Tribal Social Instincts and the Cultural Evolution of Institutions to Solve Collective Action Problems

Abstract

Human social life is uniquely complex and diverse. Much of that complexity and diversity arises from culturally transmitted ideas, values and skills that underpin the operation of social norms and institutions that structure our social life. Considerable theoretical and empirical work has been devoted to the role of cultural evolutionary processes in the evolution of social norms and institutions. The most persistent controversy has been over the role of cultural group selection and geneculture coevolution in early human populations during Pleistocene. We argue that cultural group selection and related cultural evolutionary processes had an important role in shaping the innate components of our social psychology. By the Upper Paleolithic humans seem to have lived in societies structured by institutions, as do modern populations living in small-scale societies. The most ambitious attempts to test these ideas have been the use of experimental games in field settings to document human similarities and differences on theoretically interesting dimensions. These studies have documented a huge range of behavior across populations, although no societies so far examined follow the expectations of selfish rationality. These data are at least consistent with operation of cultural group selection and gene-culture coevolution operating in the deep tribal past and with the contemporary importance of cultural evolution in the evolution of institutions and institutional diversity.

War, space, and the evolution of Old World complex societies

“…The goal of the model is to understand under what conditions ultrasocial norms and institutions will spread. The theoretical framework is provided by CMLS (5,17). As explained previously, withingroup forces cause ultrasocial traits to collapse and to be replaced with noncooperative traits.…”

“…Our theoretical framework for understanding the evolution of social norms and institutions is provided by cultural multilevel selection (CMLS) (5,17). Because the benefits of ultrasocial institutions are only felt at larger scales of social organization, and costs are born by lower-level units, fragmentation into lowerlevel units often leads to a loss of such institutions.…”

“…cultural evolution | social complexity | ultrasociality H umans have the ability to live and cooperate in huge groups of genetically unrelated individuals (what can be termed "ultrasociality") (1,2). The central conceptual issue that this paper addresses is what mechanisms facilitate the spread of the necessary norms and institutions that enable human groups to function at the scale of millions of individuals (3)(4)(5). Social scientists have proposed a number of theories to explain the emergence of large-scale societies, emphasizing such factors as population growth, warfare, information management, economic specialization, and long-distance trade (6)(7)(8)(9)(10).…”

How institutions shaped the last major evolutionary transition to large-scale human societies

“…We stress that the institution comprises the negotiation process as well as the resulting norms or rules of behaviour [11, p. 128]. This is in contrast to the cultural evolution literature, which equates institutions with equilibrium norms of behaviour in an economic game form [20], rather than with a political game form that generates rules for the economic game form.…”

Applying cultural evolution to sustainability challenges: an introduction to the special issue

“…The study of cultural evolution seeks to explain the diversity of human behavior observed worldwide and offers a mechanistic, causal framework for understanding changes in socially learned norms, values, and institutions (Richerson and Boyd 2005). It draws heavily from the diffusion of innovations literature (Richerson and Boyd 2005) and is complementarity with psychology (Mesoudi 2009), economics (van den Bergh andGowdy 2000;Bowles 2004;Hodgson and Knudsen 2010;Safarzyńska 2013), and organizational theory (Hodgson 2013), among other frameworks (Gintis 2007).…”