Research

Culturally-marked social group boundaries are ubiquitous in humans, and uniquely so among extant primates. How has this shaped human cognition about social groups, and how are beliefs about boundaries shaped by cultural evolution. I primarily address these questions through ethnographic and cognitive research with children and adults living along the Aymara-Quechua linguistic boundary in Perú. Here the power differences between ethnolinguistic groups are relatively small, categories are not racially marked and identities are perceived as more culturally than biologically inherited. I am also working on a meta-analysis of essentialist beliefs about identity inheritance to allow for cross-cultural comparisons.

Here's a popular article, a talk, and an interview about some of this work.

El-Higzi, F. and Moya, C. (2023) The challenges of encouraging refugee assistance: Lessons learned from reframing the problem as one of within-group collective action and norm change. Global Discourse. [LINK]

Moya, C. What does it mean for humans to be groupish? (2023) Philosophy Compass. [LINK] [PDF]

Wertz A. & Moya, C. Pathways to cognitive design (2019) Behavioral Processes.  [PDF] [LINK]

Moya, C. & Boyd, R. (2016) The evolution and development of inferential reasoning about ethnic markers: Comparisons between urban US and rural highland Peru. Current Anthropology. 57(S13): S131-S144.  [PDF] [sup.][LINK]

Moya, C. & Henrich, J. (2016) Culture-gene co-evolutionary psychology: Cultural learning, language and ethnic psychology. Current Opinion in Psychology. 8:112-118. [PDF][LINK]

Moya, C. and Boyd, R. (2015) Different selection pressures give rise to distinct ethnic phenomena: A functionalist framework with illustrations from the Peruvian Altiplano. Human Nature. 26(1)  [PDF] [sup.] [LINK]

Moya, C. & Scelza, B. (2015) The effect of recent ethnogenesis and migration histories on perceptions of ethnic group stability. Journal of Cognition and Culture. 15: 135-177 [PDF][sup.][LINK]

Moya, C. (2013) Evolved priors for ethnolinguistic categorization: A case study from the Quechua-Aymara boundary in the Peruvian Altiplano. Evolution and Human Behavior. 34:265-272. [PDF][sup.][LINK]

The fact that culture influence reproductive decision making fundamentally changes how we apply evolutionary models to human behavior. Cultural systems both serve as inputs into reproductive decision making and change the currencies on which people optimize. I have ongoing projects on how parents shape reproductive timing, the ethnolinguistic structure of fertility outcomes, and the relationship between religiosity and fertility, all of which use cross-cultural data. 

Moya, C., Borgerhoff Mulder, M. Colleran, H., Gerkey, D., Gibson, M., Gurven, M., Henrich, J., Hooper, P., Kaplan, H., Kline, M., Koster, J., Kramer, K., Leonetti, D., Mattison, S., Nath, D., Sanders, C., Scelza, B., Shenk, M., Snopkowski, K., Stieglitz, J., Towner, M., von Rueden, C., Ziker, J., Sear, R. Intergenerational conflict may explain why parents delay the onset of their children’s reproduction: a cross-cultural analysis. (under revision) [PDF] [sup.]

Moya, C., Goodman, A., Koupil, I. & Sear, R. (2021) Historical context affects pathways of parental influence on reproduction: An empirical test from 20th century Sweden. Social Sciences. [LINK]

Mattison, S., Moya, C., Reynolds, A., Towner, M. Evolutionary Demography of Age at Last Birth: Synthesizing Approaches from Human Behavioral Ecology and Cultural Evolution (2018) Philosophical Transactions B. [PDF] [LINK]

Moya, C. & Sear, R. (2014) Intergenerational conflicts may help explain parental absence effects on reproductive timing: A model of age at first birth in humans. Peer J. 2:e512.  [LINK]

Snopkowski, K., Moya, C., and Sear, R. (2014) A test of the intergenerational conflict model in Indonesia shows no evidence of earlier menopause in female-dispersing groups Proceedings of the Royal Society: B. 281: 20140580. [PDF][LINK]

Why do people adopt new, untested, and sometimes costly behaviors? While these may confer benefits, as is the case with health behaviors in response to novel pandemics (e.g. masking, vaccination), others are unlikely to have direct effects (e.g. conversion, pilgrimage to new apparition sites). 

In a Templeton-funded project we take advantage of a rare opportunity to study the development of a new religious ritual site in the Peruvian Altiplano where people began worshipping an apparition of Jesus, along with traditional Andean figures such as a stone toad, in 2014. Deciding whether to adopt a new behavior poses a challenge, particularly when it is difficult to verify the efficacy of that trait. New religious beliefs epitomize such a trait. Unfortunately, most accounts of religious changes are retrospective, and therefore cannot measure the social, strategic, and cognitive underpinnings of such cultural change. The proposed project remedies that. We address three goals: to 1) develop a regional project examining the predictors, and cooperative consequences of, adopting new religious practices early in its diffusion, 2) gather longitudinal data to model the spread of belief, how it is internalized, and how it is affected by external shocks such as economic uncertainty and pandemics, and 3) develop research capacity in Perú by training a multi-lingual team of students and colleagues in ethnographic, behavioral, and cognitive methods. These data will allow us to compare multiple hypotheses for why people believe new information and act in, sometimes costly, ways consistent with those beliefs. For more details, see grant application.

Moya, C., Tippireddy, N. & Tumi Quispe,  J.A. (in prep) Cultural norms and asymmetries in motivated reasoning can facilitate the spread of novel religious beliefs.

Turner, M. A., Moya, C., Smaldino, P. E., & Jones, J. H. (2023). The Form of Uncertainty Affects Selection for Social Learning. Evolutionary Human Sciences. [Preprint] [LINK]

Moya, C., Cruz y Celis Peniche, P., Kline, M., & Smaldino, P. (2020) Dynamics of Behavior Change in the COVID World. American Journal of Human Biology. [PDF] [LINK]

Kline, M. A., Gervais, M. M., Moya, C., & Boyd, R. (2019). Irrelevant‐action imitation is short‐term and contextual: Evidence from two under‐studied populations. Developmental Science. [PDF] [LINK]

Perreault, C., Moya, C. & Boyd, R. (2012) A Bayesian approach to the evolution of social learning. Evolution and Human Behavior. 33:449-459. [PDF] [sup.] [LINK]