35 Emotions Explained By Evolutionary Psychology - Rob Kurzban
In a Nutshell
Emotions are evolved measurement-and-motivation systems that tag internal states or external threats/opportunities with a felt intensity so the brain can triage competing demands and pick the next action. Modern environments often misfire these systems—Instagram envy, road-rage anger, calorie-dense food—because the cues they were calibrated on (small groups, scarce calories, repeated encounters) no longer match reality. Understanding each emotion’s ancestral function lets you decide whether to follow its impulse or override it, turning reflexive feelings into informed choices rather than automatic behavior.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Feelings drive the most interesting pieces of human behavior. If you feel hungry, you want to eat. If you feel aroused, you want to do something else. If you feel jealous, you want to say whatever. The evolutionary piece gives us a way to understand them. The evolutionary point of view is critical for studying anything that humans do because we're an animal, an ape, just like every other species on the planet. We have an evolutionary history.
A thermometer can detect heat without feeling any kind of way. A Waymo driverless car functionally wants to pick someone up at their hotel and make a right on red, which it did very safely. Functionally, artificial systems can achieve goals, but biology may not work the same way. When you put a bunch of neurons in there, they get really complicated, and then a miracle occurs somewhere in there, and the magic happens, and it feels like something.
For organisms like us, there's just no other way to do it. If an organism is afraid of a bear over there but also hungry because there's something to eat over here, it has to make a decision about which action to take. The Waymo thinks there's some number, but for humans it's how strong is the fear, how strong is the hunger, and that arbitrates which one we do. The sense that we have is a way to figure out which of the different things we're motivated to do should be a priority right now.
Consciousness as experience we have is a common currency. It says, "Oh, it's this important. You got to do it somehow." As you get more complicated, this problem becomes bigger and bigger. The Waymo's main thing is not to get into an accident, and then the second thing is to get to where you're going. But humans have all these different things, so you have to have a clearinghouse.
Everything that exists exists in some quantity. In psychology, people talk about all this stuff but never talk about the quantities. No one's talking about a unit of jealousy or a unit of hunger, really. For organisms to respond adaptively in their environment, they have to measure something, whether something inside like how much glucose is in the blood, or something outside like how close is that bear.
Once you have the measurement, you have to do something with it. From the evolutionary point of view, the information isn't useful unless it does something in terms of changing your behavior either inside or outside. Emotions measure something in the body or outside the world which is going to be adaptively relevant, and then get you to do something. This language applies from hunger to awe to jealousy to contempt to the feeling that you've seen someone before. The same measure-motivate kind of system gets you from all the low-level kinds of feelings to all the high-level ones.
All feelings have both measurement and motivation components, but for some the measurement is very straightforward. Thirsty or the feeling you need to go to the bathroom are pretty simple sets of measurements. Other measurements like jealousy are really complicated. Sometimes you don't know what you have to do unless you can measure something, and then you have to act in the world.
We misunderstand what feelings are measuring pretty often, and in the modern world it can be especially difficult. With envy, back in the day you were around very few people, and more or less everyone around you was someone you might be able to see as a competitor. But now with platforms like Instagram, you see all these people who have great success and a lot of friends. Your envy system is like in overdrive, being fooled into thinking it would be a good idea to try to get what they have even though maybe doing that wouldn't be in your best interest or maybe it isn't even feasible.
The same thing applies to anger. We get angry when someone cuts us off in traffic, which would have been really useful in the past because you're probably going to see that person again and want to tell them not to do that. But now you're never going to see them again, so the anger doesn't do anything useful, but we still experience it.
Unpleasant feelings need to be unpleasant in order to work, and pleasant feelings need to be pleasant in order to work. The reason they feel that way is to contribute to the motivation. There is really sad but very interesting work on the sensation of pain. There are people who either don't experience pain or don't experience the motivation to get rid of it when they have it. Those people don't live very long because they don't make the adjustments they have to do to stop whatever damage is occurring. If you didn't hate having your hand in a fire, you wouldn't take your hand out of it.
The body maintenance kingdom includes itchiness. There are fancy things on the surface of your skin that detect when there's something on there. For the most part, that's on there because there are little insects that might do bad things to you, put holes in you, or lay eggs in you in the case of botflies. You have to have little defense systems.
Itchiness could be socially transmitted. If people are talking about itching, you might start to feel itchy. If other people are itching, there might be things around that you haven't detected yet that are crawling on you. Maybe this is a time to be a little more vigilant.
Yawning is a hard one. There is a paper that listed 20 different possible explanations for yawning. We know other creatures do it, so it's not just a human thing. We do know that there's some social transmission. We do know that it gets some additional oxygen in there. Maybe you're getting ready to do something.
Everybody poops. Any organism that takes in stuff and then has to get rid of it is going to have to poop. You want optimal pooping, so you don't want to just poop anywhere, especially if you're a creature that might be stalked because then you're leaving evidence. In a lot of species including ours, pooping near where other organisms in the group are means they shouldn't do that.
There are cool sensory systems in the rectal area measuring the pressure on the intestinal tube. As that pressure goes up, that's the measurement, and the motivation is to poop. Then you do the pooping by releasing a little valve that opens up. It's a really well-designed system because it's ancient, with millions of years for the pooping system to get debugged by evolution by natural selection.
There is so-called latrine behavior where organisms go to a spot away from the group to do their thing. The thing about poop is that it attracts parasites because the poop can't defend itself and doesn't have an immune system. So parasites come in there, and those parasites are bad for you and for your other group members. You want to keep the poop elsewhere. You can also bury it, which is why dogs do that little flick flick flick thing, which is a residual behavior.
The system is telling you, "Oh, only poop when I have to." And then, "Oh, I should go over there to do it, where everyone else has done it." And then scoot away.
Nausea is interesting because if you are nauseous long enough, it motivates throwing up. The nice thing about vomiting is that if you do have a lot of parasites in your digestive system, that gets them out without having to go through the whole tube, which takes a while. The cues that give rise to nausea are things that indicate you've been poisoned.
A lot of people talk about motion sickness in this context. When you've got parasites on board or a toxin on board, it affects the vestibular system and your ability to perceive balance. You feel dizzy. There's a mismatch between what your eyes are seeing and what your body is feeling. The system is saying if my senses don't agree with each other, that's a pretty good signal that I've either got a toxin on board or some parasite, and I should get rid of it really quickly.
On New Year's Eve 2016 or 2017, working in a nightclub in Manchester, the speaker's business partner's first kid had his first birthday party a couple of days before. Norovirus was running rampant. The business partner texted from the disabled toilet in Newcastle. The speaker started being really catty and short with everyone around him, terse and unnecessarily brusque. He had a conversation with himself asking why he was being a dick when it was New Year's Eve, they sold out, and it was a cool adventure.
Then he started to feel a little bit hot and sweaty, then a cold feeling in his stomach. He connected the dots that he was with his partner who feels sick, his wife feels sick, and he's 150 miles away from home. He tried to hold it in until 5:00 in the morning after driving back to Newcastle, but exploded as soon as he stepped through the door into his own house.
The feelings we have don't always tell us exactly what their origins are. Sometimes on a hike in a canyon, you might suddenly feel afraid. There's a residual little thing in our head somewhere that says if you're in the low ground and there are people who could see you but you can't see them easily, that is a bad spot to be in. Obviously right now when you're in a national forest, no one's going to throw rocks on you or ambush you in the middle of Yosemite, but sometimes you get this weird little funny feeling.
Claustrophobia was experienced late in life when inside a cave. The challenge that evolution faces is getting your dial set right. You're born into a world where you have to decide whether to be especially credulous because everyone's really nice or really skeptical because people are going to be deceiving you. As you go through life, you set these dials for how much you should feel of this or that, and there's some genetic noise. Those dials just get misset sometimes.
You should be afraid of a closed space because you don't have prospect and refuge. Prospect and refuge means you can see what's coming and you can escape. In a box, you have neither of those. You can't see anything and you're not going anywhere. A closed space that's dark would be worse than a closed space that's light because you lose prospect.
We like big vistas. The house that's got the beautiful view is more beautiful than the house that backs onto a gray brick wall. If you look at the pictures of landscapes, what do people choose to paint? Expansive landscapes. You can see what's coming, whether it's a bear, a lion, a herd, or prey animals. The more prospect you have, that's why we like being higher up because we can see all around us. We're also more vulnerable up there, but we have these ancient adaptations for these two things. Claustrophobia is when you've got neither prospect nor refuge, and if your dial is set up high enough, you really don't like them.
Disgust measures the risk of pathogen exposure through various sensory cues. The smell of feces indicates organisms are present, while maggots signal parasites. The smell of decaying flesh triggers disgust because it indicates pathogens nearby. When pathogens are detected, the adaptive response is to create distance or remove the source if it's on the body. The disgust face includes tongue movement as if expelling something.
The tongue's movement in disgust serves as a defense mechanism to expel potentially contaminated substances. Eye closure during disgust may function to prevent flies or other contaminants from entering. These coordinated responses represent multiple defenses against pathogens working together.
Sexual disgust serves an important function by creating repulsion toward certain sexual opportunities. The Westermarck effect demonstrates that people raised together develop disgust toward sexual contact with each other, regardless of genetic relatedness. Deborah Lieberman's research shows that cohabitation during childhood triggers this response.
Traditional practices like Thai or Filipino families selecting future wives for young boys at ages one or two, then raising them together, create conditions where the Westermarck effect operates despite no genetic relationship. Israeli kibbutzim also demonstrate this phenomenon, where children raised together in peer groups develop sexual disgust toward each other despite parental encouragement to pair.
Some emotional systems require specific environmental cues during development to become active. Language acquisition serves as an example - people possess the capacity for languages like Thai or Tagalog, but without exposure during development, these capacities remain dormant. Similarly, certain emotional responses may not develop without appropriate triggers.
Moral condemnation reactions show significant individual variation. Some people experience visceral disgust responses to drug use, while others cannot generate concern about private substance use. This variation may serve adaptive purposes - not everyone in a group having intense aversion to new substances allows for experimentation with potential medicines or remedies.
Personality differences like extraversion and adventurousness provide group benefits because some individuals need to explore new territories. This maintains genetic variability rather than allowing homogenization. Psychopathy may have served adaptive purposes in ancestral environments, enabling individuals to undertake high-risk activities like raids without subsequent psychological trauma.
Attachment styles may serve different functions in threat detection. Anxiously attached individuals might function as early warning systems, constantly monitoring for potential dangers. Avoidantly attached people may be more decisive in taking action when threats are identified. Securely attached individuals might take longer to respond but potentially make more measured decisions.
Anxiety functions as fear directed toward potential future dangers. Public speaking anxiety arises because the situation involves reputation management with large audiences. The adaptive response involves planning specific behaviors - hand movements, anticipated questions - to mitigate identified risks.
Anxiety set too high leads to paralysis, while appropriate levels enable proactive risk mitigation. The evolutionary design should anticipate future dangers and develop strategies to address them when they occur.
Opportunity cost represents the primary constraint on anxiety levels. Every cognitive cycle spent on anxiety prevents attention to other activities. Excessive pre-event anxiety means losing productive time that could be spent on actual preparation or other valuable activities.
Evolution likely calibrated anxiety levels appropriately for ancestral environments. Modern contexts create mismatches because people encounter strangers daily, unlike ancestral conditions where such encounters were rare. Walking in cities like Philadelphia generates background anxiety due to constant exposure to unknown individuals.
Understanding what emotions are designed to accomplish enables better responses to them. When experiencing road rage, recognizing that anger serves to deter future behavior becomes irrelevant when the other driver will never be encountered again. Envy functions to motivate keeping pace with others who have resources, but becomes irrelevant when basic needs are already met.
Individuals vary significantly in optimal stimulation levels. Partners may have conflicting preferences, such as one wanting music playing while another prefers quiet. The modern advantage is the ability to select and modify environments to match personal sensory preferences, including options like separate spaces or soundproofing.
Panic triggers when danger reaches critical levels where inaction guarantees severe consequences. The response involves random locomotion - moving muscles in various patterns without specific planning. This resembles a fish flopping randomly until one movement returns it to water. In military contexts, panic may serve similar functions when all other options are exhausted.
At certain points in history in military conflict, it becomes clear to the participants that one side was about to win and one side was about to lose. Under those circumstances, a panic and route psychology sets in. With the losing side, they could beat a hasty retreat orderly back to their ships or wherever it is, but they don't beat a hasty retreat. They panic. Any given soldier throws their weapons down and runs for the ships to try to escape. This is bad overall because that is not the best way to retreat, but for that particular soldier, that was the best way to avoid the worst possible outcome. Some were cut down and some survived. This panic psychology seems to be: "If I don't do something, bad things are really going to happen, and I'm going to do the only things I can do which often just is random movements like the fish story."
Aesthetic pleasures are hard to understand. Aesthetics is very complicated, but there is a thing where people tend to find aesthetically appealing things that are correlated with stuff that would be kind of good for us. The prospect and refuge is a good example where people like those pictures - that would be a good place for them. The same thing applies for physical bodies that are healthy and in shape. People are attracted to those kinds of images and spend large amounts of time looking at them on the internet on various platforms.
These are thought of as little fitness landscapes or little fitness cues. The motivation is to observe something that might encourage them to emulate that in their own lives, either to emulate that or to do the kind of thing that one does with it. If you see a food item that meets all the criteria, like a ripe apple, it directs your attention to it, and then it causes you eventually often to do the right thing with it, which is to consume it. It's sort of like guiding your attention to it and then causing you to exploit the fitness opportunity.
Aesthetic pleasures tend to be more abstract than sensory pleasures. Just being pet is a very concrete thing, whereas that's very different from the arc of a beautiful play, which yields this kind of satisfaction or pleasure, but the parts of it are super abstract. Other than that, they're pretty similar. They're both saying this is stuff that's correlated with reproductive success in ancestral environments, so people should attend to it and be attracted to it.
Some relatives groom all the time, and only some of that could be accounted for by picking little insects off or getting dirt off. If someone is close enough to you that they can touch you and chooses to do something which is gentle rather than hurtful, that is a really good indication that this is an ally. The grooming is a very appealing thing to know - this is an individual who could be hurting me, but they're not, and therefore they're probably an ally, and that is fitness good.
Ancestrally this all started with some kind of insect removal or parasite extraction from the skin or the fur. In modern humans, it turns into a positive indication of some kind of good social outcome.
Research on pleasure from different speeds of being touched on skin found that pleasantness is strongly related to both how fast someone moves across skin and how much pressure they apply. For speed, the relationship is roughly an inverted U across multiple experiments. People tend to rate gentle stroking at around 1 to 10 cm per second as most pleasant, with around 3 cm per second repeatedly emerging near the peak. Very slow movement at 0.1 to 0.3 cm and fast movement of over 30 cm per second are generally rated as less pleasant. In practical terms, 3 cm per second is really slow - moving a hand about 12 inches would take 10 seconds.
Pressure is another dimension. Soft light stroking is more pleasant than hard heavy stroking. The leading adaptive explanation is that the system is involved less for detecting objects, more for social bonding and caregiving. Discriminative touch is about what touches you where and how hard. Effective touch is about how this touch feels emotionally. Natural stroking, caressing and grooming from social people at the speed that humans spontaneously use when gently stroking a partner, child or other person with light pressure signals affiliation rather than threat. Warmth identifies another living body and reinforces attachment. Infancy may be particularly important.
One reason that dogs and horses bond so well with humans is that the mothering frequency that they speak at to their young is the same frequency that humans speak at to their young. When saying "come on here we are, let's go for a walk, here we are," humans are in the same tonal range and same frequency, which is why humans and horses and humans and dogs relate in that same sort of way. There is work on infant directed speech and animal directed speech where the frequencies are similar and the intonation is similar. The dogs have been artificially selected way more than the horses, yet this parallel still exists between the species.
Spiciness works like a roller coaster. People like spicy - a little bit of spice is good. But once it gets past a certain point, it's not fun, it's painful. In the same way that a roller coaster isn't just scary, it's terrifying. Spices probably are important for pathogens. They seem to have some role in suppressing pathogens both within the nervous system and in food preparation. There is classic work showing that places that were warmer and wetter, so they had more parasites, used more spices in their food, controlling for the spices that were around.
The idea was that if you're eating more meat and that meat is going to get parasites on it faster because of the environment, you put more spices in there and they inhibit the growth of those pathogens. Pepper is the big one. It's not a coincidence that everywhere people use peppers. In places with a lot of pathogens, they use a lot of different peppers. Plants have to defend against pathogens too, so they have chemical defenses. These plants have chemical defenses that humans take and put in their food.
There is a drop-off point. People want the most possible that they could tolerate without feeling it on the way out. The pain is telling that there could be damage. That pain is evolution's way of saying "you could be damaging yourself, don't do that."
Fun and excitement have several pieces in common. Non-human animals are seen playing and doing fun things, like monkeys climbing to the top of a tower and jumping into a little water trough. One important piece is that fun involves training. When playing soccer as a kid, that was some of the best fun. In ancestral environments, practicing coordinating with your group probably was training for violent activities, whether on hunting activity or warfare. But it was done in a context in which learning could happen safely. Evolution wants to reward for this learning process, and fun is evolution's way of saying "yes, this is a good thing for you to do in the safety of your environment, do more of that."
A lot of fun things are like that, where people are either learning something or practicing something in a safe environment. Games are fun because they're training people to think strategically or to think about certain things that could happen in the real world. It's a lot of training, learning, and practicing.
Dancing is puzzling. People coordinate their movements with one another when there's music and some sort of rhythm, and it doesn't seem like it's practicing for something or learning anything. People might be learning something about the fact that they can coordinate with another person, but it's not clear why it's fun.
Music is mysterious as dancing. The production of music involves the point that you can't make beautiful music unless you have really good qualities - you have to be smart, creative, and have taste. There's some sexual signaling there saying "I'm pretty good at this." It is a good signal because it is really hard. People who can do it make it look easy.
The way people react to musicians shows that people need some sort of mate assessment system. Sometimes that dial goes off the charts. People look at accomplishments, physical bodies, and whatever else is known about potential mates. Sometimes it's a supernormal stimulus. Pornography is like this - in pornography you get the supernormal stimulus, and sometimes it's not just one supernormal stimulus, it's multiple, and then the evolved system is like "that's crazy."
Death grip syndrome occurs when guys who are not having sex with a person but are masturbating a lot have hands that grip way more than any female human body can grip. These men are basically de-training their penis to be able to detect the level of pressure. X PSI is available in the vagina and 10X-30X PSI is available in a hand. It's a supernormal stimulus, but just raw sensory data. Nobody would say their hand is sexier than the person they're attracted to, but the conditioning has meant that some guys have to retrain a penis for precisely that reason.
Women have outstripped men with regards to sex toys. There are a million pieces of equipment having to do with shapes, colors, textures, frequencies. They've speed run finding a way to pleasure women. There are entire racks of different equipment with different shapes, colors, and textures that move, vibrate, and twirl around.
Function Health provides comprehensive blood testing with over 160 markers compared to typical annual physicals that test around 20 markers. Users receive testing twice per year with results accessible through a simple dashboard interface that tracks trends over time. The service costs $365 per year, equivalent to $1 per day, with a current $25 discount bringing the price to $340. The exact blood panels used by the host are available through functionofhealth.com/modernwisdom.
Rob Kurzban identifies hunger as a clear example of an evolved system functioning as designed but producing poor outcomes in modern environments. The hunger system evolved to take advantage of available food resources, leading to the obesity epidemic. Kurzban mentions that emerging technologies like Ozempic may be changing this dynamic.
Kurzban identifies the appetite for morally condemning others as his least favorite evolved system. Humans derive pleasure from sitting around labeling people as "bad," and this behavior provided evolutionary benefits. When participating in mob condemnation, individuals could distract attention from themselves while potentially gaining resources from competitors. Being on the "winning side" of moral accusations was advantageous for survival.
Social media has amplified the ability to indulge in moral condemnation beyond what was possible through newspapers or television. Kurzban describes how platforms enable people to participate in moral attacks, with everyone wanting to be on the accusing side. He references an incident where someone was incorrectly identified as Andy Ngo and received death threats despite being the wrong person. This illustrates how moral attack systems function like "moral roulette" where participants spin the wheel without knowing if they've targeted the correct person.
Family love exists across mammalian species, with adaptations for caring for children and parents. The phenomenology of family love appears comparable across species. Humans show distinctive patterns in romantic relationships, being relatively monogamous compared to other primates.
Dorothy Tennov's concept of limerence describes the intense romantic feelings characterized by writing sonnets, singing, and performing brave deeds. While some bird species exhibit monogamy, human romantic love appears to have specific adaptations designed for pair-bonding. Swans demonstrate similar lifelong pair bonding, remaining together until one dies.
Human friendships differ from other species in their complexity and importance. While dolphins and chimpanzees show some non-kin affiliations, humans dedicate significant portions of their lives to cultivating and maintaining friendships. These relationships provide allies who offer support during difficult times, help with practice, and enable shared activities. Friendship emotions appear powerful and serve functions including tracking allies and ensuring relationship retention.
Hatred functions as a long-term deterrent mechanism designed to minimize or eliminate threats from individuals who have harmed or want to harm the person experiencing hatred. Unlike anger, which tends to be immediate and local, hatred persists over extended periods. Anger might occur between friends over minor incidents like taking a sweater, but hatred represents a more permanent assessment that someone will consistently cause harm and needs to be neutralized. In ancestral environments, this might have led to murder, while modern environments require different responses.
Chimpanzee communities demonstrate non-kin alliances, particularly evident during power struggles where lower-ranking individuals form coalitions against dominant members. These alliances appear to involve grooming and relationship-building behaviors. Male dolphins form long-term non-kin associations specifically for mating-related purposes, including coercive behavior toward female dolphins.
Human friendships serve multiple functions beyond what strangers can provide. These include mutual protection, reciprocal food sharing, backup during conflicts, and collective action for warfare or resource acquisition. Social learning represents another key function, as friends help locate resources like good sticks or rocks for tool-making. The alliance aspect appears most important, as knowing one's position in a friend's "friendship queue" predicts support availability during conflicts.
Research with Peter Schully demonstrates that humans mentally rank their friendships, knowing who their best friend is, followed by second and third best friends. This ranking system proves valuable during conflicts, as best friends will support against lower-ranked friends. While activities like playing or exchanging goods can occur with strangers, the critical advantage of friendships lies in knowing alliance commitments during disputes.
Kurzban argues that emotions display clear hallmarks of evolved adaptations, appearing consistent across cultures and throughout history. Ancient Greek myths, biblical texts, and other historical sources contain the same emotions observed today. The Ten Commandments' prohibition against coveting suggests envy has been recognized across cultures rather than independently invented.
Envy directs attention toward individuals who are succeeding in some domain, motivating increased effort to achieve similar outcomes or potentially undermining competitors. Jealousy specifically addresses threats to existing relationships, whether romantic or friendship-based, and triggers behaviors to protect against those threats. While envy focuses on opportunity and learning from successful others, jealousy functions as a defensive response to relationship threats.
Kurzban suggests that moralizing against jealousy may serve strategic purposes, potentially causing others to lower their defenses while maintaining one's own jealous responses. Historical examples from 1960s California demonstrate how declarations that "jealousy is a pathology" sometimes preceded the speaker pursuing someone else's partner. Similar patterns appear in intersexual competition where individuals may encourage others to adopt less competitive appearances or behaviors.
The evolutionary perspective allows analysis of emotions and behaviors without implying moral approval. Kurzban emphasizes that understanding why certain psychological mechanisms exist differs from endorsing them. The naturalistic fallacy becomes less problematic when evolutionary explanations provide understanding without requiring moral acceptance. This distinction proves particularly important when studying sensitive topics related to sex and race, where explaining phenomena does not equate to condoning them.
If you're serious about trying to stop something that you think is bad, the first step ought to be to understand it with every possible tool you have. If you understood people's motive to do X, Y, or Z, then you would think you're in a better position to fix it. Making up reasons that people do X, Y, and Z, such as claiming people who steal stuff just want to exert their power over another person, as opposed to they just want the valuable thing, might lead you to not think to lock up your valuable things anymore. You might instead try to make that seem less powerful somehow. The explanation tells you what you're going to do to stop it.
Suppressing people's study of things that we don't like is a very bad thing for society to do. Understanding what the ultimate reason for behavior would have been for evolution to keep it about does not mean giving it a pass. Jimmy Carr's got a line about saying that something is too sensitive of a topic to joke about is like saying this is a disease that's too serious to treat.
The more callous or morally repugnant the behavior, the more that we should be looking at it. Aesthetic beauty is something that's cool to study and could give us really fascinating insights, but hatred and moral condemnation are also worth studying because if people had a better understanding of this, that might lead to reducing it where it's not needed or people being able to regulate when it happens. Someone that gets served papers looks suspiciously like Andy Ngo is able to take a beat rather than being at the mercy of these things.
It is an unfortunate consequence of the current moment that an appetite people have for moral condemnation and moral attacks means that you can attack someone for studying a touchy topic. People don't get attacked for studying diseases. This appetite for moral attacks has done so much harm and undermines research that could help us understand humans, our motives, and so on, which ultimately would have to be helpful for organizing ourselves and making the world a better place.
A common accusation thrown at evolutionary theorists is that this is a just-so story, constructing a very believable but largely confabulated narrative in the present to explain something from the past. When thinking about a story, usually the way people talk about it is it's really just another word for explanation. The question is whether you have a scientific explanation which could be falsified or not.
All the sources were put online so people who are reading can look at the evidence marshaled for each of the different fields and go to the particular field and look at the citations and endnotes. It's important to be speculative, but the fact of the matter is that every hypothesis is a story. The crucial piece that is often missed is that evolutionary psychology is not saying something about the past per se, but talking about the design of some particular mechanism.
If you said the eye is for seeing, you'd be like, "Well, how do you know?" Well, it's got this transparent lens, it's got a retina, it's got all these features that make it really good for that function. You wouldn't say, "Well, that's a story." You'd say, "Oh, yeah, that's it. The eye is good for seeing." Psychological adaptations are the same sort of thing like hunger. It's got some measurement system that makes it good at its job, which is figuring out do I need calories? Is my stomach full? Has it been a long time since my meal? How much blood is in whatever? The evidence of design is what we use as evidence for supporting a particular proposal or hypothesis.
The only difference in the evolutionary approach is that we say, "Can we use what's known about human's evolutionary history to guide our guesses about what the functions are?" And then we test those. The critique is weird because others have guesses, they have hypotheses, and have data. The only difference is they just made their hypothesis up because they said, "Well, social this, cultural that." A theory was used to develop a plausible evolutionary hypothesis, and then the data was looked at to see if they support that particular proposal.
This critique has been heard since starting in the academy in 1993, and it is quite silly. It's a misunderstanding of the way science works and what is happening in the field of evolutionary psychology, which is hypothesis generation and testing about function, not some story about what happened 3 million years ago.
A lot of the hypotheses, like if you've got pre-registered research, a lot of the time they end up being right. Behavioral genetics and evolutionary psychology are two of the fields that haven't had the replication crisis happen all that much, despite being the most controversial to talk about. Those fields have actually stood up really nicely.
If you have this anti-blank slatist approach, it can make you feel a little uncomfortable, especially if you've got a worldview that suggests inequality is something that we need to get rid of. Everybody wants to try and have an equal society, but it reminds you that life isn't fair and that the world is not infinitely malleable, that the right social policies can right all wrongs and that you can flatten the playing landscape for everybody simply through the correct interventions. There is going to be mean, nasty people. Some people out there are going to misbehave regardless of what you try to do with rehabilitation or schooling or whatever because we have pretty ancient motives that you can't re-pattern with the correct like scare them straight intervention or whatever.
When in grad school, people who were looking at human social behavior without the evolutionary point of view did a lot of stuff on threat, they did a lot of stuff on the implicit association task, all this implicit racism. They were sitting there and telling us that we weren't doing science because we were evolutionary people. Here we are 25, 30 years later, and that stuff has completely fallen apart.
At the time we said to ourselves, not to them, we'd say, "Well, at least we're not just like doing advocacy but with some veneer of science, which is what they were really doing." The stereotype stuff was bad, whatever. Here we are 30 years later and the work on race, which was just about can you provide cases in which people don't sort of notice one another's race, has held up pretty well.
Leda Cosmides and the late John Tooby were the grad supervisors. Meeting John at HBES 2023 in Palm Springs felt a little bit like meeting the queen. He was a wonderful man and a genius. The comparison was like speaking like the Oracle of Delphi because you would come to him with a question and something you'd be thinking about and he'd take a second to think about it and then he would just in his John Tooby sort of explain it. He was Master Yoda.
Empathy has a lot written about it. Paul Bloom has done some nice work on it, including the book Against Empathy. For social creatures such as us, it's pretty important to be able to measure what other people are feeling because that helps you with your own strategy with respect to them. If they're an ally and they're feeling sad, it's a little bit of theory of mind, but it's not just their mind. It's all of these things.
Empathy is measuring what you're trying to measure, so it's a little bit of a meta thing. If you're sad, I'm trying to measure how sad are you, and how sad are you? Well, you're trying to figure out how bad things are. That can help me in both directions. One thing that's nice about empathy is that if you're sad, then I can comfort you and that's good for me because you're my friend and I can make you feel better and maybe help you think about how to feel better. But if you're my enemy and I have a certain amount of empathy, that is I know what you're feeling, I can make you feel worse.
This is why torture is so effective is that we know what's going to hurt both mental and physical. If I know that you are the jealousaur and I say, "Well, your girlfriend or partner or whatever it is, Cindy or John or whatever it is, no judgment. I saw them with another person," then I can make you feel bad because I know that that's going to hit your own measurement system. Empathy is a pretty useful thing because it helps us figure out both how to help and hurt others. Mostly we think about it in the sense of helping because empathy usually leads to something like care.
Empathy in some ways is investment advice. The theory is that this person is so down on their luck that they will be unusually overly appreciative of any assistance that I give them. The best possible thing that could happen in a day might be walking along a stream and happening to be carrying a life preserver and Elon Musk is drowning. Relatively minimal cost, you can send him the life preserver and then he's saved his life. Now you've done that because you know that drowning is bad and you sort of have that whatever psychology. So it is good investment but think about other cases that we don't invest in.
People go by people who are currently experiencing homelessness and they don't help them. The psychology is saying well they're unlikely to help me back either because they're never going to be able to or because I'm not going to help them enough to get over. They're so far off the bottom. There's a U-shaped function with caressing and there's optimal caressing in just the same way there's optimal helping. This was going back to John Tooby, sort of a banker's paradox which is you want to give loans to those who need a loan but are going to be able to repay it. So you've got this U-shaped function.
Gratitude is something we really should have more of in our lives. Humans are social, and when people do nice things for you, which is usually the antecedent of gratitude, you want to signal, "Okay, I acknowledge that, and this is going to increase the extent to which I am potentially going to deliver benefits to you down the road, too." Because the person who's giving you benefits is good, one of the things you're probably going to get out of it is if we're friends and I help you, then that's good for me because then you're better off or whatever. But another thing is there's going to be potential help down the line.
Gratitude means you want to make sure you signal, "Look, I recognize that A, you've just helped me, and B, more importantly, you generally you're saying, 'I know that you go around the world thinking that I'm someone who you want to help, not someone you want to hurt or just ignore.'" You're reinforcing the cycle of reciprocal benefits and potentially alliance. If you don't express gratitude, you're like, "Well, I'm not sure I'm going to help that guy again because he didn't acknowledge that I delivered this benefit to him." You sort of up the psychological little question of did he even know that I did it? Did he even notice that I helped him in this way?
A lot of the people that listen to this show are in a category of people that pay attention maybe more than on average, and that can be a real blessing because you notice things. If you don't wrangle it correctly, then that can turn into anxiety, rumination, intrusive thoughts. One of the challenges there is if you don't have a good set point for gratitude, what you can do is pay a lot of small benefits to somebody, like a housemate who leaves hoodies around. You might fold the hoodie and just put it on the desk, personally because you like the environment to be tidy, but also because if he puts it on and it's usually a Modern Wisdom hoodie, if that looks a bit shitty, it's not going to be cool for him, and it's bad rep for the brand.
Because he pays attention, he notices. There is this sort of balance between how much attention you pay and then how much gratitude. This is on both the giver and the receiver. The goal should be to have the level of gratitude and show the level of gratitude at the level of attention that you pay. If you have a mismatch with that, what you can end up doing is feeling like there's an imbalance in the resolution that you're looking at things.
You do some grand gesture. Organizing a surprise for your friend, like a business partner in Nutanix whose 40th birthday was in the UK a couple of weeks ago, and a couple of the other guys got together and decided that they were going to buy him and his family, with his kids, a trip to Lapland. Full thing. The kids are not going to go to Kingston upon Thames to go and see Santa. They're going to go to Finland, and they've sorted the whole thing, and flights, and hotels, and reindeer sled, and all the rest of it. They gave it to him, and he cried, and it was really, really beautiful. That's obviously going to be something which is worthy of gratitude. He's going to go, he's going to have these memories. They did it at the appropriate time before. He's got 4 months to like owe them before actually having to cash in the favor, so to speak.
What's really cool when it comes to gratitude is like this person came around to the house for dinner, and they know that you like this particular flavor of soft drink, and you got just one can for them in advance. The small elements like that, continuing to lower your threshold for what you believe is worthy of celebration and gratitude, is something that everyone can do.
One of the pieces of advice that gets asked for a lot at the live shows is "I don't feel my successes emotionally even though I achieve them quantifiably or objectively, what do you think I should do to try and bring more of this in?" Gratitude is great, but it's kind of hard to do. But what you can do is celebrate your friends when they achieve basically anything, no matter how small it is, is worthy of an achievement. Some balloons, a cake, a cookie, a cuddle, dinner, a big party or whatever. One friend at the start of this year had his first album launch and organizing an album launch for him was organized. It's actually kind of a vicious reciprocal gratitude practice because if you make it plain that you're prepared to celebrate someone for something small, we're horrible at celebrating ourselves, but we're great at celebrating others. So even if we can't do it for ourselves, if we do it for others, they might start doing it for us and you end up with this feedback where everyone else did it on my behalf and I'll do it for them.
If you understand why we have friendships and why alliances are important and why reciprocal altruism exists and why gratitude's important, but it's kind of hard to do for ourselves, but it's easy to do for other people and if you pay attention, you have small things, you can create this like feedback positive feedback loop, a boom loop rather than a doom loop of I'm going to do more for other people and that's one of the ways that tactically this stuff has been tried to put into practice.
Adding gratitude to your life really does, at least the read of this literature holding aside replicate, whatever, seems like this does make people happier, more content, calmer. Evolution set it in there and it is rewarding you for it because we wouldn't feel the warm glow of gratitude if it wasn't doing something for us. There's something really deep in there about relationships, which is figuring out and this goes back to empathy, what does that person care about with respect to how I think about them. In one particular case, a partner loves having flowers in the kitchen. The sort of like points that get earned for remembering to refresh the flowers.
The psychologists have under appreciated how much work economists have already done. When in Arizona a million years ago with Vernon Smith and those guys at the Economic Science Laboratory, they talked about goodwill accounting, which was basically a forerunner of some of this measurement of gratitude. They basically said, "Yeah, so people should keep track of the good that they did for someone else. And then they signal to that other person, 'Hey, I've just upped your little like goodwill account.'" They literally talked about it as how much goodwill do I have for you because of the things you did for me. There's lots of work in economics which could be mined for some of the interesting social stuff because it's sort of an under-exploited resource.
Economics has got bad branding because when people think economics they think about numbers and the way that the fiscal policy should work. But behavioral economics is one of the most robust and fascinating areas. Russ Roberts is a animal. His entire sort of thesis around like wild decisions. He's great. This plays into trust and distrust.
Trust functions as a prediction about how much one can rely on someone, while distrust represents the opposite assessment. When Vernon Smith and colleagues developed the trust game in behavioral economics, they created a measurement tool for assessing the probability that someone will follow through on stated intentions. The assessment includes both the probability of compliance and the magnitude of potential outcomes.
Trust enables gains in trade by allowing transactions where one party delivers value today with confidence the other will reciprocate tomorrow. However, this creates exposure to exploitation and loss, making trust calibration difficult. People frequently err in both directions, extending trust when unwarranted or withholding it when appropriate, with stakes that can become substantial depending on circumstances.
Modern contexts have simultaneously lowered and raised trust stakes. Legal systems, police, and formal contracts provide enforcement mechanisms unavailable in earlier eras. At the same time, increased mobility allows people to relocate easily, and various methods exist for evading commitments. The legal system cannot enforce private conversations or off-color jokes shared with friends, creating situations where trust lacks institutional backing.
Client-patient confidentiality represents litigiously enforced trust, where legal frameworks bind parties to silence to enable full disclosure. Without such binding mechanisms, therapeutic relationships would be undermined completely. The religious context provides historical precedent, with confessionals designed to ensure privacy and supplemented by cultural penalties like threats of hellfire.
Contracts represent one of the modern world's significant innovations, enabling transactions that would otherwise be impossible. Clinical psychology has helped many people, though evidence suggests the trusting relationship itself may drive benefits more than specific therapeutic techniques. CBT appears to be the current frontrunner among approaches, but pharmacological interventions represent genuine scientific advances for psychiatric conditions.
Training in clinical psychology has become increasingly politicized, potentially affecting the field's direction and the cohort of practitioners drawn to it.
Depression involves more than sadness and represents one of the most severe psychological experiences possible. The condition appears to function as a bargaining mechanism where withdrawal from activities, including childcare in postpartum cases, signals need for increased support from others.
Suicidal ideation and preparatory behaviors signal potential self-removal from the social world, imposing costs on close relationships. This withdrawal serves as an honest signal that the individual will not participate in social activities until others provide necessary investment. The reduction in energy and motivation prevents engagement in activities, forcing others to recognize the need for intervention.
The intense negative feeling may serve dual purposes: credibly signaling potential for suicide, which represents a massive cost for others to bear, and motivating the withdrawal behavior itself. This creates an honest signal because the person literally lacks motivation for previously enjoyed activities.
Low-status environments provide multiple signals that an individual is not succeeding: lack of money, absence of recognition, minimal publications, and general disregard from others. These conditions may trigger withdrawal as an adaptive response, allowing introspection about life choices rather than continued investment in failing strategies.
The withdrawn state enables thinking through circumstances without the distraction of social activities, potentially facilitating strategic reassessment when current approaches are not working.
Contempt measures whether someone is unworthy of friendship, alliance, or relationship investment based on their nature or past actions. This assessment recognizes limited resources: finite time, limited friendship slots, and restricted partnership opportunities. The emotion motivates avoidance and communicates that the person represents low value for affiliation.
Resentment differs from contempt by focusing on specific acts rather than persons. It measures whether someone received benefits they were not entitled to, such as promotions based on relationships rather than merit. This emotion connects closely to fairness concerns and violations of exchange principles.
When experiencing resentment, people often want to discuss the injustice publicly, attempting to motivate moralistic attacks against the beneficiary. The goal may be to reverse the unfair outcome and claim the deserved benefit.
Embarrassment occurs when someone violates a social norm, whether intentionally or accidentally. The involuntary flush provides an honest signal that the person recognizes the violation and normally follows norms. This demonstrates that the breach was accidental rather than characteristic, preserving reputation as a reliable norm follower.
The flush cannot be faked, making it a credible indicator that the person knows the rules and will follow them in the future. Status damage occurs when others perceive someone as unreliable in following social conventions.
Tripping or similar accidents become embarrassing primarily when witnessed by others, as the status implications depend on social observation. Alone, such incidents may produce frustration or amusement rather than embarrassment.
Shame involves recognition that one has violated a norm, potentially with intention, requiring repair through acknowledgment and acceptance of social costs. The behavioral response includes making oneself small and avoiding eye contact. Unlike embarrassment, which signals accidental norm violation, shame acknowledges that the breach may have been deliberate or that others believe it was intentional.
Shame occurs not only in cases of intentional violation but also when someone is the victim of certain kinds of assault in some cultures. The experience appears to acknowledge that under the rules governing that culture, the person has lost social value, even when the event was not their fault. The hiding of the face or other behaviors associated with shame suggest both an attempt to hide and an acknowledgment of the loss of social value.
People might judge the individual differently as a result of the event. In some cases it would be worse not to acknowledge the loss of status. The person must also begin thinking about what their life is now that this change has occurred.
People may be anticipating how others will view them. If someone has done something considered shameful or experienced something others will see as shameful, entering a room full of confidence might make them appear un-self-aware, full of themselves, or insufficiently willing to give up what they should in order to be readmitted into the normal social fabric. The signal sent by shame is that the person will change in the future given the new situation.
Shame relates to people's beliefs about other people's beliefs. Survivors of terrible events sometimes experience shame or guilt despite having done nothing wrong. They appear to be responding to what they believe other people could think about them.
Mental effort feels negative because it measures the opportunity cost of using valuable mental systems. When performing effortful tasks like the SATs, persisting on problems, doing repetitive work, or multiplying three-digit numbers in your head, working memory could be used for other purposes such as planning, solving problems, or remembering. Effort is the felt sensation that there is something else more beneficial that could be done with those mental systems right now.
The mind must monitor itself, with one part figuring out what another part is doing while simultaneously determining what else it could be doing. Boredom operates similarly by measuring how rewarding the current activity is and whether something better could be done instead.
Itchiness involves bugs crawling on skin stimulating afferents in a particular way. Contempt was not previously considered in depth. Friend jealousy occurs when a friend starts hanging out with another person, creating the sense of being demoted in the queue from position number one to position number two or three. This may be felt more strongly as children because they are less agentic and their alliances are more important than they are as adults.
Breathing is triggered by carbon dioxide levels rather than oxygen levels. In a nitrogen environment, carbon dioxide does not increase in the way it would normally, which can lead to dangerous situations because the urge to breathe is not triggered.
Déjà vu involves the sense that you have seen something before that you definitely have not. Nostalgia involves temporal emotions related to the sense of times gone by that cannot be recovered. Many emotions remain mysterious with little consensus in the research literature.
Envy causes the most havoc in life. Being exposed to all the things in the world generates unpleasant feelings. Moral condemnation or being judgy are also destructive for the reasons discussed regarding social coordination.
Trust is essential for society. Societies with high trust, whether due to good institutions or cultural history, function differently. Japan maintains high trust despite having similar institutions to other countries. People follow norms without needing courts and police to enforce every interaction.
The discussion around immigration often centers on trust concerns. One group worries that people from different cultures who do not adhere to local norms will reduce safety and community. Another group argues that distrust is unfounded and cultural similarity should not determine trust levels. Trust is fundamental to coordination and transactions.
Societies depend on whether people follow local norms. A norm of complying with government regulations produces different outcomes than a norm of exploiting regulations whenever possible.
People's issues are often not with actual circumstances but with what they think the circumstances are. Intergenerational competition involves comparing how one is doing at their stage of life versus how they think their parents were doing at the same stage. Both comparisons are interpretations rather than direct measurements of reality.
Every generation has better material circumstances, safety, food access, and longevity than previous ones. Envy involves comparing oneself to others based on beliefs rather than facts, leading to anger and blame directed at government or policy.
The evolutionary perspective helps by asking what an emotion is trying to get you to do and whether that serves your interests or the interests of those around you. The part that can be changed is what you do based on feelings, not the feelings themselves. Envy happens regardless of desire to eliminate it. The emotion tries to prompt certain behaviors, but those behaviors can be evaluated and potentially rejected.
Emotions arise without choice. Each emotion has a reason and purpose: keeping safe, bonding with others, enforcing boundaries, preventing wasted time. Removing self-judgment about whether one should feel an emotion allows cleaner engagement with the feeling itself.
The Jhana meditation approach welcomes emotions rather than distancing from them. When a thought arises during meditation, the practitioner acknowledges the part of themselves that cares about work or success, appreciates that part, and gently redirects it without shame. This resembles internal family systems or parts work, treating different aspects of the self as participants at a party rather than intruders to be pushed away.
The modular view of mind suggests different emotional systems activate at different times. Accepting that these modules will engage even during attempts to be present allows for acknowledgment without resistance. The function of each emotion can be recognized as potentially useful even if not appropriate in the current moment.
The modular view of the evolutionary approach resonates with certain practices in an interesting way, particularly when considering how competing elements require triage to determine which is most important.
Rob Kurzban's Substack is called Living Fossils. His book is titled All the Feels, and the associated website is allthefeelsbook.com. Visitors to the website can read sample chapters to determine if the book is suitable for them.
Many viewers report that YouTube unsubscribes them from channels even after pressing the subscribe button. Checking the subscribe button status ensures access to episodes before they become available to the general public, supports the show, and enables bringing bigger and better guests.
Keep Chris Williamson in your library
Save the videos and channels worth coming back to, and find them again in one place.
