An influential theory of human fairness has suggested that norms of equity evolved as community sizes grew, markets and institutions stabilized and world religions came about. The theory assumes that humans predominantly interacted with kin in the evolutionary past, lived in genetically related groups and did not have formal norms of cooperation. In this article I present anthropological evidence to the contrary. Contemporary hunter-gatherer societies from around the globe live in nomadic camps with fluid membership and low genetic relatedness; cooperate extensively based on principles of need, equity and reciprocity; have high prevalence of food sharing, cooperative hunting and alloparenting; and demonstrate formal norms of redistribution for essential goods. This directly contradicts the claim that fairness is a recently evolved disposition for market-integrated societies.

From an evolutionary perspective, anxiety can be considered as a psychological hazard-detection system. In uncertain environments, the costs of responding to false cues of danger are often miniscule as compared to those resulting from undetected threats. Therefore, the anxiety response has evolved a bias towards false alarms under conditions of uncertainty. We discuss general and specific types of anxiety responses, underlining how the nature of these are often determined by the particular types of threats in the environment.

We define two ‘problems of altruism’. The first is the classic problem of altruism, defined as the issue of how a behavior which decreases an individual’s lifetime reproductive success, while helping another individual (or individuals) increase their lifetime reproductive success, can evolve. We also define a ‘second-order problem of altruism’, where different authors have different conceptions of what does, and does not, constitute ‘altruism’, including approaches based on kin selection, multi-level selection theory, short-term altruism and psychological altruism.

Though labor-force participation of women has considerably increased in most industrialized societies and many households are now dual-earner, the gender imbalance in household division of labor persists. Moreover, the consensus amongst men and women is that such distributions are fair, resulting in normalization and perpetuation of inequality. We provide a multifactorial explanation for understanding the economic, cultural and cognitive processes underlying such inequalities within households. The economic approach suggests that gendered division of labor is a problem of coordination, and payoffs available to individuals outside their households provides asymmetric bargaining power to men and women, shaping housework conventions. In most industrialized societies, various measures of economic payoffs such as financial assets, employment potential, can then provide power to gender groups. The sociological approach bridges this macro-level view of households with the micro-level view of an individual’s perceptions of labor divisions. Utilizing various aspects of culture, this section shows that when labor divisions become stabilized on a large scale, they become part of cultural narratives and norms – such as what individuals think fairness in the household is, what gender roles they abide by, etc – which become internalized. The psychological approach explores cognitive mechanisms underpinning self-perception and assessments of fairness within one’s household. This multi factorial approach allows us to address the individual dynamics of self-concept within the broader social and economic contexts that households exist within. Ultimately, we aim to demonstrate the utility of such multidisciplinary work for informing gender policy at various levels and making holistic strides toward the improvement of women's health and wellbeing.