Can we resolve the problem of free will by understanding the cognitive adaptations involved and what they are for? 


Does the way our minds evolved to think about the mind prevent us from making progress in psychology? What recurring mistakes can we avoid if we understand how our intuitive psychology is biased towards understanding the mind? 


What functions would you need to put into a mechanical thing to get it to reason about and represent groups? What is an evolutionary task analysis?


How do historical myths work for building groups? What is mysterious about the human interest in producing and consuming history?


If we take seriously the idea that political attitudes are largely confabulations (see Pinsof et al.) and full of self-serving propaganda, what follows? 


Cognitive science cannot flourish if we don't ask what cognition is for. 


Groups are a construction of evolved minds coordinating with one another, and thus any one group identity is not inevitable, and those that exist are the result of complex social negotiations. 


The alliance hypothesis of racial categorization has a lot of empirical support, but there is a glaring counter-hypothesis that has never been ruled to explain all of the findings. Here, that counter-hypothesis is directly tested. 


What is the state of past and current theories of what a "group" is? Can we make concrete, testable theories of what a group representation is?


Debate about the extent to which the mind is modular or massively modular is based on a confusion about at what level of analysis or reduction we are describing the mind. Clarifying this error or confusion resolves the debate. 


A crucial test of the alliance hypothesis of racial categorization, using correct experimental and error-rate calculation techniques, in the context of groups in conflict. 


What are intergroup processes from an evolutionary perspective? 


An in-depth task analysis of the psychology of leadership. 


Kvam, P. D., Hintze, A., Pleskac, T. J., & Pietraszewski, D. (2019). Computational evolution and ecologically rational decision making. In R. Hertwig, T. J. Pleskac, T. Pachur, & The Center for Adaptive Rationality (Eds.) Taming Uncertainty. New York: Oxford University Press.


"Who Said What?" or memory confusion paradigm studies have suffer from a flawed calculation involving correcting for base-rates in errors. This paper explains that error, and re-calculates effect sizes for past studies involving tests of the alliance hypothesis of racial categorization. 


Evidence of an expected association between organism size and acoustic (vocalization) properties, at some of the earliest ages one can test infants. 


What are the invariant dynamics in multi-agent conflict. How can phenomena like loyalty, asymmetries between offense and defense, an so on emerge from sequences of cost/benefit decisions on the parts of individual actors? 


The alliance hypothesis of racial categorization now has considerable support, but what is the mechanism of change in the cognitive system being measured: is racial categorization encoded but inhibited from other inferences and judgments, or is it no longer encoded. Here, a direct experimental test is capable of testing between these two distinct possibilities. 


Evolutionary psychology in 3000 words. 


How to political context influence racial categorization? A crucial test of the idea that racial categorization is a byproduct of the mind's evolved alliance-tracking capacity. How does sex, race, and age categorization behave in political contexts? 


The asymmetric war of attrition is an evolutionary biological model of how organisms should trade off value and the costs of conflict in their decisions about remaining in or withdrawing from contested resources. This is a direct experimental test of this model in humans. Do children's expectations of conflict outcomes comport with the predictions of this model? And, are these expectations selective (i.e. do expectations of search outcomes differ from conflict outcomes?)


The first unambiguous and adequate evidence that racial categorization is a byproduct of the mind's alliance-tracking machinery. 


Is accent, like race, a byproduct of the mind's ability to track alliances? 


A demonstration of accent categorization producing social categorization, with tightly-matched experimental controls. 


How do children and adults reason about how conflict-related emotions spread to those not involved in the conflict? 


A short, highly-readable summary of what group psychology is from an evolutionary perspective, for a developmental/comparative audience. 


A early proposal about the elementary building blocks of multi-agent conflict. 


Methods of data analysis are different than theories of the problems and environmental dynamics that organisms face. 


If humans use reasoning to argue, what then is argument for?