Pepper & Nettle (P&N) offer a welcomed synthesis improving our understanding of responses to poverty in a life-history framework. I propose two related extensions: (1) accuracy of cultural encoded expectations, similar to extrinsic morbidity-mortality, may affect life history and the behavioral constellation of deprivation (BCD); and (2) in addition to life-history effects, impulsivity may promote niche construction (e.g., Fuentes Reference Fuentes2016; Kendal et al. Reference Kendal, Jamshid, Tehrani and Odling-Smee2011; Stotz Reference Stotz2010) in response to extrinsic risks.

Predicting allocation of effort in life history assumes that people can perceive culturally relevant “currencies” for success in context (Irons Reference Irons1998). Theoretically, people pursue salient resources in cultural models of production, because they expect their efforts to result in locally defined success, ultimately resulting in fitness. Cultural success can be measured as the production of relevant resources that meet basic needs (e.g., food security) and improve well-being. Key resources can be measured in many cases as “wealth” – income and assets (Stulp et al. Reference Stulp, Sear and Barrett2016) – although there are multiple possibilities for the differential value of “wealth types” (e.g., Mattison Reference Mattison2011) and for less-monetized measures of cultural success (Borgerhoff Mulder et al. Reference Borgerhoff Mulder, Bowles, Hertz, Bell, Beise, Clark, Fazzio, Gurven, Hill, Hooper, Irons, Kaplan, Leonetti, Low, Marlowe, McElreath, Naidu, Nolin, Piraino, Quinlan, Schniter, Sear, Shenk, Smith, von Rueden and Wiessner2009; Macfarlan et al. Reference Macfarlan, Remiker and Quinlan2012; Reference Macfarlan, Walker, Flinn and Chagnon2014). Measuring perception of relevant resources is a key empirical advancement for cross-cultural comparison that is relevant to human life history and BCD.

Cultural consensus analysis assesses adaptively relevant, shared perception (Romney et al. Reference Romney, Batchelder and Weller1987; Weller Reference Weller2007). Through environmental feedback, a group arrives at shared mental models of expected environments from common experience in “patterned practice” (Roepstorff et al. Reference Roepstorff, Niewöhner and Beck2010). In a relatively stable environment, most members of a group should agree on ways of making a living, and this agreement has been measured as “consensus” for livelihood schemata (Romney et al. Reference Romney, Batchelder and Weller1987; Weller Reference Weller2007).

Cultural consonance is the extent to which culturally encoded environmental expectations (consensus models) match individual experiences (e.g., Dressler Reference Dressler2012; Dressler et al. Reference Dressler, Borges, Balieiro and dos Santos2005; Reference Dressler, Balieiro and dos Santos2017). When shared goals match individual experiences (i.e., predicting events and outcomes), then one has high cultural consonance. Low cultural consonance – poor fit between shared goals and individual experience – can be framed as perceived deprivation and error in predictive perception, suggesting benefits of delay discounting, impulsive behavior, and reward seeking for life history and niche construction. Recent research indicates that low cultural consonance is associated with a suite of outcomes emphasized in life-history theory regarding health behaviors and “internal prediction.” Low cultural consonance measured across gradients of environmental quality has been associated with low subjective well-being (Reyes-García et al. Reference Reyes-García, Gravlee, McDade, Huanca, Leonard and Tanner2010), depression (Dressler et al. Reference Dressler, Balieiro, Ribeiro and dos Santos2007a; Reference Dressler, Balieiro, Ribeiro and dos Santos2007b; Reference Dressler, Balieiro, de Araújo, Silva and dos Santos2016), hypertension (Dressler et al. Reference Dressler, Borges, Balieiro and dos Santos2005), substance use (Dressler et al. Reference Dressler, Ribeiro, Balieiro, Oths and dos Santos2004; Reyes-García et al. Reference Reyes-García, Gravlee, McDade, Huanca, Leonard and Tanner2010), inflammatory immune response (Dressler et al. Reference Dressler, Balieiro, de Araújo, Silva and dos Santos2016; Reference Dressler, Balieiro and dos Santos2017), and so forth. Finally, cultural consonance has been shown to mediate the effects of socioeconomic status (SES), genetics, and early life adversity on depression; this mediation is especially pronounced in lower-SES communities (Dressler et al. Reference Dressler, Balieiro, de Araújo, Silva and dos Santos2016). These chronic health effects indicate “internal prediction” (Rickard et al. Reference Rickard, Frankenhuis and Nettle2014) and somatic feedback for life-history strategies with less planning, early reproduction, and so forth, as described in P&N's BCD model.

Cultural consonance can be framed as Bayesian processing, whereby cultural representations supply prior probabilities for navigating specific environments. Fit between mental models and environmental conditions is assessed by “predictive processing” based on feedback between people and their environments. Perception involves a set of “top-down” models or expectations fit to “bottom-up” data coming from the environment to inform action in bidirectional processes (Clark Reference Clark2013). A person's internal state is a kind of conversation between mental models and sensory information interacting to make sense of the world. Repeated interactions with social, economic, and political aspects of an environment results in “patterned practice” shaping attention and expectations (Roepstorff et al. Reference Roepstorff, Niewöhner and Beck2010; Strauss & Quinn Reference Strauss and Quinn1997). In this sense, culture is a set of representations of the world that provides “model goal states” (Barkow Reference Barkow1989) and locally relevant prior probabilities for achieving a goal (Clark Reference Clark2013, 6). Hence, people deploy a probabilistic or “predictive” mind in planning action (Toussaint Reference Toussaint2009). When cultural expectations conflict with incoming information, then a bidirectional mind may seek new input to reorganize perception to fit the changing environment. This line of reasoning suggests that low cultural consonance may be a highly salient measure of “surprise” or uncertainty relevant to life history, BCD, and niche construction.

Cognitive noise interfering with inferential processes has resulted in impulsive immediate action and significantly discounted delayed rewards in experiments (Deck & Jahedi Reference Deck and Jahedi2015; Hinson et al. Reference Hinson, Jameson and Whitney2003; Koffarnus et al. Reference Koffarnus, Jarmolowicz, Mueller and Bickel2013), although results are sometimes inconsistent (Koffarnus et al. Reference Koffarnus, Jarmolowicz, Mueller and Bickel2013). Cognitive load impedes useful probabilistic inference for the task at hand. Ecologically mismatched cultural models, common in poorer communities with substantial uncertainty, may be one source of cognitive noise. It is possible that aspects of impulsivity function to ignore representations (plans) that fail to predict incoming signals and simultaneously increase sensory input to arrive at new, better-fitting representations. Behavioral-activation and reward-seeking components of impulsivity (Carver & White Reference Carver and White1994; Morean et al. Reference Morean, DeMartini, Leeman, Pearlson, Anticevic, Krishnan-Sarin, Krystal and O'Malley2014) could be particularly useful for niche construction.

When cultural expectations fail, then a Bayesian mind may activate impulsive action to generate new input to reorganize perception for a new niche. Response to “surprise” (including low consonance) can be as simple as eye movements in search of information useful for perceptual models (Friston et al. Reference Friston, Adams, Perrinet and Breakspear2012). In other cases, surprise might motivate a person to change position in the environment to better match perceptual schemata. People may also probe the environment for new information to construct representations that better match their experiences.

A small body of work indicates that impulsive behavior may be differentially activated in response to hazards in stable versus unstable environments, suggesting different niche construction motivations. Similar to findings from delay-discounting experiments (Griskevicius et al. Reference Griskevicius, Tybur, Delton and Robertson2011b), an observational study indicated that Ethiopian farmers pursuing high-risk nontraditional maize production showed a significant increase in impulsivity in response to household morbidity-mortality and negative income shocks compared with farmers from relatively stable environments who were cultivating traditional drought-resistant crops (Quinlan et al. Reference Quinlan, Jilo Dira, Caudell and Quinlan2016). Cultural consonance and niche construction processes may help explain these differential responses to environmental hazards consistent with BCD models.