Joe Henrich

University of British Columbia, Economics, Faculty Member

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Sterelny Kim

The Australian National University

Matt Boyd

Christian Cordes

Universität Bremen

LUIS ALEJANDRO HERNANDEZ CASTRO

Maciej Chudek

Adam Powell

Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

kim sterelny

Kevin Laland

Ian Parker

The George Washington University

Laurel Fogarty

Stanford University

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Papers by Joe Henrich

The Evolution of Cultural Evolution The evolutionary origins of human cultural capacities and their implications for understanding human behavior

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Society for American Archaeology Demography and Cultural Evolution: How Adaptive Cultural Processes can Produce Maladaptive Losses: The Tasmanian Case Author(s)

A combination of archeological and ethnohistorical evidence indicates that, over an approximately... more A combination of archeological and ethnohistorical evidence indicates that, over an approximately 8,000-year period, from the beginning of the Holocene until European explorers began arriving in the eighteenth century, the societies of Tasmania lost a series of valuable skills and technologies. These likely included bone tools, cold-weather clothing, hafted tools, nets, fishing spears, barbed spears, spear-throwers, and boomerangs. To address this puzzle, and the more general question of how human cognition and social interaction can generate both adaptive cultural evolution and maladaptive losses of culturally acquired skills, this paper constructs a formal model of cultural evolution rooted in the cognitive details of human social learning and inference. The analytical results specify the conditions for differing rates of adaptive cultural evolution, and reveal regimes that will produce maladaptive losses of particular kinds of skills and related technologies. More specifically, the results suggest that the relatively sudden reduction in the effective population size (the size of the interacting pool of social learners) that occurred with the rising ocean levels at the end of the last glacial epoch, which cut Tasmania off from the rest of Australia for the ensuing ten millennia, could have initiated a cultural evolutionary process that (1) kept stable or even improved relatively simple technological skills, and (2) produced an increasing deterioration of more complex skills leading to the complete disappearance of some technologies and practices. This pattern is consistent with the empirical record in Tasmania. Beyond this case, I speculate on the applicability of the model to understanding the variability in rates of adaptive cultural evolution. La evidencia arqueoldgica y etnohist6rica indica que, a lo largo de aproximadamente 8, 000 afios, desde el principio del Holoceno hasta la llegada de exploradores europeos en el siglo XVIII, las sociedades de Tasmania perdieron gran parte de su cultura tecnolo'gica. Las herramientas que desaparecieron probablemente incluyen el hueso, ropa resistente alfrio, los instrumentos enmangados, arpones, lanzas de pdas, los lanza-lanzadores y los bumerangs. g Cdmo es posible que se perdiera todo esto? Para resolver este misterio, y tambidn esclarecer deforma mds general c6mo el conocimiento humano y la interaccidn social pueden generar adaptaciones y tambidn la pe'rdida de las mismas, e inclusive malas adaptaciones, en este articulo se construye un modelo formal de la evolucidn cultural que se basa en detalles cognoscitivos del aprendizaje y la inferencia humanos en el dmbito social. Los resultados analiticos especifican los regimenes de condiciones bajo los cuales la evolucidn cultural genera adaptaciones, y tambien los regimenes contrastantes bajo los cuales se producen pdrdidas que representan malas adaptaciones tanto de habilidades como de las tecnologias vinculadas con ellas. Mds especificamente, los resultados sugieren que la reduccidn relativamente repentina en el tamahio eficaz de la poblacidn (el tamafio del grupo de aprendices sociales), es la causa mds importante de estas perdidas culturales. El motor ecoldgico de esta reduccidn fue el alza del nivel del mar en la epoca final de la glaciacidn pasada, que tuvo como efecto separar a Tasmania del resto de Australia durante los ultimos diez milenios. La consecuencia fue un deterioro de las habilidades mds complejas con las cuales contaba esta poblacidn. El expediente empirico de la arqueologia en Tasmania confirma este patrdn. Mds alld de este caso particular, se presentan especulaciones acerca de la aplicabilidad de este modelo para entender la variabilidad en los indices de la evolucidn cultural adaptativa en el marco tecnoldgico. This paper presents a model of cumulative cultural evolution that explicitly links certain cognitive aspects of cultural learning with social group characteristics (e.g., size, density, interconnectedness). My goal is to provide some general theoretical insights that show how our cog-nitive capacities for social learning (i.e., cultural transmission), which likely evolved via natural selection for their ability to extract adaptive information from the social environment (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Henrich and Gil-White 2001), generate varying rates of cultural/technological

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What is the role of culture in bounded rationality

As a research program, ‘bounded rationality’ aims to understand the actual cognitive processes th... more As a research program, ‘bounded rationality’ aims to understand the actual cognitive processes that humans use to arrive at their behavioral repertoire. The assumptions of bounded rationality depart from the traditional assumptions of omniscient, ‘Laplacean Demons’ with unlimited information, time and processing ability, and instead assume that individuals possess fast, frugal algorithms which allow individuals to solve a variety of difficult problems under ecologically realistic circumstances without incurring substantial information-gathering or processing costs. In this paper, we explore three ways in which sociocultural processes produce adaptive (or boundedly rational) algorithms. First, simple imitation or social learning heuristics allow individuals to save the costs of individual learning, experimentation, and search by exploiting the information available in the minds of other individuals. Second, over cultural-evolutionary time scales, these algorithms give rise to complex...

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Tribal Social Instincts and the Cultural Evolution of Institutions to Solve Collective Action Problems

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2009

Human social life is uniquely complex and diverse. Much of that complexity and diversity arises f... more Human social life is uniquely complex and diverse. Much of that complexity and diversity arises from culturally transmitted ideas, values and skills that underpin the operation of social norms and institutions that structure our social life. Considerable theoretical and empirical work has been devoted to the role of cultural evolutionary processes in the evolution of social norms and institutions. The most persistent controversy has been over the role of cultural group selection and geneculture coevolution in early human populations during Pleistocene. We argue that cultural group selection and related cultural evolutionary processes had an important role in shaping the innate components of our social psychology. By the Upper Paleolithic humans seem to have lived in societies structured by institutions, as do modern populations living in small-scale societies. The most ambitious attempts to test these ideas have been the use of experimental games in field settings to document human similarities and differences on theoretically interesting dimensions. These studies have documented a huge range of behavior across populations, although no societies so far examined follow the expectations of selfish rationality. These data are at least consistent with operation of cultural group selection and gene-culture coevolution operating in the deep tribal past and with the contemporary importance of cultural evolution in the evolution of institutions and institutional diversity. The Genetic Evolution Capacities for Cultural Learning The first step in approaching these questions from an evolutionary perspective involves deploying logic of natural selection, aided by formal evolutionary modeling, to hypothesize what kinds of learning strategies or heuristics should individuals-be they toddlers or song birds-use to adapt to uncertain, novel and/or changing environments, including environments involving social interactions (Boyd and Richerson 1985). In such environments, information about the costs and benefits of alternative behaviors is costly, or sometimes impossible to acquire. In such environments social learning strategies, which include heuristics like 'copy the most successful' or 'copy the majority,' can outcompete learning strategies that rely solely on the direct evaluation of perceived costs and benefits (Laland 2004). This approach, however, does not suggest that people don't evaluate costs and benefits directly (of course, they do), but instead it suggests that straight cost-benefit evaluations of alternatives is only one component in a suite of strategies that permit individuals to adapt to diverse, changing, or low-information environments. Evolutionary hypotheses about cultural learning have been subdivided into those that rely on the 'context' in which a representation or cultural variant is expressed (e.g., who expresses it) and those that use the 'content' of trait or representation to determine whether to adopt it (Henrich and McElreath 2003). Context-based learning mechanisms allow learners to use cues to selectively attend to and learn from certain members of their social environment, or to integrate information from different models in specific ways. We briefly describe two of these. The first (Henrich and Gil-White 2001) proposes that cultural learners use model-based cues to figure out who, among their potential models (those from whom they could learn), are most likely to possess adaptive information (i.e., mental representations) suitable to the learner's current situation (e.g., his/her role in the social group). Theory suggests, and a wide range of empirical findings have confirmed, that both children and adults preferentially pay attention to and learn from models who are more skillful, competent, successful or prestigious (

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perspective: Behavioral experiments

Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions... more Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in hundreds of experiments from around the world. This research, however, cannot determine whether the uniformity results from universal patterns of human behavior or from the limited cultural variation available among the university students used in virtually all prior experimental work. To address this, we undertook a cross-cultural study of behavior in Ultimatum, Public Goods, and Dictator Games in a range of small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of economic and cultural conditions. We found, first, that the canonical model-based on pure self-interest-fails in all of the societies studied. Second, our data reveal substantially more behavioral variability across social groups than has been found in previous research. Third, group-level differences in economic organization and the structure of social interactions explain a substantial portion of the behavioral variation across societies: the higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs to cooperation in everyday life, the greater the level of prosociality expressed in experimental games. Fourth, the available individual-level economic and demographic variables do not consistently explain game behavior, either within or across groups. Fifth, in many cases experimental play appears to reflect the common interactional patterns of everyday life.

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The puzzle of monogamous marriage

Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, Jan 5, 2012

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The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religions

Biological Theory, 2010

Understanding religion requires explaining why supernatural beliefs, devotions, and rituals are b... more Understanding religion requires explaining why supernatural beliefs, devotions, and rituals are both universal and variable across cultures, and why religion is so often associated with both large-scale cooperation and enduring group conflict. Emerging lines of research suggest that these oppositions result from the convergence of three processes. First, the interaction of certain reliably developing cognitive processes, such as our ability to infer the presence of intentional agents, favors-as an evolutionary by-product-the spread of certain kinds of counterintuitive concepts. Second, participation in rituals and devotions involving costly displays exploits various aspects of our evolved psychology to deepen people's commitment to both supernatural agents and religious communities. Third, competition among societies and organizations with different faith-based beliefs and practices has increasingly connected religion with both within-group prosociality and between-group enmity. This connection has strengthened dramatically in recent millennia, as part of the evolution of complex societies, and is important to understanding cooperation and conflict in today's world.

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Transmission and development of costly punishment in children

Evolution and Human Behavior, 2015

Evolutionary theorists argue that cultural evolution has harnessed various aspects of our evolved... more Evolutionary theorists argue that cultural evolution has harnessed various aspects of our evolved psychology to create a variety of different mechanisms for sustaining social norms, including those related to large-scale cooperation. One of these mechanisms, costly punishment, has emerged in experiments as an effective means to sustain cooperation in some societies. If this view is correct, individuals' willingness to engage in the costly punishment of norm violators should be culturally transmittable, and applicable to both prosocial and antisocial behaviors (to any social norm). Since much existing work shows that norm-based prosocial behavior in experiments develops substantially during early and middle childhood, we tested 245 3-to 8-year olds in a simplified third party punishment game to investigate whether children would imitate a model's decision to punish, at a personal cost, both unequal and equal offers. Our study showed that children, regardless of their age, imitate the costly punishment of both equal and unequal offers, and the rates of imitation increase (not decrease) with age. However, only older children imitate not-punishing for both equal and unequal offers. These findings highlight the potential role of cultural transmission in the stabilization or destabilization of costly punishment in a population.

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Tackling group-level traits by starting at the start

We agree, emergent group-level properties are important; however, we disagree that current approa... more We agree, emergent group-level properties are important; however, we disagree that current approaches, especially culture-gene coevolutionary (CGC) approaches, have neglected them. We explain how CGC helps demystify the tumult of humans group-level complexity by 'starting at the start, and why a) assuming undifferentiated individuals, and b) focusing on cooperation are actually powerful tools to this end.

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Cooperation, Punishment, and the Evolution of Human Institutions

Science, 2006

Free-riders not wanted. Those who do not contribute but benefit from the efforts of others can ca... more

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Behavioral Data, Cultural Group Selection, and Genetics

Psychological Inquiry, 2007

Kasser et al. pose an important and often unaddressed question: how do different institutional fo... more

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Constraining free riding in public goods games: designated solitary punishers can sustain human cooperation

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2009

Much of human cooperation remains an evolutionary riddle. Unlike other animals, people frequently... more Much of human cooperation remains an evolutionary riddle. Unlike other animals, people frequently cooperate with non-relatives in large groups. Evolutionary models of large-scale cooperation require not just incentives for cooperation, but also a credible disincentive for free riding. Various theoretical solutions have been proposed and experimentally explored, including reputation monitoring and diffuse punishment. Here, we empirically examine an alternative theoretical proposal: responsibility for punishment can be borne by one specific individual. This experiment shows that allowing a single individual to punish increases cooperation to the same level as allowing each group member to punish and results in greater group profits. These results suggest a potential key function of leadership in human groups and provides further evidence supporting that humans will readily and knowingly behave altruistically.

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Gene-culture coevolution in the age of genomics

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2010

The use of socially learned information (culture) is central to human adaptations. We investigate... more The use of socially learned information (culture) is central to human adaptations. We investigate the hypothesis that the process of cultural evolution has played an active, leading role in the evolution of genes. Culture normally evolves more rapidly than genes, creating novel environments that expose genes to new selective pressures. Many human genes that have been shown to be under recent or current selection are changing as a result of new environments created by cultural innovations. Some changed in response to the development of agricultural subsistence systems in the Early and Middle Holocene. Alleles coding for adaptations to diets rich in plant starch (e.g., amylase copy number) and to epidemic diseases evolved as human populations expanded (e.g., sickle cell and G6PD deficiency alleles that provide protection against malaria). Large-scale scans using patterns of linkage disequilibrium to detect recent selection suggest that many more genes evolved in response to agricultur...

Friendship, cliquishness, and the emergence of cooperation

Journal of Theoretical Biology, 2006

The evolution of cooperation is a central problem in biology and the social sciences. While theor... more The evolution of cooperation is a central problem in biology and the social sciences. While theoretical work using the iterated prisoner's dilemma (IPD) has shown that cooperation among non-kin can be sustained among reciprocal strategies (i.e. tit-for-tat), these results are sensitive to errors in strategy execution, cyclical invasions by free riders, and the specific ecology of strategies. Moreover, the IPD assumes that a strategy's probability of playing the PD game with other individuals is independent of the decisions made by others. Here, we remove the assumption of independent pairing by studying a more plausible cooperative dilemma in which players can preferentially interact with a limited set of known partners and also deploy longer-term accounting strategies that can counteract the effects of random errors. We show that cooperative strategies readily emerge and persist in a range of noisy environments, with successful cooperative strategies (henceforth, cliquers) maintaining medium-term memories for partners and low thresholds for acceptable cooperation (i.e. forgiveness). The success of these strategies relies on their cliquishness-a propensity to defect with strangers if they already have an adequate number of partners. Notably, this combination of medium-term accounting, forgiveness, and cliquishness fits with empirical studies of friendship and other long-term relationships among humans.

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On Modeling Cognition and Culture: Why cultural evolution does not require replication of representations

Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2002

Formal models of cultural evolution analyze how cognitive processes combine with social interacti... more Formal models of cultural evolution analyze how cognitive processes combine with social interaction to generate the distributions and dynamics of 'representations.' Recently, cognitive anthropologists have criticized such models. They make three points: mental representations are non-discrete, cultural transmission is highly inaccurate, and mental representations are not replicated, but rather are 'reconstructed' through an inferential process that is strongly affected by cognitive 'attractors.' They argue that it follows from these three claims that: 1) models that assume replication or replicators are inappropriate, 2) selective cultural learning cannot account for stable traditions, and 3) selective cultural learning cannot generate cumulative adaptation. Here we use three formal models to show that even if the premises of this critique are correct, the deductions that have been drawn from them are false. In the first model, we assume continuously varying ...

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Teaching and the Life History of Cultural Transmission in Fijian Villages

Human Nature, 2013

Five Misunderstandings About Cultural Evolution

Human Nature, 2008

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Adaptive Social Learning Strategies in Temporally and Spatially Varying Environments

Human Nature, 2012

Long before the origins of agriculture human ancestors had expanded across the globe into an imme... more Long before the origins of agriculture human ancestors had expanded across the globe into an immense variety of environments, from Australian deserts to Siberian tundra. Survival in these environments did not principally depend on genetic adaptations, but instead on evolved learning strategies that permitted the assembly of locally adaptive behavioral repertoires. To develop hypotheses about these learning strategies, we have modeled the evolution of learning strategies to assess what conditions and constraints favor which kinds of strategies. To build on prior work, we focus on clarifying how spatial variability, temporal variability, and the number of cultural traits influence the evolution of four types of strategies: (1) individual learning, (2) unbiased social learning, (3) payoff-biased social learning, and (4) conformist transmission. Using a combination of analytic and simulation methods, we show that spatial-but not temporal-variation strongly favors the

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Pride, personality, and the evolutionary foundations of human social status

Evolution and Human Behavior, 2010

Based on evolutionary logic, Henrich and Gil-White [Evolution and Human Behavior, 22(3), 165-196]... more Based on evolutionary logic, Henrich and Gil-White [Evolution and Human Behavior, 22(3), 165-196] distinguished between two routes to attaining social status in human societies: dominance, based on intimidation, and prestige, based on the possession of skills or expertise. Independently, emotion researchers Tracy and Robins [Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(3), 506-525] demonstrated two distinct forms of pride: hubristic and authentic. Bridging these two lines of research, this paper examines whether hubristic and authentic pride, respectively, may be part of the affective-motivational suite of psychological adaptations underpinning the status-obtaining strategies of dominance and prestige. Support for this hypothesis emerged from two studies employing self-reports (Study 1), and self-and peer-reports of group members on collegiate athletic teams (Study 2). Results from both studies showed that hubristic pride is associated with dominance, whereas authentic pride is associated with prestige. Moreover, the two facets of pride are part of a larger suite of distinctive psychological traits uniquely associated with dominance or prestige. Specifically, dominance is positively associated with traits such as narcissism, aggression, and disagreeableness, whereas prestige is positively associated with traits such as genuine self-esteem, agreeableness, conscientiousness, achievement, advice-giving, and prosociality. Discussion focuses on the implications of these findings for our understanding of the evolutionary origins of pride and social status, and the interrelations among emotion, personality, and status attainment.

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Prestige-biased cultural learning: bystander's differential attention to potential models influences children's learning

Evolution and Human Behavior, 2012

Reasoning about the evolution of our species' capacity for cumulative cultural learning has led c... more Reasoning about the evolution of our species' capacity for cumulative cultural learning has led culture-gene coevolutionary (CGC) theorists to predict that humans should possess several learning biases which robustly enhance the fitness of cultural learners. Meanwhile, developmental psychologists have begun using experimental procedures to probe the learning biases that young children actually possessa methodology ripe for testing CGC. Here we report the first direct tests in children of CGC's prediction of prestige bias, a tendency to learn from individuals to whom others have preferentially attended, learned or deferred. Our first study showed that the odds of 3-and 4-year-old children learning from an adult model to whom bystanders had previously preferentially attended for 10 seconds (the prestigious model) were over twice those of their learning from a model whom bystanders ignored. Moreover, this effect appears domain-sensitive: in Study 2 when bystanders preferentially observed a prestigious model using artifacts, she was learned from more often on subsequent artifact-use tasks (odds almost five times greater) but not on food-preference tasks, while the reverse was true of a model who received preferential bystander attention while expressing food preferences.

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The Evolution of Cultural Evolution The evolutionary origins of human cultural capacities and their implications for understanding human behavior

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Society for American Archaeology Demography and Cultural Evolution: How Adaptive Cultural Processes can Produce Maladaptive Losses: The Tasmanian Case Author(s)

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What is the role of culture in bounded rationality

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Tribal Social Instincts and the Cultural Evolution of Institutions to Solve Collective Action Problems

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2009

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perspective: Behavioral experiments

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The puzzle of monogamous marriage

Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, Jan 5, 2012

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The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religions

Biological Theory, 2010

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Transmission and development of costly punishment in children

Evolution and Human Behavior, 2015

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Tackling group-level traits by starting at the start

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Cooperation, Punishment, and the Evolution of Human Institutions

Science, 2006

Free-riders not wanted. Those who do not contribute but benefit from the efforts of others can ca... more

Download

Behavioral Data, Cultural Group Selection, and Genetics

Psychological Inquiry, 2007

Kasser et al. pose an important and often unaddressed question: how do different institutional fo... more

Download

Constraining free riding in public goods games: designated solitary punishers can sustain human cooperation

Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 2009

Download

Gene-culture coevolution in the age of genomics

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2010

Friendship, cliquishness, and the emergence of cooperation

Journal of Theoretical Biology, 2006

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On Modeling Cognition and Culture: Why cultural evolution does not require replication of representations

Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2002

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Teaching and the Life History of Cultural Transmission in Fijian Villages

Human Nature, 2013

Five Misunderstandings About Cultural Evolution

Human Nature, 2008

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Adaptive Social Learning Strategies in Temporally and Spatially Varying Environments

Human Nature, 2012

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Pride, personality, and the evolutionary foundations of human social status

Evolution and Human Behavior, 2010

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Prestige-biased cultural learning: bystander's differential attention to potential models influences children's learning

Evolution and Human Behavior, 2012

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The evolution of prestige: Freely conferred deference as a mechanism for enhancing the benefits of cultural transmission

Evolution and human behavior, 2001

This paper advances an``information goods'' theory that explains prestige processes as an emergen... more This paper advances an``information goods'' theory that explains prestige processes as an emergent product of psychological adaptations that evolved to improve the quality of information acquired via cultural transmission. Natural selection favored social learners who could evaluate potential models and copy the most successful among them. In order to improve the fidelity and comprehensiveness of such ranked-biased copying, social learners further evolved dispositions to sycophantically ingratiate themselves with their chosen models, so as to gain close proximity to, and prolonged interaction with, these models. Once common, these dispositions created, at the group level, distributions of deference that new entrants may adaptively exploit to decide who to begin copying. This generated a preference for models who seem generally``popular.'' Building on social exchange theories, we argue that a wider range of phenomena associated with prestige processes can more plausibly be explained by this simple theory than by others, and we test its predictions with data from throughout the social sciences. In addition, we distinguish carefully between dominance (force or force threat) and prestige (freely conferred deference). D

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Pride, Personality, and the Evolutionary Foundations of Human Social Status

Based on evolutionary logic, Henrich and Gil-White [Evolution and Human Behavior, 22(3), distingu... more Based on evolutionary logic, Henrich and Gil-White [Evolution and Human Behavior, 22(3), distinguished between two routes to attaining social status in human societies: dominance, based on intimidation, and prestige, based on the possession of skills or expertise. Independently, emotion researchers Tracy and Robins [Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 92(3), 506-525] demonstrated two distinct forms of pride: hubristic and authentic. Bridging these two lines of research, this paper examines whether hubristic and authentic pride, respectively, may be part of the affective-motivational suite of psychological adaptations underpinning the status-obtaining strategies of dominance and prestige. Support for this hypothesis emerged from two studies employing self-reports (Study 1), and self-and peer-reports of group members on collegiate athletic teams (Study 2). Results from both studies showed that hubristic pride is associated with dominance, whereas authentic pride is associated with prestige. Moreover, the two facets of pride are part of a larger suite of distinctive psychological traits uniquely associated with dominance or prestige. Specifically, dominance is positively associated with traits such as narcissism, aggression, and disagreeableness, whereas prestige is positively associated with traits such as genuine self-esteem, agreeableness, conscientiousness, achievement, advice-giving, and prosociality. Discussion focuses on the implications of these findings for our understanding of the evolutionary origins of pride and social status, and the interrelations among emotion, personality, and status attainment.

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Gaze Allocation in a Dynamic Situation: Effects of Social Status and Speaking

Human visual attention operates in a context that is complex, social and dynamic. To explore this... more Human visual attention operates in a context that is complex, social and dynamic. To explore this, we recorded people taking part in a group decision-making task and then showed video clips of these situations to new participants while tracking their eye movements. Observers spent the majority of time looking at the people in the videos, and in particular at their eyes and faces. The social status of the people in the clips had been rated by their peers in the group task, and this status hierarchy strongly predicted where eyetracker participants looked: high-status individuals were gazed at much more often, and for longer, than low-status individuals, even over short, 20-s videos. Fixation was temporally coupled to the person who was talking at any one time, but this did not account for the effect of social status on attention. These results are consistent with a gaze system that is attuned to the presence of other individuals, to their social status within a group, and to the information most useful for social interaction.

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Prestige-Biased Cultural Learning :Bystander's Differential Attention to Potential Models Influences Children's Learning

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Further thoughts on the evolution of pride's two facets: A response to Clark

In Clark's thoughtful analysis of the evolution of the two facets of pride, he suggests that the ... more In Clark's thoughtful analysis of the evolution of the two facets of pride, he suggests that the concurrent existence of hubristic and authentic pride in humans represents a "persistence problem," wherein the vestigial trait (hubristic pride) continues to exist alongside the derived trait (authentic pride). In our view, evidence for the two facets does not pose a persistence problem; rather, hubristic and authentic pride both likely evolved as higher-order cognitive emotions that solve uniquely human-but distinctevolutionary problems. Instead of being conceptualized as serial homologues, with one the vestigial form of the other, we argue that hubristic and authentic pride are both derived homologues of a vestigial proto-pride emotion that existed in our shared ancestry with other primates.

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Status, Prestige and Leadership

Foundations of human sociality: Economic experiments and ethnographic evidence from fifteen small-scale societies

The pre-Inca archeology of the valley and city of Cuzco and the cultural transformations leading ... more The pre-Inca archeology of the valley and city of Cuzco and the cultural transformations leading to the rise of the Inca empire have attracted much archeological attention in recent years. The purpose of this volume is to examine "the settlement patterns for each major time period in the history of the Cuzco Valley" and the multitude of societies and ethnic groups that comprised it through time. Brian Bauer has put together a stimulating and, in some cases,

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Culture, evolution and the puzzle of human cooperation

Cognitive systems research, 2006

Synthesizing existing work from diverse disciplines, this paper introduces a culture-gene coevolu... more Synthesizing existing work from diverse disciplines, this paper introduces a culture-gene coevolutionary approach to human behavior and psychology, and applies it to the evolution of cooperation. After a general discussion of cooperation in humans, this paper summarizes Dual Inheritance Theory and shows how cultural transmission can be brought under the Darwinian umbrella in order to analyze how culture and genes coevolve and jointly influence human behavior and psychology. We then present a generally applicable mathematical characterization of the problem of cooperation. From a Dual Inheritance perspective, we review and discuss work on kinship, reciprocity, reputation, social norms, and ethnicity, and their application to solving the problem of cooperation.

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Human Cooperation

Genetic and cultural evolution of …, 2003

We here review the evolutionary theory relevant to the question of human cooperation and compare ... more We here review the evolutionary theory relevant to the question of human cooperation and compare the results to other theoretical perspectives. Then, we will summarize some of our own work, distilling a compound explanation that we believe gives a plausible account of human cooperation and selfishness. This account leans heavily on group selection 1 on cultural 2 variation but also includes lower level forces driven by both micro-scale cooperation and purely selfish motives. We propose that innate aspects of our social psychology coevolved with group selected cultural institutions to produce just the kinds of social and moral faculties originally proposed by Darwin. We call this the "tribal social instincts" hypothesis. The account is systemic in the sense that human social systems are functionally differentiated, conflicted, and diverse. A successful explanation of human cooperation has to account for these complexities. For example, a tribal scale cultural group selection process alone cannot account for human patterns of cooperation because, on the one hand, much conflict exists within tribes and, on the other, people have proven able to organize cooperation on a much larger scale than tribes. We include multi-level selection and gene-culture coevolution effects to account for some of these complexities. We allude to some empirical tests of the resulting hypotheses. In particular, we argue that strong support for the tribal social instincts hypothesis comes from the structure of modern social institutions. These institutions have conspicuous "work-arounds" that shed light on the underlying instincts.

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Why humans cooperate: A cultural and evolutionary explanation

... Title. HM 1106.H44 2007 305.6&#x27;815dc22 2006048326 987654321 Printed in the United St... more

Constraining free riding in public goods games: designated solitary punishers can sustain human cooperation

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In search of homo economicus: behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies

The American Economic …, 2001

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Does culture matter in economic behavior? Ultimatum game bargaining among the Machiguenga of the Peruvian Amazon

The American Economic Review, 2000

In revising economic theory, researchers have generally assumed, often implicitly, that all human... more In revising economic theory, researchers have generally assumed, often implicitly, that all humans deploy similar, pan-human cognitive machinery for making economic decisions. This paper, however, reports results from an experimental economics game (the Ultimatum Game) performed in the Peruvian Amazon which substantially deviate from the robust results found elsewhere in the world. These data strongly suggest that cultural differences (socially transmitted behavioral rules) may fundamentally affect basic economic behavioral patterns.

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Markets, religion, community size, and the evolution of fairness and punishment

science, 2010

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Is strong reciprocity a maladaptation? On the evolutionary foundations of human altruism

econstor www.econstor.eu Der Open-Access-Publikationsserver der ZBW -Leibniz-Informationszentrum ... more econstor www.econstor.eu Der Open-Access-Publikationsserver der ZBW -Leibniz-Informationszentrum Wirtschaft The Open Access Publication Server of the ZBW -Leibniz Information Centre for Economics Nutzungsbedingungen: Die ZBW räumt Ihnen als Nutzerin/Nutzer das unentgeltliche, räumlich unbeschränkte und zeitlich auf die Dauer des Schutzrechts beschränkte einfache Recht ein, das ausgewählte Werk im Rahmen der unter → http://www.econstor.eu/dspace/Nutzungsbedingungen nachzulesenden vollständigen Nutzungsbedingungen zu vervielfältigen, mit denen die Nutzerin/der Nutzer sich durch die erste Nutzung einverstanden erklärt.

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Why People Punish Defectors: Weak Conformist

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Cultural group selection, coevolutionary processes and large-scale cooperation

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2004

In constructing improved models of human behavior, both experimental and behavioral economists ha... more In constructing improved models of human behavior, both experimental and behavioral economists have increasingly turned to evolutionary theory for insights into human psychology and preferences. Unfortunately, the existing genetic evolutionary approaches can explain neither the degree of prosociality (altruism and altruistic punishment) observed in humans, nor the patterns of variation in these behaviors across different behavioral domains and social groups. Ongoing misunderstandings about why certain models work, what they predict, and what the place is of "group selection" in evolutionary theory have hampered the use of insights from biology and anthropology. This paper clarifies some of these issues and proposes an approach to the evolution of prosociality rooted in the interaction between cultural and genetic transmission. I explain how, in contrast to non-cultural species, the details of our evolved cultural learning capacities (e.g., imitative abilities) create the conditions for the cultural evolution of prosociality. By producing multiple behavioral equilibria, including group-beneficial equilibria, cultural evolution endogenously generates a mechanism of equilibrium selection that can favor prosociality. Finally, in the novel social environments left in the wake of these cultural evolutionary processes, natural selection is likely to favor prosocial genes that would not be expected in a purely genetic approach.

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THEORETICAL FOUNDATIONS: THE COEVOLUTION OF SOCIAL NORMS, INTRINSIC MOTIVATION, MARKETS, AND THE INSTITUTIONS OF COMPLEX SOCIETIES

Classical scholars long ago proposed a positive relationship between developed market economies a... more Classical scholars long ago proposed a positive relationship between developed market economies and prosocial or fair-minded motivations in impersonal interactions. 1 One of the first and best known scholars to write in this vein was none other than Adam Smith (2000, [1759]), whose position was consistent with the findings we present in this volume. Even before Smith, however, Montesquieu ( , 319 [1749)was explicit on this subject:

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The Development of Contingent Reciprocity

Cooperation between nonrelatives is common in humans. Reciprocal altruism is a plausible evolutio... more Cooperation between nonrelatives is common in humans. Reciprocal altruism is a plausible evolutionary mechanism for cooperation within unrelated pairs, as selection may favor individuals who selectively cooperate with those who have cooperated with them in the past. Reciprocity is often observed in humans, but there is only limited evidence of reciprocal altruism in other primate species, raising questions about the origins of human reciprocity. Here, we explore how reciprocity develops in a sample of American children ranging from 3 to 7.5 years of age, and also compare children's behavior to that of chimpanzees in prior studies to gain insight into the phylogeny of human reciprocity. Children show a marked tendency to respond contingently to both prosocial and selfish acts, patterns that have not been seen among chimpanzees in prior studies. Our results show that reciprocity increases markedly with age in this population of children, and by about 5.5 years of age children consistently match the previous behavior of their partners.

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Chimpanzees do not take advantage of very low cost opportunities

Chimpanzees provide help to unrelated individuals in a broad range of situations. The pattern of ... more Chimpanzees provide help to unrelated individuals in a broad range of situations. The pattern of helping within pairs suggests that contingent reciprocity may have been an important mechanism in the evolution of altruism in chimpanzees. However, correlational analyses of the cumulative pattern of interactions over time do not demonstrate that helping is contingent upon previous acts of altruism, as required by the theory of reciprocal altruism. Experimental studies provide a controlled approach to examine the importance of contingency in helping interactions. In this study, we evaluated whether chimpanzees would be more likely to provide food to a social partner from their home group if their partner had previously provided food for them. The chimpanzees manipulated a barpull apparatus in which actors could deliver rewards either to themselves and their partners or only to themselves. Our Wndings indicate that the chimpanzees' responses were not consistently inXuenced by the behavior of their partners in previous rounds. Only one of the 11 dyads that we tested demonstrated positive reciprocity. We conclude that contingent reciprocity does not spontaneously arise in experimental settings, despite the fact that patterns of behavior in the Weld indicate that individuals cooperate preferentially with reciprocating partners.

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Rapid cultural adaptation can facilitate the evolution of large-scale cooperation

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Homo qualis: A Cross-Society Experimental Analysis of Three Bargaining Games

Data from three bargaining games-the Dictator Game, the Ultimatum Game, and the Third-Party Punis... more Data from three bargaining games-the Dictator Game, the Ultimatum Game, and the Third-Party Punishment Game-played in 15 societies are presented. The societies range from US undergraduates to Amazonian, Arctic, and African hunter-gatherers. Behaviour within the games varies markedly across societies. The paper investigates whether this behavioural diversity can be explained solely by variations in inequality aversion. Combining a single parameter utility function with the notion of subgame perfection generates a number of testable predictions. While most of these are supported, there are some telling divergences between theory and data: uncertainty and preferences relating to acts of vengeance may have influenced play in the Ultimatum and Third-Party Punishment Games; and a few subjects used the games as an opportunity to engage in costly signalling.

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More altruistic punishment in larger societies

If individuals will cooperate with cooperators, and punish non-cooperators even at a cost to them... more If individuals will cooperate with cooperators, and punish non-cooperators even at a cost to themselves, then this strong reciprocity could minimize the cheating that undermines cooperation. Based upon numerous economic experiments, some have proposed that human cooperation is explained by strong reciprocity and norm enforcement. Second-party punishment is when you punish someone who defected on you; third-party punishment is when you punish someone who defected on someone else. Third-party punishment is an effective way to enforce the norms of strong reciprocity and promote cooperation. Here we present new results that expand on a previous report from a large cross-cultural project. This project has already shown that there is considerable cross-cultural variation in punishment and cooperation. Here we test the hypothesis that population size (and complexity) predicts the level of third-party punishment. Our results show that people in larger, more complex societies engage in significantly more third-party punishment than people in small-scale societies.

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Cooperation, Punishment, and the Evolution of Human Institutions

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In search of Homo economicus: Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies

Recent investigations have uncovered large, consistent deviations from the predictions of the tex... more Recent investigations have uncovered large, consistent deviations from the predictions of the textbook representation of Homo economicus . One problem appears to lie in economists' canonical assumption that individuals are entirely self-interested: in addition to their own material payoffs, many experimental subjects appear to care about fairness and reciprocity, are willing to change the distribution of material outcomes at personal cost, and are willing to reward those who act in a cooperative manner while punishing those who do not even when these actions are costly to the individual. These deviations from what we will term the canonical model have important consequences for a wide range of economic phenomena, including the optimal design of institutions and contracts, the allocation of property rights, the conditions for successful collective action, the analysis of incomplete contracts, and the persistence of noncompetitive wage premia.

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Why people punish defectors

Journal of theoretical biology, 2001

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Adaptive Content Biases in Learning about Animals Across the Lifecourse

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Mirrors in the Head: Cultural Variation in Objective Self-Awareness

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Adaptive social learning strategies in temporally and spatially varying environments

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Cultural transmission and the diffusion of innovations: Adoption dynamics indicate that biased cultural transmission is the predominate force in behavioral change

American Anthropologist, 2001

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Division of Labor, Economic Specialization, and the Evolution of Social Stratification

This paper presents a simple mathematical model that shows how economic inequality between social... more This paper presents a simple mathematical model that shows how economic inequality between social groups can arise and be maintained even when the only adaptive learning process driving cultural evolution increases individuals' economic gains. The key assumptions are that human populations are structured into groups and that cultural learning is more likely to occur within than between groups. Then, if groups are sufficiently isolated and there are potential gains from specialization and exchange, stable stratification can sometimes result. This model predicts that stratification is favored, ceteris paribus, by (1) greater surplus production, (2) more equitable divisions of the surplus among specialists, (3) greater cultural isolation among subpopulations within a society, and (4) more weight given to economic success by cultural learners.

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Five Misunderstandings about Cultural Evolution

Recent debates about memetics have revealed some widespread misunderstandings about Darwinian app... more Recent debates about memetics have revealed some widespread misunderstandings about Darwinian approaches to cultural evolution. Drawing from these debates, this paper disputes five common claims: (1) mental representations are rarely discrete, and therefore models that assume discrete, gene-like particles (i.e., replicators) are useless; (2) replicators are necessary for cumulative, adaptive evolution; (3) content-dependent psychological biases are the only important processes that affect the spread of cultural representations; (4) the "cultural fitness" of a mental representation can be inferred from its successful transmission; and (5) selective forces only matter if the sources of variation are random. We close by sketching the outlines of a unified evolutionary science of culture.

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Cultural Transmission and the Diffusion of Innovations: Adoption dynamics indicate that biased cultural transmission is the predominate force in behavioral change and much of sociocultural evolution

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The evolution of cultural evolution

Evolutionary Anthropology: Issues, …, 2003

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UNDERSTANDING CULTURAL EVOLUTIONARY MODELS A REPLY TO READS CRITIQUE

2 This reply to Read's (2005) critique of my paper is divided into three parts. Part I clarifies ... more 2 This reply to Read's (2005) critique of my paper is divided into three parts. Part I clarifies Read's misinterpretations and mischaracterizations of both Dual Inheritance Theory in general and my model specifically. Part II addresses several problems in Read's empirical analyses of forager toolkits, and presents an alternative analysis. Part III tackles some common misunderstandings about the relationship between cost-benefit models (such as Read's) and cultural evolutionary modeling approaches, as well as highlighting some concerns with Read's efforts. In writing this, I have tried to introduce the reader to the issues in debate, but to fully understand this reply, one should read both my paper and Read's critique.

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Why societies vary in their rates of innovation The evolution of innovation-enhancing institutions

This chapter applies an integrated approach to decision-making and cultural evolution to explore ... more This chapter applies an integrated approach to decision-making and cultural evolution to explore some of the characteristics that influence population-level differences in innovativeness and to understand how such differences emerge. In laying the foundation for subsequent arguments I begin by summarizing research showing how evolutionary theory can direct and inform our understanding of decision-making, social learning and cultural evolution. Then, extending insights from existing cultural evolutionary models, I examine how a population's size and degree of 'cultural interconnectedness' can influence rates of both innovation and invention. A simple model illustrates the relative importance of cultural interconnectedness compared to individual invention. Combining ethno-historical and archaeological cases, I further explore the relative importance of "mother necessity" and "heroic genius" vs. recombination, lucky mistakes, and the accretion of small changes in driving invention. This discussion suggests that, at best, "necessity" is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain invention and that invention processes are dominated by incremental additions, recombinations, and lucky errors, not revolutionary insights. This means that inventiveness is-at least in part-a product of large populations (that generate more lucky errors) and greater interconnectedness that together with population size favors more recombinant inventions, as well as a greater likelihood of these diffusing widely. Lastly, I examine how increasing the interconnectedness in a population gives rise to an n-person cooperative dilemma. While some partial solutions to this dilemma have emerged across our species, only some societies have evolved the informal (and later formal) institutions-i.e., systems of reputation, signaling, and punishment-that favor the wide sharing of information, ideas and insights. Theoretical work has revealed three avenues to solving such n-person cooperative dilemmas, but crucially, all three generate multiple stable equilibria, meaning that while they can stabilize cooperative information sharing, they can also stabilize "information hiding and free-riding" as well as other non-group-beneficial states. In such circumstances, processes of cultural group selection, which operate through various forms of competition among groups, can favor the evolution of those institutional forms that best promote the open dissemination so crucial to innovation. This line of thinking proposes that cultural evolution has favored the emergence of institutions that increase cultural interconnectedness, thereby stimulating both greater inventiveness and more innovation at the population level.

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The Cultural Evolution of Cooperation

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On Modeling Cognition and Culture: Why replicators are not necessary for cultural evolution

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The Puzzle of Monogamous Marriage

The anthropological record indicates that approximately 85 per cent of human societies have permi... more The anthropological record indicates that approximately 85 per cent of human societies have permitted men to have more than one wife (polygynous marriage), and both empirical and evolutionary considerations suggest that large absolute differences in wealth should favour more polygynous marriages. Yet, monogamous marriage has spread across Europe, and more recently across the globe, even as absolute wealth differences have expanded. Here, we develop and explore the hypothesis that the norms and institutions that compose the modern package of monogamous marriage have been favoured by cultural evolution because of their group-beneficial effects-promoting success in inter-group competition. In suppressing intrasexual competition and reducing the size of the pool of unmarried men, normative monogamy reduces crime rates, including rape, murder, assault, robbery and fraud, as well as decreasing personal abuses. By assuaging the competition for younger brides, normative monogamy decreases (i) the spousal age gap, (ii) fertility, and (iii) gender inequality. By shifting male efforts from seeking wives to paternal investment, normative monogamy increases savings, child investment and economic productivity. By increasing the relatedness within households, normative monogamy reduces intra-household conflict, leading to lower rates of child neglect, abuse, accidental death and homicide. These predictions are tested using converging lines of evidence from across the human sciences.

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Demography and cultural evolution: how adaptive cultural processes can produce maladaptive losses: the Tasmanian case

American Antiquity, 2004

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Cultural Evolution (General, Rates, Sociality, Networks)

The Evolution of Religion: How Cognitive By-Products, Adaptive Learning Heuristics, Ritual Displays, and Group Competition Generate Deep Commitments to Prosocial Religions

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The evolution of costly displays, cooperation, and religion: Credibility enhancing displays and their implications for cultural evolution

This paper lays out an evolutionary theory for the cognitive foundations and cultural emergence o... more This paper lays out an evolutionary theory for the cognitive foundations and cultural emergence of the extravagant displays (e.g., ritual mutilation, animal sacrifice and martyrdom) that have so tantalized social scientists, as well as more mundane actions that influence cultural learning and historical processes. In Part I, I use the logic of natural selection to build a theory for how and why seemingly costly displays influence the cognitive processes associated with cultural learningwhy do "actions speak louder than words?" The core idea is that cultural learners can both avoid being manipulated by their models (those they are inclined to learn from) and more accurately assess their belief commitment by attending to displays or actions by the model that would seem costly to the model if he held beliefs different from those he expresses verbally. Part II examines the implications for cultural evolution of this learning bias in a simple evolutionary model. The model reveals the conditions under which this evolved bias can create stable sets of interlocking beliefs and practices, including quite costly practices. Part III explores how cultural evolution, driven by competition among groups or institutions stabilized at alternative sets of these interlocking belief-practice combinations, has led to the association of costly acts, often in the form of rituals, with deeper commitments to group beneficial ideologies, higher levels of cooperation within groups, and greater success in competition with other groups or institutions. I close by discussing the broader implications of these ideas for understanding various aspects of religious phenomena.

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The Zeus Problem: Why Representational Content Biases Cannot Explain Faith in Gods

In a recent article, argued that a collection of five representational content features can expla... more In a recent article, argued that a collection of five representational content features can explain both why people believe in God and why people do not believe in Santa Claus or Mickey Mouse. In this model -and within the cognitive science of religion as a whole -it is argued that representational content biases are central to belief. In the present paper, we challenge the notion that representational content biases can explain the epidemiology of belief. Instead, we propose that representational content biases might explain why some concepts become widespread, but that context biases in cultural transmission are necessary to explain why people come to believe in some counterintuitive agents rather than others. Many supernatural agents, including those worshipped by other cultural groups, meet Barrett's criteria. Nevertheless, people do not come to believe in the gods of their neighbors. This raises a new challenge for the cognitive science of religion: the Zeus Problem. Zeus contains all of the features of successful gods, and was once a target for widespread belief, worship, and commitment. But Zeus is no longer a target for widespread belief and commitment, despite having the requisite content to fulfill Barrett's criteria. We analyze Santa Claus, God, and Zeus with both content and context biases, finding that context -not content -explains belief. We argue that a successful cognitive science of religious belief needs to move beyond simplistic notions of cultural evolution that only include representational content biases.

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Religious Prosociality: A Synthesis

Religion is a ubiquitous aspect of human cultures; yet until recently, we knew relatively little ... more Religion is a ubiquitous aspect of human cultures; yet until recently, we knew relatively little 15 about its natural origins and effects on human minds and societies. This is changing, as scientific interest in religion is on the rise. Debates about the evolutionary origins and functions of religion, including its origins in genetic and cultural evolution, hinge on a set of empirical claims about religious prosociality: whether, and through what particular psychological and cultural pathways, certain religious beliefs and practices encourage prosocial behaviors. Here we synthesize and 20 evaluate the scientific literature on religious prosociality, highlighting both gaps and open questions. Converging evidence from several fields suggests a nuanced pattern such that some religious beliefs and practices, under specific socio-historical contexts, foster prosocial behaviors among strangers. This emerging picture is beginning to reveal the psychological mechanisms underlying religious prosociality. Further progress will depend on resolving outstanding puzzles, 25 such as whether religious prosociality exists in small-scale societies, the extent to which it is constrained by in-group boundaries, and the psychology underlying various forms of nonbelief. Norenzayan, Henrich, and Slingerland All rights reserved by the authors. No citing, abstracting, or other usage permitted.

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Religion

Challenges for everyone: real people, deception, one-shot games, social learning, and computers

This commentary suggests: (1) experimentalists must expand their subject pools beyond university ... more This commentary suggests: (1) experimentalists must expand their subject pools beyond university students; (2) the pollution created by deception would not be a problem if experimentalists fully used non-student subjects; (3) one-shot games remain important and repeated games shouldn't ignore social learning; (5) economists need to take better control context; and (6) using computers in experiments creates potential problems.

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Internet Enhancements for "Are peasants risk-averse decision-makers?

Many economic anthropologists deal with risk and risk aversion in the same way as economists.

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Behavioral Data, Cultural Group Selection, and Genetics

Kasser et al. pose an important and often unaddressed question: how do different institutional fo... more Kasser et al. pose an important and often unaddressed question: how do different institutional forms, or economic systems, shape the ideas, values, beliefs, motivations, and practices of their members or participants .(also see . While I applaud their 25 efforts in opening up this line, I offer two concerns. First, Kasser et al. neglected two large-scale comparative projects that directly test their principle hypotheses and arrive at quite different conclusions. Second, much of their evidence involves relationships among 30 variables drawn from samples within one ACC populations, yet their hypotheses seem to demand comparisons among populations with differing exposure to ACC institutions. This may have resulted in faulty causal inferences. 35 The authors hypothesize that ACC institutions, collectively forming the capitalist economic system, favor the transmission of cultural representations that promotes self-interest, competition, and materialism, while suppressing the acquisition of representations 40 related to altruism, fairness, cooperation and numerous aspects of psychological well-being. In my view, the proper test of such hypotheses would involve a systematic comparative study, preferably using behavioral measures of self-interest, fairness, etc., from popula-45 tions with differing degrees of exposure to ACC institutions. It happens that my colleagues and I, over the last decade, have run two such projects, deploying behavioral experiments among 15 diverse populations drawn from some of the remotest corners of 50 the globe Henrich et al., 2006). Our results contradict the authors' central claims. In dictator, ultimatum, third party punishment and public goods games, we used actual allocation 55 decisions among anonymous members of these communities to measure altruism, fairness, willingness to punish unfairness, and cooperation. These decisions had real financial consequences and involved nontrivial sums of real money-we typically put one-day's 60 wage on the line (although wage labor was rare or non-existent in several of our societies). With regard to the question at hand, the findings are unambiguous: Our American samples are among the most equitably minded, cooperative, and altruistic people across 65 our 15 populations. This finding was replicated in our second project, even after several methodological adjustments.

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Reply to Kuznar's comment on our ``Are Peasants Risk Averse Decision-Makers

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What Is the Role of Culture in Bounded Rationality

As a research program, 'bounded rationality' aims to understand the actual cognitive processes th... more As a research program, 'bounded rationality' aims to understand the actual cognitive processes that humans use to arrive at their behavioral repertoire. The assumptions of bounded rationality depart from the traditional assumptions of omniscient, 'Laplacean Demons' with unlimited information, time and processing ability, and instead assume that individuals possess fast, frugal algorithms which allow individuals to solve a variety of difficult problems under ecologically realistic circumstances without incurring substantial information-gathering or processing costs. In this paper, we explore three ways in which sociocultural processes produce adaptive (or boundedly rational) algorithms. First, simple imitation or social learning heuristics allow individuals to save the costs of individual learning, experimentation, and search by exploiting the information available in the minds of other individuals. Second, over cultural-evolutionary time scales, 1 these algorithms give rise to complex sets of motivations, decision-processes, rules, cues, and procedures that are adaptive in particular socio-ecologies (yet quite maladaptive in others). Third, cultural and socio-interactional processes can combine to give rise to adaptive group processes that distribute cognition, knowledge, skill and labor (institutions, governing processes, markets, etc.). We argue that these three types of processes form the essential elements in a wide range of human decision-making and behavioral patterns. Consequently, any effort to understand these requires an exploration of how each of these sociocultural processes works.

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Market Incorporation, Agricultural Change and Sustainability among the Machiguenga

By marshaling empirical data from five Machiguenga communities studied over 20 years, this paper ... more By marshaling empirical data from five Machiguenga communities studied over 20 years, this paper disputes two common assumptions about the behavior of indigenous peoples in the face of increasing commercialization. First, many Amazonian researchers suggest that the social and ecological deterioration confronting native populations results from extemally-imposed political, legal and market structures that compel local groups to pursue short-term, unstable economic strategies. Second, these structural explanations are combined with the increasing recognition that indigenous peoples possess a substantial agroecological knowledge to suggest that, if indigenous people receive control of adequate land and resources, they will implement their traditional knowledge in conservative resource management practices. In contrast to these assumptions, this analysis shows that the Machiguenga are not compelled by external forces (such as land tenure, migration policies or economic trends), but instead are active enthusiastic participants seeking to engage the market in order to acquire westem goods. Further, despite highly adaptive traditional subsistence pattems and a vast agroecological knowledge, households and communities facing increasing degrees of market integration are progressively altering their traditional cropping strategies, planting practices, labor allocation and land use patterns toward a greater emphasis on commodity crop production and domesticated animal breeding. This increasing concentration on income generating activities subverts the environmentally-friendly nature of traditional productive practices and creates a socially, economically, and ecologically unsustainable system. Many Amazonian researchers insist that the social, economic, and ecological deterioration confronting indigenous peoples results from the inexorable process of capitalist market expansion. Indigenous peoples seem compelled by externally-imposed political, social, legal, and economic structures to pursue short-term, unsustainable economic strategies that inevitably lead to escalating rates of environmental destruction, malnutrition, economic dislocation, and social inequity (e.g., Clay, 1992; Hecht, 1992; Durham, 1995). Governmental policies relating to land tenure, resource access, and colonization, often viewed as the tools of conspiring politicians, industrialists, multilateral aid organizations and transnational capital, often stand as the proximate cause of these problems. Undoubtedly these factors, and combinations thereof, do provide valuable insights into the plight of indigenous peoples. But too much emphasis on these exogenous factors has neglected the degree to which indigenous peoples, who are increasingly gaining access to land and environmental resources, actively and enthusiastically engage the market by making economic decisions intended to expand commercial participation.

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Decision-making, Cultural Transmission and Adaptation in Economic Anthropology1

It's our custom -Bartolo Gallardo (1998), a Mapuche farmer in Chile who was replying to my questi... more

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Decision-making

Cross-cultural dataset for the evolution of religion and morality project

by Dimitris Xygalatas and Joe Henrich

A considerable body of research cross-culturally examines the evolution of religious traditions, ... more A considerable body of research cross-culturally examines the evolution of religious traditions, beliefs and behaviors. The bulk of this research, however, draws from coded qualitative ethnographies rather than from standardized methods specifically designed to measure religious beliefs and behaviors. Psychological data sets that examine religious thought and behavior in controlled conditions tend to be disproportionately sampled from student populations. Some cross-national databases employ standardized methods at the individual level, but are primarily focused on fully market integrated, state-level societies. The Evolution of Religion and Morality Project sought to generate a data set that systematically probed individual level measures sampling across a wider range of human populations. The set includes data from behavioral economic experiments and detailed surveys of demographics, religious beliefs and practices, material security, and intergroup perceptions. This paper describes the methods and variables, briefly introduces the sites and sampling techniques, notes inconsistencies across sites, and provides some basic reporting for the data set.

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