Hi, I'm Jessica D. Ayers!

Traditionally, relationships with family members have been treated as cooperative regardless of who the person is. But, just like genes from mom and dad can be in conflict, family members from the maternal and paternal side of the family can have conflictual relationships. But the sources for conflict and cooperation exponentially increase from here, genetic relatives (such as mom, dad, sister, brother, etc.) have relationships both within a family and across families after marriage (such as with a mother-in-law, father-in-law, sister-in-law, brother-in-law, etc.). We have begun to investigate how relationships with these individuals have different amounts of cooperation and conflict as a result of differences in genetic relatedness.

I'm also interested in understanding how people become friends, and how this might be influenced by the underlying differences in genetic conflict. The general consensus in the current friendship literature is that men and women "use" their friends for different purposes, with women forming more intimate, close, and dyadic relationships while men for looser, larger, and more hierarchically structured friendship groups. This is presumably because women have faced evolutionary pressures that fostered the development of dyadic structures (such as alloparenting and familial replacement) while men have faced evolutionary pressures that have fostered the development of coalitional structures (such as warfare and hierarchies). I am interested in how these differences in evolutionary pressures interact with our genes to produce different friendship initiation, maintenance, and dissolution patterns. I am also interested in the possibility that these inherent differences lead to different "rules" that we want our friends to follow as well as different traits that we want our friends to have.