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Though labor-force participation of women has considerably increased in most industrialized societies and many households are now dual-earner, the gender imbalance in household division of labor persists. Moreover, the consensus amongst men and women is that such distributions are fair, resulting in normalization and perpetuation of inequality. We provide a multifactorial explanation for understanding the economic, cultural and cognitive processes underlying such inequalities within households. The economic approach suggests that gendered division of labor is a problem of coordination, and payoffs available to individuals outside their households provides asymmetric bargaining power to men and women, shaping housework conventions. In most industrialized societies, various measures of economic payoffs such as financial assets, employment potential, can then provide power to gender groups. The sociological approach bridges this macro-level view of households with the micro-level view of an individual’s perceptions of labor divisions. Utilizing various aspects of culture, this section shows that when labor divisions become stabilized on a large scale, they become part of cultural narratives and norms – such as what individuals think fairness in the household is, what gender roles they abide by, etc – which become internalized. The psychological approach explores cognitive mechanisms underpinning self-perception and assessments of fairness within one’s household. This multi factorial approach allows us to address the individual dynamics of self-concept within the broader social and economic contexts that households exist within. Ultimately, we aim to demonstrate the utility of such multidisciplinary work for informing gender policy at various levels and making holistic strides toward the improvement of women's health and wellbeing.

We define two ‘problems of altruism’. The first is the classic problem of altruism, defined as the issue of how a behavior which decreases an individual’s lifetime reproductive success, while helping another individual (or individuals) increase their lifetime reproductive success, can evolve. We also define a ‘second-order problem of altruism’, where different authors have different conceptions of what does, and does not, constitute ‘altruism’, including approaches based on kin selection, multi-level selection theory, short-term altruism and psychological altruism.

Language is one of the most complex of human traits. There are many hypotheses about how it originated, what factors shaped its diversity, and what ongoing processes drive how it changes. We present the Causal Hypotheses in Evolutionary Linguistics Database (CHIELD, https://chield.excd.org/), a tool for expressing, exploring, and evaluating hypotheses. It allows researchers to integrate multiple theories into a coherent narrative, helping to design future research. We present design goals, a formal specification, and an implementation for this database. Source code is freely available for other fields to take advantage of this tool. Some initial results are presented, including identifying conflicts in theories about gossip and ritual, comparing hypotheses relating population size and morphological complexity, and an author relation network. European Research Council (ERC) 639291 Academy of Finland 296212 European Research Council (ERC) 805371 Australian Research Council FL130100111 Leverhulme Trust CF-2016-435 Australian Research Council FL130100141 John Templeton Fund 40128

From an evolutionary perspective, anxiety can be considered as a psychological hazard-detection system. In uncertain environments, the costs of responding to false cues of danger are often miniscule as compared to those resulting from undetected threats. Therefore, the anxiety response has evolved a bias towards false alarms under conditions of uncertainty. We discuss general and specific types of anxiety responses, underlining how the nature of these are often determined by the particular types of threats in the environment.

We define two ‘problems of altruism’. The first is the classic problem of altruism, defined as the issue of how a behavior which decreases an individual’s lifetime reproductive success, while helping another individual (or individuals) increase their lifetime reproductive success, can evolve. We also define a ‘second-order problem of altruism’, where different authors have different conceptions of what does, and does not, constitute ‘altruism’, including approaches based on kin selection, multi-level selection theory, short-term altruism and psychological altruism.