Coalitional Psychology (us versus them; collective action; perceptions of race; multi-individual cooperation)

Cooperation between 3 or more individuals who are not kin is rare in the animal kingdom, yet common in our species. How could this have evolved? See:

Tooby, J., Cosmides, L., & Price, M. (2006). Cognitive adaptations for n-person exchange: The evolutionary roots of organizational behavior. Managerial and Decision Economics, 27, 103-129.

"Seeing" others as members of a race may not be inevitable, as many psychologists had thought. Instead, the tendency to notice and remember someone’s race may be a changeable byproduct of brain mechanisms that evolved for another reason: to detect shifting coalitions and alliances. By creating a social context in which race was uncorrelated with coalitional alliances, we were able to drastically decrease the extent to which subjects noticed and remembered other people’s race. Click here for more

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. (December 18, 2001; Epub 2001 Dec 11. PMID: 11742078) www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/98/26/15387.pdf  or click here

For The Economist's article on this work, click here

Cosmides, L., Tooby, J. & Kurzban, R.  (2003).  Perceptions of race.  Trends in Cognitive Sciences 7(4), 173-179 (April).  PMID: 12691766 or PDF

Price, M. E., Cosmides, L. & Tooby, J.  (2002).  Punitive sentiment as an anti-free rider psychological device.  Evolution and Human Behavior, 23, 203-231. (doi:10.1016/S1090-5138(01)00093-9)  PDF

For more relevant research by Robert Kurzban and by Michael Price:

Robert Kurzban:  http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~kurzban/

See also The Economist article on his newest work (Jan 24, 2005)

Michael Price:  http://www.brunel.ac.uk/sss/psychology/staff-profiles/michael-price