– by Keelah Williams

In the United States, Americans stereotype Black individuals as being more likely to commit certain types of crime than White individuals. But is this really about race alone? Or might people sometimes use race to infer the kinds of environments others might inhabit and the behavioral predispositions those environments might incentivize?

In a paper recently published in Evolution and Human Behavior, I argue that beliefs about who is (or is not) likely to commit particular crimes are actually driven by inferences about the kinds of environments (“ecologies”) people come from. People from resource-poor and unpredictable ecologies are stereotyped as engaging in more criminal behavior than people from resource-rich and predictable ecologies. And because the legacy of racism means that race and ecology are intertwined in the U.S., American perceivers use race as a proxy for ecology: They tend to infer that Black people are more likely to dwell in “desperate” ecologies, and White people are more likely to dwell in “hopeful” ecologies.

In a series of three studies, I show that—in the absence of information about the ecology of the target individual—American perceivers stereotype Black targets as more likely to commit crimes such as drug possession, resisting arrest, and vehicle theft than are White targets. But when perceivers are provided with both race and ecology information about the targets, perceivers’ stereotypes track ecology but not race: White and Black targets from resource-poor and unpredictable environments are stereotyped as equally likely to commit those crimes. And, White and Black targets from resource-rich and predictable environments are stereotyped as equally unlikely to commit those crimes. These findings suggest that beliefs about others’ criminal propensities may not be driven solely by race per se but may instead reflect inferences about the behavioral disposition of people who come from hopeful or desperate ecologies.

These findings have practical implications for reducing racial bias in the criminal justice system. Previous work suggests that Black criminal offenders receive harsher punishments for the same crimes because they are seen as more dangerous and likely to reoffend than White criminal offenders. But if people’s beliefs about whether someone is predisposed to commit different crimes are driven by ecology rather than race, this suggests that race differences in legal outcomes could be reduced to the extent that targets are described as hailing from similar ecologies. (The appropriateness of using ecology information when making legal decisions is a separate question, however—especially because many cues to ecology may be outside of the person’s control.)

This paper was published as part of a Special Issue on Evolution, Justice, and the Law that I edited with Debra Lieberman. Evolutionary social science and the law are natural complements: The former seeks to understand behavior while the latter seeks to regulate behavior. As the articles in the Special Issue demonstrate, an evolutionary approach has immense value in the legal sphere because it has explanatory power, generates novel predictions for legally relevant behavior, and provides insights that inform normative debates in the law.

The articles in the Special Issue are grouped into five broad themes. The first theme—including papers by Carlton Patrick, Daniel Sznycer, Peter DeScioli, and Aaron Sell—considers the origins of moral judgments. Is there an objective set of moral principles independent of law? How do intuitions about justice arise? And should such universal intuitions guide lawmaking?

The second theme—including papers by Sarah Brosnan, Owen Jones, and Jeffrey Stake—addresses the topics of ownership and fairness. How do adaptations generate decisions to retain or relinquish material goods? What can the non-human primate literature tell us about the modern human sense of fairness and justice?

The third theme—including papers by Cass Sunstein and Keelah Williams—explores contextual factors that influence legal judgments. How does the prevalence of societal problems affect our categorization of what is problematic in the first place? And, as the beginning of this blog addresses, what best explains people’s propensity to infer criminality—ecology or race?

The fourth theme—including papers by Michael Guttentag and Douglas Yarn—examines the extent to which law influences cooperative behavior. How are laws regarding resource distribution influenced by our evolved dispositions? When might extralegal channels of dispute resolution (e.g., dueling) promote cooperative relationships more than adjudication?

Finally, the fifth theme—including papers by David Buss, Kingsley Browne, and Martin Daly—touches on matters of sex and death. How do evolved sex differences affect perceptions of what is legally objectionable and the existence of disparities in the workplace? What role does inequality play in homicide rates? How can an evolutionary perspective help solve societal problems on a macro scale?

Altogether, the Special Issue offers a variety of papers that explore how our evolved psychology generates intuitions, preferences, and behaviors in the legal sphere. Debra and I hope you enjoy this Special Issue representing a burgeoning research program at the intersection of evolutionary science and law.

Read the original article here: Williams, K. (2023). Stereotypes of criminality in the U.S. track ecology, not race. Evolution & Human Behavior, 44(3), 255-263.

This is part of a special issue of Evolution & Human Behavior on Evolution, Justice & Law, edited by Keelah Williams & Debra Lieberman

– by Michael Guttentag

Law has played a pivotal role in the emergence of human sociality. If this conjecture is correct many questions naturally follow. When and why did the turn to law emerge? How could law have played a role in the distant past if powerful sovereigns are a comparatively recent development? What distinctive contributions does the legal system make to the maintenance of social order?

In Evolutionary psychology and resource-sharing laws I explore these and other questions by considering laws that serve a particular purpose – sharing resources. Resource-sharing laws are laws that encourage cooperation and discourage competition.  One simple example of a resource-sharing law is a law that limits private property rights, because such a law will reduce the incentive to compete rather than cooperate for scarce resources.

Concepts of law

A first step in addressing questions about law and the emergence of human sociality is to note that there are a multitude of ideas about what law is. One concept of law views the law as the commands issued by a sovereign and backed by a credible threat of punishment. This concept of law was popularized by John Austin in the Nineteenth Century, and suggests that law is a relatively modern affair, contingent on the existence of a sovereign powerful enough to command obedience (Austin, 1863, The province of jurisprudence and uses of the study of jurisprudence).

An alternative conceptualization of what law is comes from H. L. A. Hart and his 1960 masterwork “The Concept of Law” (Hart, 1960, The concept of law). In Hart’s account law’s uniqueness comes from the combination of two distinctive features: normativity and a two-tiered rule structure. According to Hart, unlike commands obeyed under threat of force, laws are obeyed because people to at least some degree accept the law as describing how people ought to behave. This is the normative aspect of law.

The second defining feature of law according to Hart is the way legal systems are constructed. Unlike other normative systems, the law contains both rules and rules about rules, or, in Hart’s terminology, both primary rules and secondary rules. Primary rules delineate when people “are required to do or abstain from certain actions, whether they wish to or not,” and include “restrictions on the free use of violence, theft, and deception,” and “various positive duties to perform services or make contributions to the common life.” Secondary rules describe how to “introduce new rules of the primary type, extinguish or modify old ones, or in various ways determine their incidence or control their operations.”

The combination of primary and secondary rules, law’s two-tiered structure, creates a generative system for establishing normative obligations much as language provides a nuanced, flexible, and generative way for humans to communicate. The possibility that law has played a pivotal role in the emergence of human sociality makes sense if one begins from Hart’s view as to what makes law a distinctive normative system.

Outlawing polygyny

One historically important resource-sharing law is the polygyny prohibition. Studying this prohibition highlights several ways laws contribute to the maintenance of a cooperative society. The polygyny prohibition is typical of a resource-sharing law in that it works by reducing the gains that can be realized by engaging in competitive behavior, in this case reducing the benefits granted to those who secure additional mating partners. Laws prohibiting polygyny are among the first recorded laws, dating back to ancient Athens, and illustrate several of the benefits of using a legal system to share resources. First, the public process of defining that a rule is a law makes reversing course more difficult. In this way the law can make commitments to arrangements that discourage competition such as the polygyny prohibition more credible. Second, the presence of a law in the historical record provides a meme that is easy to replicate. The family law provisions adopted by Solon around 600 B.C.E. have provided a template for millennia of one way a society can modify marital practices to reduce competition for mates.

Origins of a law instinct or norm psychology

The use of legal rules to facilitate resource sharing can also provide insight into how an ability to use this kind of generative normative system (a law instinct or norm psychology) may have emerged. Big game hunting, a formative practice in shaping human behavior, presents the kinds of resource-sharing opportunities and challenges that laws designed to share resources are particularly well-attuned to address. Successful big game hunting requires balancing individual and cooperative interests. A legal regime limiting the private property claims of individual hunters could encourage cooperation and might be quite helpful in this context. Moreover, our ancestors’ ability to “solve” the meat-sharing problem by defining what constitutes communal property and what constitutes private property might have provided a pathway to develop a broader tendency to use a generative normative system to “solve” resource-sharing problems.

Divvying up transaction surplus

Another insight from exploring resource-sharing laws as a window into law’s roles in the maintenance of a cooperative society is that this line of inquiry helps to explain aspects of the nuanced relationship between prosociality and transactions with strangers in market transactions. There are well-established competing hypotheses about the link between participation in market transactions and prosociality. As Albert Hirschman observed, on the one hand, there is the “doux commerce” thesis that commerce is “a civilizing agent of considerable power and range.” On the other hand, there are concerns that “capitalist society … exhibits a pronounced proclivity toward undermining the moral foundations of any society” (Hirschman, 1982, Rival interpretations of market society: Civilizing, destructive, or feeble?)

Largely absent from this debate is the question of how parties to market transactions divvy up any gains from trade. Gains from trade present the kinds of resource-sharing challenges that resource-sharing laws are designed to address. This insight generates testable hypotheses. The ability to successfully divvy up transaction surplus might moderate the relationship between participating in market transactions and prosociality. If this is correct, then the relationship between prosocial attitudes and participation in market transactions should vary depending on market structure. Where there is one price at which all transactions take place, there is less of a need for cooperation because the market price provides a ready-made mechanism with which to allocate transaction surplus. In contrast, in a market characterized by a series of independent bilateral negotiations the challenge of sharing transaction surplus in a fair and efficient manner needs to be addressed each time a transaction is consummated. As a result, at least some amount of prosociality may be helpful or even generated when participating in a bilateral negotiation.

Work by Armin Falk and Nora Szech shows how an experiment could shed light on this hypothesis by exploring whether market structure moderates the relationship between prosociality and participation in market transactions. Falk and Szech did not find a statistically significant difference on their measure of moral values between treatments in which transactions were executed by bilateral trade and in which transactions took place at a pre-set price. Their work does, however, suggest ways to further explore the hypothesis that divvying up transaction surplus explains at least some part of the nuanced relationship between prosociality and participating in market transactions.

These ideas and others in the article Evolutionary psychology and resource-sharing laws show how considering resource-sharing laws in the context of evolutionary psychology generates a variety of insights as to how and why law may have played a pivotal role in the emergence of human sociality.

Read the article: Guttentag, M. (2023). Evolutionary psychology and resource-sharing laws. Evolution and Human Behavior, 44(3), 264-271.

This article is part of a special issue of Evolution & Human Behavior on Evolution, Justice, and the Law, edited by Debra Lieberman & Keelah Williams.

– by Andrew Delton

“It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth” (Darwin, 1859, Origin of Species). As we stand beside a river and gaze at such a bank, images enter our minds unbidden. We need not cogitate to see the warblers and the dragonflies, the churn of the water, or the moss-covered rocks. Our perception of the scene feels unmediated.

This, we know, is an illusion. Vision arises from a fiendishly complicated set of adaptations, including eyes for capturing photons bouncing off nearby objects and computations performed by the nervous system for turning this raw sensory data into a useful picture of the world.

Feelings, too, enter our minds unbidden. When our child comes crying to us with a scraped knee, warmth rises in our breast and we want to console her. When a friend needs us to cover the check, we are only too happy to do so. When an enemy commits a faux pas, a bolt of cold glee takes hold—this accidental gift will help us burnish our reputation at his expense.

Desires to help or harm also feel unmediated. But, as with vision, are these desires also created by complex and largely unconscious computations? Our team, including Daniel Sznycer, Adrian Jaeggi, Julian Lim, and other collaborators, designed a series of studies to find out.

We studied how people decide to help or harm, specifically whether they do so with precision. We suspected that the felt simplicity of these desires is actually created by computations involving precise variables. These variables encode how much a person is willing to trade off their own welfare to help or hurt another person. Given their function, we call them welfare tradeoff ratios.

In our studies your task was to decide whether to give one sum of money to a specific other person (perhaps your best friend or an acquaintance) or to keep a different sum of money for yourself. For instance, would you take $54 for yourself or give your friend $37? Probably you’d take the $54. But what if you would get only $46? Or $39? Or $31? Now you might switch to giving the $37 to your friend.

We had participants make many decisions (in some cases up to 60). Across decisions, we varied exactly how much money was at stake for both people. In most, you decided whether to pass up money for yourself to give to the other person—helping. More rarely you decided whether to pay to prevent the other person from getting money—harming.

To measure precision, we examined how consistently participants chose who got what. For instance, if you would forgo $46 to give your friend $37, it would be inconsistent to later keep $31 for yourself rather than give your friend $37. Why pass up a large amount only to keep a smaller sum? If precise variables for welfare tradeoffs create desires to help or harm, we predicted that people would make few inconsistent decisions. Were we correct?

First, we studied university students in the United States and Argentina. As suspected, they were very consistent when deciding to help or harm. We measured consistency in two ways. One way was strict, requiring that people make no inconsistent choices at all in a set of many decisions. On this measure, if people were responding randomly, then they would be consistent only 1% of the time. In fact, our students were consistent 70% of the time or more. Our second measure was forgiving and did not require perfection. Here, random choices would lead to consistency about 70% of the time. In fact, on this measure, students were consistent 94% of the time or more.

We also found that people were more generous with friends than acquaintances. This didn’t surprise us. But it shows the students understood our task and took it seriously.

We found what we expected. Yet students are strange. They have undergone years of formal schooling in math. They live in advanced, industrial democracies. Perhaps something about their evolutionarily unprecedented lives caused them to be so precise—rather than, as we hypothesized, a universal psychology for making welfare tradeoffs.

To find out, we conducted similar studies among small-scale communities of people who forage and farm: the Shuar of the Ecuadorian Amazon and the Tsimane of the Bolivian Amazon. Did we find similar results among people who lead very different lives from university students?

Yes. Among the Shuar, on our strict measure of consistency, they were between 25% and 41% consistent. This is lower than among students but to be expected: We gave members of Shuar more decisions, making the task much harder. (Had they responded randomly, they would have been consistent a mere 0.05% of the time; recall that for students the number was 1%.) On the more forgiving measure, members of the Shuar were consistent 85% of the time (random responding would have been 68%).

Unlike the students, Shuar participants were not more or less likely to help or harm different categories of people—whether siblings, friends, or acquaintances. This surprised us but it could make sense given recent violence in the area; for protection, members of the Shuar might have been interested in shoring up connections even with distant associates.

Finally, we studied members of the Tsimane. The method we used with them did not allow us to calculate consistency. But they had no problem making many tradeoffs between themselves and other people. And like the students, the Tsimane participants were more generous with close others than distant others (for instance, community members versus outsiders).

Altogether, in three of three tests of quantitative consistency, university students from the US and Argentina and members of the Shuar made tradeoffs with precision. Members of the Tsimane found similar decisions easy and intuitive.

Desires to help or harm appear generated by precise variables in the mind.

Read the article here:  Delton, A.W., Jaeggi, A.V., Lim, J., Sznycer, D., Gurven, M., Robertson, T.E., Sugiyama, L.S., Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (in press) Cognitive foundations for helping and harming others: making welfare tradeoffs in industrialized and small-scale societies. In press in Evolution and Human Behavior.

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– by Michelle Scalise Sugiyama

For most of our species’ existence, culturally shared knowledge has been stored in memory and transmitted orally. This presents an impediment to the emergence of cumulative culture: how to encode, retrieve, and transmit accumulated knowledge in a portable, readily accessible format that resists corruption. Ethnologists have long observed that, in hunter-gatherer cultures, narrative is used for this purpose. Widely characterized as teachings by their Indigenous proprietors, forager oral traditions are known to encode a broad range of ecological knowledge. However, this strategy substitutes one memorization task for another: if a story is misremembered, the knowledge it encodes faces the same fate. Thus, the effectiveness of storytelling as an information management system hinges on the production of high-fidelity copies from telling to telling, begging the question of how this is accomplished.

Research on the formal properties of oral narrative–both prose and verse–shows that these traditions are maintained through the application of multiple mnemonic strategies, many of which exploit cognitive biases. Formal and genre constraints further facilitate recall by limiting the performer’s options as a tale or poem is being unraveled from memory. To take a modern example, the coarse subject matter, humorous tone, laconic style, distinctive meter, and AABBA rhyme scheme of limerick sharply delimit the sentiment, syllables, and words that can follow the line, “There once was a man from Nantucket.” However, research indicates that exploitation of cognitive biases does not guarantee full retention. A series of four experiments using folk stories found that subjects recalled minimally counterintuitive items better than mundane items in the stories. If these findings are representative of oral story transmission in general, we would expect “mundane” content (i.e., generalizable knowledge) to be lost over time, but this prediction is belied by the plethora of ecological knowledge encoded in forager narrative. How do oral cultures manage this?

Our study tested the hypothesis that, to meet the challenge of high-fidelity replication, foraging peoples have developed myth transmission rules. Our inspiration was the following description of Klamath and Modoc storytelling:

“Myth narration occurred principally on winter nights and informal sanctions prohibited myth narration at other times. For example, the Modoc believed that telling myths during the day would cause one to be bitten by a rattlesnake. . . . Klamath myth narration ideally ceased at the end of winter. . . . telling myths after this time would purportedly delay the long-awaited arrival of spring. . . . Only adults were permitted to narrate. . . . However, participation as a listener was unrestricted and generally included the entire winter household. . . . Myths preferably were not mixed with other oral tradition forms. . . . Narrators were not permitted to deviate greatly from local versions. If narrators diverged excessively, listeners would interrupt and engage in debate until the correct version was decided upon. (306-307)”

These restrictions limit myth narration to winter nights, confining transmission to large blocks of leisure time when people are gathered together. This practice minimizes distractions, enabling listeners to give full attention to the story, and “copies” the story to several minds simultaneously. Adult-only narration increases the probability that myths are told by persons who know them thoroughly, while mixed-age audience composition ensures that older generations are present to check for accuracy and younger generations are present to learn the myths. Finally, fear of negative sanctions discourages people from breaking these rules. Collectively, these restrictions increase the chances that the “right” version of a myth—and the knowledge it encodes–gets copied to the next generation.

To test our hypothesis, we searched the forager ethnographic record for descriptions of oral storytelling, which we analyzed for the presence of eight rule types: (1) transmission by the most proficient storytellers (2) under low-distraction conditions with (3) multiple individuals and (4) generations in attendance, and the application of measures that (5) prevent, identify, and/or correct mistakes, (6) maintain audience attention, (7) negatively sanction rule violations and/or (8) incentivize rule compliance. Although our sample was heavily biased toward North American foragers, we found descriptions for 80 different cultures, distributed across six continents and diverse biomes.

All of the predicted rule types were present on at least three continents, and seven types were present on at least four. Myth recitation was largely the prerogative of older adults and preferentially occurred during periods of low economic activity. Most tellings occurred in the context of formal or informal social gatherings, with mixed-age audiences the norm. Rules regulating narrator performance occurred in 50 cultures, and included the use of prompting (e.g., call-and-response), repetition, song, and other forms of ostensive communication to engage and sustain audience attention. Listeners, in turn, were commonly expected to signal periodically that they were still awake, and to interrupt and correct the narrator if mistakes were made. Evidence of sanctions was limited to Africa and the Americas, and consisted largely of a belief that misfortune would follow rule transgressions.

These findings point to additional factors at play in the emergence of cumulative culture. Symbolic behaviors (e.g., myth, song, dance, visual art, games, names) and rules surrounding their performance have been largely unexplored as systems that support high-fidelity encoding and transmission of generalizable knowledge. Re-conceptualizing these behaviors as information technologies may help us better understand how evolved cognitive capacities, ecological constraints, and human inventions interact to produce the ratchets that make cumulative culture possible.

Read the original article: Scalise Sugiyama, M., & Reilly, K.J. (in press). Cross-cultural forager myth transmission rules: implications for the emergence of cumulative culture. Evolution & Human Behavior.