Bailey R House
Senior Lecturer

Profile

Biography

• Postdoctoral Scholar; Arizona State University; USA; 2015-2018
• Humboldt Research Fellow; Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology; Germany; 2013-2015
• PhD in Biological Anthropology; University of California, Los Angeles; USA; 2013
• BA in Cognitive Science; Hampshire College; USA; 2003

Career

After doing my undergraduate thesis in cognitive psychology, I worked in research laboratories specializing in both developmental and comparative psychology. I completed my PhD in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA, where my dissertation work combined evolutionary anthropology with cross-cultural, developmental, and comparative psychology. After my PhD, I continued to do postdoctoral work in these areas at the MPI for Evolutionary Anthropology, and in the Institute for Human Origins at Arizona State University.

Research

Projects

I study decision-making and behaviour in adults and children, how these vary across diverse societies, and how they are shaped by both cultural beliefs and ​evolved adaptations. In particular, I look at the development of prosocial behaviour.

Culture and Social Development
This work explores how prosocial behaviour changes across development, in response to both an increasing sensitivity to social norms and the maturation of psychological mechanisms for reciprocal cooperation. Using behavioural experiments with children and adults living in different societies, I study how our universal human psychology for norms and cooperation can lead to the emergence of cultural diversity in behaviour during childhood. The goal of this work is to better understand how culture and psychological maturation work together to produce human diversity in cooperation and other behaviours.

Species Differences in Behaviour
I am also interested in studying how and why chimpanzees and other primates make choices that benefit others, and comparing non-human primates' choices to the choices that humans make in very similar kinds of situations. This gives us insight into the ways that humans differ from other animals, and how these differences emerge from uniquely human capacities for culture. The goal of this work is to draw clearer conclusions about the nature of the evolved psychological adaptations that produce human cooperative behaviours.

Collaborators

• Joan Silk
• H. Clark Barrett
• Joseph Henrich
• Patricia Kanngiesser
• Michael Tomasello

Publications

Selected publications

• House, B., Silk, J. B., & McAuliffe, K. (2023). No strong evidence for universal gender differences in the development of cooperative behaviour across societies. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 378(1868), 20210439.
• Benozio, A., House, B. R., & Tomasello, M. (2023). Apes reciprocate food positively and negatively. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 290(1998), 20222541.
• House, B.R., Kanngiesser, P., Barrett, H.C., Broesch, T., Cebioglu, S., Crittenden, A.N., Erut, A., Lew-Levy, S., Sebastian-Enesco, C., Smith, A.M., Yilmaz, S., Silk, J.B. (2020). Universal norm psychology leads to societal diversity in prosocial behaviour and development. Nature Human Behaviour. 1–9.
• House, B. R., Kanngiesser, P., Barrett, H. C., Yilmaz, S., Smith, A. M., Sebastian-Enesco, C., Erut, A., Silk, J. B. (2020). Social norms and cultural diversity in the development of third-party punishment. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 287(1925), 20192794.
• House, B.R. (2018) How do social norms influence prosocial development? Current opinion in psychology, 20, 87-91.
• House, B.R., Tomasello, M. (2018) Modeling social norms increasingly influences costly sharing in middle childhood. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology. 171, 84-98.
• House, B.R. (2017) Diverse Ontogenies of Reciprocity and Prosociality: variation in cooperation across Fiji and the United States. Developmental science, 20(6), e12466.
• Silk, J.B., House, B.R. (2016) The Evolution of Altruistic Social Preferences in Human Groups. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 371(1687), 20150097.
• House, B.R., Henrich, J., Sarnecka, B.W., Silk, J.B. (2013) The Ontogeny of Contingent Reciprocity in Children. Evolution and Human Behavior, 34(2), 86-93.
• House, B.R., Silk, J.B., Henrich, J., Barrett, H.C., Scelza, B., Boyette, A., Hewlett, B.S., McElreath, R, Lawrence, S. (2013) The Ontogeny of Prosocial Behavior Across Diverse Societies. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 110(36), 14586-14591.

Full publications list

See Google Scholar or the York Research Database for a full list of publications.

Teaching

Undergraduate

Current Modules

Previous Modules