Settlement Patterns and Community Organization: Cross-Cultural Codes 3

Murdock, George Peter; Wilson, Suzanne F.

doi:10.2307/3773219

Cited by 155 publications

(113 citation statements)

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“…Data were coded from the Ethnographic Atlas (Murdock 1967), Atlas of World Cultures (Murdock 1981), and Murdock and Wilson (1972) for density, group size, mobility, marital residence, number of subsistence modes and importance of each subsistence type, type of animal husbandry, and type and intensity of agriculture. Murdock and Morrow (1970) produced codes for level of trade, degree to which food is stored, and "food condition" (variation in food availability).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Behavioral ecology of conservation in traditional societies

Low

1996

Human Nature

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and XX 19XX, on the two sort of commons). Many of our current ecological dilemmas have the properties of commons. Among traditional societies, commons problems are also common (e.g. see Hawkes 1992).Thus it's of particular interest when we can identify commons that are managed, despite the temptations of individually rational, group-destructive behavior, in a way that is far-sighted and conserving. There are strong suggestions from laboratory gaming experiments that repeated interactions are important in fostering the necessary trust and cooperativeness (e.g. Walker XX 19XX). Did peoples in traditional society cooperate to a greater extent than we do today? Were there conscribed areas (e.g. natal family) of cooperation?My purpose here is to step back from complex situations, and examine these problems in traditional societies: [1] whether evidence of environmental degradation exists in traditional societies; [2] when (under what ecological conditions) a strong conservation ethic is evidenced in traditional societies; and whether it bears any relationship to degradation; and [3] under what conditions societies attempt to foster the characteristics (e.g. trust) that facilitate cooperation. I seek commonalties which perhaps can then be used in teasing apart more complex examples. A Behavioral Ecological ApproachDespite all our cultural complexity, we humans must solve the same ecological problems as all other organisms in order to survive and reproduce. And, however complex the interaction between our genes and the external environment, when family lineages die out, they are replaced by other, competing, lineages. Thus, behavioral ecologists often calculate an unfamiliar sort of self-interest: genetic self interest. Further, despite a certain amount of polemic (e.g., Lewontin et al. 1984), the evidence is accumulating that it is appropriate to apply to humans, at least for the purposes of generating hypotheses, the central paradigm in biology: that humans, like other living organisms, have evolved to maximize their genetic contribution to future generations through producing offspring and assisting non-descendant relatives; that the particular strategies accomplishing such maximization will differ in specifiable ways in different environments; and, just as for other mammals, these strategies will typically differ between the sexes. Humans can, through their extensive elaboration of devices like nepotism and reciprocity, respond in complex and subtle ways; this does not mean that selection is absent.In the behavioral ecological literature (e.g. see Cronk 1991, Krebs and Davies 1992), two things stand out: [1] genetically selfish behaviors, those which enhance an individuals' genetic representation (through direct reproduction or assistance of relatives), are always favored; and [2] fertility responds to the richness, controllability and predictability of important resources, and to the sources of juvenile mortality. All living things have evolved to acquire and use resources to Low

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Behavioral ecology of conservation in traditional societies

Low

1996

Human Nature

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“…Second, behavioral studies on modern forager populations suggest they disproportionately practice sex-biased affiliation among male kin, with a tendency for brothers to co-reside (Hill et al, 2011). Moreover, cross-cultural research, finds that the majority of current human societies are normatively patrilocal (Murdock & Wilson, 1980). Lastly, some human population genetic studies show evidence of an evolutionary history of female-biased dispersal patterns (Balaresque, Manni, Dugoujon, Crousau-Roy, & Heyer, 2006;Seielstad, Minch, & Cavalli-Sforza, 1998;Wilson et al, 2001).…”

Section: Cooperation During Repeated Interactionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sex differences in cooperation: A meta-analytic review of social dilemmas.

Balliet

Macfarlan

et al. 2011

Psychological Bulletin

285

234

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Although it is commonly believed that women are kinder and more cooperative than men, there is conflicting evidence for this assertion. Current theories of sex differences in social behavior suggest that it may be useful to examine in what situations men and women are likely to differ in cooperation. Here, we derive predictions from both sociocultural and evolutionary perspectives on context-specific sex differences in cooperation, and we conduct a unique meta-analytic study of 272 effect sizes-sampled across 50 years of research-on social dilemmas to examine several potential moderators. The overall average effect size is not statistically different from zero (d ϭ -0.05), suggesting that men and women do not differ in their overall amounts of cooperation. However, the association between sex and cooperation is moderated by several key features of the social context: Male-male interactions are more cooperative than female-female interactions (d ϭ 0.16), yet women cooperate more than men in mixed-sex interactions (d ϭ -0.22). In repeated interactions, men are more cooperative than women. Women were more cooperative than men in larger groups and in more recent studies, but these differences disappeared after statistically controlling for several study characteristics. We discuss these results in the context of both sociocultural and evolutionary theories of sex differences, stress the need for an integrated biosocial approach, and outline directions for future research.

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“…Therefore, we adapt the methodology used in the cross-cultural analysis work to develop our own technology adoption datasets. Murdock & Morrow (1970) in their work "Subsistence Economy and Supportive Practices", provide a detailed description of the methodology that is commonly used to code a crosscultural dataset (Carneiro 1970;Tuden and Marshall 1972;Barry and Paxson 1971;Murdock and Wilson 1972). In their work, Murdock and Morrow use over 400 sources to evaluate 180 cultures.…”

Section: Description Of Technology Data Setmentioning

confidence: 99%