David Becker

D. Vaughn Becker is an Associate Professor of Human Systems Engineering in The Polytechnic School at Arizona State University, Honors Faculty in Barrett, The Honors College, Co-Director of the Evolutionary Social Psychology Co-Laboratory, and a Senior Global Futures Scientist in the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory. He is a cognitive and social psychologist whose work is shaped by evolutionary psychology, complex adaptive systems, connectionist modeling, and human-systems engineering. He is an Alexander von Humboldt fellow and in 2026 received the prestigious Global Scholar Fulbright Fellowship, one of only 20 granted for the year, to build an international collaboratory exploring issues in AI alignment.

Becker’s research examines how social and emotional forces shape cognition and behavior in ways that serve fundamental biological and social goals, including self-protection, disease avoidance, status pursuit, affiliation maintenance, mating, and resource acquisition. Much of his work focuses on diagnostic, or abductive, inference: how people use uncertain cues to detect threats, opportunities, allies, rivals, and affordances in the social world. He often applies signal detection theory, multidimensional scaling, experimental methods, attentional and memory paradigms, and psychophysiological approaches to understand how adaptive motives can bias perception, categorization, memory, and decision making.

A recurring theme in Becker’s work is what evolutionary psychiatrist Randolph Nesse has called “smoke detector” effects: the tendency of evolved systems to over-detect potential threats when the costs of missing them would have been high. Becker has studied these processes in domains such as emotion perception, pathogen avoidance, intergroup perception, sexual selection, social categorization, and motivated attention. His recent work also investigates fundamental social motives across societies, disease-avoidance psychology during COVID-19, pathogen avoidance and prejudice, and the ways evolved motives interact with changing ecological threats and opportunities.

With Steven Neuberg, Douglas Kenrick, and colleagues, Becker has developed the AM/FM approach, or Affordance Management of Fundamental Motives, which extends evolutionary social cognition by linking fundamental motives to perceived affordances in the environment. This framework draws on Gibsonian affordances, connectionist models, Jungian ideas about archetypal representational systems, and dynamical systems perspectives to explain how recurrent social challenges shape perception and action. The approach is especially relevant to understanding how humans navigate complex social environments, large-scale social traps, and the responsible design and use of artificial intelligence.

Becker’s broader work asks how cognitive science can better engage with real-world systems. He has pursued field-oriented and cross-cultural extensions of laboratory findings, international collaboration, computational modeling, agent-based thinking, and visualization tools for understanding complex social dynamics. His teaching and applied work emphasize experimental design, research methods, cognitive science, human-centered technology, and the design of systems that support human judgment, learning, cooperation, and regenerative futures.