ArticleEvolutionary human sciences2021
Targeted conspiratorial killing, human self-domestication and the evolution of groupishness.
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 10 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
10 citing papers in PubMed.
- Survival of the wittiest (not friendliest): The art and science behind human linguistic and cognitive evolution.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Hominin Population Structure, Mating Systems, and Intrasexual Competition : Implications for Craniofacial Robusticity and the Self-Domestication Hypothesis.Human nature (Hawthorne, N.Y.) · 2025Article
- Differences in expression of male aggression between wild bonobos and chimpanzees.Current biology : CB · 2024Article
- Cultural evolution: A review of theoretical challenges.Evolutionary human sciences · 2024Review
- Shared reproductive disruption, not neural crest or tameness, explains the domestication syndrome.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Norm violations and punishments across human societies.Evolutionary human sciences · 2023Article
- What made us "hunter-gatherers of words".Frontiers in neuroscience · 2023Article
- Modelling behaviour in intergroup conflicts: a review of microeconomic approaches.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Dominance in humans.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Review
- Celebrating the 150th anniversary of theEvolutionary human sciences · 2021Article
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
Groupishness is a set of tendencies to respond to group members with prosociality and cooperation in ways that transcend apparent self-interest. Its evolution is puzzling because it gives the impression of breaking the ordinary rules of natural selection. Boehm's solution is that moral elements of groupishness originated and evolved as a result of group members becoming efficient executioners of antisocial individuals, and he noted that self-domestication would have proceeded from the same dynamic. Self-domestication is indicated first at ~300,000 years ago and has probably gathered pace ever since, suggesting selection for self-domestication and groupishness for at least 12,000 generations. Here I propose that a specifically human style of violence, targeted conspiratorial killing, contributed importantly to both self-domestication and to promoting groupishness. Targeted conspiratorial killing is unknown in chimpanzees or any other vertebrate, and is significant because it permits coalitions to kill antisocial individuals cheaply. The hypothesis that major elements of groupishness are due to targeted conspiratorial killing helps explain why they are much more elaborated in humans than in other species.
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.