Venue/Location: Bagdad Theater, 3702 Southeast Hawthorne Blvd, Phone: (503) 467-7521
Date: Monday, April 4, 2011 - 7:00 PM
Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite
7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Doors open at 5:00pm.
Do you wonder why people are so inconsistent? Why people often seem to contradict themselves? Why they believe things they know aren't true? Why they say "don't do X" and then do that very thing? This presentation, grounded in evolutionary psychology, explains why. The reason is that the human mind is "modular," made up of a large number of parts with different functions. Sometimes these parts conflict with one another. The poet Walt Whitman once wrote, "I am large; I contain multitudes." Robert Kurzban argues that Whitman was right. We all contain multitudes (of modules), which makes us all inconsistent. Or, at least, it makes everyone (else) inconsistent.
Robert Kurzban, PhD, is author of the book Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite and is currently an associate professor in the Psychology Department at the University of Pennsylvania. He founded PLEEP, the Penn Laboratory for Experimental Evolutionary Psychology, in 2003. He has published dozens of journal articles on a wide array of subjects, including morality, cooperation, friendship, mate choice, supernatural beliefs, modularity, and self-control.
He received his PhD at the University of California Santa Barbara at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology in 1998 and received postdoctoral training at Caltech in the Division of Humanities and Social Sciences, UCLA Anthropology, and the University of Arizona’s Economic Science Laboratory with Vernon Smith. In 2008, he won the inaugural Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution from the Human Behavior and Evolution Society.
He is the editor-in-chief of the new journal, Frontiers in Evolutionary Psychology, and co-editor-in-chief of the flagship journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, Evolution and Human Behavior.