Robert Kurzban

Robert Kurzban is an American freelance writer and former psychology professor specializing in evolutionary psychology.

Career
Kurzban was a tenured professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania until 2018, when he resigned following allegations of inappropriate relationships with undergraduate students. Following his resignation, he was dismissed as the director of the department's honors program. He also resigned as president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society (HBES) and as Editor-in-Chief of the Society’s journal, Evolution and Human Behavior. Since then he has worked as a freelance writer.

Kurzban was trained by two pioneers in the field of evolutionary psychology, John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, and his research focused on evolutionary approaches to understanding human social behavior. He took an adaptationist view of human psychology, studying the adaptive function, or, survival value, in the adoption of traits by humans. His work aimed at understanding the functions of psychological mechanisms occurring in human social life. He used methods drawn from social psychology, cognitive psychology, and especially experimental economics to research topics including morality, punishment, and mate choice.

Evolutionary psychology has come under attack from a number of critics. Kurzban was active in defending the discipline from prominent detractors and also worked to clarify the principle of cognitive modularity, which plays an important role in the discipline.

He was elected president of HBES in 2017.

Selected publications