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  1. Why do good hunters have higher reproductive success?Eric Alden Smith - 2004 - Human Nature 15 (4):343-364.
    Anecdotal evidence from many hunter-gatherer societies suggests that successful hunters experience higher prestige and greater reproductive success. Detailed quantitative data on these patterns are now available for five widely dispersed cases (Ache, Hadza, !Kung, Lamalera, and Meriam) and indicate that better hunters exhibit higher age-corrected reproductive success than other men in their social group. Leading explanations to account for this pattern are: (1) direct provisioning of hunters’ wives and offspring, (2) dyadic reciprocity, (3) indirect reciprocity, (4) costly signaling, and (5) (...)
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  • Coevolution of neocortical size, group size and language in humans.R. I. M. Dunbar - 1993 - Behavioral and Brain Sciences 16 (4):681-694.
    Group size is a function of relative neocortical volume in nonhuman primates. Extrapolation from this regression equation yields a predicted group size for modern humans very similar to that of certain hunter-gatherer and traditional horticulturalist societies. Groups of similar size are also found in other large-scale forms of contemporary and historical society. Among primates, the cohesion of groups is maintained by social grooming; the time devoted to social grooming is linearly related to group size among the Old World monkeys and (...)
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  • Strong reciprocity, human cooperation, and the enforcement of social norms.Ernst Fehr, Urs Fischbacher & Simon Gächter - 2002 - Human Nature 13 (1):1-25.
    This paper provides strong evidence challenging the self-interest assumption that dominates the behavioral sciences and much evolutionary thinking. The evidence indicates that many people have a tendency to voluntarily cooperate, if treated fairly, and to punish noncooperators. We call this behavioral propensity “strong reciprocity” and show empirically that it can lead to almost universal cooperation in circumstances in which purely self-interested behavior would cause a complete breakdown of cooperation. In addition, we show that people are willing to punish those who (...)
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  • Unto Others: The Evolution and Psychology of Unselfish Behavior.Elliott Sober & David Sloan Wilson - 1998 - Harvard University Press.
    The authors demonstrate that unselfish behavior is in fact an important feature of both biological and human nature. Their book provides a panoramic view of altruism throughout the animal kingdom--from self-sacrificing parasites to the human capacity for selflessness--even as it explains the evolutionary sense of such behavior.
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  • Multilevel selection and the social transmission of behavior.David Sloan Wilson & Kevin M. Kniffin - 1999 - Human Nature 10 (3):291-310.
    Many evolutionary models assume that behaviors are caused directly by genes. An implication is that behavioral uniformity should be found only in groups that are genetically uniform. Yet, the members of human social groups often behave in a uniform fashion, despite the fact that they are genetically diverse. Behavioral uniformity can occur through a variety of psychological mechanisms and social processes, such as imitation, consensus decision making, or the imposition of social norms. We present a series of models in which (...)
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  • Emotions and actions associated with norm-breaking events.David Sloan Wilson & Rick O’Gorman - 2003 - Human Nature 14 (3):277-304.
    Norms have a strong influence on human social interactions, but the emotions and actions associated with norm-breaking events have not been systematically studied. We asked subjects to imagine themselves in a conflict situation and then to report how they would feel, how they would act, and how they would imagine the feelings and actions of their opponent. By altering the fictional scenario that they were asked to imagine (weak vs. strong norm) and the perspective of the subject (norm-breaker vs. the (...)
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  • Complex societies.Peter J. Richerson & Robert Boyd - 1999 - Human Nature 10 (3):253-289.
    The complexity of human societies of the past few thousand years rivals that of social insect societies. We hypothesize that two sets of social “instincts” underpin and constrain the evolution of complex societies. One set is ancient and shared with other social primate species, and one is derived and unique to our lineage. The latter evolved by the late Pleistocene, and led to the evolution of institutions of intermediate complexity in acephalous societies. The institutions of complex societies often conflict with (...)
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  • Complex societies.Peter J. Richerson & Robert Boyd - 1999 - Human Nature 10 (3):253-289.
    The complexity of human societies of the past few thousand years rivals that of social insect societies. We hypothesize that two sets of social “instincts” underpin and constrain the evolution of complex societies. One set is ancient and shared with other social primate species, and one is derived and unique to our lineage. The latter evolved by the late Pleistocene, and led to the evolution of institutions of intermediate complexity in acephalous societies. The institutions of complex societies often conflict with (...)
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  • Social network size in humans.R. A. Hill & R. I. M. Dunbar - 2003 - Human Nature 14 (1):53-72.
    This paper examines social network size in contemporary Western society based on the exchange of Christmas cards. Maximum network size averaged 153.5 individuals, with a mean network size of 124.9 for those individuals explicitly contacted; these values are remarkably close to the group size of 150 predicted for humans on the basis of the size of their neocortex. Age, household type, and the relationship to the individual influence network structure, although the proportion of kin remained relatively constant at around 21%. (...)
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  • The natural selection of altruistic traits.Christopher Boehm - 1999 - Human Nature 10 (3):205-252.
    Proponents of the standard evolutionary biology paradigm explain human “altruism” in terms of either nepotism or strict reciprocity. On that basis our underlying nature is reduced to a function of inclusive fitness: human nature has to be totally selfish or nepotistic. Proposed here are three possible paths to giving costly aid to nonrelatives, paths that are controversial because they involve assumed pleiotropic effects or group selection. One path is pleiotropic subsidies that help to extend nepotistic helping behavior from close family (...)
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  • Attachment and Loss.John Bowlby - 1968 - Pimlico.
    Provides a comprehensive report on the mother-child bond and the emotional effects of and behavioral response to maternal deprivation.
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  • The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture.Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides & John Tooby - 1992 - Oxford University Press. Edited by Jerome H. Barkow, Leda Cosmides & John Tooby.
    Second, this collection of cognitive programs evolved in the Pleistocene to solve the adaptive problems regularly faced by our hunter-gatherer ancestors-...
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  • The evolution of altruistic punishment.Rob Boyd - manuscript
    Robert Boyd*†, Herbert Gintis‡, Samuel Bowles§, and Peter J. Richerson¶.
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  • Human conversational behavior.Robin I. M. Dunbar, Anna Marriott & Neil D. C. Duncan - 1997 - Human Nature 8 (3):231-246.
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  • The evolution of altruistic punishment.Robert Boyd, Herbert Gintis, Samuel Bowles, Peter Richerson & J. - 2003 - Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 100 (6):3531-3535.
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