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 regard to the ancestral problems they evolved ...

Career

Kurzban was a tenured professor of psychology at the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...

until 2018, when he resigned following allegations of inappropriate relationships with undergraduate students. 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 (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 ev ...

(HBES) and as Editor-in-Chief of the Society’s journal, Evolution and Human Behavior. Since then he has worked as a freelance writer. Kurzban was trained by two pioneers in the field of

John Tooby John Tooby (July 26, 1952 – November 10, 2023) was an American anthropologist who, together with his psychologist wife Leda Cosmides, pioneered the field of evolutionary psychology. Biography Tooby received his PhD in Biological Anthropology ...

and

Leda Cosmides Leda Cosmides (born May 1957) is an American psychologist, who, together with anthropologist husband John Tooby, pioneered the field of evolutionary psychology. Biography Cosmides was born into a Greek family. Her parents, George Cosmides and N ...

, and his research focused on evolutionary approaches to understanding human social behavior. He took an adaptationist view of human psychology, studying the adaptive function, or, survival value, in the adoption of traits by humans. His work aimed at understanding the functions of psychological mechanisms occurring in human social life. He used methods drawn from

social psychology Social psychology is the methodical study of how thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are influenced by the actual, imagined, or implied presence of others. Although studying many of the same substantive topics as its counterpart in the field ...

cognitive psychology Cognitive psychology is the scientific study of human 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, whi ...

, 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 expe ...

to research topics including morality, punishment, and mate choice. Evolutionary psychology has come under attack from a number of

critics A critic is a person who communicates an assessment and an opinion of various forms of creative works such as art, literature, music, cinema, theater, fashion, architecture, and food. Critics may also take as their subject social or governme ...

. Kurzban was active in defending the discipline from prominent detractors and also worked to clarify the principle of cognitive modularity, which plays an important role in the discipline. He was elected president of HBES in 2017.

Selected publications

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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 American moral psychologists University of Pennsylvania faculty Writers from Poughkeepsie, New York 21st-century American Jews Human Behavior and Evolution Society