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An illustration of how self-interested enforcement (SIE) and cultural group selection (CGS) compare in sculpting rules. Closed forms represent groups. Closed forms with different shapes represent groups with different social structures: groups 1 and 2 have the same social structure while group 3 is different. Floating lines represent rules. Lines with different shapes represent rules in different social structures: rules A and B are stable in social structure 1, whereas rule C is stable in social structure 2. Rule B is dashed and rule A is not to show that, whereas both rules are stable in the same social structure, they are different rules. Black arrows signify individuals making rules. Gray arrows signify the spread of rules and/or social structures; gray lines and closed forms denote rules and social structures that have spread.
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Rules regulating social behavior raise challenging questions about cultural evolution in part because they frequently confer group-level benefits. Current multilevel selection theories contend that between-group processes interact with within-group processes to produce norms and institutions, but within-group processes have remained underspecified,...
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Citations
... In sum, just as people engage with religion in self-interested ways, they also are more likely to adopt moral judgments that reflect their own interests-people tend to adopt the kinds of moral judgments that mitigate their vulnerabilities (Moon, 2023;Petersen, 2013;Pitesa & Thau, 2014) or because they perceive these norms as better at advancing their goals (Singh et al., 2017). A scientific approach to religion has played a prominent role in demonstrating these phenomena and, in at least some cases, has led to these additional lines of research. ...
What do we gain from the scientific study of religion? One possibility is that religious contexts are unique, and cognition within these contexts is worth understanding. Another possibility is that religion can be viewed as a laboratory for understanding psychology and culture more broadly. Rather than limiting the study of religion to a single context, I argue that the study of religion is useful precisely because it illuminates secular psychological and cultural processes. I first outline my practical approach to psychology and religion, focusing on how people use religion to advance mundane goals. I then discuss several domains in which studying religion has led to important insights, including culture, prejudice, and cognition. This article is an extended version of an Early Career Award address given at the International Association for the Psychology of Religion meeting in 2023 in Groningen, Netherlands.
... The evolution of social norms is an important topic of study in research on cultural evolution. Cultural evolution theory has been fruitful in showing the importance of biased transmission in the spread and maintenance of cultural traits (Boyd and Richerson, 1985;Henrich and Boyd, 1998;Boyd and Richerson, 2002;McElreath et al., 2003;Efferson et al., 2008;Mesoudi, 2011b), but limited consideration has been given to power dynamics and their role in the spread of ideas (Singh et al., 2017;Cofnas, 2018) and this field of inquiry has somewhat ignored gender (Lawson et al., 2023). Instead, social influence is mostly considered in the form of deference and voluntary copying of the behaviour of high-status individuals rather than coercion by those in power. ...
... Gender norms are socially enforced by group members (and often by the state) through punishment or social exclusion (Egan and Perry, 2001;Blakemore, 2003;Parrott, 2009;Skočajić et al., 2020). Like other social norms, gender norms may adjust to changing community´ members' interests in norm-governed behaviours, as well as to their bargaining positions (Singh et al., 2017). Sex ratio dynamics can therefore influence gender norms by changing individuals' interests. ...
... The term gendered conflict works to disessentialize differences between women and men by underlining the fact that women and men's conflicting interests cannot be reduced to sex-based biological differences, but are very much shaped by gender norms. We further argue that models of cultural evolution are crucial in understanding gendered conflict, while gender norms as well as bargaining and power dynamics are somewhat neglected in cultural evolution theory itself (Singh et al., 2017;Lawson et al., 2023). Sexual conflict theory has been used quite extensively to model and measure bargaining over gender roles and over women's autonomy and decision-making power (e.g. ...
Sexual conflict theory has been successfully applied to predict how in non-human animal populations, sex ratios can lead to conflicting reproductive interests of females and males and affect their bargaining positions in resolving such conflicts of interests. Recently this theory has been extended to understand the resolution of sexual conflict in humans, but with mixed success. We argue that an underappreciation of the complex relationship between gender norms and sex ratios has hampered a successful understanding of sexual conflict in humans. In this paper, we review and expand upon existing theory to increase its applicability to humans, where gender norms regulate sex ratio-effects on sexual conflict. Gender norms constrain who is on the marriage market, how they are valued, and may affect reproductive decision-making power. Gender norms can also directly affect sex ratios, and we hypothesize that they structure how individuals respond to market value gained or lost through biased sex ratios. Importantly, gender norms are in part a product of women's and men's sometimes conflicting reproductive interests, but these norms are also subject to other evolutionary processes. An integration of sexual conflict theory and cultural evolutionary theory is required to allow for a full understanding of sexual conflict in humans.
... The fast and easy explanation is that humans are somehow "naturally" or "innately" egalitarian, and that large and modern societies have corrupted us (e.g., Bregman, 2019; see, e.g., Hallpike, 2020;Buckner, 2020, for critical reviews). The more nuanced and astute conclusion is that when groups are small and many people know your name, then the greatest individual rewards come from attending to local norms of how to behave, maintaining your reputation, and valuing group harmony above all (Singh et al., 2017;von Rueden, 2020, Hooper et al., 2021. Put simply, fairness and egalitarianism can overlap with self-interest, and when they do then the chances of social harmony are increased, sometimes dramatically so. ...
... All societies, from hunter-gatherers to modern liberal democracies, are governed by institutional rules [1,2] that help to coordinate individuals, promote cooperative behaviour, and resolve social dilemmas [3][4][5]. Many hunter-gatherer societies have rules that regulate the conditions under which individuals should give food to others [6]. ...
... Although this number could be pushed up if several other informal norms that guide behaviour in different contexts are included, it is still orders of magnitude smaller than that seen in modernized countries, e.g. 40 000 new laws took effect in the USA in 2014 alone [4]. Although we do not explicitly model different rules, we can speculate that having multiple rules on which consensus needs to be reached has a similar effect to having more difficult political games (i.e. ...
All societies need to form institutional rules to regulate their social interactions. These specify what actions individuals should take in particular situations, and what sanctions will apply if individuals violate these rules. However, forming these institutional rules involves playing a political game—a process of negotiation between individuals that is costly and time-consuming. Intuitively, this cost should be expected to increase as a group becomes larger, which could then select for a transition to hierarchy to keep the cost of playing the political game down as group size increases. However, previous work has lacked a mechanistic yet general model of political games that could formalize this argument and test the conditions under which it holds. We address this by formalizing the political game using a standard consensus formation model. We show that the increasing cost of forming a consensus over institutional rules selects for a transition from egalitarian to hierarchical organization over a wide range of conditions. Playing a political game to form institutional rules in this way captures and unites a previously disparate set of voluntary theories for hierarchy formation, and can explain why the increasing group size in the Neolithic would lead to strong political inequality.
This article is part of the theme issue ‘Evolutionary ecology of inequality’.
... Social equality thus aligns more closely with cooperation than competition (Townsend, 2018;Hooper et al., 2021), with competition associated with efforts to improve one's absolute returns and to enhance one's own relative standing against others (Hickey and Davidsen, 2019;Mandalaywala, 2019;Wilson and Codding, 2020). Tensions will thus arise between those who favor cooperation and more even resource distributions and those who favor more competitive and uneven resource distributions (Singh et al., 2017;Pandit et al., 2020;Powers et al., 2021), leading to the between-individual differences in values that comprise the inequality dimension. ...
Psychological research repeatedly identifies two dimensions of political values. Recent work argues that these dimensions reflect the dual evolutionary foundations of human social and political life: a trade-off between cooperation and competition that generates differences in values about social inequality, and a trade-off in managing group coordination that generates differences in values about social control. Existing scales used to measure political values, however, were created prior to this framework. Here, we introduce the Dual Foundations Scale, designed to capture values about the two trade-offs. We validate the scale across two studies, showing it accurately and reliably measures both dimensions. Our results support key predictions of the dual foundations framework and pave the way for future work on the foundations of political ideology.
... Researchers increasingly focus on how individuals produce and selectively retain cultural products evaluated as best satisfying the goals of an individual, a process labelled 'subjective selection' 169 . Subjective selection seems to underlie the evolution not only of useful technology 169,170 but also of many domains of so-called 'symbolic' culture, including social norms 171,172 , fictional narratives 173,174 , and religious practices and beliefs [175][176][177] . Subjective selection is a promising explanation for some musical universals. ...
... Other approaches (e.g., Jackson & Gray, 2023;Johnson et al., 2015;Spiro & D'Andrade, 1958) investigate variants of the "projection hypothesis," namely that various aspects of gods are projections of believers' own concerns, temperaments, and interests. A related view emphasizes that appeals to rules-secular as well as supernatural-are shaped by individuals' self-interest (e.g., people invent or enforce rules that benefit themselves), and that rules therefore often serve the interest of the powerful (Singh et al., 2017). While these frameworks might help address some very specific aspects of god beliefs and appeals (e.g., when elites use appeals to gods as a means for social control; Ellwood, 1918;Swanson, 1960, ch. ...
How do beliefs about gods vary across populations, and what accounts for this variation? We argue that appeals to gods generally reflect prominent features of local social ecologies. We first draw from a synthesis of theoretical, experimental, and ethnographic evidence to delineate a set of predictive criteria for the kinds of contexts with which religious beliefs and behaviors will be associated. To evaluate these criteria, we examine the content of freely-listed data about gods' concerns collected from individuals across eight diverse field sites and contextualize these beliefs in their respective cultural milieus. In our analysis, we find that local deities' concerns point to costly threats to local coordination and cooperation. We conclude with a discussion of how alternative approaches to religious beliefs and appeals fare in light of our results and close by considering some key implications for the cognitive and evolutionary sciences of religion.
... While the sharing of meat can be said to represent a recurrent cooperative dilemma, this kind of tradition seems to be a good example of the self-interested promotion and enforcement of supernatural beliefs (Singh et al., 2017). Notably similar practices of deceptive meat monopolization attributed to the consumption of spirits are found across various independent hunter-gatherer societies all over the world (Buckner, 2021). ...
... Additionally, the model for peer-review presented in this paper is left intentionally vague. The intention is based on research on self-interest of individuals and society to showcase that groups can create their own policies creating a stronger sense of community (Singh et al., 2017). The evaluation process minimizes individual impacts of the governing system and creates a community of acceptable standards. ...
... The evaluation process minimizes individual impacts of the governing system and creates a community of acceptable standards. The work by Singh et al. (2017), highlights the benefits of rule enforcement in group-work benefits overall payoff and behavioral outcomes. • Each team member will complete the peer-evaluation form, including a self-evaluation. ...
This working paper proposes the use of musical selections to enhance team-based learning (TBL) activities in economics education. The author provides pre-designed lessons and templates that match the Voluntary National Content Standards in Economics and are appropriate for upper-primary and secondary institutions. The approach builds on the importance of TBL in the economics classroom and employs popular culture themes to make economics education relevant to modern students. The combination of music applications, TBL experiences, and pre-designed lesson templates is innovative and extends economics education literature. Research outlines the four major events that must be included in TBL course design: group work, self- and peer-review, timely and frequent feedback, and real-world application design (Michaelsen & Sweet, 2008). The foundations of Michaelsen and Sweet (2008) led the approach of the work, with an example of building a group environment that can be facilitated by the instructor and a model for peer-review. The paper concludes by emphasizing the importance of teacher commitment to the TBL process for success with relevant age-appropriate material.
... If differences in social norms lead to differences in cooperative behavior, then an important avenue for future research is to understand how social norms and institutions evolve and how to better harness our concern for reputation in order to meaningfully create environments in which cooperation can be individually advantageous. Some have argued that prosocial norms evolve through a process of cultural group selection (Richerson et al., 2016), while others argue that norms and rules are the end-result of a bargaining process among competing parties (Powers et al., 2016, Singh et al., 2017. In any case, a deeper understanding of the interaction between individual psychology and social institutions is necessary in order to improve our understanding of human social behavior (Henrich, 2015(Henrich, , 2020. ...
