ArticleRoyal Society open science2018
Parasites and politics: why cross-cultural studies must control for relatedness, proximity and covariation.
Article in Royal Society open science, 2018. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers.
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Who cites it
33 citing papers in PubMed.
- Kava consumption and the rise of sociopolitical complexity in Oceania.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Macroevolutionary analysis of polysynthesis shows that language complexity is more likely to evolve in small, isolated populations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Curating global datasets of structural linguistic features for independence.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Pathogen stress heightens sensorimotor dimensions in the human collective semantic space.Communications psychology · 2025Article
- Ecological Threats and Cultural Systems : Epidemics and Natural Disasters Do Not Predict Collectivism.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2024Article
- Political Attitudes and Disease Threat: Regional Pathogen Stress Is Associated With Conservative Ideology Only for Older Individuals.Personality & social psychology bulletin · 2024Article
- Islands are engines of language diversity.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Global musical diversity is largely independent of linguistic and genetic histories.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Investigating environmental effects on phonology using diachronic models.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Salience of infectious diseases did not increase xenophobia during the COVID-19 pandemic.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- Languages with more speakers tend to be harder to (machine-)learn.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Cross-national analyses require additional controls to account for the non-independence of nations.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Why did foraging, horticulture and pastoralism persist after the Neolithic transition? The oasis theory of agricultural intensification.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Supernatural explanations across 114 societies are more common for natural than social phenomena.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- Head and dependent marking and dependency length in possessive noun phrases: a typological study of morphological and syntactic complexity.Linguistics vanguard : multimodal online journal · 2023Article
- Neighbours and relatives: accounting for spatial distribution when testing causal hypotheses in cultural evolution.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- Of Germs and Culture; Parasite Stress as the Origin of Individualism-Collectivism.Evolutionary psychological science · 2023Article
- Language endangerment: Using analytical methods from conservation biology to illuminate loss of linguistic diversity.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2023Review
- The role of the behavioural immune system on covid-19 lockdown attitudes: The relationship with authoritarianism and collectivism.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2023Article
- From Text to Thought: How Analyzing Language Can Advance Psychological Science.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
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No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
A growing number of studies seek to identify predictors of broad-scale patterns in human cultural diversity, but three sources of non-independence in human cultural variables can bias the results of cross-cultural studies. First, related cultures tend to have many traits in common, regardless of whether those traits are functionally linked. Second, societies in geographical proximity will share many aspects of culture, environment and demography. Third, many cultural traits covary, leading to spurious relationships between traits. Here, we demonstrate tractable methods for dealing with all three sources of bias. We use cross-cultural analyses of proposed associations between human cultural traits and parasite load to illustrate the potential problems of failing to correct for these three forms of statistical non-independence. Associations between parasite stress and sociosexuality, authoritarianism, democracy and language diversity are weak or absent once relatedness and proximity are taken into account, and parasite load has no more power to explain variation in traditionalism, religiosity and collectivism than other measures of biodiversity, climate or population size do. Without correction for statistical non-independence and covariation in cross-cultural analyses, we risk misinterpreting associations between culture and environment.
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