Partners and pathogens: Socio-ecological approaches for understanding cultural variation in psychology and behavior

I will present research examining how cultural and regional variation can be understood as adaptations to differing socio-ecological contests. Differing social ecologies present individuals with unique adaptive tasks to which they must orient their behaviors and cognition, and understanding the nature of these tasks and the strategies adapted to them can allow researchers to both explain and predict variation in behavioral and cognitive tendencies across cultures and social contexts. First, I will discuss how relational mobility, defined as the amount of opportunities that individuals have to enter into and exit from social relationships in a given social ecology, can be useful to explain cultural variation in behavioral and psychological processes. I will present the results of previous and ongoing studies that use the framework of relational mobility to understand cultural differences in psychological processes, and discuss the utility and challenges associated with this approach. I will also discuss more recent research examining the role of ecological pathogen in understanding state-level variation in interracial dating and marriage.