ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Men's status and reproductive success in 33 nonindustrial societies: Effects of subsistence, marriage system, and reproductive strategy.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 70 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
70 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- A meta-analysis of the association between male dimorphism and fitness outcomes in humans.eLife · 2022Pooled it
- The interpersonal and intrapsychic functions of the pride expression.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Review
- The legacy of privilege: Social inheritance reverses sex differences in reproductive inequality in the spotted hyena.Science advances · 2026Article
- Short-Term and Long-Term Mating Strategies Show Distinct Patterns of Attraction to Dominance and Prestige.Social psychological and personality science · 2026Article
- Human prestige psychology can promote adaptive inequality in social influence.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Testing the Mother's Curse Hypothesis in Human Mitochondrial Genome Evolution.Genome biology and evolution · 2025Article
- Testing the art as adaptation hypothesis through artistic practice and reproductive success in Papua woodcarvers.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Human Reproductive Egalitarianism: A Catalyst for the Evolution of Personality Traits.Clinical neuropsychiatry · 2025Article
- Women's subsistence strategies predict fertility across cultures, but context matters.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Genetic variants underlying human bisexual behavior are reproductively advantageous.Science advances · 2024Article
- Dyadic inter-group cooperation in shotgun hunting activities in a Congo Basin village.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- A gene-culture co-evolutionary perspective on the puzzle of human twinship.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Descent, marriage, and residence practices of a 3,800-year-old pastoral community in Central Eurasia.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Gender disparities in material and educational resources differ by kinship system.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- The interdependence of relational and material wealth inequality in Pemba, Zanzibar.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Toward an evolutionary ecology of (in)equality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Reproductive inequality in humans and other mammals.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Contraception ends the genetic maintenance of human same-sex sexual behavior.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- Contraception ends the genetic maintenance of human same-sex sexual behavior.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2023Article
- Status does not predict stress among Hadza hunter-gatherer men.Scientific reports · 2023Article
10 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Social status motivates much of human behavior. However, status may have been a relatively weak target of selection for much of human evolution if ancestral foragers tended to be more egalitarian. We test the "egalitarianism hypothesis" that status has a significantly smaller effect on reproductive success (RS) in foragers compared with nonforagers. We also test between alternative male reproductive strategies, in particular whether reproductive benefits of status are due to lower offspring mortality (parental investment) or increased fertility (mating effort). We performed a phylogenetic multilevel metaanalysis of 288 statistical associations between measures of male status (physical formidability, hunting ability, material wealth, political influence) and RS (mating success, wife quality, fertility, offspring mortality, and number of surviving offspring) from 46 studies in 33 nonindustrial societies. We found a significant overall effect of status on RS (r = 0.19), though this effect was significantly lower than for nonhuman primates (r = 0.80). There was substantial variation due to marriage system and measure of RS, in particular status associated with offspring mortality only in polygynous societies (r = -0.08), and with wife quality only in monogamous societies (r = 0.15). However, the effects of status on RS did not differ significantly by status measure or subsistence type: foraging, horticulture, pastoralism, and agriculture. These results suggest that traits that facilitate status acquisition were not subject to substantially greater selection with domestication of plants and animals, and are part of reproductive strategies that enhance fertility more than offspring well-being.
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