Robert Kurzban

Kurzban was a tenured professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania until 2018, when he resigned following allegations of impropriety. Following his resignation, he was dismissed as the department's honors program director. He also resigned as president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) and editor-in-chief of the Society’s journal, Evolution and Human Behavior. He now works as a freelance author and writer.

Kurzban was trained by two pioneers in the field of evolutionary psychology, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, and his research has focused on evolutionary approaches to understanding human social behavior. He has taken an adaptationist view of human psychology, studying the adaptive function, or survival value, in adopting traits by humans. His work aims to understand the functions of psychological mechanisms in human social life. 

He has used methods drawn from social psychology, cognitive psychology, and especially experimental economics. His early work investigated the social construction of race and concerned a hypothesis being proposed at the time, that people "automatically" encode the race of people they observe. Kurzban argued that because humans evolved in a world in which they rarely, if ever, encountered people of significantly different physical appearance from themselves, it was unlikely that the human brain evolved with a mechanism to encode what is currently referred to as "race." 

A series of experiments showed that the extent to which people categorized others by race could be reduced with a relatively minor manipulation in the laboratory. He also has researched cooperation, morality, and mate choice (including speed dating). In 2009, he gave a plenary address at the annual meeting of HBES in Fullerton, California.

His first book, Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite: Evolution and the Modular Mind, was published by Princeton University Press in 2010. His second book The Hidden Agenda of the Political Mind: How Self-Interest Shapes Our Opinions and Why We Won’t Admit It, co-authored with Jason Weeden, was published in 2014 also by Princeton University Press. He was elected president of HBES in 2017.