people

Stephanie Fox

Stephanie
Anthropology
UC Santa Barbara
Postdoctoral Scholar

Stephanie Fox is a postdoctoral scholar in the Department of Anthropology. She uses cross-species data from humans and non-human primates to investigate the evolutionary roots of human social behaviour, particularly female social relationships and cooperation. Her work focuses on the benefits of sociality, variables that constrain individuals from achieving their optimal social phenotypes, and how both benefits and constraints of sociality change in different life phases. Demography plays a key role in predicting access to different types of social partners over the lifespan, particularly with respect to the availability of related partners. Dr. Fox's recent work examines how a female's reproductive history shapes her access to offspring as social partners, and how adult offspring promote or constrain the social integration of their ageing mothers. Her work draws on long-term field observations of wild primates, including chimpanzees and blue monkeys, and laboratory analyses of biomarkers from non-invasively collected biological samples. She also leads an interdisciplinary working group dedicated to synthesizing cross-species and cross-cultural research to build holistic, evolutionary perspectives on human social ageing. 

Publications

Fox, S. A., Scelza, B., Silk, J., & Kramer, K. L. 2023. 
"New perspectives on the evolution of women's cooperation. "
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 378(1868), 20210424.
Fox, S. A., Muller, M. N., González, N. T., Enigk, D. K., Machanda, Z. P., Otali, E., ... & Thompson, M. E. 2023. 
"Weak, but not strong, ties support coalition formation among wild female chimpanzees"
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 378(1868), 20210427