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

evolutionary psychology Evolutionary psychology is a theoretical approach in psychology that examines cognition and behavior from a modern evolutionary perspective. It seeks to identify human psychological adaptations with regards to the ancestral problems they evolv ...

. Kurzban was a tenured professor of psychology at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest- ...

until 2018, when he resigned following allegations of impropriety. Following his resignation, he was dismissed as the director of the department's honors program. He also resigned as president of the

Human Behavior and Evolution Society The Human Behavior and Evolution Society, or HBES, is an interdisciplinary, international society of researchers, primarily from the social and biological sciences, who use modern evolutionary theory to help to discover human nature — including ...

(HBES) and as Editor-in-Chief of the Society’s journal, Evolution and Human Behavior. He now works as a freelance author and writer. Kurzban was trained by two pioneers in the field of

John Tooby John Tooby (born 1952) is an American anthropologist, who, together with psychologist wife Leda Cosmides, helped pioneer the field of evolutionary psychology. Biography Tooby received his PhD in Biological Anthropology from Harvard University ...

and

Leda Cosmides Leda Cosmides (born May 1957) is an American psychologist, who, together with anthropologist husband John Tooby, helped develop the field of evolutionary psychology. Biography Cosmides originally studied biology at Radcliffe College/Harvard Univ ...

, 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 Social psychology is the scientific study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the real or imagined presence of other people or by social norms. Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the re ...

cognitive psychology Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of mental processes such as attention, language use, memory, perception, problem solving, creativity, and reasoning. Cognitive psychology originated in the 1960s in a break from behaviorism, which ...

, and especially

experimental economics Experimental economics is the application of experimental methods to study economic questions. Data collected in experiments are used to estimate effect size, test the validity of economic theories, and illuminate market mechanisms. Economic exp ...

. 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 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

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). 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. 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 Princeton University Press is an independent publisher with close connections to Princeton University. Its mission is to disseminate scholarship within academia and society at large. The press was founded by Whitney Darrow, with the financial s ...

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.

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, . * * * * *

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Kurzban, Robert 1969 births Cornell University alumni Living people University of California, Santa Barbara alumni University of California, Los Angeles alumni University of Arizona faculty Evolutionary psychologists Moral psychologists University of Pennsylvania faculty People from Poughkeepsie, New York Human Behavior and Evolution Society