Hadza Hunter-Gatherers Disagree on Perceptions of Moral Character

Abstract

To the extent that moral character is grounded in stable and observable truths, there should exist agreement between people in their judgments of others’ character. In Western populations, this agreement is found. We examine whether this is universal in Hadza hunter-gatherers of Tanzania. Ninety-four judges ranked their campmates on global character and relevant character traits for a total of 802 observations. Judges disagreed on rankings of global character, generosity, and honesty but agreed more on hard work and hunting ability. Individual rankings on specific traits predicted character evaluations. There was agreement between judges on the extent to which generosity and hard work related to character. These findings suggest that Hadza have shared beliefs about what traits constitute character but disagree on which of their campmates exhibit these traits. We discuss these findings in light of other research suggesting that stable moral dispositions may not be universal.

Partner choice in human evolution: The role of cooperation, foraging ability, and culture in Hadza campmate preferences

“…Consistent with predictions from models of partner choice, and data from WEIRD subjects, we find evidence that Hadza hunter-gatherers do prefer to live with people they deem as more cooperative. These results contrast with results from several papers citing little evidence for partner choice maintaining cooperation in the Hadza, including a lack of preference for more cooperative campmates (Apicella et al, 2012;Smith et al, 2018;Smith & Apicella, 2020). We also find that while the preference for generous campmates has strengthened, the preference for productive foragers has weakened.…”

“…If cooperation went to fixation, individuals would no longer benefit from discriminating between partners and the preference for cooperative partners would weaken or disappear (with enough time). Thus, it is possible that the lack of preference for cooperative campmates observed in 2010 or even the disagreement observed in our current ranking data (Smith & Apicella, 2020) may reflect a long history of partner choice.…”

“…This same study also found no evidence that individual cooperative behavior is stable over time. Further evidence suggests that people may, in fact, be observing different levels of cooperativeness in others across time and situations; there is considerable disagreement between participants on who are the most generous or moral campmates (Smith & Apicella, 2020). Behavioral persistence is necessary for partner choice to maintain cooperation-without it, a person's current willingness to cooperate provides no information about whether that person will cooperate in the future.…”

An Adaptationist Framework for Personality Science

“…Consistent with the lexical approach and its assumptions, the descriptive personality constructs subsequently identified do, in fact, exhibit impressive predictive validity for many important life outcomes, such as risk taking, car accidents, alcoholism, marital conflict, infidelity, marital stability and divorce, occupational success, mating strategies, offspring production, and longevity (Buss, 1991a, 1991b; Goldberg, 1993; Mõttus et al, 2019; Ozer & Benet–Martinez, 2006; Penke & Jokela, 2016; Roberts et al, 2007; Soto, 2019). Because natural languages contain many thousands of items for person description (adjectives, type nouns, and phrases), many of which are at least partly synonymous, researchers have used factor analysis to create broad dimensions of variation based on intercorrelated ratings of descriptors.…”

“…Since the mid–20th century, personality psychologists have factor–analysed lexical and sentence–length descriptions of behaviour under the assumption that patterns of covariance in these descriptors reveal fundamental traits—the building blocks of personality with which to create a ‘periodic table of elements’ for the field (Cattell, 1966; Costa & McCrae, 1992; Lee & Ashton, 2008; Saucier & Goldberg, 1996). This approach has produced structural taxonomies of personality—notably the Big Five and HEXACO models—that show impressive ability to predict important life outcomes (Goldberg, 1993; Ozer & Benet–Martinez, 2006; Roberts, Kuncel, Shiner, Caspi, & Goldberg, 2007; Soto, 2019).…”