ArticlePhilosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences2021
The cultural evolution and ecology of institutions.
Article in Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 13 papers.
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Who cites it
13 citing papers in PubMed.
- 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
- 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
- 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
- Modelling the role of environmental circumscription in the evolution of inequality.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Gendered conflict in the human family.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Review
- Market integration, income inequality, and kinship system among the Mosuo of China.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- Religious celibacy brings inclusive fitness benefits.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Integrating economic and evolutionary approaches to polygynous marriage.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Review
- Four levers of reciprocity across human societies: concepts, analysis and predictions.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Review
- Shared cultural ancestry predicts the global diffusion of democracy.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
- 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
- Foundations of cultural evolution.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2021Article
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7 authors.
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Abstract
Human societies are structured by what we refer to as 'institutions', which are socially created and culturally inherited proscriptions on behaviour that define roles and set expectations about social interactions. The study of institutions in several social science fields has provided many important insights that have not been fully appreciated in the evolutionary human sciences. However, such research has often lacked a shared understanding of general processes of change that shape institutional diversity across space and time. We argue that evolutionary theory can provide a useful framework for synthesizing information from different disciplines to address issues such as how and why institutions change over time, how institutional rules co-evolve with other culturally inherited traits, and the role that ecological factors might play in shaping institutional diversity. We argue that we can gain important insights by applying cultural evolutionary thinking to the study of institutions, but that we also need to expand and adapt our approaches to better handle the ways that institutions work, and how they might change over time. In this paper, we illustrate our approach by describing macro-scale empirical comparative analyses that demonstrate how evolutionary theory can be used to generate and test hypotheses about the processes that have shaped some of the major patterns we see in institutional diversity over time and across the world today. We then go on to discuss how we might usefully develop micro-scale models of institutional change by adapting concepts from game theory and agent-based modelling. We end by considering current challenges and areas for future research, and the potential implications for other areas of study and real-world applications. This article is part of the theme issue 'Foundations of cultural evolution'.
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