ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2016
How institutions shaped the last major evolutionary transition to large-scale human societies.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 30 papers.
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Who cites it
30 citing papers in PubMed.
- Institutionalised Commitment and Its Origins.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2026Article
- The social leverage effect: Institutions transform weak reputation effects into strong incentives for cooperation.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Cultural evolution: Where we have been and where we are going (maybe).Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Institutional complexity emerges from socioecological complexity in small-scale human societies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Group Formation and the Evolution of Human Social Organization.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2024Article
- Evolution of the polycrisis: Anthropocene traps that challenge global sustainability.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Identifying culture as cause: Challenges and opportunities.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Integrating evolutionary theory and social-ecological systems research to address the sustainability challenges of the Anthropocene.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Characteristic processes of human evolution caused the Anthropocene and may obstruct its global solutions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Modelling the role of environmental circumscription in the evolution of inequality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Playing the political game: the coevolution of institutions with group size and political inequality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Human societal development: is it an evolutionary transition in individuality?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Four reasons for scepticism about a human major transition in social individuality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Human socio-cultural evolution in light of evolutionary transitions: introduction to the theme issue.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Major evolutionary transitions in individuality between humans and AI.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Four levers of reciprocity across human societies: concepts, analysis and predictions.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Review
- Assessing different historical pathways in the cultural evolution of economic development.Evolution and human behavior : official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society · 2022Article
- The cultural evolution and ecology of institutions.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
- Long-term gene-culture coevolution and the human evolutionary transition.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Why Class Formation Occurs in Humans but Not among Other Primates : A Primate Coalitions Model.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2020Article
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3 authors.
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Abstract
What drove the transition from small-scale human societies centred on kinship and personal exchange, to large-scale societies comprising cooperation and division of labour among untold numbers of unrelated individuals? We propose that the unique human capacity to negotiate institutional rules that coordinate social actions was a key driver of this transition. By creating institutions, humans have been able to move from the default 'Hobbesian' rules of the 'game of life', determined by physical/environmental constraints, into self-created rules of social organization where cooperation can be individually advantageous even in large groups of unrelated individuals. Examples include rules of food sharing in hunter-gatherers, rules for the usage of irrigation systems in agriculturalists, property rights and systems for sharing reputation between mediaeval traders. Successful institutions create rules of interaction that are self-enforcing, providing direct benefits both to individuals that follow them, and to individuals that sanction rule breakers. Forming institutions requires shared intentionality, language and other cognitive abilities largely absent in other primates. We explain how cooperative breeding likely selected for these abilities early in the Homo lineage. This allowed anatomically modern humans to create institutions that transformed the self-reliance of our primate ancestors into the division of labour of large-scale human social organization.
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