Robert Kurzban

I study the evolved design of the human mind: why we have the feelings we have, why we are so sure of our own good sense, and why our opinions line up so neatly with our interests.

I trained with Leda Cosmides and John Tooby at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and I was a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania for more than a decade. These days I write, I talk with podcasters, and I am the junior partner in my sister's studio, The Pottery Spottery.

For two decades my research asked what the parts of the human mind are for: why we stigmatize and exclude, how the mind keeps track of coalitions (and why race is easier to erase than people assume), why moral judgment looks the way it does, and what mental effort is. Google Scholar counts about 25,000 citations of that work, with an h-index of 63 (September 2026). The full list is on Google Scholar.

Selected papers

1. Kurzban, R., & Leary, M. R. (2001). Evolutionary origins of stigmatization: The functions of social exclusion. Psychological Bulletin.
2. Kurzban, R., Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2001). Can race be erased? Coalitional computation and social categorization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
3. Barrett, H. C., & Kurzban, R. (2006). Modularity in cognition: Framing the debate. Psychological Review.
4. Kurzban, R., Duckworth, A., Kable, J. W., & Myers, J. (2013). An opportunity cost model of subjective effort and task performance. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.
5. Tybur, J. M., Lieberman, D., Kurzban, R., & DeScioli, P. (2013). Disgust: Evolved function and structure. Psychological Review.
6. DeScioli, P., & Kurzban, R. (2013). A solution to the mysteries of morality. Psychological Bulletin.
7. Kurzban, R., & Houser, D. (2005). Experiments investigating cooperative types in humans: A complement to evolutionary theory and simulations. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
8. Kurzban, R., Burton-Chellew, M. N., & West, S. A. (2015). The evolution of altruism in humans. Annual Review of Psychology.

The Living Fossils is my Substack on evolutionary psychology and behavioral economics: the parts of our minds built for a world that no longer exists, and what they do now.

Podcast appearances and interviews, including Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman and What Happens Next in 6 Minutes, are listed on the All the Feels media page.

For interview requests, email me.

• B.A., Cornell University, 1991
• Ph.D. in psychology, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1998
• Master of Public Administration, Fels Institute of Government, University of Pennsylvania
• Professor of psychology, University of Pennsylvania
• Past president of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society and past editor-in-chief of its journal, Evolution and Human Behavior

• X (Twitter)
• LinkedIn
• Amazon author page
• Google Scholar
• ResearchGate
• Substack

rkurzban@gmail.com