engleski

The Nature of Culture - Incorporating culture in the ultimate/proximate analysis of human social behavior: The Trivers-Willard effect

The Trivers-Willard effect (TWE) presumes that parents allocate their investment (in utero and postpartum) toward daughters when they live in poor socio-economic conditions and toward sons when they live in better socio-economic conditions. According to the classical Mayr cause and effect analysis in biology, the logic of TWE follows ultimate, adaptation level of causality and should be visible at the population level. According to the Integrated Causal Model (ICM), it can be presumed that ultimate evolved psychological information-processing mechanisms (IPMs) working at a proximate level should generate TWE at an individual level. Contemporary studies of TWE in different cultural populations have shown inconclusive results. Different cultures are products of different ultimate-proximate and micro-macro interactions: 1. IPMs alone are the effects of an interaction of ultimate and proximate causality ; they generate cultures, and cultures generate them ; 2. IPMs follow ultimate causality and therefore they should represent the maximal and minimal values of cultural plasticity. In this poster I would like to propose a specific human ICM model of TWE by placing accent on the cultural part of proximate level of causality based on culturally specific socio-economic data.

Trivers-Willard effect; utimate/proximate causality; Integrated Causal Model; cultural plasticity

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