Robert Kurzban

Short description: American psychologist

Robert Kurzban

Born|  (1969-09-29) September 29, 1969 (age 53)

Poughkeepsie, New York

Occupation| Psychologist
Academic background
Education| BA, Cornell University, 1991; Ph.D, UCSB, 1998
Thesis| The Social Psychophysics of Cooperation in Groups (1998)
Doctoral advisor| Leda Cosmides & John Tooby
Academic work
Discipline| Psychology
Sub-discipline| Evolutionary Psychology
Institutions| University of Pennsylvania
Notable works| Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind
The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind: How Self-Interest Shapes Our Opinions and Why We Won’t Admit It
Website| robkurzban.com

Robert Kurzban is an American freelance writer and former psychology professor specializing in evolutionary psychology.

Kurzban was a tenured professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania until 2018, when he resigned following allegations of impropriety. Following his resignation, he was dismissed as the director of the department's honors program.[1][2] He also resigned as president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) and as Editor-in-Chief of the Society’s journal, Evolution and Human Behavior.[3] He now works as a freelance author and writer.

Kurzban was trained by two pioneers in the field of evolutionary psychology, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, and his research has focused on evolutionary approaches to understanding human social behavior. He has taken an adaptationist view of human psychology, studying the adaptive function, or, survival value, in the adoption of traits by humans. His work has aimed at understanding the functions of psychological mechanisms occurring in human social life. He has used methods drawn from social psychology, cognitive psychology, and especially experimental economics.

His early work investigated the social construction of race and concerned a hypothesis being proposed at the time, 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 significantly different physical appearance from themselves, it was unlikely that the human brain evolved with a mechanism to encode what is currently referred to as "race". A series of experiments[4] showed that with a relatively minor manipulation in the laboratory, the extent to which people categorized others by race could be reduced. He also has done research on cooperation, morality, and mate choice (including speed dating).

Evolutionary psychology has come under attack from a number of critics. Kurzban has been active in defending the discipline from prominent detractors and also has worked to clarify the principle of cognitive modularity, which plays an important role in the discipline.[5]

In 2009, he gave a plenary address at the annual meeting of HBES in Fullerton, California.

His first book, Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind, was published by Princeton University Press in 2010. His second book The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind: How Self-Interest Shapes Our Opinions and Why We Won’t Admit It, co-authored with Jason Weeden, was published in 2014 also by Princeton University Press.

He was elected president of HBES in 2017.[6]

## Selected publications

* with Jason Weeden: The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind: How Self-Interest Shapes Our Opinions and Why We Won't Admit it. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 2014, ISBN:978-0-691-161112.
* Barrett, H. C.; Kurzban, R. (2006). "Modularity in cognition: Framing the debate". Psychological Review 113 (3): 628–647. doi:10.1037/0033-295X.113.3.628. PMID 16802884.
* 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. doi:10.1177/1088868306294906. PMID 18453459.
* 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. doi:10.1073/pnas.0408759102. PMID 15665099.
* Kurzban, R.; Weeden, J. (2005). "HurryDate: Mate preferences in action". Evolution and Human Behavior 26 (3): 227–244. doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2004.08.012.
* 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. doi:10.1073/pnas.251541498. PMID 11742078. Bibcode: 2001PNAS...9815387K.

## References

1. ↑ Liu, Manlu (2018-07-22). "Professor Kurzban resigned after allegations of inappropriate relationships with students". https://www.thedp.com/article/2018/07/robert-kurzban-resigns-professor-upenn-romantic-relationships-philadelphia-penn-psychology.
2. ↑ Mondon, Marielle (2018-07-25). "Penn professor resigns following allegations of inappropriate relationships with students". https://www.phillyvoice.com/penn-professor-kurzban-resigns-sexual-misconduct-allegations-relationships-students/.
3. ↑ Pages, Academic Web (2018-05-02). "Changes in HBES President and E&HB Editor-in-Chief". https://www.hbes.com/changes-in-hbes-president-and-ehb-editor-in-chief/.
4. ↑ 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): 15387–92. doi:10.1073/pnas.251541498. ISSN 0027-8424. PMID 11742078. Bibcode: 2001PNAS...9815387K.
5. ↑ Kurzban, R. (2002). "Alas poor evolutionary psychology: Unfairly accused, unjustly condemned. [Review of Alas Poor Darwin: Arguments Against Evolutionary Psychology edited by H. Rose and S. Rose]". Human Nature Review, 2: 99–109. http://human-nature.com/nibbs/02/apd.html.
6. ↑ "About HBES". 2022-07-08. https://www.hbes.com/about/.

* v
* t
* e

Evolutionary psychology

* History

Processes|

* Altruism
* Coevolution
* Evolutionarily stable strategy
* Kin selection
* Natural selection
* Sexual selection
* Social selection

Areas|

* Psychological development
* Morality
* Religion
* Depression
* Educational psychology
* Evolutionary aesthetics
* Music
* Darwinian literary studies
* Evolution of emotion

Biologists/
Neuroscientists|

* John Crook
* Charles Darwin
* Richard Dawkins
* Jared Diamond
* W. D. Hamilton
* Peter Kropotkin
* Gordon Orians
* Jaak Panksepp
* Margie Profet
* Giacomo Rizzolatti
* Randy Thornhill
* Robert Trivers
* Carel van Schaik
* Claus Wedekind
* Wolfgang Wickler
* David Sloan Wilson
* E. O. Wilson
* George C. Williams
* Richard Wrangham

Anthropologists|

* Jerome H. Barkow
* Robert Boyd
* Napoleon Chagnon
* Gregory Cochran
* Robin Dunbar
* Daniel Fessler
* Mark Flinn
* Henry Harpending
* John D. Hawks
* Joseph Henrich
* Ruth Mace
* Daniel Nettle
* Stephen Shennan
* Donald Symons
* John Tooby
* Pierre van den Berghe

Behavioral economists/
Political scientists|

* Samuel Bowles
* Ernst Fehr
* Herbert Gintis
* Dominic D. P. Johnson
* Gad Saad

Literary theory/
Aesthetics|

* Joseph Carroll
* Denis Dutton

Psychologists/
Cognitive scientists|

* Simon Baron-Cohen
* Justin L. Barrett
* Jay Belsky
* David F. Bjorklund
* Paul Bloom
* Pascal Boyer
* Joseph Bulbulia
* David Buss
* Josep Call
* Anne Campbell
* Peter Carruthers
* Leda Cosmides
* Martin Daly
* Daniel Dennett
* Paul Ekman
* Anne Fernald
* Aurelio José Figueredo
* David C. Geary
* Gerd Gigerenzer
* Jonathan Haidt
* Judith Rich Harris
* Stephen Kaplan
* Douglas T. Kenrick
* Simon M. Kirby
* Robert Kurzban
* Michael T. McGuire
* Geoffrey Miller
* Darcia Narvaez
* Randolph M. Nesse
* Steven Neuberg
* David Perrett
* Steven Pinker
* Paul Rozin
* Mark Schaller
* David P. Schmitt
* Todd K. Shackelford
* Roger Shepard
* Peter K. Smith
* Dan Sperber
* Anthony Stevens
* Frank Sulloway
* Michael Tomasello
* Mark van Vugt
* Andrew Whiten
* Glenn Wilson
* Margo Wilson

Research centers/
organizations|

* Center for Evolutionary Psychology
* Human Behavior and Evolution Society
* Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology
* Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences
* New England Complex Systems Institute

Related subjects
and articles|

* The Adapted Mind
* The Evolution of Human Sexuality
* Evolutionary Psychology
* Evolution and Human Behavior
* Biosocial criminology
* Criticism of evolutionary psychology
* Evolutionary anthropology
* Evolutionary medicine
* Evolutionary linguistics
* Evolutionary neuroscience
* Evolutionary psychology and culture
* Group selection
* Human evolution
* Memetics
* Primatology
* Sociobiology
* Sociocultural evolution

Lists|

* Evolutionary psychologists
* Evolutionary psychology research groups and centers
* Bibliography of evolution and human behavior

* Evolutionary psychology
* Psychology portal
* Evolutionary biology portal

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