ArticleEvolutionary human sciences2021
Coevolution of actions, personal norms and beliefs about others in social dilemmas.
Article in Evolutionary human sciences, 2021. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 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
15 citing papers in PubMed.
- Cultural tightness and social cohesion under coevolving beliefs, behaviors, and preferences.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- The cultural evolution of pluralistic ignorance.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Article
- The war of the worldviews.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- The evolution of zero-sum and positive-sum worldviews.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2025Article
- Why people follow rules.Nature human behaviour · 2025Article
- A complex adaptive systems model of labour reciprocity and normative reasoning in swidden agriculture.Royal Society open science · 2025Article
- Cultural tightness and resilience against environmental shocks in nonindustrial societies.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Modelling social norms: an integration of the norm-utility approach with beliefs dynamics.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Human and nonhuman norms: a dimensional framework.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Co-evolution of behaviour and beliefs in social dilemmas: estimating material, social, cognitive and cultural determinants.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Article
- The spread of technological innovations: effects of psychology, culture and policy interventions.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Inequality between identity groups and social unrest.Journal of the Royal Society, Interface · 2022Article
- Authority matters: propaganda and the coevolution of behaviour and attitudes.Evolutionary human sciences · 2022Article
- Economic experiments support Ostrom's polycentric approach to mitigating climate change.Humanities & social sciences communications · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Human decision-making is affected by a diversity of factors including material cost-benefit considerations, normative and cultural influences, learning and conformity with peers and external authorities (e.g. cultural, religious, political, organisational). Also important are dynamically changing personal perceptions of the situation and beliefs about actions and expectations of others as well as psychological phenomena such as cognitive dissonance and social projection. To better understand these processes, I develop a unifying modelling framework describing the joint dynamics of actions and attitudes of individuals and their beliefs about the actions and attitudes of their groupmates. I consider which norms get internalised and which factors control beliefs about others. I predict that the long-term average characteristics of groups are largely determined by a balance between material payoffs and the values promoted by the external authority. Variation around these averages largely reflects variation in individual costs and benefits mediated by individual psychological characteristics. The efforts of an external authority to change the group behaviour in a certain direction can, counter-intuitively, have an opposite effect on individual behaviour. I consider how various factors can affect differences between groups and societies in the tightness/looseness of their social norms. I show that the most important factors are social heterogeneity, societal threat, effects of authority, cultural variation in the degree of collectivism/individualism, the population size and the subsistence style. My results can be useful for achieving a better understanding of human social behaviour and historical and current social processes, and in developing more efficient policies aiming to modify social behaviour.
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.