Social Ecology: Lost and Found in Psychological Science
Perspectives on Psychological Science
How do institutions, geography, and everyday surroundings become part of psychological explanation?
Reading
I’m a fan of these!
Some of my favorite papers, chapters, and books. They ask how our surroundings shape us, how we make sense of one another, and how to study those connections. I’ve grouped them by the questions they open up.
Social ecology
How does the environment get into the mind?
The crowded life is a slow life: Population density and life history strategy
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Can living among more people change how far ahead we plan? Connecting population density to individual life strategies.
Residential mobility breeds familiarity-seeking
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Moving somewhere new can make familiar things more appealing—a connection between changes in our surroundings and what we seek.
Contest and scramble competition: patterns of female aggression and ranging behavior among primates
Behavioral Ecology
How does the distribution of food shape competition? A view of social behavior through the environments primates inhabit.
Evolution & adaptation
What is the mind built to do?
Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology
The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology · Chapter 1
What changes when we ask what a mental mechanism evolved to do, as well as how it works?
Life History Theory and Evolutionary Psychology
The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology · Chapter 2
Time and energy are finite. Life history theory asks how organisms allocate them across growth, reproduction, and parenting.
Domain Specificity and Intuitive Ontology
The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology · Chapter 3
Do we understand objects, living things, and people through the same mental machinery? A case for specialized cognitive systems.
Evolutionary Social Psychology
Handbook of Social Psychology
Connecting everyday social motives and responses to situations with evolutionary questions about their functions.
Renovating the Pyramid of Needs: Contemporary Extensions Built Upon Ancient Foundations
Perspectives on Psychological Science
Revisiting Maslow’s familiar pyramid: how motives develop, overlap, and become more or less pressing as circumstances change.
Groups & cultural learning
Why do we stay, follow, and learn from others?
Social Identity as Social Glue: The Origins of Group Loyalty
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Why stay with a group when leaving could pay more? Experiments on identification, loyalty, and the value of belonging.
The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission
Evolution and Human Behavior
Why do we willingly defer to some people? A theory linking prestige to the benefits of learning from others.
Thinking & valuing
How do we make sense of people—and a good life?
Social Psychologists and Thinking about People
Advanced Social Psychology: The State of the Science · Chapter 1
The different pictures of human nature behind social psychology, and how those pictures guide the questions researchers ask.
Thinking backward: Some curable and incurable consequences of cognitive busyness
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
Can we undo an impression formed while distracted? Correcting the original judgment may not undo the inferences built on it.
Motivated inference: Self-serving generation and evaluation of causal theories
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
How what we want to believe shapes the causal explanations we generate and the evidence we accept.
Concepts of happiness across time and cultures
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin
Happiness has not always meant feeling good. Its changing meanings invite us to examine what our measures take for granted.
Theory & methods
How do we turn an idea into a research question?
Handbook of Theories of Social Psychology: Volume 1
SAGE
A collection of explanations for social behavior—a companion for asking what a theory predicts and how to test it.
Concept Mover’s Distance: measuring concept engagement via word embeddings in texts
Journal of Computational Social Science
How can a text engage with an idea without naming it? A way to connect theoretical concepts to word embeddings.