Social Networks and Cooperation in Hunter-Gatherers

By C. Apicella, F. Marlowe, James H. Fowler, Nicholas A. Christakis. Nature, 2012

625 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Social networks show striking structural regularities, and both theory and evidence suggest that networks may have facilitated the development of large-scale cooperation in humans. Here, we characterize the social networks of the Hadza, a population of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania. We show that Hadza networks have important properties also seen in modernized social networks, including a skewed degree distribution, degree assortativity, transitivity, reciprocity, geographic decay and homophily. We demonstrate that Hadza camps exhibit high between-group and low within-group variation in public goods game donations. Network ties are also more likely between people who give the same amount, and the similarity in cooperative behaviour extends up to two degrees of separation. Social distance appears to be as important as genetic relatedness and physical proximity in explaining assortativity in cooperation. Our results suggest that certain elements of social network structure may have been present at an early point in human history. Also, early humans may have formed ties with both kin and non-kin, based in part on their tendency to cooperate. Social networks may thus have contributed to the emergence of cooperation.

Subfields: Cultural Studies, Experimental and Cognitive Psychology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9709fd1b3bdb1ab79c2662aeb49a42dd54e9998e

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Citations in the corpus

Ecology in an anthropogenic biosphere (2015, background): “…through the adaptive advantages of social foraging, collective strategies for warfare and defense, material exchange, and even the collaborative advantages of language (Boyd and Richerson 1985, Henrich 2004, Bowles 2006, 2009, Laland et al. 2010, Apicella et al. 2012, Rand and Nowak 2014).”
Social contagion theory: examining dynamic social networks and human behavior (2011, methodology): “While we have done work on the former [5, 7-13], here we will focus primarily on the latter, discussing analyses of the flow of behaviors, affective states, or germs.”
Graph Convolutional Reinforcement Learning (2018, background): “The development of human cooperation is facilitated by the underlying graph of human societies (Ohtsuki et al., 2006; Apicella et al., 2012), where the mutual interplay between humans is abstracted by their relations.”
Coalitions in theory and reality: a review of pertinent variables and processes (2015, background): “Human coalitions and alliances range from cooperation within a single family to acts of support between nation-states (Chagnon, 1988; Bowles, 2009; Apicella et al., 2012).”
Beyond Altruism: Sociological Foundations of Cooperation and Prosocial Behavior (2015, neutral): “…toward friends of friends, somewhat less so toward friends of friends of friends, and least generous toward more distal others or strangers (Apicella et al. 2012, Baldassarri & Grossman 2013, Leider et al. 2009). information about others’ trustworthiness through ties that connect group…”