norms, strongly enforced) to "loose" (tolerant of individual differences). In this new podcast, we explore the distinctive blend of tightness and looseness needed to adapt to the pandemic.    Related Material Michele's book: Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: How Tight and Loose Cultures Wire Our World I...

Evolution education is often considered solely the domain of the biology classroom, with evolutionary explanations centered largely on genetic change over generations. In this TVOL Podcast, David Sloan Wilson talks with education researchers Susan Hanisch and Dustin Eirdosh about emerging approaches in evolution education that challenge this view and embrace an interdisciplinary conceptualization...

Max Beilby and Mark van Vugt discuss the science of evolutionary mismatch how it can help us understand human behavior in modern novel environments such as the workplace. Mark van Vugt is a professor in Evolutionary and Organizational Psychology at VU Amsterdam and is also a research associate at the University of Oxford. His latest book is, " Mismatch: How Our Stone Age Brain Deceives Us Every Da...

In 1992, the evolutionary psychologists Leda Cosmides and John Tooby predicted, "Just as one can now flip open Gray's Anatomy to any page and find an intricately detailed depiction of some part of our evolved species-typical morphology, we anticipate that in 50 or 100 years one will be able to pick up an equivalent reference work for psychology and find in it detailed information-processing descri...

The idea that nature, left to itself, reaches some sort of harmonious balance is still widespread in the lay public and some public policy circles. "This View of Life" leads to a different conclusion; that "niceness" can evolve, but only when special conditions are met. Otherwise, evolution results in organisms that impose suffering on each other. David explores this theme for primate societies wi...

What is Dugnad? It is a uniquely Norwegian word that identifies an important aspect of its culture of cooperation. David Sloan Wilson talks with Carsta Simon and Hilde Mobekk on their recently published article titled Dugnad: A Fact and Narrative of Norwegian Prosocial Behavior , published in Perspectives on Behavior Science and available open access for a limited time period. Carsta and Hilde's s...

Peter Gray , the first psychologist to write an introductory psychology textbook from an evolutionary perspective, experienced a family crisis when his son started to rebel against public school. Finding alternative schooling for his son led Peter to champion a new paradigm for child development and education from an evolutionary perspective.   He joins David to discuss this journey and more, incl...

One of the high points of David's professional life has been to work with Elliott Sober , Hans Reichenbach Professor and William F. Vilas Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin. Elliott has made foundational contributions to many topics in evolutionary science, including his and David's collaboration on multilevel selection (MLS) theory. In this conversation, they discuss...

Phrases such as "social constructivism" and "relativism" signal the importance of symbolic meaning systems in human life. Taken to extremes, they have been used to undermine the authority of science and even to deny the existence of objective knowledge, paving the way for today's epidemic of "fake news". Against this background, evolutionary science can establish a sensible middle ground that reco...

Most people think of cultural differences in terms of race, class, nationality, or religion. Michele Gelfand introduces the concept of 'tight" and "loose", which cuts across all of those other categories.   Michele is a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of Maryland, College Park and joins David to discuss cultural diversity from an evolutionary perspective and more, including...