- Robert Kurzban
Robert Kurzban is an Associate Professor of
Psychology at theUniversity of Pennsylvania , specializing inevolutionary psychology . He was born inPoughkeepsie ,New York on September 29th, 1969. He received his undergraduate degree in psychology fromCornell University in 1991 and subsequently completed his PhD in the Psychology Department at UCSB in 1998. He continued his training with postdoctoral work in the Department ofAnthropology atUCLA , and the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences at Caltech. He also spent two years at the Economic Science Laboratory theUniversity of Arizona withNobel Laureate Vernon L. Smith . Kurzban’s research focuses on evolutionary approaches to understanding human social behavior. He founded thePennsylvania Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Psychology at theUniversity of Pennsylvania in 2003.Research
Robert Kurzban was trained by two pioneers in the field of
evolutionary psychology ,John Tooby andLeda Cosmides and his research reflects this background. He takes an adaptationist view of human psychology, and his work is aimed at understanding the functions of psychological mechanisms designed around social life. He uses methods drawn fromsocial psychology ,cognitive psychology , and especiallyexperimental economics . His early work investigated the social category "race" and was directed at the hypothesis that people "automatically" encode the race of people they observe. Kurzban argued that because humans evolved in a world in which they rarely if ever encountered people of very different physical appearance from themselves, it was unlikely that the human mind was designed to encode what is currently referred to as race. A series of experiments cite journal | url = http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/full/98/26/15387 | author = Kurzban, R., Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. | year = 2001 | title = Can race be erased? Coalitional computation and social categorization | journal =Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences | volume = 98 | issue = 26 | issn = 15387-15392 | pmid = 11742078 | doi = 10.1073/pnas.251541498 | pages = 15387] showed that with a relatively minor manipulation in the laboratory, the extent to which people categorized others by race could be reduced. He has also done research on cooperation, mate choice (and speed dating), and morality. Evolutionary psychology has come under attack from a number of critics. Kurzban has been active in defending the discipline from prominent detractors and also worked to clarify the principle of cognitive modularity, which plays an important role in the discipline. cite journal | url = http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/apd.html
author = Kurzban, R. | year = 2002 | title = Alas poor evolutionary psychology: Unfairly accused, unjustly condemned. [Review of Alas Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology edited by H. Rose and S. Rose] | journal =Human Nature Review , 2 | pages = 99–109 ]elected Publications
*Barrett, H. C., & Kurzban, R. (2006). Modularity in cognition: Framing the debate. "Psychological Review", 113(3), 628-647.
*Kurzban, R., & Aktipis, C. A. (2007). Modularity and the social mind: Are psychologists too self-ish? "Personality and Social Psychology Review", 11(2), 131-149.
*Kurzban, R. & Houser, D. (2005) An experimental investigation of cooperative types in human groups: A complement to evolutionary theory and simulations. "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences", 102(5), 1803-1807.
*Kurzban, R., & Weeden, J. (2005). HurryDate: Mate preferences in action. "Evolution and Human Behavior", 26(3), 227-244.
*Kurzban, R., Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2001). Can race be erased? Coalitional computation and social categorization. "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences", 98(26), 15387-15392.References
External links
* [http://www.psych.upenn.edu/PLEEP/index.html The Pennsylvania Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Psychology] (PLEEP)
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