PostDoctoral Research Fellowship

Schroeder Kari B, Atherton CA

Investigators

Abstract

The proposed training and research program in this Minority Postdoctoral Fellowship project will enable the Fellow to investigate, within an evolutionary framework, how variation in personality affects cooperative behavior. Self reported personality measures and behavior from experimental economic games will be used to test for the effects of personality on social decision making. These data will be supplemented with genetic and affective data. Based on a pilot study the Fellow conducted with Dr. Richard McElreath at the University of California, Davis, there is reason to expect that variation in the personality dimension Neuroticism, which can be described as susceptibility to negative emotions, partially predicts variation in cooperative behavior. Receipt of this postdoctoral fellowship would give the Fellow the opportunity to be trained for two years by Dr. Daniel Nettle at the Centre for Behavior and Evolution (CBE), Newcastle University, United Kingdom. Because of his research on the evolution of personality differences, Dr. Nettle is a prime candidate for guiding the Fellow in the proposed research. Dr. Nettle has combined theory from multiple fields to successfully address questions of key evolutionary interest, as the Fellow would like to do. The diverse disciplines and expertise represented at the CBE makes it a highly suitable environment for the Fellow to strengthen her background in economics and neuroscience, further develop her modeling skills, and practice presenting her ideas and research results both formally and informally. These same qualities, as well as the research on the evolution of cooperation already underway at the CBE, also make it an optimal environment in which to integrate multimeasure data and theory from different disciplines. Intellectual merit. Neither the proximate mechanisms for human cooperation nor the evolution of personality differences are well understood, yet both are key components for understanding one of the most compelling questions in modern biology - the evolution of human cooperation. The Fellow aims to tie these two threads together by investigating how personality affects social decision making behavior. The proposed research program is original in that it hypothesizes a relationship between two foci that have each motivated considerable bodies of research: the personality dimension of Neuroticism and human prosociality. Because of the cascade of biological, environmental, and psychological mechanisms that may precipitate social decision making, unwrapping the proximate mechanisms for prosocial behavior requires multilevel data. Based on a pilot study which supports Neuroticism as one factor that mediates prosocial behavior, further investigation of the correlation between Neuroticism and social decision making, as well as investigation of how Neuroticism and decision making each relate to affect and to a serotonergic genetic variant, is warranted. The results have the potential to advance knowledge in three distinct areas of research - the etiology of the myriad psychopathologies with which high Neuroticism is associated, the proximate mechanisms for human prosociality, and the evolution of personality differences. Broader impacts. The proposed research program will train a female postdoctoral scientist at a crucial juncture in her academic career, as she prepares to pursue a tenure track position, and will enable her to develop collaborative relationships with international researchers in multiple disciplines. The results will be of interest to scientists in multiple fields, including those in psychology, anthropology, and economics, and hence will be published in a peer reviewed journal of broad readership. In addition, the results may offer a new, evolutionary context within which to understand high Neuroticism, which is a strong predictor of mental illnesses and was recently referred to as a significant public health risk in an article by Dr. Benjamin Lahey in the peer reviewed journal American Psychologist. In another dimension of this project, to help increase the participation of underrepresented groups in the social, behavioral and economic sciences, the Fellow will teach hands-on lessons on the evolution of human cooperation and social learning to Native Alaskan teenagers at a federally funded math and science camp.