ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2009
Culture and the evolution of human cooperation.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2009. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 148 papers.
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Who cites it
148 citing papers in PubMed.
- Vasopressin increases human risky cooperative behavior.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2016Trial
- Trial
- Socially Minded Intelligence: How Individuals, Groups, and Artificial Intelligence Can Make Each Other Smarter (or Not).Personality and social psychology review : an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc · 2026Article
- Stable intuition and the rise of deliberative prosociality in childhood.Nature human behaviour · 2026Article
- Bipedality in chacma baboons (Papio ursinus griseipes) in Gorongosa National Park: a multi-contextual, socially-relevant and demographically-structured behavior.Primates; journal of primatology · 2026Article
- Cost-free charity facilitates dishonesty in a dice-rolling experiment.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- An exploratory study of perceived and actual similarity in extraversion and moral attitudes toward manners in young adult friendships: Evidence from Japanese female students.BMC research notes · 2026Article
- Historical reconstruction of human moralization with word association and text corpora.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Interpersonal heart rate synchrony and prosocial behaviors in musical contexts.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Review
- The Impact of Cooperation Under Climate Constraints: An Agent-Based Model for Exploring Paleolithic Behavioral Adaptations in the Inner Asian Mountain Corridor.Journal of archaeological method and theory · 2026Article
- The perception of prosocial agents by chimpanzees and humans.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Predicting human cooperation: sensitizing drift-diffusion model to interaction and external stimuli.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Evolutionary parsimony: an equilibrium refinement that sharply constrains the space of outcomes in games with multiple equilibria.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Did Down-Regulated Instincts Enable Human Gene-Culture Coevolution?Evolutionary anthropology · 2025Review
- Victims of Misfortune are Blamed for Imposing Costs on Others : Testing a Cooperation-Dilemma Factor in Victim-Blame.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Indirect punishment can outperform direct punishment in promoting cooperation in structured populations.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Indirect reciprocity in the public goods game with collective reputations.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2025Article
- Social induction and the developmental trajectory of participation in intergroup conflict by vervet monkeys.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Music as a social instrument: a brief historical and conceptual perspective.Frontiers in cognition · 2025Review
- A neurocognitive mechanism for increased cooperation during group formation.Communications psychology · 2024Article
88 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
The scale of human cooperation is an evolutionary puzzle. All of the available evidence suggests that the societies of our Pliocene ancestors were like those of other social primates, and this means that human psychology has changed in ways that support larger, more cooperative societies that characterize modern humans. In this paper, we argue that cultural adaptation is a key factor in these changes. Over the last million years or so, people evolved the ability to learn from each other, creating the possibility of cumulative, cultural evolution. Rapid cultural adaptation also leads to persistent differences between local social groups, and then competition between groups leads to the spread of behaviours that enhance their competitive ability. Then, in such culturally evolved cooperative social environments, natural selection within groups favoured genes that gave rise to new, more pro-social motives. Moral systems enforced by systems of sanctions and rewards increased the reproductive success of individuals who functioned well in such environments, and this in turn led to the evolution of other regarding motives like empathy and social emotions like shame.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.