John P. Ziker

Costly punishment across human societies.

Recent behavioral experiments aimed at understanding the evolutionary foundations of human cooperation have suggested that a willingness to engage in costly punishment, even in one-shot situations, may be part of human psychology and a key element in understanding our sociality. However, because most experiments have been confined to students in industrialized societies, generalizations of these insights to the species have necessarily been tentative. Here, experimental results from 15 diverse populations show that (i) all populations demonstrate some willingness to administer costly punishment as unequal behavior increases, (ii) the magnitude of this punishment varies substantially across populations, and (iii) costly punishment positively covaries with altruistic behavior across populations. These findings are consistent with models of the gene-culture coevolution of human altruism and further sharpen what any theory of human cooperation needs to explain.

Markets, religion, community size, and the evolution of fairness and punishment

A Fair Society Many of the social interactions of everyday life, especially those involving economic exchange, take place between individuals who are unrelated to each other and often do not know each other. Countless laboratory experiments have documented the propensity of subjects to behave fairly in these interactions and to punish those participants deemed to have behaved unfairly. Henrich et al. (p. 1480, see the Perspective by Hoff) measured fairness in thousands of individuals from 15 contemporary, small-scale societies to gain an understanding of the evolution of trustworthy exchange among human societies. Fairness was quantitated using three economic games. Various societal parameters, such as the extent to which food was purchased versus produced, were also collected. Institutions, as represented by markets, community size, and adherence to a world religion all predict a greater exercise of fairness in social exchange. The origins of modern social norms and behaviors may be found in the evolution of institutions. Large-scale societies in which strangers regularly engage in mutually beneficial transactions are puzzling. The evolutionary mechanisms associated with kinship and reciprocity, which underpin much of primate sociality, do not readily extend to large unrelated groups. Theory suggests that the evolution of such societies may have required norms and institutions that sustain fairness in ephemeral exchanges. If that is true, then engagement in larger-scale institutions, such as markets and world religions, should be associated with greater fairness, and larger communities should punish unfairness more. Using three behavioral experiments administered across 15 diverse populations, we show that market integration (measured as the percentage of purchased calories) positively covaries with fairness while community size positively covaries with punishment. Participation in a world religion is associated with fairness, although not across all measures. These results suggest that modern prosociality is not solely the product of an innate psychology, but also reflects norms and institutions that have emerged over the course of human history.

Food Sharing at Meals Kinship, Reciprocity, and Clustering in the Taimyr Autonomous Okrug, Northern Russia

The presence of a kinship link between nuclear families is the strongest predictor of interhousehold sharing in an indigenous, predominantly Dolgan food-sharing network in northern Russia. Attributes such as the summed number of hunters in paired households also account for much of the variation in sharing between nuclear families. Differences in the number of hunters in partner households, as well as proximity and producer/consumer ratios of households, were investigated with regard to cost-benefit models. The subset of households involved in reciprocal meal sharing is 26 of 84 household host-guest pairs. The frequency of reciprocal meal sharing between families in this subset is positively correlated with average household relatedness. The evolution of cooperation through clustering may illuminate the relationship between kinship and reciprocity at this most intimate level of food sharing.

Culture does account for variation in game behavior

Lamba and Maces critique (1) of our research (2–4) is based on incorrect claims about our experiments and several misunderstandings of the theory underpinning our efforts. Their findings are consistent with our previous work and lead to no unique conclusions.

Assigned territories, family/clan/communal holdings, and common-pool resources in the Taimyr Autonomous Region, Northern Russia.

This paper describes an indigenous hunting/fishing/trapping economy in the Taimyr Autonomous Region, northern Russia, and traces the continuities and developments in property since the collapse of the Soviet command economy in 1991. Indigenous relations to hunting grounds and renewable resources are discussed with ethnographic case material from Dolgan and Nganasan communities. Land tenure is analyzed in terms of inclusive and exclusive property and informal and formal resource management. The asymmetric growth and distribution of common-pool territories and private holdings is a central issue. A number of factors when examined together appear to favor common property and traditional management including ancestral frames of morality and access, crosscutting kin relationships, principles of ownership and mutual aid, cooperative hunting, sharing of meat and fish, as well as migration patterns of prey species and relative increases in the cost of freight transport since 1991. In addition, private holdings often make commercial sales and generally have better access to urban centers, while they are more closely regulated through land, tax, and environment offices of local government.

Subsistence and Food Sharing in Northern Siberia: Social and Nutritional Ecology of the Dolgan and the Nganasan

Traditional foraging activities and extensive food sharing are critical to the contemporary nutritional well-being of Dolgan and Nganasan people in the Taimyr Region, Russia. Despite recent economic transformations geared toward free-market capitalism in the post-socialist era, since 1991, a native communal resource-management regime has developed. This article outlines the social and nutritional significance of subsistence and food sharing within a remote indigenous community in Arctic Siberia. Empirical data on procurement processes and relationships, along with data on food distributions and rationales, are discussed. These data are relevant to questions about food sharing and its significance in hunting-and-gathering economies and the evolution of human sociality.

Indigenous Siberians solve collective action problems through sharing and traditional knowledge

The sustainability of indigenous communities in the Arctic, and the vulnerable households within, is in large part dependent on their continuing food security. Using a methodology inspired from a community on the Taimyr Peninsula in northern Siberia, a network of post-procurement food distributions is explored to describe underlying patterns of stability. Four pathways for food sharing are identified, including kin and non-kin distributions that are both reciprocated and unreciprocated. These four pathways obtain even when considering differences in household hunting skill, differences in household hunting wealth, the sum costs of procurement, and documented reciprocation in non-food goods and services. The interplay between traditional ecological knowledge about sharing and access to resources and the observed sharing behavior is discussed. These findings illustrate the robustness of prosocial solutions to collective action problems surrounding food procurement and security in an indigenous Siberian community.

The Effects of Wealth on Male Reproduction among Monogamous Hunter-Fisher-Trappers in Northern Siberia

Variability in men’s reproductive success (RS) is partly attributable to the ability of successful men to influence resource flows relevant to the mate choice and reproduction of women. This study explores the effects of variability in resource flows on men’s RS in an indigenous foraging/mixed-economy community in northern Siberia where monogamous marriage norms predominate. A series of material, embodied, and relational wealth indicators are tested as predictors of men’s age-adjusted RS and age at first birth. Material wealth related to hunting, embodied wealth as represented by hunting skill, and relational wealth as represented by numbers of kin are the most consistent predictors of men’s RS. In this monogamous population, the wives of men with more hunting capital and of men rated as better hunters have shorter interbirth intervals, and hunters show strong producer priority. These findings and ethnographic observations appear more consistent with a provisioning model than with a signaling-for-mates model.

Reply to van Hoorn: Converging lines of evidence

We agree with the comments by van Hoorn (1) on our critique (2): testing causal hypotheses about human behavior is a challenge (1, 3). Making progress requires specifying alternative hypotheses and then testing these hypotheses using diverse and converging lines of evidence. We have defended the hypothesis that social norms, which culturally coevolved with the institutions of large-scale societies including markets, influence economic decision-making. This hypothesis emerged from a larger set that we developed both at the outset of our project and as we went along. Our interdisciplinary team’s initial list of hypotheses included the idea that experimental games might spark an innate reciprocity module that would yield little variation across populations. We also considered the hypothesis that group-level differences might result from individual differences in wealth or income. Nevertheless, what emerged in the data in our first project was (i) substantial variation among 15 populations, (ii) a strong correlation with market integration, and (iii) little relation to individual-level economic or demographic variables. Not satisfied with our first effort, we sampled 10 new populations, replicated these findings with improved protocols (developed based on critiques of the Phase I), and then extended them to two additional experimental games. Along the way, we have explored alternative hypotheses using measures of genetic relatedness, social network position, anonymity manipulations, and framing tools. To our knowledge, no other existing hypotheses can better account for the observed patterns of variation.

Kinship and friendship in the Taimyr autonomous region, Northern Russia

Food sharing, or non-market intra-group exchange (Winterhalder 1997) of food, is an integral part of the survival strategies people are employing at the geographic and demographic periphery of the Russian Federation (Clarke 2002; Krupnik 2000; Ziker 2002a). Beginning with the 1991 dismantling of the Soviet Unions planned economy, a distressing and demoralizing period of change has taken place in the Taimyr Autonomous Regions indigenous communities, as in other regions of Siberia (Gray 2000, King 2002, Krupnik/Vakhtin 2002). In the late Soviet period, men were employed to practice hunting professionally, and women were employed in the sewing department or social service sector. Families were well-paid and had access to a variety of consumer goods. Since 1991, economic duress and high mortality rates have affected almost every family (Ziker 2002b: 85-104). For many indigenous households in Taimyr, subsistence hunting and gathering now provides almost all of the protein, fat, and fruit consumed (Ziker 2002c). Beyond being a traditional good, exemplified in legends and family rituals, sharing food is one way people are creating and strengthening community in the face of the uncertain transition from the Soviet planned economy to the market economy. This article explores the importance of kinship and friendship in sharing and distributing locally produced food in indigenous communities in the Taimyr Autonomous Region, northern Russia. Food sharing is of notable importance in the economies of a variety of hunting and gathering societies the world over (e. g., Bodenhorn 2000; Kaplan/Hill 1985). Other things being equal, one might expect food sharing to occur mostly along lines of kinship and friendship. Marshall