Daniel Brian Krupp

SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow

Department of Psychology

 

 

I am a postdoctoral fellow in the Lalumière lab. I use evolutionary theory to generate hypotheses about human social psychology. My research addresses two distinct problems: the first concerns cooperation and conflict, and the second concerns mate choice. Brief summaries are presented below, but more detailed information can be found on my personal website.

1. Cooperation and conflict

Evolutionary theory offers a unique window on social organization at all levels of life. Hamilton's theory of inclusive fitness extended Darwin's original theory by distinguishing two routes to social evolution: via the effects of an individual actor on its own reproductive success (direct fitness) or its effects on others who have a nonrandom probability of sharing a relevant sample of the actor's genes (indirect fitness). This suggests that alleles promoting personally costly (altruistic and spiteful) behaviour can evolve alongside alleles promoting self-interested (selfish and mutually beneficial) behaviour.

My own work in this field manipulates social and ecological cues in the context of experimental games, where participants are given money to use when making decisions that affect their own outcomes as well as the outcomes of others. In this research, my colleagues and I have examined the effect of kinship on the "tragedy of the commons" (Krupp, DeBruine, & Barclay, 2008), a social problem caused by a tension between individual and group interests, and the effect of health on social exchange (Krupp, DeBruine, & Jones, 2008).

2. Mate choice

Mate choice decisions require information, gathered from the environment, about the options available to the decision-maker. A primary function of attention is to guide information foraging behaviour: the decision-maker needs to reduce the number of options from a large set to smaller one, and direct effort towards acquiring the final choice. Because of the involvement of attentional systems in information foraging, researchers can use methods designed to study its allocation to make inferences about preferences for particular stimuli (Krupp, 2008). For instance, people attend to images that they find attractive (Suschinsky, Elias, & Krupp, 2007). I am interested in adapting these methods to ask questions about mate preferences and the methods by which people narrow their options.

Recent Publications

Krupp, D. B. (2008). Through Evolution’s Eyes: Extracting Mate Preferences by Linking Visual Attention to Adaptive Design. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 37, 57-63.

Krupp, D. B., DeBruine, L. M., & Barclay, P. (2008). A cue of kinship promotes cooperation for the public good. Evolution and Human Behavior, 29, 49-55.

Krupp, D. B., DeBruine, L. M., & Jones, B. C. (2008). Apparent health facilitates the reciprocation of trust. Manuscript in preparation.

Suschinsky, K. D., Elias, L. J., & Krupp, D. B. (2007). Looking for Ms. Right: Allocating attention to facilitate mate choice decisions. Evolutionary Psychology, 5, 428-441.