Human Cultures through the Scientific Lens E-Book

Pascal Boyer

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

This volume brings together a collection of seven articles previously published by the author, with a new introduction reframing the articles in the context of past and present questions in anthropology, psychology and human evolution. It promotes the perspective of ‘integrated’ social science, in which social science questions are addressed in a deliberately eclectic manner, combining results and models from evolutionary biology, experimental psychology, economics, anthropology and history. It thus constitutes a welcome contribution to a gradually emerging approach to social science based on E. O. Wilson’s concept of ‘consilience’.

Human Cultures through the Scientific Lens spans a wide range of topics, from an examination of ritual behaviour, integrating neuro-science, ethology and anthropology to explain why humans engage in ritual actions (both cultural and individual), to the motivation of conflicts between groups. As such, the collection gives readers a comprehensive and accessible introduction to the applications of an evolutionary paradigm in the social sciences.

This volume will be a useful resource for scholars and students in the social sciences (particularly psychology, anthropology, evolutionary biology and the political sciences), as well as a general readership interested in the social sciences.

 

Leseprobe

HUMAN CULTURES THROUGH THE SCIENTIFIC LENS

Human Cultures through the Scientific Lens

Essays in Evolutionary Cognitive Anthropology

Pascal Boyer

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© 2021 Pascal Boyer

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Pascal Boyer, Human Cultures through the Scientific Lens: Essays in Evolutionary Cognitive Anthropology. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2021, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0257

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ISBN Paperback: 9781800642065

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DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0257

Cover photo: Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash at https://unsplash.com/photos/-TQU ERQGUZ8

Cover design by Anna Gatti

Contents

1.

Anthropology, Useful and Scientific: An Introduction

1

Pascal Boyer

2.

Institutions and Human Nature

11

Pascal Boyer

The Naturalness of (Many) Social Institutions: Evolved Cognition as their Foundation

15

with Michael Bang Petersen

3.

Why Ritualized Behavior?

49

Pascal Boyer

Why Ritualized Behavior? Precaution Systems and Action Parsing in Developmental, Pathological and Cultural Rituals

53

with Pierre Liénard

4.

Social Groups and Adapted Minds

113

Pascal Boyer

Safety, Threat, and Stress in Intergroup Relations: A Coalitional Index Model

117

with Rengin Firat & Florian van Leeuwen

5.

How People Think about the Economy

155

Pascal Boyer

Folk-Economic Beliefs: An Evolutionary Cogniti­­ve Model

159

with Michael Bang Petersen

6.

Detecting Mental Disorder

217

Pascal Boyer

Intuitive Expectations and the Detection of Mental Disorder: A Cognitive Background to Folk-Psychiatries

221

Pascal Boyer

7.

The Ideal of Integrated Social Science

253

Pascal Boyer

Modes of Scholarship in the Study of Culture

257

Pascal Boyer

List of Tables and Illustrations

275

Index

279

1. Anthropology, Useful and Scientific: An Introduction

© 2021 Pascal Boyer, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0257.01

The essays gathered in this volume were all intended as contributions to what I would like to call a useful and scientificanthropology, two words that may seem a tad presumptuous and require an explanation.

First, the useful part. The essays address specific questions such as the following:

Why do some social institutions seem ‘natural’ to many people across different cultures?

How do people form their views of the economy?

Why do human beings engage in ritual behaviors, either pathological (in compulsive disorders) or culturally sanctioned (like ceremonies)? What are the common features of these behaviors?

How do people detect that someone has a mental disorder? Does this differ from one culture to another?

What motivates conflict between groups?

Do ethnic conflict and discrimination have an impact on people’s health? If so, how does that happen?

What explains the differences between religions?

Why are some political institutions stable and not others?

These are all questions of some social importance. It is not difficult to see that it would be a Good Thing, so to speak, to make progress in addressing such issues. I do not claim that the essays gathered here are more useful than other attempts in the social sciences, but simply that the main motivation here is indeed to be useful, to provide models and findings that help us move closer to a proper explanation of these phenomena. That is the goal, the ambition, if perhaps not the actuality.

What about ‘scientific’? In my view, the main way for scholarship to be useful, indeed useable, in these domains, is to proceed in a scientific manner. By using this term, I certainly do not mean to claim or imply that the various statements contained here are true. In fact, making such a claim would be quite the unscientific thing to do. The implication is simpler and more modest, meaning that the models proposed can and should be examined in terms of empirical data, and that they may be found to be false or in serious need of revision on the basis of such data.

In all these essays we adopt the perspective of an ‘integrated’ social science, that addresses questions about cultures and societies in a deliberately eclectic manner, combining results and models from evolutionary biology, experimental psychology, economics, anthropology and history (Morin, 2016; Sperber, 1996; Tooby & Cosmides, 1992). This approach is sometimes derided as ‘positivistic’ and ‘reductionistic’, and that is exactly what it is. It is blithely reductionist (explaining what happens at a high level of complexity in terms of the combinations of simpler, lower-level elements) and mostly positivist (if the term simply denotes the scientific aspiration).

Why Science Isn’t and Should Not Be True to Life

To some people, it may seem that this way of describing and explaining social phenomena robs them of much of their substance. The models may be compelling but they miss out the rich texture and detail of actual social interactions. We talk about rituals in general without considering the particular and highly varied social contexts in which they take place; we examine people’s views of economic processes, but we ignore the subtle individual differences in their construction; we consider widespread assumptions about madness, but not how they are modulated in each case… to these objections, the proper reply would be: Yes, YES! We do that, and that is exactly what we should do. Far from being a problem, the exclusion of so much information is precisely the main virtue of this way of proceeding.

The point will seem quite obvious to some and strikingly wrong-headed to others. For some people, doing science consists in discovering ‘what really happens’, beyond error, prejudice and received wisdom. Scientists are seen as people who describe things the way they really are. So it seems that one’s theories should always be ‘true to life.’ That is very misleading.

In some sense, of course, scientific theories are ‘true to life’ because evidence is the only tribunal that judges right and wrong. An embarrassing, unexplained fact carries more weight than a satisfactory, elegant theory, and that is what makes scientific activities so frustrating sometimes.

In another sense, scientific theories are not, cannot be, and should not be ‘true to life.’ Producing a theory does not mean taking into account all possible aspects of the phenomena you describe. On the contrary, it means that you focus on some aspects that can be described in terms of abstract generalizations, assuming, for the sake of simplicity, that all other aspects are ‘equal’. The notion of ‘all else being equal’ seems entirely natural and compelling to some people; and it seems utterly alien to many others. As the Russian writer Alexander Zinoviev put it, the two styles of thinking are diametrically opposed: ‘the scientific principle produces abstractions, the anti-scientific principle destroys them on the grounds that such and such has not been considered. The scientific principle establishes strict concepts, the anti-scientific principle makes them ambiguous on the pretext of thus revealing their true variety’ (Zinoviev, 1979, p. 209).

Why Social Science Is Impossible (Or Nearly So)

Where do we stand, in our understanding of social phenomena? How much do we know? It often seems like we are nowhere near where we should be, given the amount of available information about human cultures and history. Analogies with other sciences are certainly difficult, but it may seem that we are at the same stage as chemistry was, say around the beginning of the nineteenth century. At the time, chemists had at their disposal a vast number of facts about different substances and their interactions, but very little by way of a systematic understanding of these facts. Why would an acid and a base combine to form water and a salt? (For that matter, the distinction between acids and alkali would have been difficult to explain).

One obstacle on the way to social science is, as it turns out, human minds themselves. The problem is that, in a sense, we already have all sorts of ideas about societies, what could be called a ‘folk-sociology’ (Boyer, 2018, pp. 216–237). Folk-sociology consists in a set of partly tacit assumptions, that we all use when trying to describe or explain social facts and processes.

For instance, one major feature of our folk-sociology, found in the most diverse societies, is that we spontaneously construe human groups as agents. We talk about villages or social classes or nations as entities that want this, fear that, make decisions, fail to perceive what is happening, reward people or take revenge against them, are hostile towards other groups, and so on. All these terms suggest that, in some implicit way, we consider that what happens in social groups is very much the same as what happens in a human mind.

Another assumption of folk-sociology is that power is a kind of substance attached to particular individuals, and its operation is analogous to a physical force. This is manifest in such phrases as ‘she has power,’ ‘she lost power,’ ‘his power increased,’ and so on. This is not just a Western or European way of speaking. Such metaphors are familiar from many tribal societies, chiefdoms, and early states. We say that people ‘have’ and ‘exercise’ power. We conceive of someone with power as able to ‘push’ others toward certain behaviors (as a physical force can move objects), we say that people who did not follow the leader are ‘resisting,’ that they are not ‘swayed’, they resent being ‘pushed around’, etc.

These conceptions of social facts and processes are based on loose and misleading conventional metaphors (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). We vaguely perceive that social groups are not literally agents and that power is not literally a force, but it is very difficult to think outside the metaphors. Try to describe political power without ever using notions like ‘pushing’ and ‘resisting’; or try to describe international relations without ever saying that ‘Russia wanted this’ and ‘England realized that…’, and so forth. Indeed, the metaphors are so entrenched that they may seem self-evidently true—which is why some social scientists, in the past, tried to argue that nations really were like agents and political power really was a force.

Now folk-sociology is a real hindrance, when you try to think about cultural phenomena in a scientific manner, because it hides the very problems we should try to solve. Seeing the nation or the ethnic group as agents conceals difficult questions, such as: why do people favor their group against others? Why would people behave as loyal members of an ethnic group, rather than defect to another one? In the same way, seeing power as a force makes it impossible to describe the complicated dynamics, whereby the preferences of some people (the leaders) seem to have effects on the behaviors of others (the followers). The notion of power as force indeed makes it impossible to understand how power relations change: why was the East German communist party so powerful in 1988 and so powerless in 1990?

Can we really discard folk-sociology? It is difficult for two reasons. The first one is that our social understandings are largely implicit. As the old saying goes, it is difficult to reason people out of something they were not reasoned into. The view that power is a force, for instance, is not usually an explicit, conscious representation of what political power consists of. A second, more familiar reason is that our ideas about society are not just a matter of detached consideration. They guide our own social interaction, and what happens in that interaction does matter to us. While abandoning your folk-theories in the domains of physics or biology does not come at much of a price, giving up on some ill-conceived notion of political power or gender roles may be a more delicate affair.

If all this is true, then doing social science in the scientific manner might seem well-nigh impossible. There may be both a natural inclination and some strong incentives not to consider social and cultural processes in scientific terms. On the contrary, there may be powerful reasons to adopt and preserve theories that are not entirely coherent, or do not have much supporting evidence, simply because they fit both our intuitive expectations and our particular projects.

That may explain why the results are decidedly mixed, why we are very much in the same position as chemists before Galton. While we can admire the great insights of luminaries like Montesquieu or Ibn Khaldun, the prospect of a cumulative social science seems to recede almost as fast as we proceed.

Why Cultural Stability Is a Mystery

A standard answer to many questions in social science, such as those listed at the beginning of this introduction, is that people have particular mental representations, e.g., about what rituals to perform, or what the economy is like, or what is morally repugnant behavior, because those notions ‘are in their culture’. So, the fact that you consider, e.g., the economy as a large pie that can be divided in different ways, or a shaman’s rituals as required in order to combat witchcraft, these are notions that ‘are in the culture’ which would explain why people entertain them.

That cannot be a very good explanation, because it is not an explanation at all. To adopt a phrase from physicists, it is not even wrong. It makes little sense to say that most Zulu people like spicy foods, or that Mongols consult shamans because those preferences are in their culture—because what we mean when we say that some notion is ‘in the culture’ is simply that it is common among people in a particular place. So we are in effect saying that many Zulu people like spicy foods because many Zulu people like spicy foods. That is not a good start.

The only way that kind of strange statement could make sense would be if we assumed that ideas and values, representations and preferences, are always transmitted identically from generation to generation. That is, we might be implying that Mongols resort to shamanism because previous Mongols did that too. In this sense, ‘it is in their culture’ would mean ‘they adopted whatever their forebears did’.

That would be almost reasonable. Of course, it would also be largely false. Cultures change as much as they persist. But at least we are now talking about something that is not entirely tautological, and in fact introduces the most important theme in the study of cultures: What is ‘in the culture’ depends on what is transmitted from one individual to another.

That is of course an old idea, but it is only very recently that social scientists took it seriously enough to build formal models of what is now called ‘cultural evolution’. A convenient date of birth for that movement might be the publication of Culture and the Evolutionary Process by Boyd and Richerson (1985). The starting point of the model was that cultural material comes in different packets of information, called memes, transmitted from individual to individual. The notion of memes had originally been proposed by Richard Dawkins (1976), and it then formed the starting point of many attempts to describe cultural material. In this selectionist perspective, trends in cultural evolution, for instance, the persistence of a particular tradition or its downfall, the fact that some ideas can diffuse to large communities or on the contrary remain confined to a few individuals all stems from the relative selective success of different memes. This way of thinking transposed to cultural material the successful models of genetic evolution by random mutation and selective retention.

There was a limitation in these selectionist models, however. Memes were construed as abstract realities that replicate by passing from one mind to another, but there was no explanation of how that happened. Or, people assumed that ‘imitation’ would be the explanation. This was consistent with another one of our folk-sociological assumptions, namely, that human cultures are by default stable. Social scientists for a long time assumed that there was nothing special to explain in the fact that many Venetian and Xhosa customs or ideas were very similar to what the Venetians and the Xhosa of the previous generation had been doing or thinking. In that view, stability is not mysterious, in fact it is invisible! And only change requires a special explanation.

But it is stability that is mysterious. The Xhosa views about marriage or agriculture are conveyed through a vast number of communicative interactions between individuals. But human communication is a place of high entropy—it resembles a game of Chinese Whispers more than serial photocopying. What you get at the end is very different from the beginning, not just because of distortion, but mostly because of reconstruction (Morin, 2016). Distortion does happen when you make copies of copies of copies… but in Chinese Whispers, each individual in the chain is trying to construct something that would make sense, given what they heard. Human communication, even about ‘cultural’ matters like marriage or agriculture, is even more entropic, as people are in many cases not even trying to reproduce what they heard.

The ‘epidemiology of culture’ promoted by Dan Sperber and others (and illustrated in several of the essays in this volume) assumed that these facts about human communication were crucial for understanding the apparent stability of some aspects of human cultures, or the fact that different individuals across space and time seem to have roughly similar mental representations (Sperber, 1985). Human communication has to be reconstructive, because much of what is conveyed is not said and need not be said. That is true of the simplest everyday conversations, as studies in linguistic pragmatics demonstrate (Grice, 1991). Sperber and others argued that this fact was essential to understanding human cultures. What makes them stable or changing is not the ‘memes’, the explicit statements and gestures, but the way these are completed, in the minds of the receivers, with all sorts of additional content (Sperber, 1985).

So, where does stability come from? The main factor here is not imitation or repetition, but similarities in the ‘additional content’ I just mentioned. That is where the view of communication inherited from pragmatics was combined with a view of the human mind promoted by cognitive psychology (Tooby & Cosmides, 2005). Human mental capacities were no longer described as a unified, multi-purpose computer that would absorb what the environment threw at it, but as a series of learning systems shaped by natural selection, and specialized in handling recurrent challenges of ancestral environments—how to find nutrition and avoid predators, for sure, but how to find the best possible mate, how to recruit social support, how to defend one’s group against enemies, and many more, as described by what is now called evolutionary psychology (Buss, 2016).

Why Social Science Is Possible after All: A Field Without a Name

I of course assume that, against the odds, we can build scientific accounts and that we are in fact gaining ground in our models of human cultures.

In this volume, my co-authors and I consider what could be described as questions of political science (What makes institutions stable, and compelling?), cultural anthropology (Why perform rituals? How do people detect mental illness?), sociology (How does ethnicity impact health?) and economics (Do people’s view of the economy match their economic behavior?).

The list may seem a tad disparate, but it is not haphazard. These questions all spring from a common way of seeing human cultures, as the product of the interaction of evolved human capacities and preferences with variable environments. We take seriously the fact that natural selection provides not just an explanation for what we know of human nature, but also a source of rich hypotheses for what is still to be discovered. We also take as self-evident that economic models and game theory provide rich models for interactions between agents, that experimental psychology or neuroscience are the best sources for understanding human minds, and that the variation in human norms and concepts provides a wonderful opportunity to describe the envelope of human nature.

Is there a discipline that studies all that? Not if the term ‘discipline’ denotes traditional academic divisions. But those matter less and less to actual scholarly projects. Our field-without-a-name is making great progress, and it will prove both scientific and useful.

References

Boyd, R., & Richerson, P. J. (1985). Culture and the Evolutionary Process. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Boyer, P. (2018). Minds Make Societies. How Cognition Explains the World Humans Create. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

Buss, D. M. (Ed.) (2016). The Handbook of Evolutionary Psychology (Second Edition) (Vol. I and II). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Grice, H. P. (1991). Logic and conversation. In H. P. Grice (Ed.), Studies in the Way of Words (pp. 1–143). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Morin, O. (2016). How Traditions Live and Die. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sperber, D. (1985). Anthropology and Psychology: Towards an Epidemiology of Representations. Man, 20, 73–89.

——. (1996). Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. Oxford: Blackwell.

Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1992). The psychological foundations of culture. In J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & et al. (Eds.), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. (pp. 19–136). New York: Oxford University Press.

——. (Eds.). (2005). Conceptual Foundations of Evolutionary Psychology. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons Inc.

Zinoviev, A. (1979). The Yawning Heights [translated by Clough, G.]. London: Random House.

2. Institutions and Human Nature

© 2021 Pascal Boyer, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0257.02

Introductory Note

One of the most enduring and most damaging assumptions in the social sciences is the belief that it makes sense to talk about nature and culture, or to part the ‘innate’ from the ‘acquired’ in describing human behavior. Almost as misguided is the recommendation that we should describe behavior as some combination or mixture of these elements—an insipid counsel for moderation that only results in a stubborn incuriosity about what is being ‘mixed’ and how (Pinker, 2002).

Against all this, many biologists, anthropologists and psychologists have, for decades, tried to illustrate how these oppositions dissolve, when we consider human capacities and preferences from an evolutionary standpoint (Ridley, 2003; Tooby & Cosmides, 2010). It is part of mankind’s evolved nature that we can acquire from our conspecifics vast amounts of information that constitute our ecological niche (Tooby & DeVore, 1987). This is possible because genetic selection fashioned a whole suite of learning mechanisms that orient the growing mind’s attention to specific cues in the environment, and govern that mind’s inferences. That is how we can acquire detailed and valuable information about, e.g., the physical relations between solid objects, the invisible beliefs and intentions that explain agents’ behaviors, the nature of the social bonds between people around us, the syntax of the local language, the best ways to extract resources from the natural world or to establish cooperation and garner social support. All this requires extensive learning, which requires extensively prepared systems—for a survey, see Boyer (2018, pp. 1–30) and Tooby & Cosmides (1992).

How does this relate to the study of institutions? To be more specific, Michael Petersen and I were trying to address the very general question, why do people adopt some institutions as quite ‘natural’, in the familiar sense, while others are much less compelling? Why is marriage apparently so self-evident, that in most cultures throughout history, no-one needed an explanation for it? Why would the rules of a deliberative democracy be a much more fragile construction?

We can describe institutions as the ‘rules of the game’ in complex social interaction (North, 1990). These rules can be very different, from time to time and place to place. From that diversity, many people would conclude that genetic evolution by natural selection is irrelevant. But historical or cultural differences are, just like commonalities, an outcome of our evolved dispositions (Sperber & Hirschfeld, 2004). That is what Michael Petersen and I tried to illustrate in this article, using the contrasted cases of marriage institutions, criminal justice, and commons management as our examples. These display vast cultural and historical differences, and in fact some institutions are only found in some human societies. But in these different cases and, we would argue, many more besides these, we can see highly intuitive specific expectations at play, which make some parts of the local, historically specific institutional arrangements very easy to acquire, which in turn makes it relatively easy for people to coordinate their behaviors around common rules. The intuitive expectations are shaped by evolved learning systems, and in turn they shape the various institutions.

An important consequence of this model is that explanations of institutions are, by necessity, domain-specific. For instance, cultural rules about marriage are strongly constrained by human intuitions about mating, about the ways humans combine sexual access, care for their offspring and economic cooperation. By contrast, judicial rules are influenced by our moral intuitions and expectations concerning cooperation. So, to explain two different domains of institutions, we need to investigate two separate mental systems, each of which has its own domain of application, its computational rules, and its associated emotions.

That is why general models or theories of institutions are, in our view, incomplete. True, political scientists and economists have put forward important models of, e.g., the conditions under which there is demand for and supply of institutional rules, especially in complex modern societies—in the article we discuss some of these, especially from the neo-institutional economics literature. But institutions are not just systems of rules, they are also systems of rules mentally represented by individuals—in fact, in many cases they consist in individual mental representations about the mental representations of other individuals (Heintz, 2007). That is why, at some point in our explanations, we must consider the role of evolved domain-specific intuitions, which means that we leave aside a general theory of institutions and produce theories of particular kinds of institutions.

References

Boyer, P. (2018). Missing links: The psychology and epidemiology of shamanistic beliefs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 41, e71. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0140525X17002023

Heintz, C. (2007). Institutions as Mechanisms of Cultural Evolution: Prospects of the Epidemiological Approach. Biological Theory, 2, 244–249. https://doi.org/10.1162/biot.2007.2.3.244

North, D. C. (1990). Institutions, institutional change, and economic performance. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press.

Pinker, S. (2002). The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. New York: Viking.

Ridley, M. (2003). Nature via Nurture. Genes, Experience and What Makes Us Human. New York: Harper Collins.

Sperber, D., & Hirschfeld, L. A. (2004). The cognitive foundations of cultural stability and diversity. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8, 40–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2003.11.002

Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1992). The Psychological Foundations of Culture. In J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, et al. (Eds.), The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture. (pp. 19–136). New York: Oxford University Press.

——. (2010). Groups in Mind: The Coalitional Roots of War and Morality. In H. Høgh-Olesen (Ed.), Human Morality & Sociality: Evolutionary & Comparative Perspectives (pp. 191–234). New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

Tooby, J., & DeVore, I. (1987). The Reconstruction of Hominid Behavioral Evolution through Strategic Modeling. In W. Kinzey (Ed.), Primate Models of Hominid Behavior (pp. 183–237). New York: SUNY Press.

The Naturalness of (Many) Social Institutions: Evolved Cognition as their Foundation1

with Michael Bang Petersen

© 2021 Michael Bang Petersen, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0257.03

Abstract: Most standard social science accounts only offer limited explanations ofinstitutional design, i.e., why institutions have common features observed in many different human groups. Here, we suggest that these features are best explained as the outcome of evolved human cognition, in such domains as mating, moral judgment and social exchange. As empirical illustrations, we show how this evolved psychology makes marriage systems, legal norms and commons management systems intuitively obvious and compelling, thereby ensuring their occurrence and cultural stability. We extend this to propose under what conditions institutions can become ‘natural’, compelling and legitimate, and outline probable paths for institutional change given human cognitive dispositions. Explaining institutions in terms of these exogenous factors also suggests that a general theory of institutions as such is neither necessary nor in fact possible. What are required are domain-specific accounts of institutional design in different domains of evolved cognition.

1. Introduction

General accounts of social institutions should provide plausible and testable answers to questions of institutional design, such as, why do social institutions have the specific features that we observe in human societies? Why do we observe common institutional features in otherwise very different cultural environments? Or, why do some institutions seem natural and compelling to participants, while others are considered alien or coercive? Here, we develop the view that present institutional theories do not properly address such design questions, and that this can be remedied only by taking into account what we call the ‘naturalness’ of institutions, their connection to human expectations and preferences that result from evolution by natural selection. This perspective may help us understand commonalities across cultures, but also why some institutions are more successful and compelling than others and why they change in particular directions.

To some extent, this suggestion echoes a defining feature of the neo-institutional approach. From the beginning, neo-institutionalism has been oriented towards developing realistic models of the actors, countering the Homoeconomicus model inherent in older institutional accounts and emphasizing thecognitive limits of human decision makers (Brousseau & Glachant, 2008). From this perspective, important lines of inquiry have been developed with regards to, first, how institutions carry a range of unintended consequences given the cognitive limits of their designers, and, second, how a function of institutions is to counter such limits (North, 1990). At the same time, however, this perspective of bounded rationality provides only a partial description of human cognition. While one line of research within the cognitive sciences has been preoccupied with the biased and fallible nature of human cognition, a complementary line of research has developed the view that human cognition is in fact ‘better than rational’ (Cosmides & Tooby, 1994).

Evolutionary psychologists have argued that human cognition includes a multitude of domain-specific cognitive programs, each optimally geared (within evolutionary constraints) to solve particular problems in the course of human evolutionary history (Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992). The inferential power of these specialized programs comes from their content-rich nature. That is, they are loaded with inbuilt assumptions about their domain. Environments that fit these inbuilt assumptions appear intuitive and readily understandable.

Our aim is to outline the argument that institutions are effective not despite human cognition but, in part, because of human cognition. Essentially,we argue that the content-rich nature of evolved intuitions provides a foundation which can be and is often used in the design of many social institutions. Institutions that fit these intuitions, we propose, develop more easily, require less effort to conform to, and are more culturally stable.

While evolutionary psychology is increasingly incorporated into social theory (Alford & Hibbing, 2004; Hodgson, 1999; McDermott, 2006; Petersen, 2010), and some economists have been keen to integrate an evolutionary logic into their models (Dopfer, 2005; Enright, 1984), many social scientists may be unfamiliar with the approach. By way of developing our account, we therefore present a series of illustrations of how our knowledge of human evolution and cognition provides the tools for a causal, naturalistic understanding of social institutions such as marriage rules and norms, legal systems and social exchange mechanisms. In each instance, our point of departure will be the existence of specific cross-cultural features in the design of these institutions and how these can be seen as the institutionalization of evolved intuitions. From this, we show how these insights can inform the study of institutions, the naturalness of (many) social institutions and develop a range of novel predictions on how institutions develop and change.

2. Explaining Common Features

We focus here on named social institutions, that is, sets of norms and rules in which all culturally competent members of a group have explicit, accessible mental representations. For instance, football in England, marriage in the USA, potlatch among the Tlingit or meeting for Quakers are social institutions of thekind we consider here. The important point here is that people have some notion that, for example, there is such a thing as potlatch in their social environment and they have some notion of how observed behaviors can be seen as exemplars of these abstract notions, or violations of their rules (Searle, 1995). These named bundles of concepts, norms and behaviors are what we call ‘institutions’ in the rest of this article (Ostrom, 2005). This is only a subset of ‘institutions’ in the neo-institutional sense, some of which remain implicit, such as, for example, a sense of fairness or simple habits.

Institutional models generally emphasize the contribution of both formal and informal aspects of such institutions, the former including laws, contracts, administrative rules and procedures, while the latter include implicit norms and routines. Here, we want to explore the cognitive processes that underpin both aspects of institutions. An institution such as ‘marriage’ in the USA combines legal norms and emotional preferences, contracts and moral intuitions; in short, both formal and informal aspects. The question for us is, what makes certain ‘packages’ of informal and formal norms natural and compelling to participants?

In many domains, fairly similar institutions can be found in diverse cultural environments. For instance, despite obvious differences, many human groups know of interaction norms that (seemingly) correspond to what an English speaker would call ‘marriage’ (we will discuss, presently, whether that similarity is an illusion). An interesting fact is that such diverse institutions share not just very general properties, for example, conditions and limits of sexual relationships and parenting, but also many other features, for example, the association between long-term sexual intimacy and economic solidarity, the fact that the union is in principle exclusive, the fact that its inception requires public ceremonies, etc. These are common features, most of which may not be universal, but all of which are so widespread that this recurrence requires an explanation.

In the social sciences, different frameworks suggest very different ways of considering institutions and their common features. For instance, a culturalist account is the default position of much anthropological reflection on institutions. In this view, the latter are the way they are because they are congruent with the particular concepts, values, norms, etc. widespread in a particular place (Gudeman, 1986). A recurrent problem of anthropological culturalism is, of course, the presence of recurrent features of social institutions, which in a purely localist framework would have to constitute massively improbable coincidences. This is true for marriage but also for the emergence of similar patterns in, for example, commons management, sports or political structures. To a large extent, classical functionalist accounts are fraught with similar problems. They require that most institutions emerge as solutions to particular classes of problems or situations, and survive to the extent that they fulfill that role in congruence with other institutions. However, again, this has proved insufficient to account for the recurrence of particular institutions (e.g., raising children in families) compared with other, possibly efficient alternatives (e.g., raising children in kibbutz-like communities) (Merton, 1996).

A more promising account of institutions appeared in economics with the development of neo-institutional models. These extended the notion of institution to encompass both formal and informal, tacit or explicit ‘rules of the game’ that constrain interaction between economic agents (North, 1990). These rules decrease transaction costs and information costs in particular. Within the neo-institutional tradition, there are different accounts of how institutions are created. Since there is not the space to review such models in detail, for such surveys, see Knight and Sened (1995), North (2005) and Brousseau and Glachant (2008). Briefly, conventional accounts assume that institutions emerge out of the recurrent features of repeated economic interactions—they are simply regularities turned into rules (Sugden, 1986). Competitive accounts suggest that institutions develop out of original, small-scale norms by conferring competitive advantages to newcomers who participate in the new arrangement (Greif, 2006). Finally, bargaining models emphasize power asymmetries between parties in the creation or modifications of institutions (Knight, 1995). However, none of these accounts point to easy, natural answers to questions of design. Whether specific institutions are shaped by bargaining or convention is not sufficient to account for highly specific features, such as, for example, the link between intention and responsibility in the law, or the connection between economic sharing and sex in marriage norms.

Here, we present a complement to neo-institutional accounts. Institutions comprise rules or norms that most agents obey, expect most others to obey and expect most others to expect them to obey (Bicchieri, 2006). But, for a rule or a norm to become an institution, it must be widely distributed in the minds of the members in a group (Sperber, 1996). In order to explain how institutions are developed and changed, we therefore need to understand how people adopt, modify and transmit rules and norms (Heintz, 2007). Most importantly, we need to understand which types of rules and norms are particularly likely to be transmitted and adopted without much modification, while others require significant effort, skill and special knowledge.

This leads to our main contention, that institutions are best understood against the background of a set of human psychological dispositions that influence the effort needed to adopt and accept certain social arrangements. To introduce this cognitive account of institutions, we illustrate how our evolved psychology makes an impact on the developments of common features in three different domains of institutional design.

3. Illustration (I). Marriage Norms and Mating Strategies

Institutional Framework

In most societies, there is a distinction between occasional or informal sexual encounters and arrangements (which may be approved, tolerated, frowned upon, prohibited, etc.) and more stable and formalized unions. The initiation of the latter kind of union is generally, at least in principle, marked by some public event. There are shared norms about what each party should expect from the other, given such ceremonies, and about how they should behave towards third parties. Finally, sanctions are associated with the violation of these norms. Why is all this so common?

A standard, and plausible initial answer would be that such norms reduce uncertainty in social interaction, a general feature of social institutions. Marriage norms and wedding ceremonies certainly have that effect, in several ways. First, marriage between two individuals conveys to third parties that the individuals concerned have rights in each other that (mutatis mutandis the local norms) are not available to other members of the group. There is, for example, a certain amount of resources or help that a husband may expect from a wife or vice versa, or a woman from her in-laws, but not from others. Second, marriage conveys to third parties that the individuals concerned have (again, with local variations) withdrawn from the pool of potential mates. The fact that there is a long-term stable union between the partners modifies third parties’ mating strategies and preferences towards either one of the partners. Ceremonies do not just signal this to a large number of people, but also inform them all at the same time in the same way. Third, marriage conveys to each party that the other is (at least overtly) committed to fulfilling their obligations as per the local norms. Regardless of intentions, the public commitment signal creates expectations against which either party can measure behaviors.

In other words, the most important effects of weddings seem to consist in signaling. In all human societies, weddings are of interest and great concern to outsiders, which is why for instance the ceremonies are often quite literally very noisy affairs (van Gennep, 1909). Internal signals between the married parties are equally important. The potential benefits of an efficient marriage are in part public goods, and in many cases cannot be achieved without sacrifices, given the spouses’ divergent preferences (E. Posner, 2000). So marriage requires honest, hard-to-fake signals of commitment. These are provided in many societies by costly conditions for marriage, for example, the obligation for brides to leave their kin groups, for grooms to provide bride wealth, or to show adequate means to support a family, etc. Such conditions serve (in part) as signals, which may explain why, when they are relaxed as happened in many Western societies, they are replaced with informal signals such as occasional gifts (E. Posner, 2000). The occurrence of informal, ‘spontaneous’ signals varies inversely with the precision of the group-wide representation of marriage roles.

All this is fine, but falls short of a satisfactory answer to questions of design. Coordination and uncertainty-reduction effects do not explain why marriage is universally about two parties, so that polygamy is a series of two-party contracts, not a group arrangement; why polygyny is common and polyandry exceedingly rare; why a single institution binds sexual, economic and offspring-related norms in most societies; why divorce is often available but fixed-term marriage is generally not; and other such common features.

Evolutionary Background

The institutions may make more sense in the context of specific preferences and competences that arise from human evolution. Obviously, natural selection results in particular mating preferences and processes in each species, and ours can be no exception (Symons, 1979). It would be surprising if human competences and preferences in this domain had no influence on the design of marriage. Indeed, human reproduction and parenting display expected features given the specific history of our primate lineage (Van Schaik & Van Hooff, 1983).

As in most other mammals, there is in humans a large asymmetry of reproductive costs between human males and females. The latter’s costs include a long gestation, an even longer nurturing period, with their associated energy and opportunity costs, as compared with the lesser cost incurred by males. This, as in comparable species, means that sexual selection has been important in favoring distinct behaviors and preferences in males and females. Females need to be much choosier than males in mate selection. Also, females should prefer males with demonstrable capacity and willingness to nurture their offspring. Differences between male and female preferences result in an equilibrium that includes relatively long-term paternal investment in children’s nurturing, conditional on fathers’ certainty that the children are their own biological offspring, as well as a certain but limited amount of philandering and ‘mate poaching’ in both sexes.

These evolutionary factors predict a whole variety of human behaviors which are actually observed in most human societies, such as: the general disposition towards long-term paternal investment; sexual differences in attractiveness criteria (Buss, 1989); differences between criteria for long- and short-term mates (Kaplan & Gangestad, 2005); the ways in which attractiveness is turned off by childhood cohabitation and other cues, leading to incest avoidance (Lieberman, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2003); the specific triggers of and gender differences in sexual and romanticjealousy (Buss, 2000); mechanisms of sexual coercion and attempts by men to control women’s sexuality and increase paternal certainty (Wilson & Daly, 1998); the general pattern of serial exclusive monogamy (and polygyny) observed in human societies (Van Schaik & Van Hooff, 1983); the male tendency to reject step-children (Anderson, Kaplan, Lam, & Lancaster, 1999; Anderson, Kaplan, & Lancaster, 1999; Daly & Wilson, 1988); the influence of male presence/absence on young women’s choices of reproductive strategies (Ellis, 1993); and many other behaviors.

Naturally, most computations required by such behaviors are largely unconscious — only their results are available to conscious inspection. To cite but one example, it seems that women’s choice of early sexual activity and early pregnancy are directly affected by paternal presence during a critical period in early childhood (Ellis et al., 2003). This can be explained as learning from the environment which reproductive strategy is most appropriate, given low paternal investment in offspring (Quinlan, 2003). Obviously, young women never represent reproductive choices as a search for optimal fitness. They are responding to such proxies as the attractiveness of particular mates or a desire for children, and other here-and-now preferences for particular kinds of behaviors, all of which are the outcome of non-conscious cognitive processes.

An Integrated Perspective

An important point here is that human preferences and behaviors in the mating domain include the expectation of stable long-term unions between men and women that associate privileged or exclusive sexual access with economic solidarity. Note that this is largely intuitive, that is, most humans hold this expectation without necessarily having the explicit model or principles that would explain it. Also, this expectation is of course more abstract than the norms for such long-term unions in particular societies, which can vary in many respects such as number of people involved (polygyny versus monogamy), exclusiveness (e.g., societies with sanctioned ‘visiting’ lovers), required paternal investment in offspring (from full responsibility to occasional visits) and, most important, filiation and inheritance rules.

All this suggests that human beings are equipped with an evolved, domain-specific learning system that is prepared for and attentive to information about the particular ways in which marriage unions are locally defined and organized. In this perspective, the transmission of culturally specific information about marriage norms ‘free-rides’ on information supplied by our intuitive expectations. That is, people easily acquire their local marriage norms because the assumptions (e.g., that the union is heterosexual, that it is about long-term mating, that it associates sexual access with resource sharing, etc.) are among the evolved cognitive equipment of the species.

This would explain why many aspects of marriage norms are not the object of explicit, deliberate transmission, and seem to ‘go without saying’ while others are the object of explicit norms. For instance, the assumption that marriage binds a man and a woman is intuitive enough that it is not actually specified in most cultures. By contrast, the permissible number of simultaneous unions, or the precise manner in which they can be broken up, are matters of explicitly transmitted information. The expectations that married people will contribute to each other’s welfare, or that an officially declared union must be officially dissolved, do not have to be made explicit. In this perspective, the social institution seems to consist in particular parameter settings of a marriage template that is spontaneously created by normally developing minds.

4. Illustration (II). Criminal Law and Moral Intuitions

Institutions

The emergence of ‘the law’ as a separate domain of norms and behaviors, distinct from other social norms, is confined to large polities with literacy (Goody, 1986; Maine, 1963). However, most human groups do have explicit norms for conflict resolution and the punishment of wrongs, even if these are not defined as different from ordinary, non-legal decision making (Hoebel, 1964). From these norms and procedures to the literate, codified legal systems of large states, there is a continuum of social complexification, along which some central aspects of legal norms are preserved. Legal systems all modify personal, face-to-face conflict resolution on the basis of norms that are: (a) explicit; (b) (at least partly) de-contextualized (e.g., construed as the right way to sanction theft, rather than this particular act of theft); (c) (at least partly) impersonal, as they in principle apply to whole classes of agents or even to all possible agents; and (d) therefore more predictable than informal ones.

Why these common features? One possible explanation is that legal institutions are just economically efficient sets of conventions. Richard Posner, for instance, considers that standard economic models of utility maximization explain most features of legal systems (R. A. Posner, 1981). Economic rationality would account for differences between the custom-bound legal systems of small-scale traditional societies, and the legal codes of large-scale industrial polities. For instance, the former generally maintain strict (no-fault) liability, so that one (or one’s kin group) is responsible for whatever damage one has caused, whether or not one is guilty of a wrong or of negligence. This, as Richard Posner argues, makes sense in economic systems where the cost of information is particularly high, so that long inquiries into circumstances and intentions would be problematic. In the same way, the fact that litigants are generally asked to pay for arbitrage, in other words to hire a judge, makes sense as there is no institution for the public provision of magistrates (R. A. Posner, 1981).

Economic efficiency can certainly account for specific differences between the legal norms of various places, but it seems insufficient to explain the common features of these systems and the ways in which people generally find them compelling (Cosmides & Tooby, 2006). This is particularly clear in the domain of criminal justice, where apparently obvious features of the institutions, e.g., tacit assumptions about the relative severity of different crimes, only make sense against the background of cooperation in ancestral conditions. The naturalness of (many) social institutions arrangements are based on complex intuitive assumptions about behavior, intentions and fairness.

Relevant Cognitive Systems

In the last 20 years, convergent findings in developmental psychology, behavioral economics and cross-cultural psychology have suggested that human beings in very different groups evaluate the moral valence of actions on the basis of largely tacit, emotion-laden common intuitions (Haidt, 2007). Intuitive morality is independent from (and only partly affected by) explicit, culturally specific understandings of and teachings about right and wrong (Greene, 2005). Intuitive morality also underpins a sense of fairness that is quite distinct from economic rationality (McCabe & Smith, 2001). Rather than survey these models and findings, we will only mention those points directly relevant to the issue of criminal behavior and appropriate punishment.

Human minds in a variety of cultural environments develop the following specific intuitive processes. First, there is a domain of moral principles and norms, distinct from other evaluative dimensions of action. Indeed, even preschool children have definite intuitions about the difference between moral rules and mere social conventions (Elliot Turiel, 1994). Second, the judgment that a behavior is permissible, commendable or wrong occurs as a fast, automatic consequence of representing the specific action and context. These intuitions may then be explicated, nuanced or (more rarely) reversed by explicit reasoning, but the latter is quite literally an afterthought — deliberate, slow and often produced in order to justify a pre-existing intuition. Third, intuitive moral appraisals are generally accompanied by congruent emotions. Emotional appraisal is part of the processes leading to moral evaluation, which is why experimental manipulations of the emotion can trigger significant changes in moral judgment (Haidt, 2001). All this is particularly visible in young children’s moral development. In contrast to the classical, Kantian picture of children gradually building moral understandings by acquiring more complex modes of reasoning (Kohlberg, 1981), experimental evidence suggests that moral development consists in the calibration of prior intuitions (E. Turiel, 2002).

Experimental evidence also shows that people are intuitively convinced that wrong behaviors vary in seriousness — that much is assumed by young children even for completely novel behaviors (E. Turiel, 2002). Another common intuition is that the punishment should fit the crime, as it were — such that a schedule of graded punishments is required (Nichols & Knobe, 2008). Again, these thoughts are not entertained as the result of deliberate reasoning on moral matters, but as the intuitions that start the process of moral reasoning.

Another important aspect of moral intuitions is a motivation to punish norm violators, even in third parties who are not harmed by the transgression. This preference is not based on learning from trial and error, since the potential consequences of either punitive or non-punitive strategies are manifest only in the long run. Such punitive attitudes are universal in human groups and virtually non-existent in other animals. There are various interpretations for this evolutionary novelty. Punitive sentiments may have helped recruitment to collective action (Yamagishi, 1992). They may also signal cooperative attitudes, as those who punish transgressors are signaling their attachment to local norms and their willingness to incur costs in their defense (Fessler, 2001), which would explain why people tend to be more punitive when observed by others (Robinson, Kurzban, & Jones, 2007). Finally, punitive attitudes may be an attempt to eliminate thefitness advantage enjoyed by free-riders (Price, Cosmides, & Tooby, 2002) or recalibrate their motivations (Petersen, Sell, Tooby, & Cosmides, 2010). What is certain is that the motivation for third-party punishment is general in human groups, and strong enough to override the cost involved.

An Integrated Perspective

In the same way as for marriage, evolved psychological capacities and processes constrain legal norms. They provide a set of understandings that need not be explicitly transmitted as a condition for participation, and therefore make institutions ‘learnable’ to the extent that they are congruent to intuitive understandings (Cosmides & Tooby, 2006). Legal institutions do not require that one learn concepts of right and wrong, the need for appropriate sanctions, or that one acquire the motivation for third-party punishment. Also, the ways in which legal institutions publicize decision making seems to derive from moral intuitions. As we noted, people have definite intuitions about the role of reputation in cooperation. It may be no surprise that legal institutions turn reasoning and decision making, ordinarily private mental events, into publicly scrutable processes. Courts work in the open, laws are inscribed in stone or in books, and penalties are made visible, for instance, by using stigma as a salient form of punishment (Kurzban & Leary, 2001; E. A. Posner, 2007). All these aspects of the law seem self-evident to most practitioners, as indeed they should be if they are based on common pre-existing intuitions.

In return, institutions do modify social interactions in the legal domain. Obviously, the existence of public representations of norms and processes make punishment more predictable and the domain of lawful behavior more easily delineated, which translates as an advantage in transaction costs (R. A. Posner, 1981). But the effects may be even deeper, as most people tend to reify or essentialize the law as independent from actual people’s decisions and the workings of their minds. To the extent that the motivations for particular judgments seem both stable and impersonal, they reinforce this tacit form of legal idealism, a notion that laws are not made but discovered, which itself may make them more compelling.

5. Illustration (III). Commons and Exchange Intuitions

The cognitive framework may also make sense of some common features of particular economic institutions. Consider, for instance, Elinor Ostrom’s description of the principles that allow efficient management of common-pool resources such as fisheries, water distribution, etc., in which a resource must be pooled and might be depleted by opportunistic unregulated use (Ostrom, 1990). According to Ostrom, the following principles are necessary, though not sufficient, to preserve the semi-formal institutions that manage commons: (1) some rules must clearly define the set of agents authorized to use the commons and the conditions for entry; (2) the rules must be adapted to the specific nature of the resource; (3) the rules must be designed by the users; (4) rule observance must be monitored by the users or agents accountable to the users; and (5) rule violation must be sanctioned by graded punishment (Ostrom, 1990).

Why are commons institutions the way they are, and why these recurrent features? An institutional account does not directly address them, as it is focused on different issues, both theoretical (showing how efficient commons-management systems emerge despite collective action problems) and pragmatic (deriving recommendations for efficient commons management). All the rules mentioned above require a complex background of psychological processes and preferences. For one thing, commons management implies definite judgments about distributive justice, about which divisions of resources count as acceptable, given different agents’ contributions or needs (Fehr, Schmidt, Kolm, & Ythier, 2006). Psychologists have shown that such judgments are mostly based on early developed intuitions (Enright, 1984). Young children in very diverse cultures use similar principles of distributive justice, combining a principle of equality (equal shares as the best distribution) with context-based intuitions about merit and need (Sigelman & Waitzman, 1991). Obviously, these early judgments are then calibrated during development as a function of local forms of exchange. But the underlying principles subsist. They result in specific fairness intuitions that cannot be explained in terms of standard rational choice models (Fehr et al., 2006).

The cognitive mechanisms required for commons management also include the capacity and motivation to identify violators of agreed norms. Experimental findings suggest that people are specifically sensitive to cheating (taking benefits without paying costs in a social contract) and quickly identify which behaviors constitute cheating. The underlying cognitive system is domain specific, in the sense that social contract violations are not processed in the same way as violations of social norms in general, or exceptions to other kinds of rules (Cosmides & Tooby, 2005).

As Ostrom and others have demonstrated, efficient use of commons requires a whole lot of specific ‘tools’ (institutions in the neo-institutional framework) such as rules, norms and models to overcome collective action problems. However, these tools need not be provided by the institutions themselves. To a large extent, norms and rules ‘free-ride’ on competencies and motivations for fair exchange that are part of our evolved cognitive equipment.

6. What Are Evolved Domain-Specific Systems?

Evolved Systems as Specialized Learning and Decision Mechanisms

The perspective developed in relation to these three examples highlights how institutional designs are directly facilitated by the structure of human cognition. In this way, they complement the focus of previous accounts of the interplay between cognition and institutions. In the extant literature, the focus has been on the general cognitive limitations of human cognition and how the latter affect the workings of institutions. One strand of argument has been preoccupied with how the fallibility of institutional designs can be traced back to the fallibility of the cognitive capabilities of their designers (Pierson, 2004). Another strand of research has focused on how institutions can buffer the limits of human cognition (Knight & North, 1997). Hence, institutions — refined through trial and error — provide external constraints on behavior which simplify individual choice and guide it toward rational outcomes. A third strand of research has focused less on the limits of fixed cognitive processes but rather argued for the plasticity of cognitive processes and how they are molded by the institutional environment of the individual (Dequech, 2006). While these avenues toward integrating insights on human cognition and institutions are highly important, they are based on an incomplete description of the current state of knowledge in cognitive science.

In our view, the content (and not just the limits) of a variety of special and species-typical cognitive systems, as observed by evolutionary anthropologists and psychologists, is relevant to issues of institutional design and maintenance. As we noted above, human beings have an intuitive mating psychology that includes attractiveness judgments, relationship maintenance and reproductive strategies (Buss, 1989; Symons, 1979). They have specialized social exchange mechanisms for cheater- and cooperator-detection (Cosmides & Tooby, 2005) and a highly specific moral psychology (Haidt, 2007). They also have a coalitional psychology which monitors the establishment and maintenance of groups with common interests, vigilance towards defection, rivalry towards other groups, etc. (Kurzban & Neuberg, 2005), as well as systems that monitor ethnic cohesion and attitudes towards others (Schaller, 2006) or gender relations (Sidanius & Veniegas, 2000; Wilson & Daly, 1992). In fact, sketching the range of evolved cognitive mechanisms underlying common human behaviors would be far beyond the scope of this article (for general surveys, see (Buss, 2005); (Dunbar, Barrett, & Lycett, 2005)).

Several features of these cognitive systems are of particular relevance here:

Cognitive systems are domain specific. Cognitive predispositions are notjust general constraints, for example, on the amount of material that can be acquired, on the capacity of attention and memory. Cognitive predispositions also consist in