Formal theoretical models propose that cooperative networks can be maintained when individuals condition behavior on social standing. Here, we empirically examine the predictions of such models of positive and negative indirect reciprocity using a suite of network-structured economic games in four rural Colombian communities (N = 496 individuals, N = 53,876 ratings/transfers). We observe that, at a dyadic-level, individuals have a strong tendency to exploit and punish others in bad standing (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEmerging evidence suggests that gender is a defining feature of personhood. Studies show that gender is the primary social category individuals use to perceive humanness and the social category most strongly related to seeing someone-or something-as human. However, the universality of gender's primacy in social perception and its precedence over other social categories like race and age have been debated.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
February 2024
While it is commonly assumed that farmers have higher, and foragers lower, fertility compared to populations practicing other forms of subsistence, robust supportive evidence is lacking. We tested whether subsistence activities-incorporating market integration-are associated with fertility in 10,250 women from 27 small-scale societies and found considerable variation in fertility. This variation did not align with group-level subsistence typologies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFYoung children and adolescents in subsistence societies forage for a wide range of resources. They often target child-specific foods, they can be very successful foragers, and they share their produce widely within and outside of their nuclear family. At the same time, while foraging, they face risky situations and are exposed to diseases that can influence their immune development.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTwo universal strategies for attaining influence-dominance, or the use of intimidation and force to obtain power, and prestige, or garnering respect by demonstrating knowledge and expertise-are communicated through distinct nonverbal displays in North America. Given evidence for the emergence and effectiveness of these strategies across cultures, including non-Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic small-scale, traditional societies in Africa, Asia, and South America, the nonverbal displays that are used to reliably communicate these strategies also might be universal. Here, we demonstrate that the dominance display is recognized by the Mayangna, a small-scale society in rural Nicaragua, and by Canadian children as young as 2 and 3 years old.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTo address claims of human exceptionalism, we determine where humans fit within the greater mammalian distribution of reproductive inequality. We show that humans exhibit lower reproductive skew (i.e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: Research on emotion communication typically focuses on facial expressions, yet scientists dating back to Darwin have noted the importance of the body in conveying emotions. In fact, studies have found that the body is reliably used to express and recognize anger, fear, and sadness, by individuals in several industrialized populations. Here, we provide the first evidence that bodily expressions of these three emotions are reliably recognized by members of an isolated small-scale traditional society: the Mayangna of Nicaragua.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAcross multiple species of social mammals, a growing number of studies have found that individual sociality is associated with survival. In long-lived species, like primates, lifespan is one of the main components of fitness. We used 18 years of data from the Lomas Barbudal Monkey Project to quantify social integration in 11 capuchin () groups and tested whether female survivorship was associated with females' tendencies to interact with three types of partners: (1) all group members, (2) adult females, and (3) adult males.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFA key issue distinguishing prominent evolutionary models of human life history is whether prolonged childhood evolved to facilitate learning in a skill- and strength-intensive foraging niche requiring high levels of cooperation. Considering the diversity of environments humans inhabit, children's activities should also reflect local social and ecological opportunities and constraints. To better understand our species' developmental plasticity, the present paper compiled a time allocation dataset for children and adolescents from twelve hunter-gatherer and mixed-subsistence forager societies (n = 690; 3-18 years; 52% girls).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe present pre-registered research provides the first evidence that a downwards head tilt is sufficient to communicate dominance from a neutral facial expression among the Mayangna, members of an unindustrialized, small-scale traditional society in Nicaragua who have had minimal exposure to North American culture. Consistent with the Action Unit imposter effect observed in North American populations (Witkower and Tracy in Psychol Sci 30:893-906, 2019), changes to the appearance of the upper face caused by a downwards head tilt were sufficient to elicit perceptions of dominance among this population. Given that the Mayangna are unlikely to associate a downwards head tilt or related apparent facial changes with dominance as a result of cross-cultural learning, the present results suggest that perceptions of dominance formed from a downwards head tilt, and the visual illusion shaping these perceptions, are a widely generalizable, and possibly universal, feature of human psychology.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStudies of dogs have proliferated among canine scientists, aided in part by the logistical convenience of working with owned animals whose care is handled by others. These pet dogs are unlike most dogs that have lived in contemporary or prehistoric settings. In particular, many of the dogs studied by canine scientists are NATIVE dogs: (1) neutered, (2) alimented, (3) trained, (4) isolated, (5) vaccinated, and (6) engineered.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResearchers often use moral dilemmas to investigate the specific factors that influence participants' judgments of the appropriateness of different actions. A common construction of such a dilemma is the Trolley Problem, which pits an obvious utilitarian solution against a common deontological dictum to not do harm to others. Cross-cultural studies have validated the robustness of numerous contextual biases, such as judging utilitarian decisions more negatively if they require contact with other individuals (contact bias), they force others to serve as a means to an end (means bias), and if they require direct action rather than inaction (omission bias).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study examined the relationships between hair cortisol concentrations (HCC) and sex, age, nutritional status (as determined by body condition scores, or BCS), and body mass (geometric mean calculated from morphometric measurements), as well as the potential influence of hair pigmentation (light, dark, or agouti/mixed) on HCC in dogs of the Bosawas Biosphere Reserve, Nicaragua. The dogs examined in this study live in a marginal environment where disease, malnutrition, and mortality rates are high. For fur color, HCC was significantly higher in light fur than in than dark and mixed fur ( < 0.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHuman adaptation depends on the integration of slow life history, complex production skills, and extensive sociality. Refining and testing models of the evolution of human life history and cultural learning benefit from increasingly accurate measurement of knowledge, skills, and rates of production with age. We pursue this goal by inferring hunters' increases and declines of skill from approximately 23,000 hunting records generated by more than 1800 individuals at 40 locations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLong-lasting, romantic partnerships are a universal feature of human societies, but almost as ubiquitous is the risk of instability when one partner strays. Jealous response to the threat of infidelity is well studied, but most empirical work on the topic has focused on a proposed sex difference in the type of jealousy (sexual or emotional) that men and women find most upsetting, rather than on how jealous response varies. This stems in part from the predominance of studies using student samples from industrialized populations, which represent a relatively homogenous group in terms of age, life history stage and social norms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPhilos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci
September 2019
A hypothesis for the evolution of long post-reproductive lifespans in the human lineage involves asymmetries in relatedness between young immigrant females and the older females in their new groups. In these circumstances, inter-generational reproductive conflicts between younger and older females are predicted to resolve in favour of the younger females, who realize fewer inclusive fitness benefits from ceding reproduction to others. This conceptual model anticipates that immigrants to a community initially have few kin ties to others in the group, gradually showing greater relatedness to group members as they have descendants who remain with them in the group.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProc Natl Acad Sci U S A
August 2018
Becoming valuable to fellow group members so that one would attract assistance in times of need is a major adaptive problem. To solve it, the individual needs a predictive map of the degree to which others value different acts so that, in choosing how to act, the payoff arising from others' valuation of a potential action (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAmong social mammals, humans uniquely organize themselves into communities of households that are centred around enduring, predominantly monogamous unions of men and women. As a consequence of this social organization, individuals maintain social relationships both within and across households, and potentially there is conflict among household members about which social ties to prioritize or de-emphasize. Extending the logic of structural balance theory, I predict that there will be considerable overlap in the social networks of individual household members, resulting in a pattern of group-level reciprocity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFor individuals, status is derived both from their personal attributes and the groups with whom they are affiliated. Depending on the performance of their groups, the status of individuals may benefit or suffer from identifying closely with the group. When the group excels, high-status members potentially receive much of the credit and increased status.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: We measured carbon and nitrogen isotopic ratios in a contemporary population, and tested how the isotopic variability relates to measures of socioeconomic status (e.g., household wealth) and anthropometric measures (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBehavioral ecologists frequently use observational methods, such as instantaneous scan sampling, to record the behavior of animals at discrete moments in time. We develop and apply multilevel, multinomial logistic regression models for analyzing such data. These statistical methods correspond to the multinomial character of the response variable while also accounting for the repeated observations of individuals that characterize behavioral datasets.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMen's investments in parenting and long-term reproductive relationships are a hallmark feature of human reproduction and life history. The uniqueness of such male involvement among catarrhines has driven an extensive debate surrounding the selective pressures that led to and maintain such capacities in men. Three major pathways have been proposed through which men's involvement might confer fitness benefits: enhancing child well-being, increasing couple fertility, and decreasing likelihood of partner desertion.
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