HBES

HBES is an international society for scientists studying the evolution of human behavior 🌎🌍🌏 Journal: @EvolHumBehav 📖 Account managed by Yunsuh “Nike” Wee

[HBES @HumBehEvoSoc]

Huge congratulations to Matilda Brindle, Catherine F. Talbot, and Stuart West on their Ig Nobel Prize win! 🏆

Their award-winning paper, "A comparative approach to the evolution of kissing," 💋 was published right here in Evolution and Human Behavior

Read the study: https://t.co/AkrhDnxCyB

[HBES @HumBehEvoSoc]

Congratulations to @JaimieKrems, Rebecka Hahnel-Peeters @RandomMutations, Laureon Merrie, Keelah Williams @kegwilliams, and Daniel Sznycer @dsznycer on their 2026 Ig Nobel Peace Prize! 🏆👏

Read the award-winning research in Evolution and Human Behavior: https://t.co/5OqLYf7Sxe

[Jaimie Arona Krems @JaimieKrems]

Hi, guys! We just won the 2026 @IgNobel Peace Prize (for this👇 showing we value friends who are mean to our enemies)

[HBES @HumBehEvoSoc]

If you attended HBES, please provide feedback in our survey(https://t.co/TIbcfT5UNM). If you didn't attend, we still value your opinions, and want to know more about you! Give your thoughts on how to shape HBES for the future, including the conferences.

[HBES @HumBehEvoSoc]

Clinical psychopathy includes the co-occurrence of interpersonal (e.g., manipulativeness, dominance), affective (e.g., callousness, disaffiliation), and behavioral (e.g., sensation seeking, disinhibition) domains of functioning, which when combined, result in an antisocial cluster of traits that have serious social and individual costs. Despite its poignant description and costs, it is possible that it has been shaped that why by evolutionary pressures because it provided a solution—an exploitative one—to the adaptive problem of mate and/or social competition.

https://t.co/qrVl1flwcw

[HBES @HumBehEvoSoc]

Membership fees will increase starting September 15 (see below for details). If you are currently on a one-year membership, you can upgrade to a three-year plan at the current prices. You have until September 15 to upgrade your one-year membership.

For more information, please visit: https://t.co/TDKIEES46R

[HBES @HumBehEvoSoc]

Does awareness of death always strengthen commitment to social norms and cultural values? Our findings suggest a more nuanced picture. Rather than producing a fixed response, mortality awareness may function as a context-sensitive cue that helps people prioritize different adaptive goals, including survival and reproduction.
https://t.co/OPT2ebBrtN

[HBES @HumBehEvoSoc]

Do germ concerns shape our social lives? In a new study, people more wary of germs reported having, wanting, and thinking they ought to have fewer friends, especially casual friends and acquaintances at the outer edges of their networks.
https://t.co/Z0jQM3mMDk

[HBES @HumBehEvoSoc]

Since behaviors spread among familiars (via social learning or genetic transmission), familiars behave similarly. Conditioning cooperation on familiarity—i.e. empathy—concentrates the benefits of cooperation among cooperators, allowing this behavior to evolve.
https://t.co/cIOfjiGtxU

[HBES @HumBehEvoSoc]

Our paper revisits the long-debated idea of Man the Hunter and asks what the term has actually meant over time. We argue that the debates surrounding it inspired important research on cooperation, food sharing, women’s subsistence labor, and human behavioral flexibility. Its legacy is more complex and more scientifically productive than it is often portrayed.
https://t.co/sXqqCBLoXq

[HBES @HumBehEvoSoc]

Our new study provides empirical evidence for the proverb “actions speak louder than words,” especially in the context of reputation maintenance or self-presentation. When you see someone’s wrongdoing and hear them say, “I didn’t intend to do it,” you may doubt it. Your doubt has empirical support!
https://t.co/tn6hjksFft

[HBES @HumBehEvoSoc]

When someone we love gives time, care, or valuable resources to someone else, jealousy may signal more than insecurity. In this post, we explore jealousy as an evolved response to shifts in resource allocation—revealing how deeply humans need to feel chosen, prioritized, and uniquely invested in.
https://t.co/n4miceNfLk

[HBES @HumBehEvoSoc]

The engravings from the Blombos Cave and Diepkloof Rock Shelter in South Africa are made by early Homo sapiens and dated from ~100 thousand years ago. They are interpreted as intentional markings—but what functions did they actually serve? We examined this question by leveraging the combined analytical traction of transmission chains and cognitive experiments.
https://t.co/GGM2DgNx8G

[HBES @HumBehEvoSoc]

Why are humans so intelligent? A new article explores the evolution of human intelligence and expands upon Richard Alexander’s idea that humans had to “cooperate to compete”.
https://t.co/Ag3Cq9MY2o

[HBES @HumBehEvoSoc]

Gaming is found in every human society, but why do we spend so much time competing under artificial rules? Our new research explores the possibility that games evolved as low-risk ways to assess skill, strategy, and reliability when forming alliances.
https://t.co/OIbFclJa9s

[HBES @HumBehEvoSoc]

What can baby monkeys teach us about the origins of sexual behavior? New research in Evolution and Human Behavior followed wild infant capuchin monkeys continuously, from birth to their first year of life, and found that sociosexual behaviors emerge remarkably early—with surprising sex differences that challenge assumptions about "practice" for adult roles. The study reveals that primate sexuality is flexible and multi-functional, with marked sex differences, from the very beginning, with early interactions potentially serving social bonding functions well before reproduction is possible.
https://t.co/uTguhruuvH

[HBES @HumBehEvoSoc]

Why is romantic kissing so common yet not Universal. Samani & Thomas argue that it is easy for people to learn because of universal intuitions about close bodily contact and social intimacy, and that it arises when people need to distinguish romantic relationships and other intimacy relationships!
https://t.co/wdWkC3DJf2

[HBES @HumBehEvoSoc]

📢 Deadline extended! Abstract submissions for the 2026 FOSSIL conference are now due June 30. Join us Aug 7–8 at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, OK. All career stages & all areas of evolutionary human science welcome—please share widely!

📝 Submit: https://t.co/YNWl9clQaT

[HBES @HumBehEvoSoc]

Congratulations to Yukino Watanabe, winner of the #HBES2026 Poster Award! 📌

[HBES @HumBehEvoSoc]

Takeaway: culture shapes whether policy works, persists across generations, and responds to interventions. Designing policy that ignores it tends to fail. Designing policy that works WITH local institutions can succeed in ways economists don’t expect. #HBES2026

[HBES @HumBehEvoSoc]

Plenary 3 at #HBES2026 🎤 Sara Lowes on "Culture, Policy, and Economic Development." Three big ideas: culture shapes policy outcomes, culture persists, and culture responds to policy. A thread 🧵

[HBES @HumBehEvoSoc]

Working WITH culture: in the DRC, age-set initiation rituals create cohesive cohorts of young men. Committees made up of young men in age-set communities did MORE oversight of chiefs, and chiefs captured fewer distributed health products as a result.