ArticleJournal of the Royal Society, Interface2018
Greater wealth inequality, less polygyny: rethinking the polygyny threshold model.
Article in Journal of the Royal Society, Interface, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 23 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
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.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
23 citing papers in PubMed, 67 citations in OpenAlex.
- Accounting for uncertainty and bias in archaeological and historical evidence on wealth inequality.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- How Do People Maintain Consensual Non-Monogamy? An International Development and Validation of the Multiple Relationships Maintenance Scale.Archives of sexual behavior · 2026Article
- Competition for heritable wealth, not cultural group selection, drives the evolution of monogamy.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- High rates of polygyny do not lock large proportions of men out of the marriage market.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Crusaders, monks and family fortunes: evolutionary models of male homosexuality and related phenomena.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Human Reproductive Egalitarianism: A Catalyst for the Evolution of Personality Traits.Clinical neuropsychiatry · 2025Article
- Construct validity in cross-cultural, developmental research: challenges and strategies for improvement.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Little evidence that nonmonogamous family structures are detrimental to children's well-being in Mpimbwe, Tanzania.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Half a century of quantitative cultural evolution.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Forward and backward modeling of cultural evolutionary processes.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Patrilineal segmentary systems provide a peaceful explanation for the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck.Nature communications · 2024Article
- A gene-culture co-evolutionary perspective on the puzzle of human twinship.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Cross-cousin marriage among Tsimane forager-horticulturalists during demographic transition and market integration.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Reproductive inequality in humans and other mammals.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
- How subcultures emerge.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- Integrating economic and evolutionary approaches to polygynous marriage.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Review
- The uses and abuses of tree thinking in cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Review
- Games and enculturation: A cross-cultural analysis of cooperative goal structures in Austronesian games.PloS one · 2021Article
- The multinomial index: a robust measure of reproductive skew.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
- Navigating cross-cultural research: methodological and ethical considerations.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
34 authors at 20 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Monogamy appears to have become the predominant human mating system with the emergence of highly unequal agricultural populations that replaced relatively egalitarian horticultural populations, challenging the conventional idea-based on the polygyny threshold model-that polygyny should be positively associated with wealth inequality. To address this polygyny paradox, we generalize the standard polygyny threshold model to a mutual mate choice model predicting the fraction of women married polygynously. We then demonstrate two conditions that are jointly sufficient to make monogamy the predominant marriage form, even in highly unequal societies. We assess if these conditions are satisfied using individual-level data from 29 human populations. Our analysis shows that with the shift to stratified agricultural economies: (i) the population frequency of relatively poor individuals increased, increasing wealth inequality, but decreasing the frequency of individuals with sufficient wealth to secure polygynous marriage, and (ii) diminishing marginal fitness returns to additional wives prevent extremely wealthy men from obtaining as many wives as their relative wealth would otherwise predict. These conditions jointly lead to a high population-level frequency of monogamy.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
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.