The cultural evolution and ecology of institutions

Abstract

Human societies are structured by what we refer to as ‘institutions’, which are socially created and culturally inherited proscriptions on behaviour that define roles and set expectations about social interactions. The study of institutions in several social science fields has provided many important insights that have not been fully appreciated in the evolutionary human sciences. However, such research has often lacked a shared understanding of general processes of change that shape institutional diversity across space and time. We argue that evolutionary theory can provide a useful framework for synthesizing information from different disciplines to address issues such as how and why institutions change over time, how institutional rules co-evolve with other culturally inherited traits, and the role that ecological factors might play in shaping institutional diversity. We argue that we can gain important insights by applying cultural evolutionary thinking to the study of institutions, but that we also need to expand and adapt our approaches to better handle the ways that institutions work, and how they might change over time. In this paper, we illustrate our approach by describing macro-scale empirical comparative analyses that demonstrate how evolutionary theory can be used to generate and test hypotheses about the processes that have shaped some of the major patterns we see in institutional diversity over time and across the world today. We then go on to discuss how we might usefully develop micro-scale models of institutional change by adapting concepts from game theory and agent-based modelling. We end by considering current challenges and areas for future research, and the potential implications for other areas of study and real-world applications. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Foundations of cultural evolution’.

Religious celibacy brings inclusive fitness benefits

“…Institutions are one of the defining features of human societies [ 1 ]. Whether institutions are influenced by the inclusive fitness interests of the individuals participating in them is a matter of debate.…”

Market integration, income inequality, and kinship system among the Mosuo of China

“…Market integration is a powerful force of economic, health, and lifestyle change (e.g., Colleran, 2020;Godoy et al, 2004;Gurven et al, 2015;Lu, 2007;Wu, 2019). It is not, however, a linear process (e.g., see Figure 1); its outcomes are sensitive to local context , including starting points (e.g., different phases of market integration are expected to yield different outcomes), opportunity structures, and the cultural norms and institutions shaping responses to those opportunities (see Currie et al 2021). Our results demonstrate clearly that market integration in response to tourism involves a shift from subsistence-to market-oriented activities, consistent with Lu's definition of market integration (Lu, 2007), but they do not map cleanly onto wealth or inequality.…”

Decline and Fall, Growth and Spread, or Resilience? Approaches to Studying How and Why Societies Change

“…A similar tool that has become popular in dynamic historical research, also adapted directly from biological evolution, is the use of phylogenic models. A recent study by Currie et al employs phylogenic modelling and historical data to explain both similarities and divergence in institutional systems of various societies across the globe at different periods, and trace how institutions co-evolve with other societal features (Thomas E. Currie et al 2021) 11 . The phylogenic approach provides a useful manner to articulate a time-series of socio-cultural change, but the key contribution for our purposes here is in directly testing alternate causal hypotheses about societal dynamics against empirical historical data.…”