This multi-site research project examines how fundamental motives such as mating, self-protection, status-seeking, and affiliation influence basic cognitive processes such as perception and memory. Whether decisions which involve the allocation of critically important resources are influenced by fluctuations in fundamental motivations, such as self-protection, mating, or status concerns is of interest. These motivations frequently generate nonlinearities in decision making, and are themselves evoked by the dynamical interplay of chronic individual goals, ecological circumstances, and acute situational forces -- processes foundational to complexity science. The researchers propose a series of studies examining how fundamental motivations might alter the psychological functions underlying everyday decision-making. Specifically, they propose to conduct 20 conceptually related studies examining variation in decision-making as a function of shifting individuals' focus towards different fitness-relevant problems. Each experiment manipulates different fundamental motivations (such as status seeking, self-protection, kin care, disease avoidance, or mating), and examines the effects of such motivations on decisions about economic risks or trade-offs between different desirable economic and social outcomes. These motivations frequently generate nonlinearities in decision making, and are themselves evoked by the dynamical interplay of chronic individual goals, ecological circumstances, and acute situational forces. Studies 1-2 examine risk in financial investing; studies 3-8 explore discounting of future versus probabilistic benefits; studies 9-12 focus on financial loss aversion; studies 13-14 examine loss aversion to different social benefits; studies 15-16 examine budget allocation between different economic and social outcomes; and studies 17-20 examine budget allocation between different outcomes in micro- versus macroeconomic decisions. This work is influenced by theoretical developments at the interface of evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and social psychology, and has potential for broad theoretical advances with critical relevance to important everyday decisions. The work proposed here is representative of complexity science.
