The content and structure of reputation domains across human societies: a view from the evolutionary social sciences

Garfield, Zachary H.; Schacht, Ryan; Post, Emily; Ingram, Dominique; Uehling, Andrea; Macfarlan, Shane J.

doi:10.31219/osf.io/mk4wq

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 6 publications

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“…In these circumstances, reputations for antisocial behavior were potentially very costly, whereas reputations for prosociality, conforming to group norms, and cooperative behavior conferred various benefits, including the vital consequence of being safe from punishment. Consistent with this perspective, evidence of reputations for cultural conformity and prosociality are prevalent in the ethnographic record (31). Reputations for conforming to social norms and excelling at culturally valued skills, independent of economic success, may be heavily weighted in social interactions and particularly among politically autonomous, subsistence-based populations.…”

Section: Norms Human Sociality and Culturementioning

confidence: 88%

Norm violations and punishments across human societies

Garfield¹,

Ringen²,

Buckner³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Punishments for norm violations are hypothesized to be a crucial component of the maintenance of cooperation in humans but little is known about cross-cultural variation in their use. We investigated the degree to which punishment systems were correlated with socioecology and cultural history. We took data from the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample database and also coded ethnographic documents from a sample of 131 largely nonindustrial societies. We recorded whether punishment for norm violations concerned adultery, religion, food, rape, or war cowardice, and whether sanctions were reputational, physical, material or execution. We used Bayesian phylogenetic regression modeling to test for culture-level covariation. We found little evidence of phylogenetic signals in evidence for punishment types, suggesting punishment systems change relatively quickly over cultural evolutionary history. We found evidence that reputational punishment was associated with egalitarianism and the absence of food storage; material punishment was associated with the presence of food storage; physical punishment was moderately associated with greater dependence on hunting; and execution punishment was moderately associated with social stratification. We interpret results within a cultural ecological framework and emphasize the importance of socioecological context for understanding diversity in human punishment systems.

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Section: Norms Human Sociality and Culturementioning

confidence: 88%

Norm violations and punishments across human societies

Garfield¹,

Ringen²,

Buckner³

et al. 2022

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

How small-scale societies achieve large-scale cooperation

Glowacki

Lew‐Levy

2022

Current Opinion in Psychology

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Religion: the WEIRDest concept in the world?

Lightner

Garfield

Hagen

2022

Religion, Brain & Behavior

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After a long hiatus, grand theory in anthropology is back. From the second half of the 19th century through first half of the 20th, anthropologists aimed to develop overarching theories of human cultural variation, from the early evolutionism of Tylor and Morgan to the functionalism of Malinowski to the cultural ecology of Steward. One by one, however, these theories failed. Fleeing the conceptual wreckage, many anthropologists disavowed grand theory, turning inward to produce highly particular accounts of specific populations, or to pillory anthropology itself. Predictably, anthropology's scientific influence waned (Spiro, 1992).Anthropology's subject matter, though, was too scientifically important to ignore. As the 20th century drew to a close, Jared Diamond, an outsider, put forward a materialist grand theory in Guns, Germs, and Steel that rooted economic disparities between the West and the 'Other' in the luck of the ecological draw: domesticatable species in a longitudinally extensive temperate continent, Eurasia, gave its inhabitants a leg up over those in Africa, Australia, and the Americas in developing large, innovative nation-states (Diamond, 1997).If Guns, Germs, and Steel revived materialist grand theory, then anthropologist Joseph Henrich's The WEIRDest People in the World is its ideational counterpart. Henrich credits Guns, Germs, and Steel for his initial interest in cross-cultural differences in prosperity, and in his comprehensive and thought-provoking book, Henrich (2020) presents a variety of cultural evolutionary theories to explain how Western societies became psychologically peculiar and affluent. His is ultimately an account of the cultural evolutionary success of one unusual family of religious movements and institutions -the Catholic Church and the Protestant Reformation -whose suites of beliefs and practices shaped Western minds over the course of several centuries.We have been conducting extensive investigations of the ethnographic literature on the roles and functions of leaders and knowledge specialists across cultures, many of whom are part of religious institutions -the universalizing "launchpads" that, according to Henrich, have taken over the world in some form or another (p. 151). Our results speak to an ongoing discussion about the evolutionary origins of religion. Some of our results support Henrich, for whom religious institutions have been a powerful evolutionary force from the "fog of prehistory" onward (p. 127), playing a causal role in shaping behavior and psychology, and having downstream effects on socioeconomic and ecological practices. Religion, according to this view, culturally evolved to promote collective action and other group-level advantages.Other results of ours, though, support the Boyer (2020) "wild religions" view that in many cultures there are no religious institutions in the sense that Henrich describes. Instead, there are a variety of ideas that Westerners tend to label "religious" that are better understood as cognitively attractive explanations employ...

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The content and structure of reputation domains across human societies: a view from the evolutionary social sciences

Cited by 3 publications

References 6 publications

Norm violations and punishments across human societies

Norm violations and punishments across human societies

How small-scale societies achieve large-scale cooperation

Religion: the WEIRDest concept in the world?

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