How Small-Scale Societies Achieve Large-Scale Cooperation

For most of our species’ history, humans have lived in relatively small subsistence communities, often called small-scale societies. While these groups lack centralized institutions, they can and often do maintain large-scale cooperation. Here, we explore several mechanisms promoting cooperation in small-scale societies, including (a) the development of social norms that encourage prosocial behavior, (b) reciprocal exchange relationships, (c) reputation that facilitates high-cost cooperation, (d) relational wealth, and (e) risk buffering institutions. We illustrate these with ethnographic and psychological evidence from contemporary small-scale societies. We argue that these mechanisms for cooperation helped past and present small-scale communities adapt to diverse ecological and social niches.

Publication: Luke Glowacki, et al., How small-scale societies achieve large-scale cooperation, Current Opinion in Psychology (2023). DOI: 10.1016/j.copsyc.2021.08.026

Original Story Source: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology