University of British Columbia

Psychology 205: Culture, Cognition, and Evolution
This course introduces students to the rapidly expanding interdisciplinary area of culture, cognition and evolution. This approach to understanding human behavior and psychology explicitly integrates the study of culture (i.e., ideas, beliefs, values, behaviors, and practices) and human psychology within a broad evolutionary framework. Such a framework allows us to better understand how innate aspects of the human mind influence the transmission and dynamics of human beliefs, practices, preferences and decision-making, and how, in turn, emerging cultural patterns and culturally-constructed environments shape our minds, emotions, and cognitive processes. This course will emphasize a closely related set of theoretical approaches that allow us to transcend debates such as “nature vs. nurture” to examine human minds as joint products of three interactive processes: genetic evolution, cultural evolution (history), and ontogeny (development and learning). In studying these processes students will come to understand how culture and cultural evolution has shaped the course of human evolutionary history. (Undergraduate)
 
Psychology 358: Evolutionary Psychology
This course introduces students to the rapidly expanding interdisciplinary area of evolutionary psychology. This approach applies modern understand of evolutionary processes to the study of human behavior and psychology. We will examine the evolutionary origins and underlying psychology of diverse phenomena, including altruism, incest, food preferences, kinship, ethnicity, xenophobia, reciprocity, parental investment, violence, homicide, war, honor, cultural learning, social norms, prestige, religion (supernatural beliefs), suicide, menopause, mating preferences, emotions (like jealousy, disgust, anger, love, and joy) and homosexuality. This course will emphasize a closely related set of theoretical approaches that allow us to transcend debates about “nature vs. nurture” to examine human minds as joint products of three interactive processes: genetic evolution, cultural evolution (history), and ontogeny (development and learning). In studying these processes, students will come to understand how both cultural and genetic evolution has shaped our feelings, motivations, psychological abilities, and behavior, and how cultural evolution has shaped the course of human evolutionary history and altered the direction of genetic evolution. (Undergraduate)
 
Economics 234: Wealth and Poverty of Nations
One of the starkest facts about the world today is the immense variation in the wealth of different peoples. These differences emerge whether one measures total economic production, the percent of a nation living on less than $1 per day, infant mortality rates, longevity, homicide rates, patents, internal inequality, or malnutrition. Twenty percent of the world’s population lives on less than 1 dollar per day, while many people around us spend three times this on a cup of coffee each day. How did the world get like this? What causes these differences? Has it always been this way? In our effort to understand the origins and causes of global inequality we will draw freely from economics, biology, anthropology, psychology and history. We’ll go where ever the questions take us. Our search will begin during the Paleolithic era, before complex human civilizations first began to emerge. We will examine the influence of genetics, biogeography, the orientation of the continents, the coevolution of culture, pathogens and peoples, competition and markets, colonialism, the evolution of institutions and property rights, cultural values, technological innovation and the industrial revolution, marriage and religion. We will leave no stone unturned. Along the way we will develop an integrated framework that will permit us to think about human motivation, knowledge production, the emergence of institutions, and the long-term evolution of human societies. (Undergraduate)
 
Psychology 407: Culture and Cognition
This course introduces the emerging evolutionary approach to understanding human behavior and psychology that approaches humans as a cultural species. The emphasis here is on understanding both the broad range of psychological diversity created by culture, and cultural evolution, as well as on how culture is learned, represented, and transmitted. In assessing the importance of culture, we will also consider how it has shaped, and continues to shape, the human genome and genetic contributions to behavior and psychology. (Undergraduate)
 
ASTU 204a: Understanding Humans: An Integrated Approach
How can we understand humans, our psychology, behavior, diversity, cultures, histories, institutions, arts, technologies, gods, and moral systems? People have been wondering about these questions for a long time and in the last few hundred years researchers at universities have considered it intensely. What are fruits of all these efforts? Have the humanities and social sciences converged on a unified approach to understanding humans? Are the views of decision-making psychologists about mind and motivation consistent with the position taken by economists, who advise our politicians and government organizations? Are the views that sociologists and anthropologists take regarding artistic production, music or ethnicity informed by findings in cognitive neuroscience or developmental psychology? Faculty of Arts students rarely get an overview of the humanities as a whole, especially in a manner that questions some of the basic assumptions at work in most humanistic disciplines or that examines the basis of the humanities / natural science divide itself. This course is designed to give students a unique introduction to a new, vertically-integrated approach to the humanities that promises to transform the manner in which we think about human-level phenomena such as art, literature, ethics or politics. (Undergraduate)
 
Economics 590 & Psychology 529: Decision-making, rationality and the nature of human morality and social behavior
Within a broadly evolutionary framework this seminar course will pursue an interdisciplinary inquiry into human decision-making by drawing materials from social and cognitive psychology, behavioral economics and game theory, neuroscience, anthropology, political science, and behavioral genetics. Substantive areas of focus will include (1) rationality, heuristics and biases in decision-making, (2) social preferences and prosocial motivations, (3) inter-temporal choice, (4) risk and uncertainty, (5) religion, (6) culture, institutions and prosocial preferences, (7) adaptive learning and belief formation, (8) in-group, out-group, and ethnicity, and (9) methods for studying decision-making. (Graduate)
 
Economics 590 & Psychology 529: Understanding Culture: Analytical and Modeling Approaches
This course reviews current theoretical and empirical approaches to understanding culture and cultural evolution from an interdisciplinary perspective. Theoretical work will principally draw on modeling approaches in evolutionary biology and anthropology, while most empirical research will come from economics, archeology, and psychology. Emphasis will be given to new sources of data and novel techniques for testing hypotheses about population-level differences and cultural evolution. (Graduate)