Field
Anthropology
Project Description
This project explores how age, sex, and parenthood shape moral decision-making in situations that require choosing between helping kin, supporting the broader community, or protecting one’s reputation. While many studies examine empathy and altruism as stable traits, this research focuses on how these moral priorities shift across the human life course, particularly as caregiving roles and reproductive stakes change. Using scenario-based surveys grounded in evolutionary theory and moral psychology, the project investigates patterns of moral rigidity and flexibility—revealing when and why people act with compassion or self-interest. By integrating life stages and kinship into models of moral judgment, this work offers a novel perspective on how kindness is calibrated to the social and biological demands of our lives.
Team
David Aguilar, H. Clark Barrett
David Aguilar is a graduate student in biological anthropology at UCLA. His research examines how reproductive ecology, moral reasoning, and cognitive development are shaped by life history dynamics across the human lifespan, with a particular interest in kinship, caregiving, and decision-making in variable ecological and social environments. His previous work includes studies on bereavement and fertility behavior, workplace conditions in Los Angeles’ garment sector, and how environmental health information circulates in long-standing Latino communities in East Los Angeles. Through an integrative approach that combines evolutionary theory with community-based research, David aims to understand how individuals navigate complex environments and make decisions that affect their well-being, family systems, and future planning.
H. Clark Barrett is a Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. He is a biological anthropologist who studies the evolution of cognition and how concepts, values, and ways of thinking circulate within communities and around the world. Since the late 1990s he has worked with Indigenous Shuar, Achuar, and Shiwiar communities in Ecuador on topics ranging from cooperative decision-making and moral judgment to Indigenous ecological knowledge. He has participated in several collaborative international research projects, including the Geography of Philosophy Project, a three-year project that investigated concepts of knowledge, wisdom, and understanding around the world. He is the author of The Shape of Thought: How Mental Adaptations Evolve (2015, Oxford University Press), which examined debates about the adaptive nature of cognition in light of contemporary theory in evolutionary and developmental biology. He co-edited the recently released Epistemologías Andinas y Amazónicas: Conceptos Indígenas de Conocimiento, Sabiduría y Comprensión (2023, PUCP Press), and the forthcoming Southern Epistemologies: Knowledge, Wisdom, and Understanding in the Andes and Western Amazon (HAU Press), a pair of volumes exploring Indigenous approaches to knowledge in South America. Currently he is Director of the UCLA Center for Behavior, Evolution, and Culture, and President of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society.