1. Introduction 1.1
• Since interactions with kin have been
central to individual survival and
reproduction then humans have surely
evolved psychological mechanisms designed
to facilitate the recognition of kin and to
behaviorally discriminate kin and nonkin.
2. • Animals tend to assist those that are more
closely related to them.
• Humans are no exception to this set of
principles.
• In order to do this they must have a way of
distinguishing kin from nonkin.
3. • Kin recognition depends on the perception
of specific cues such as spatial location,
familiarity, and similarity.
• Because kin recognition is cue dependent,
and many cues are less than reliable,
organisms can be tricked.
• Sometimes they respond to kin as nonkin
and more often they will respond to nonkin
as kin.
4. • Psychological representations of kin and
nonkin are not simply a product of rational
assesments of generic relatedness.
• Like other animals, people use a set of
signals as indicators of kinship. Some signals
exist in individuals’ emotional states.
• The subjective and and emotion-laden
feeling of closeness appears to serve as a
kinship cue.
• More genetically similar individuals arouse
stronger subjective feelings of closeness
5. • The arousal of emotions must depend on
the detection of primary perceptual and
cognitive cues.
• Children can identify siblings by smell.
• These cues tend to fall into two broad
classes: those that connote familiarity and
those that connote similarity.
6. • Familiarity-Unrelated people who grow up
together seem to view one another as kin
despite knowledge to the contrary, and as a
result, find each other unattractive as
sexual partners.
• Similarity-There is evidence that fathers
favor children that look most like them.
Adults report greater willingness to assist
unrelated children who happen to have
facial features in common with their
own.People are also more likely to assist
someone with the same name.
