No abstract

Behavior is a way for organisms to respond flexibly to the environmental conditions they encounter. Our own species exhibits large behavioral flexibility and occurs in all terrestrial habitats, sharing these environments with many other species. It remains unclear to what extent a shared environment constrains behavior and whether these constraints apply similarly across species. Here, we show that foraging human populations and nonhuman mammal and bird species that live in a given environment exhibit high levels of similarity in their foraging, reproductive, and social behaviors. Our findings suggest that local conditions may select for similar behaviors in both humans and nonhuman animals.

These other non-information benefits of friends could be thought of as entering the cost term in the maximization problem we write down below, reducing the net cost of friends.

W e use a controlled experiment to analyze gender differences in stereotypes about risk preferences of men and women across two distinct island societies in the Pacific: the patrilineal Palawan in the Philippines and the matrilineal Teop in Papua New Guinea. We find no gender differences in actual risk preferences, but we find evidence for culture-specific stereotypes. Like men in Western societies, Palawan men overestimate women's actual risk aversion. By contrast, Teop men underestimate women's actual risk aversion. We argue that the observed differences in stereotypes between the two societies are determined by the different social status of women.Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.