Theory:
1. Developed an elaborate information-processing model of an adaptation to war.
2. This model has produced 14 novel hypotheses, predicting the existence of certain tendencies in the human mind that allow effectively navigating coalitional aggression.
3. Some hypotheses are general, pertaining to processes studied by scholars in multiple research fields. For example, the theorizing about coalitional formidability assessments has led to the prediction that our visual attention system spontaneously attends to coordinated groups of males and that our enumeration capacity is enhanced when the enumerated objects resemble coordinated groups of males.
Methods:
4. We have developed and extensively piloted several experimental designs. We built on existing paradigms in cognitive psychology but also considerably improved upon them in original ways. Specifically, we have adapted the dot-probe and dot-enumeration paradigms to assess the specific features people attend to in human groups and how people enumerate naturalistic objects (groups of humans), as contrasted to abstract objects (e.g. dots). The generic dot-probe and dot-enumeration paradigms had typically been used in experiments administered in physical labs. We have developed procedures, with publicly available code, to administer these tasks online, e.g. via crowdsourcing platforms such as Prolific. The shift from lab to online research has been conditioned by the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic has been a major logistical obstacle and, at the same time, a major cause of innovation for AWAR. Pandemic-related restrictions rendered lab research in many cases unfeasible. Technologies and methodologies have developed rapidly to administer experiments online. The project has capitalized on these developments and by now has produced a number of innovations in the form of cognitive experimental tasks that can be feasibly administered online. To reach these goals, a highly-skilled research team was recruited, including social psychologists, cognitive neuroscientists, and behavioral economists, who have brought a unique mix of skills, from advanced programming of experiments to in-depth expertise in human visual attention. We have also collaborated with scholars from the research-site countries, including Ukraine.
Findings:
5. Twenty-five exploratory experiments (ca. 5000 participants) custom-fitted established attentional bias, enumeration, and rating paradigms for large-scale online administration, and preliminary tested the hypotheses. Seven preregistered studies with probability samples totaling ca. 12,000 participants supported 11 of the 14 hypotheses. Participants automatically attended to, efficiently enumerated, and made nuanced assessments of rapidly presented schematic coalitions. Male participants enumerated the coalitions more rapidly and accurately, female participants perceived them as more formidable, and female and less formidable participants overestimated their numerical size. Combined with multiple tests of alternative explanations, the evidence suggests the existence of specialized adaptations to intergroup coalitional aggression, consistent with the broader hypothesis that human prehistory was characterized by war. The final step in evaluating the overarching hypothesis lies in cross-cultural testing (Step 7). We are currently conducting a study that replicates the core experimental paradigms across 30 countries using representative samples (ca 15,000) in a multi-level framework. We also currently conduct studies that test real world implications of the adaptation in Ukraine (Step 8).
