Social structure and the evolutionary ecology of inequality.

Abstract

From rising disparities in income to limited socio-political representation for minority groups, inequality is a topic of perennial interest for contemporary society. Research in the evolutionary sciences has started to investigate how social structure allows inequality to evolve, but is developing in silo from existing work in the social and cognitive sciences. I synthesise these literatures to present a theoretical framework of how and why cultural and ecological conditions can create social structure that either produces or constrains inequality. According to this framework, such conditions dictate the costs and benefits of cooperation that shape individuals' social preferences and resulting behaviours. These behaviours aggregate to produce distinct structures of a society's social networks, which generate different levels of inequality observed across societies.