ArticleEvolution and human behavior : official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society2018
Optimising human community sizes.
Article in Evolution and human behavior : official journal of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Religious parents receive more alloparental aid in rural Bangladesh.Evolutionary human sciences · 2026Article
- Income and Sex Moderate the Association Between Population Density and Reproduction: A Multilevel Analysis of Life History Strategies Across 23 Nations.Archives of sexual behavior · 2025Article
- The origins and function of musical performance.Frontiers in psychology · 2023Article
- Why did doctrinal religions first appear in the Northern Subtropical Zone?Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Review
- Laughter and its role in the evolution of human social bonding.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Chimpanzees organize their social relationships like humans.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Beyond Dunbar circles: a continuous description of social relationships and resource allocation.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Article
- Managing the stresses of group-living in the transition to village life.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
- An agent-based model of the female rivalry hypothesis for concealed ovulation in humans.Nature human behaviour · 2021Article
- Scaling human sociopolitical complexity.PloS one · 2020Article
- The fractal structure of communities of practice: Implications for business organization.PloS one · 2020Article
- Cognitive resource allocation determines the organization of personal networks.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2018Article
- Primate social group sizes exhibit a regular scaling pattern with natural attractors.Biology letters · 2018Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
We examine community longevity as a function of group size in three historical, small scale agricultural samples. Community sizes of 50, 150 and 500 are disproportionately more common than other sizes; they also have greater longevity. These values mirror the natural layerings in hunter-gatherer societies and contemporary personal networks. In addition, a religious ideology seems to play an important role in allowing larger communities to maintain greater cohesion for longer than a strictly secular ideology does. The differences in optimal community size may reflect the demands of different ecologies, economies and social contexts, but, as yet, we have no explanation as to why these numbers seem to function socially so much more effectively than other values.
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Registered trials
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.