Evolution- Skills, Personal Relationships, Aggression, and Resource Control


Our resarch focuses on the psychological underpinnings of human social power and social success. Our model (i.e., Resource Control Theory; Hawley, 1999) integrates work from various disciplines (e.g., developmental psychology, social psychology, peer relationships, and evolutionary theory). As such, it challenges prevalent thought on aggression and social adaptation, as well as common assumptions about gender and social status.

Currently we are looking at morality, aggression, power in relationships, and attitudes toward evolutionary theory and its applications.All of our work is predicated on the assumption that social dominance is a central organizing feature to social groups and as such has far reaching implications for many domains of functioning.

Application for Research Assistantship (Psyc 480)


Pat Hawley recieved her PhD from UC Riverside where she studied evolution, animal behavior, and quantitative methods. She spent several years at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development (Berlin) as a Post doctoral Fellow until 1998 when she returned to a research position at Yale and taught at So. Connecticut State University. She has been at KU since 2002.