SciComm

Following release of her paper with Cody Ross in Evolutionary Human Sciences, Anne spoke with Penn State science communicator Fracisco Tutella about how us vs them mindsets are common but not inevitable. She identified common ingredients to us vs them thinking, like differential resource access, what other people say, and past experience, and small ways each of us can tackle us vs them behavior through local action.

WSU and Penn State covered a Conservation Letters paper by Kris, Anne, and Tanzanian and international collaborators: Having any friendship with someone in a nearby village makes someone more likely to participate in fisheries management, including reporting violators, cleaning up the beach, and educating others. See here for the releases from Washington State and Penn State.

Anne represented biological anthropology as a speaker and panelist for Michigan Anthropology’s annual Four-Field Symposium in 2024, focused on sustainability. The resulting conversation focused on locally led adaptation, community engagement, and who gets to decide what counts as sustainable. The talks and panel discussion, including lots of insights for students, are available here.

In a blog post riffing off of their article with lab alum Eric Hubbard in Evolution & Human Behavior, Ollie and Anne write that chosen kin – non-kin, to evolutionary scientists – are often central to human social networks and to cooperative childrearing, though they’re understudied. Though godparents don’t have measurable impacts on educational attainment in rural Bolivia, as Eric, Ollie, and Anne predicted in the paper, they do play other key roles. Ollie and Anne close by suggesting that studying chosen kin helps “honor the resilience and diversity of human social bonds.”

In a blog post riffing off of her article with Cody Ross in Evolution & Human Behavior, Anne writes that intergroup relationships are profoundly flexible in humans, ranging from highly aggressive to highly tolerant. That said, our experiences shape which end of the distribution we expect, and scientists haven’t been doing a great job at documenting variation in intergroup behavior partially because scientists’ own expectations influence what scientists study. Anne outlines ways forward, including diversifying the sciences and improving methodological design.

Reporter Aimee Sulit wrote a summary of Anne’s recent talk at The Foley Institute. A video of the talk is available here.

As an invited speaker at The Foley Institute’s fall speaker series, Anne overviewed what we know about climate adaptation and how we should study it (and support it) going forward.

Anne was the lead guest editor of a special issue in Phil Trans B on how studying culture can provide insight into climate change adaptation. Tate Young wrote a piece for Daily Evergreen about the special issue, sharing not only the take-home messages of the issue, but also Anne’s recent experiences working on climate adaptation, including her recent efforts to improve her chops as a science communicator.

In his blogpost summarizing our article in Evolution & Human Behavior, Kris provides a background on long-distance friendships in humans - from past examples to a priori predictions about how they should work - and then summarizes our findings from Tanzania. Take-home message: “People lean on their friends to get through hard times and long-distance friends can provide some kinds of help that close-distance friends might not be able to provide, no strings attached.”

Anne was the lead guest editor of a special issue in Phil Trans B on how studying culture can provide insight into climate change adaptation. Will Ferguson wrote a summary in WSU Insider, emphasizing what we can learn from the adaptation strategies communities are using around the globe.