Our weekly Seminar Series welcomes Sarah Mathew, associate professor at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. Mathew investigates why humans, unlike other animals, cooperate in groups comprising large numbers of genetically unrelated individuals, and how the evolution of this unique form of cooperation is tied to the origins of moral sentiments, cultural norms, and warfare.
Talk title
“The cultural evolution of cooperative norms”
Abstract
Peer sanctioning of norm violators can explain how humans cooperate in large groups and in transient interactions with unfamiliar individuals, but it is unclear how these norms evolve. I will present three results that show how cultural evolutionary processes favor social norms that promote cooperation.
1) By examining third party punishment among the politically uncentralized Turkana pastoralists of Kenya, I will show how meta-norms that regulate peer punishment can promote norm enforcement behavior.
2) Using the correspondence between the scale of cooperation and cultural variation in four neighboring pastoral groups in Kenya, I will show how group-level selection on cultural traits can explain the persistence of cooperative norms in transient interactions.
3) Based on theoretical findings, I will posit that culturally evolved norms and third party monitoring are crucial also for pairwise cooperation in repeated interactions, which can account for why reciprocity is more common in humans than other animals.
Recommended readings
S. Mathew, “How the second-order free rider problem is solved in a small-scale society” (2017).
R. Boyd, S. Mathew, “Arbitration supports reciprocity when there are frequent perception errors.” Nature Human Behaviour, 2021.
C. Handley, S. Mathew, “Human large-scale cooperation as a product of competition between cultural groups.” Nature Communications 11, 702 (2020).
More about Sarah Mathew
Sarah Mathew completed her PhD in anthropology at the University of California-Los Angeles. She is a recipient of the Andrew Carnegie Fellowship in support of research on challenges to democracy and international order. She is an associate professor at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University.
Mathew’s research combines formal modeling of the evolution of cooperation with fieldwork to test theories of how cooperation is sustained. Mathew has been running a field project in Kenya among the Turkana, a politically decentralized pastoral society with limited market integration, examining how and at what scale people cooperate when centralized political institutions are absent. Her findings point to the foundational role of informal cultural norms, and the human capacity for cultural transmission in the emergence of cooperation.
As interethnic warfare is prevalent in this population in the form of cattle raiding, Mathew has also examined why Turkana warriors participate in these high-stakes battles where the costs of participation such as injury or death is borne by the individual, but the gains of victory are shared widely. Through systematic empirical studies in this unique ethnographic context, Mathew's work has illustrated how the collective action problem in warfare is solved without hierarchical formal military institutions.
About the SRI Seminar Series
The SRI Seminar Series brings together the Schwartz Reisman community and beyond for a robust exchange of ideas that advance scholarship at the intersection of technology and society. Seminars are led by a leading or emerging scholar and feature extensive discussion.
Each week, a featured speaker will present for 45 minutes, followed by 45 minutes of discussion. Registered attendees will be emailed a Zoom link approximately one hour before the event begins. The event will be recorded and posted online.
Sarah Mathew