Environmental harshness and unpredictability, life history, and social and academic behavior of adolescents in nine countries.

Abstract

Safety is essential for life. To survive, humans and other animals have developed sets of psychological and physiological adaptations known as life history (LH) tradeoff strategies in response to various safety constraints. Evolutionarily selected LH strategies in turn regulate development and behavior to optimize survival under prevailing safety conditions. The present study tested LH hypotheses concerning safety based on a 6-year longitudinal sample of 1,245 adolescents and their parents from 9 countries. The results revealed that, invariant across countries, environmental harshness, and unpredictability (lack of safety) was negatively associated with slow LH behavioral profile, measured 2 years later, and slow LH behavioral profile was negatively and positively associated with externalizing behavior and academic performance, respectively, as measured an additional 2 years later. These results support the evolutionary conception that human development responds to environmental safety cues through LH regulation of social and learning behaviors.

Aggression and risk‐taking as adaptive implementations of fast life history strategy

“…One major human evolutionary milestone is complex sociality (Dunbar, ), which drives the development of the human brain and modern human race (Barton, ). Human sociality relies on two systems aligned with fast and slow LH (Chang et al, ; Figueredo & Jacobs, ). One may be predominant, aligned with slow LH, and fostered by more controllable environments with more predictable future prospects.…”

“…These include harsh parenting (Mell, Safra, Algan, Baumard, & Chevallier, ) and parental absence (Belsky et al, ), employment and residential changes, including homelessness (Doom, Vanzomeren‐Dohm, & Simpson, ; Masten et al, ; Zuo, Huang, Cai, & Wang, ), exposure to gangs, violence, and crime (Brumbach, Figueredo, & Ellis, ; Upchurch, Aneshensel, Sucoff, & Levy‐Storms, ), and low socioeconomic status (SES) (Belsky, Schlomer, & Ellis, ), which being associated in many urban areas with drug use, crime, and dangerous neighborhoods represents unsafe more than resource shortages (Chang & Lu, ). Both directly and indirectly through child perceived stress (Belsky et al, ; Del Giudice, Ellis, & Shirtcliff, ), these indicators of early environmental unsafety have been associated with fast LH characteristics including early menarche (Belsky et al, ), early initiation of sex (Simpson, Griskevicius, Kuo, Sung, & Collins, ) and higher frequency of sexual activity (Baumer & South, ), risky substance use behavior (Brumbach et al, ), and aggressive, antisocial, and externalizing behaviors (Chang et al, ; Doom et al, ; Simpson et al, ; Zuo et al, ). Parental separation has been extensively documented as facilitating fast LH and its corresponding physical effects (e.g., early menarche; Ellis, ) and behavioral manifestations (e.g., antagonistic behavior; Ellis et al, ; Newcomber & Udry, ).…”

“…With reduced extrinsic risks and increased environmental predictability and controllability, on the other hand, human social schemata orient toward coexistence, cooperation, and orderly competition to maximize resource acquisition through collaboration (Chen & Chang, ; Zhu, Hawk, & Chang, ; Zhu et al, ). Cross‐cultural evidence bolsters the linkage between experiences of environmental unpredictability (e.g., family instability) and antisocial, externalizing behavior (Chang et al, ).…”

Effects of Peer Influences and Life-History Strategy on Chinese Junior High School Students’ Prosocial and Antisocial Behaviors

“…Another set of risk/protective factors for adolescents' social conduct can be traced to individual differences in life-history strategy (LHS; Chang et al, 2019), which refers to a suite of traits resulting from gene-environment interactions in the direction that maximize reproductive success in various environmental conditions (Ellis et al, 2009). Such geneenvironment interactions lead to fundamental tradeoffs between traits facilitating immediate reproductive efforts and those facilitating future-oriented somatic efforts (Chisholm, 1993;Del Giudice et al, 2015;Chang and Lu, 2018).…”

Debate: Facing uncertainty with(out) a sense of control – cultural influence on adolescents’ response to the COVID‐19 pandemic

“…Consistent with the survey results, there are conceivably large cross-cultural variations not only in terms of people's responses to the COVID-19 pandemic and its preventive measures but also with regard to the negative psychological effects individuals (and especially adolescents) could experience as a result of these measures. We argue that while COVID-19-related restrictions could have profound psychological implications for adolescents, who are especially susceptible to environmental harshness and unpredictability (Chang et al, 2019), the effects are likely to differ depending on the specific type of learning style adolescents adopt to cope with uncertainty threats (Chang et al, 2011). Specifically, societal disease-control regulations that restrict personal freedoms might undermine adolescents' sense of control in individualistic cultures, where individual learning-focused problem-solving style (i.e., a free, independent search for innovative solutions) is the predominant way to deal with uncertainty.…”