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Abstract
This dissertation explores how substantive law shapes behavior. Substantive law refers to the rules of entitlement and obligation that are enforced by a legal authority. Assuming people have a model in their minds about what the substantive behavioral rules will be enforced, the question is: how do we act on that information? To address this question, I apply the approach of evolutionary psychology to theorize what adaptive problems the cognitive mechanisms underlying legal behavior likely evolved to solve. I propose that there are two distinct thought-processes for responding to the law, which were designed to handle different classes of adaptive problem. The first is the problem of responding to threats from other social agents. The second is the problem of engaging in social exchange with other social agents. Using descriptions of the tasks human psychology should have evolved to solve, I hypothesize what mechanisms human cognition should have to solve these problems well and how these mechanisms might operate in the context of law. I then present the results of research I conducted that provides empirical support for some of these hypotheses. Two of these studies present ethnographic data about how cannabis users in Uruguay judge the fairness of cannabis laws and how these judgments shape their behavior. The third study presents the results of a controlled cognitive experiment testing for a specific hypothesized feature in human threat psychology. Taken together, these results demonstrate the value of the evolutionary psychological approach to the study of legal behavior.