The following activities are being conducted at the Dare Institute:
Experimental studies of mother-infant and stranger-infant interactions, examining
two- and five-month-old infants' responses to these different caregivers.
Studies of the development of caring and attachment across the life-span.
Questions include the evolutionary and social-reinforcement bases for the
development of assortitativeness—the choosing of like people—in
human relations, and the development of political affiliation and voter preference.
A research program on how tasks (and performance on them) are naturally ordered
by their hierarchical complexity.
This includes mathematical work on the recursive basis of generating stages
and the neural networks basis for recognizing the next stage's action.
A research program in the Cambridge public schools examining the development
of problem solving in children, and ways to facilitate this development. The
necessity of reinforcing outstanding behavior on a daily basis as well as
the political implications of such a policy have been examined.
A research program examining the effect of informal and formal education (leadership,
cross-cultural experience) on development in undergraduate and postgraduate
students in Mexico and the United States.
A research project on the interrelationships among various domains of human
thought—such as the moral, the epistemological, and the aesthetic—and
to what extent people's abilities in one domain are correlated with their
abilities in the other domains.
A research program examining decision-making processes in people, pigeons,
and computers and how the components of that process develop. This research
uses evolutionary, social-conditioning, sociological, economic, and developmental-stage
approaches in the political and institutional arenas.
A research program on doctor-patient relationships. These studies focus on
sexual behavior, malpractice, threats, and the perception of causes for bad
outcomes. Ethical and clinical reasoning are examined.
A yearly symposium on the quantitative analysis of behavior, which brings
together researchers from many different universities to present and discuss
research on a variety of topics. An edited book is prepared from each symposium.
So far, four books have been published, two are currently
in press, and two more are in preparation.