{"title":"Co-occurrence of Ostensive Communication and Generalizable Knowledge in Forager Storytelling : Cross-Cultural Evidence of Teaching in Forager Societies.","authors":"Michelle Scalise Sugiyama","doi":"10.1007/s12110-021-09385-w","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-021-09385-w","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Teaching is hypothesized to be a species-typical behavior in humans that contributed to the emergence of cumulative culture. Several within-culture studies indicate that foragers depend heavily on social learning to acquire practical skills and knowledge, but it is unknown whether teaching is universal across forager populations. Teaching can be defined ethologically as the modification of behavior by an expert in the presence of a novice, such that the expert incurs a cost and the novice acquires skills/knowledge more efficiently or that it would not acquire otherwise. One behavioral modification hypothesized to be an adaptation for teaching is ostensive communication-exaggerations of prosody and gesture that signal intent to transmit generalizable knowledge and indicate the intended receiver. On this view, the use of ostensive communication in conjunction with the transmission of generalizable knowledge constitutes evidence of teaching. Oral storytelling appears to meet these criteria: Indigenous peoples regard their traditions as important sources of ecological and social knowledge, and oral storytelling is widely reported to employ paralinguistic communication. To test this hypothesis, descriptions of performed narrative in forager societies were coded for the use of 14 ostensive-communicative behaviors and the presence of generalizable knowledge. Although biased toward North America, the study sample comprised 53 forager cultures spanning five continents, 34 language families, and diverse biomes. All cultures evinced the predicted behaviors. Results suggest that foragers use storytelling as a mode of instruction, thus providing cross-cultural evidence of teaching in forager populations.</p>","PeriodicalId":47797,"journal":{"name":"Human Nature-An Interdisciplinary Biosocial Perspective","volume":"32 1","pages":"279-300"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1007/s12110-021-09385-w","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"25584205","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cultural Change Reduces Gender Differences in Mobility and Spatial Ability among Seminomadic Pastoralist-Forager Children in Northern Namibia.","authors":"Helen E Davis, Jonathan Stack, Elizabeth Cashdan","doi":"10.1007/s12110-021-09388-7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-021-09388-7","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>A fundamental cognitive function found across a wide range of species and necessary for survival is the ability to navigate complex environments. It has been suggested that mobility may play an important role in the development of spatial skills. Despite evolutionary arguments offering logical explanations for why sex/gender differences in spatial abilities and mobility might exist, thus far there has been limited sampling from nonindustrialized and subsistence-based societies. This lack of sampling diversity has left many unanswered questions regarding the effects that environmental variation and cultural norms may have in shaping mobility patterns during childhood and the development of spatial competencies that may be associated with it. Here we examine variation in mobility (through GPS tracking and interviews), performance on large-scale spatial skills (i.e., navigational ability), and performance on small-scale spatial skills (e.g., mental rotation task, Corsi blocks task, and water-level task) among Twa forager/pastoralist children whose daily lives have been dramatically altered since settlement and the introduction of government-funded boarding schools. Unlike in previous findings among Twa adults, boys and girls (N = 88; aged 6-18) show similar patterns of travel on all measures of mobility. We also find no significant differences in spatial task performance by gender for large- or small-scale spatial skills. Further, children performed as well as adults did on mental rotation, and they outperformed adults on the water-level task. We discuss how children's early learning environments may influence the development of both large- and small-scale spatial skills.</p>","PeriodicalId":47797,"journal":{"name":"Human Nature-An Interdisciplinary Biosocial Perspective","volume":"32 1","pages":"178-206"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1007/s12110-021-09388-7","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"38897696","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Eric Schniter, Shane J Macfarlan, Juan J Garcia, Gorgonio Ruiz-Campos, Diego Guevara Beltran, Brenda B Bowen, Jory C Lerback
{"title":"Age-Appropriate Wisdom? : Ethnobiological Knowledge Ontogeny in Pastoralist Mexican Choyeros.","authors":"Eric Schniter, Shane J Macfarlan, Juan J Garcia, Gorgonio Ruiz-Campos, Diego Guevara Beltran, Brenda B Bowen, Jory C Lerback","doi":"10.1007/s12110-021-09387-8","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-021-09387-8","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>We investigate whether age profiles of ethnobiological knowledge development are consistent with predictions derived from life history theory about the timing of productivity and reproduction. Life history models predict complementary knowledge profiles developing across the lifespan for women and men as they experience changes in embodied capital and the needs of dependent offspring. We evaluate these predictions using an ethnobiological knowledge assessment tool developed for an off-grid pastoralist population known as Choyeros, from Baja California Sur, Mexico. Our results indicate that while individuals acquire knowledge of most dangerous items and edible resources by early adulthood, knowledge of plants and animals relevant to the age and sex divided labor domains and ecologies (e.g., women's house gardens, men's herding activities in the wilderness) continues to develop into middle adulthood but to different degrees and at different rates for men and women. As the demands of offspring on parents accumulate with age, reproductive-aged adults continue to develop their knowledge to meet their children's needs. After controlling for vision, our analysis indicates that many post-reproductive adults show the greatest ethnobiological knowledge. These findings extend our understanding of the evolved human life history by illustrating how changes in embodied capital and the needs of dependent offspring predict the development of men's and women's ethnobiological knowledge across the lifespan.</p>","PeriodicalId":47797,"journal":{"name":"Human Nature-An Interdisciplinary Biosocial Perspective","volume":"32 1","pages":"48-83"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1007/s12110-021-09387-8","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"38901520","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Early Plant Learning in Fiji.","authors":"Rita Anne McNamara, Annie E Wertz","doi":"10.1007/s12110-021-09389-6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-021-09389-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Recent work with infants suggests that plant foraging throughout evolutionary history has shaped the design of the human mind. Infants in Germany and the US avoid touching plants and engage in more social looking toward adults before touching them. This combination of behavioral avoidance and social looking strategies enables safe and rapid social learning about plant properties within the first two years of life. Here, we explore how growing up in a context that requires frequent interaction with plants shapes children's responses with the participation of communities in rural Fiji. We conducted two interviews with adults and a behavioral study with children. The adult interviews map the plant learning landscape in these communities and provide context for the child study. The child study used a time-to-touch paradigm to examine whether 6- to 48-month-olds (N = 33) in participating communities exhibit avoidance behaviors and social looking patterns that are similar to, or different from, those of German and American infants. Our adult interview results confirmed that knowledge about daily and medicinal uses of plants is widely known throughout the communities, and children are given many opportunities to informally learn about plants. The results of the child behavioral study suggest that young Fijian children, like German and American infants, are reluctant to reach for novel artificial plants and are fastest to interact with familiar household items and shells. In contrast to German and American infants, Fijian children also quickly reached for familiar real plants and did not engage in differential social looking before touching them. These results suggest that cultural contexts flexibly shape the development of plant-relevant cognitive design.</p>","PeriodicalId":47797,"journal":{"name":"Human Nature-An Interdisciplinary Biosocial Perspective","volume":"32 1","pages":"115-149"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2021-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1007/s12110-021-09389-6","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"25519276","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dispositional Fear and Political Attitudes.","authors":"Peter K Hatemi, Rose McDermott","doi":"10.1007/s12110-020-09378-1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-020-09378-1","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Previous work proposes that dispositional fear exists predominantly among political conservatives, generating the appearance that fears align strictly along party lines. This view obscures evolutionary dynamics because fear evolved to protect against myriad threats, not merely those in the political realm. We suggest prior work in this area has been biased by selection on the dependent variable, resulting from an examination of exclusively politically oriented fears that privilege conservative values. Because the adaptation regulating fear should be based upon both universal and ancestral-specific selection pressures combined with developmental and individual differences, the elicitation of it should prove variable across the ideological continuum dependent upon specific combinations of fear and value domains. In a sample of ~ 1,600 Australians assessed with a subset of the Fear Survey Schedule II, we find fears not infused with political content are differentially influential across the political spectrum. Specifically, those who are more fearful of sharp objects, graveyards, and urinating in public are more socially conservative and less supportive of gay rights. Those who are more fearful of death are more supportive of gay rights. Those who are more fearful of suffocating and swimming alone are more concerned about emissions controls and immigration, while those who are more fearful of thunderstorms are also more anti-immigration. Contrary to existing research, both liberals and conservatives are more fearful of different circumstances, and the role of dispositional fears are attitude-specific.</p>","PeriodicalId":47797,"journal":{"name":"Human Nature-An Interdisciplinary Biosocial Perspective","volume":"31 4","pages":"387-405"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1007/s12110-020-09378-1","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"38331482","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The \"Social Brain,\" Reciprocity, and Social Network Segregation along Ethnic Boundaries.","authors":"Michael Windzio","doi":"10.1007/s12110-020-09382-5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-020-09382-5","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>How does segregation along ethnic boundaries emerge in social networks? Human evolution resulted in highly social beings, capable of prosociality, mindreading, and self-control, which are important aspects of the \"social brain.\" Our neurophysiologically \"wired\" social cognition implies different cognitive goal frames. In line with recent developments in behavioral theory, the present study defines network ties as episodes of social exchange. This dynamic definition can account for shifts in goal frames during an exchange episode: whereas deliberate choice and hedonic or gain goals drive the initiation of a tie, given the opportunity structure, the normative goal frame activates a strong dynamic effect of reciprocity, which limits actors' choice set and appears as \"self-organization\" at the network level. Longitudinal analyses of 18 birthday party networks comprising 501 students support the definition of network ties as exchange episodes, as well as the relevance of humans' inherent tendency to reciprocate. However, reciprocation is much stronger in dyads of the same ethnicity than in dyads of different ethnicities. Network segregation along ethnic boundaries results from deliberate decisions during the initiation of an episode, but also from different commitments to reciprocity during the ongoing exchange process, depending on intra or interethnic dyadic constellations.</p>","PeriodicalId":47797,"journal":{"name":"Human Nature-An Interdisciplinary Biosocial Perspective","volume":"31 4","pages":"443-461"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1007/s12110-020-09382-5","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"38805511","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Are Moral Intuitions Heritable?","authors":"Kevin Smith, Peter K Hatemi","doi":"10.1007/s12110-020-09380-7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-020-09380-7","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Two prominent theoretical frameworks in moral psychology, Moral Foundations and Dual Process Theory, share a broad foundational assumption that individual differences in human morality are dispositional and in part due to genetic variation. The only published direct test of heritability, however, found little evidence of genetic influences on moral judgments using instrumentation approaches associated with Moral Foundations Theory. This raised questions about one of the core assumptions underpinning intuitionist theories of moral psychology. Here we examine the heritability of moral psychology using the moral dilemmas approach commonly used in Dual Process Theory research. Using such measures, we find consistent and significant evidence of heritability. These findings have important implications not only for understanding which measures do, or do not, tap into the genetically influenced aspects of moral decision-making, but in better establishing the utility and validity of different intuitionist theoretical frameworks and the source of why people differ in those frameworks.</p>","PeriodicalId":47797,"journal":{"name":"Human Nature-An Interdisciplinary Biosocial Perspective","volume":"31 4","pages":"406-420"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1007/s12110-020-09380-7","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39135480","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
François Osiurak, Caroline Cretel, Naomi Duhau-Marmon, Isabelle Fournier, Lucie Marignier, Emmanuel De Oliveira, Jordan Navarro, Emanuelle Reynaud
{"title":"The Pedagogue, the Engineer, and the Friend : From Whom Do We Learn?","authors":"François Osiurak, Caroline Cretel, Naomi Duhau-Marmon, Isabelle Fournier, Lucie Marignier, Emmanuel De Oliveira, Jordan Navarro, Emanuelle Reynaud","doi":"10.1007/s12110-020-09379-0","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-020-09379-0","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Humans can follow different social learning strategies, sometimes oriented toward the models' characteristics (i.e., who-strategies). The goal of the present study was to explore which who-strategy is preferentially followed in the technological context based on the models' psychological characteristics. We identified three potential who-strategies: Copy the pedagogue (a model with high theory-of-mind skills), copy the engineer (a model with high technical-reasoning skills), and copy the friend (a model with high level of prosocialness). We developed a closed-group micro-society paradigm in which participants had to build the highest possible towers. Participants began with an individual building phase. Then, they were gathered to discuss the best solutions to increase tower height. After this discussion phase, they had to make a new building attempt, followed by another discussion phase, and so forth for a total of six building phases and five discussion rounds. This methodology allowed us to create an attraction score for each participant (the more an individual was copied in a group, the greater the attraction score). We also assessed participants' theory-of-mind skills, technical-reasoning skills, and prosocialness to predict participants' attraction scores based on these measures. Results show that we learn from engineers (high technical-reasoning skills) because they are the most successful. Their attraction power is not immediate, but after they have been identified as attractors, their technique is copied irrespective of their pedagogy (theory-of-mind skills) or friendliness (prosocialness). These findings open avenues for the study of the cognitive bases of human technological culture.</p>","PeriodicalId":47797,"journal":{"name":"Human Nature-An Interdisciplinary Biosocial Perspective","volume":"31 4","pages":"462-482"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1007/s12110-020-09379-0","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"39135482","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rodrigo de Menezes Gomes, Fívia de Araújo Lopes, Felipe Nalon Castro
{"title":"Influence of Sexual Genotype and Gender Self-Perception on Sociosexuality and Self-Esteem among Transgender People.","authors":"Rodrigo de Menezes Gomes, Fívia de Araújo Lopes, Felipe Nalon Castro","doi":"10.1007/s12110-020-09381-6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-020-09381-6","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Empirical data from studies with both heterosexual and homosexual individuals have consistently indicated different tendencies in mating behavior. However, transgenders' data are often overlooked. This exploratory study compared levels of sociosexuality and self-esteem between transgenders and non-transgender (cisgender) individuals. The aim was to verify whether either sexual genotype or gender self-perception had more influence on the examined variables in transgenders. Correlations between self-esteem and sociosexuality levels were also investigated. The sample consisted of 120 Brazilian individuals (51 transgenders) from both sexes. Sociosexuality scores indicated mostly sex-typical patterns for transgenders of both sexes across the construct's three dimensions (behavior, attitude, and desire), except for female-to-male transgenders' behavioral sociosexuality. Unique associations between the dimensions of sociosexuality were found for transgender participants. No differences in self-esteem were observed and no correlations between self-esteem and sociosexuality were found. The results suggest that transgenders' sociosexuality is largely influenced by their sexual genotype despite their incongruent gender self-perception and that the relationships between behavior, attitude, and sociosexual desire are different from those observed in cisgenders.</p>","PeriodicalId":47797,"journal":{"name":"Human Nature-An Interdisciplinary Biosocial Perspective","volume":"31 4","pages":"483-496"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1007/s12110-020-09381-6","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"38763529","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Marginal Utility of Inequality : A Global Examination across Ethnographic Societies.","authors":"Kurt M Wilson, Brian F Codding","doi":"10.1007/s12110-020-09383-4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-020-09383-4","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Despite decades of research, we still lack a clear explanation for the emergence and persistence of inequality. Here we propose and evaluate a marginal utility of inequality hypothesis that nominates circumscription and environmental heterogeneity as independent, necessary conditions for the emergence of intragroup material inequality. After coupling the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample (SCCS) with newly generated data from remote sensing, we test predictions derived from this hypothesis using a multivariate generalized additive model that accounts for spatial and historical dependence as well as subsistence mode. Our analyses show that the probability a society will be stratified increases significantly as a function of proxies of environmental heterogeneity and environmental circumscription. This supports the hypothesis that increasing environmental heterogeneity and circumscription drives the emergence and persistence of inequality among documented societies across the globe. We demonstrate how environmental heterogeneity and circumscription produce situations that limit individuals' options so that some may find it in their best interest to give up some autonomy for material gain, while others may find it in their best interest to give up some material resources for another individual's time or deference. These results support the marginal utility of inequality framework and enable future explorations of the ecological conditions that facilitate the emergence of intragroup inequality through time and across the globe.</p>","PeriodicalId":47797,"journal":{"name":"Human Nature-An Interdisciplinary Biosocial Perspective","volume":"31 4","pages":"361-386"},"PeriodicalIF":2.5,"publicationDate":"2020-12-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1007/s12110-020-09383-4","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"25318628","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}