The Evolution, Violence, and Empowerment Lab

Despite tremendous societal attention to sexual violence and research devoted to understanding its causes and the circumstances in which it occurs, relatively little research effort has been specifically devoted to defenses preventing sexual violence and its associated harms to victims.  My research uses sexual conflict theory and an evolutionary perspective to understand the key emotions and cognitive processing producing women’s defenses against sexual violence.

The EVE Lab investigates how women navigate threats of sexual violence through evolved psychological mechanisms, social alliances, and strategic behavior. Rooted in evolutionary psychology and guided by a feminist lens, our research explores women’s threat management psychology; sexual conflict; and the complex interplay between perpetrator-victim relationships, contextual factors, and individual differences.

The EVE Lab studies questions such as: How do women defend themselves—physically, emotionally, and socially—against the risk of sexual aggression? What roles do women’s social allies (i.e., “bodyguards”) play in women’s evolved defense systems? How do individual differences shape sexual and social relationships across development, context, and culture?

Our work bridges experimental, survey, and cross-cultural methods to uncover the strategies women use to survive, adapt, and assert power in environments marked by sexual conflict. Past work from the EVE Lab has examined how conflict between the sexes has shaped men’s (a) likelihood of perpetrating sexual violence (Hahnel-Peeters et al., 2022) and (b) attitudes surrounding sexual violence victims (Hahnel-Peeters et al., 2024). Current work examines how conflict between the sexes has shaped women’s defenses against sexual exploitation. Projects include (a) building a taxonomy on women’s defenses against sexual violence and experimentally test hypothesized design features of selected defenses, (b) examining cross-sex theory of mind in the domain of sexual violence, and (c) examining moral judgments towards sexual behavior across cultures.