Kinship systems—culturally evolved rules and practices governing descent, residence, marriage, and inheritance—are among the most fundamental forms of human social organisation. Yet despite their profound consequences for how people experience family, gender, power, and belonging, kinship has received surprisingly little attention in contemporary psychology. 

In this talk, I argue that kinship provides an important framework for understanding psychological variation across cultures and demonstrate its implications across intrapersonal, interpersonal, and intergroup levels of analysis. Drawing on cultural evolutionary theory, I conceptualise kinship systems as institutions that emerge in response to ecological, economic, and intergroup pressures and, in turn, organise social relationships in ways that shape psychological development. Because kinship systems structure where people live, who controls resources, how families are formed, and where individuals locate their primary social ties, they create enduring social environments through which culturally patterned psychologies can develop and be reproduced across generations. 

I will use this framework to propose a theory of how kinship institutions become psychologically embedded and how their effects may scale from family relationships to broader social organisation. I will then outline a four-year programme of research designed to test these ideas. As this is very much a developing framework, I would especially welcome “what if?”, “how about?”, and “have you considered?” questions from anthropologists and others who may know considerably more about kinship than I do. The broader aim is to position kinship as an underused but powerful framework for explaining cross-cultural variation in human psychology, while also making the case for a more explicitly institutional psychology: one that asks how culturally evolved systems of rules, roles, and relationships become embedded in minds and, in turn, shape patterns of thought, feeling, and behaviour.

About the Speaker
Dr Khandis Blake is an evolutionary social psychologist at the University of Melbourne who applies nature/nurture frameworks to study sexual politics.