anthrologue | Shai de Vries

I am a DPhil (PhD) candidate working as part of the Calleva project. Although I currently work within the Anthropology department, I have worked in different fields as well and consider myself a behavioural scientist. I hold a BA in Psychology and an MSc in Behavioural Science from Radboud University, where I worked with Dr. Willem Frankenhuis.

I am interested in how human social groups affect social behaviour. I am working on several meta-analyses related to this topic in order to see what we can learn from all the studies already out there. I think it is important to integrate knowledge from various disciplines, and I enjoy working with a group of people from many different backgrounds, like Anthrologue. I value open and reproducible research practices, and I enjoy talking to other researchers about ways to integrate these practices into their projects.

selected publications

Hidden talents in harsh conditions? A preregistered study of memory and reasoning about social dominance Frankenhuis, W., de Vries, S., Bianchi, J., and Ellis, B. Developmental Science 2020
journal abstract bib
Although growing up in stressful conditions can undermine mental abilities, people in harsh environments may develop intact, or even enhanced, social and cognitive abilities for solving problems in high‐adversity contexts (i.e. ‘hidden talents’). We examine whether childhood and current exposure to violence are associated with memory (number of learning rounds needed to memorize relations between items) and reasoning performance (accuracy in deducing a novel relation) on transitive inference tasks involving both violence‐relevant and violence‐neutral social information (social dominance vs. chronological age). We hypothesized that individuals who had more exposure to violence would perform better than individuals with less exposure on the social dominance task. We tested this hypothesis in a preregistered study in 100 Dutch college students and 99 Dutch community participants. We found that more exposure to violence was associated with lower overall memory performance, but not with reasoning performance. However, the main effects of current (but not childhood) exposure to violence on memory were qualified by significant interaction effects. More current exposure to neighborhood violence was associated with worse memory for age relations, but not with memory for dominance relations. By contrast, more current personal involvement in violence was associated with better memory for dominance relations, but not with memory for age relations. These results suggest incomplete transfer of learning and memory abilities across contents. This pattern of results, which supports a combination of deficits and ‘hidden talents,’ is striking in relation to the broader developmental literature, which has nearly exclusively reported deficits in people from harsh conditions. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at: https://youtu.be/e4ePmSzZsuc.
@article{Frankenhuis-et-al_2020, title = {Hidden talents in harsh conditions? A preregistered study of memory and reasoning about social dominance}, author = {Frankenhuis, Willem E and {de Vries}, Sarah A and Bianchi, JeanMarie and Ellis, Bruce J}, journal = {Developmental Science}, volume = {23}, number = {4}, pages = {e12835}, year = {2020}, doi = {10.1111/desc.12835}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.12835}, abbr = {personal} }
Does exposure to psychosocial adversity enhance deception detection ability? Frankenhuis, W., Roelofs, M., and de Vries, S. Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences 2018
journal abstract bib
People who grow up under stressful conditions tend to score lower on conventional assessments of cognitive abilities. They might, however, develop enhanced mental skills and abilities for solving problems that are more ecologically relevant to them. We present 2 studies examining whether psychosocial adversity (i.e., exposure to neighborhood violence and to harsh parenting) enhances the ability to detect deception. Our results, based on Signal Detection and Bayesian analyses, are mixed. In Study 1, we find no support for our hypothesis that exposure to psychosocial adversity enhances deception detection ability. In Study 2, we do find that only harsher parenting predicts greater accuracy. This evidence is either weak or strong, depending on whether we compare our hypothesis to the null hypothesis or an impairment model, respectively. In both studies, we find no relationship between neighborhood violence and accuracy. Although the implications of our findings are modest, we hope they will encourage future research focused on the skills and abilities of people who develop in harsh environments.
@article{Frankenhuis-et-al_2018, title = {Does exposure to psychosocial adversity enhance deception detection ability?}, author = {Frankenhuis, Willem E and Roelofs, Marieke FA and {de Vries}, Sarah A}, journal = {Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences}, volume = {12}, number = {3}, pages = {218--229}, year = {2018}, doi = {10.1037/ebs0000103}, url = {https://doi.org/10.1037/ebs0000103}, abbr = {personal} }