According to parasite stress theory, we should see higher levels of collectivism in situations of higher pathogen stress, but not in response to other kinds of material insecurity.
According to the material insecurity or institutional hypotheses, we should expect people to exhibit less collectivism and in-group loyalty when state-level institutions successfully meet people’s basic needs and guard against material threats.
Finally, the asocial life history hypothesis suggests that in situations where people have fewer opportunities to control risk, for example, in situations of greater mortality and economic uncertainty, they will avoid investments in anything but their own immediate reproduction (and thus eschew commitments to relationships and other social investments).
Another important distinction between these different theories is the feedbacks they posit.
Parasite stress and asocial life history theories both assume a relatively fixed environment to which individuals adapt.
The material insecurity or institutional hypothesis, on the other hand, assumes positive co-evolutionary feedbacks, whereby the existence of beneficial institutions can lead people to make further investments in those institutions to render them even better investments in the future. Thus, the material insecurity or institutional hypothesis can lead to novel social trajectories which are not purely driven by initial conditions—such as parasite levels—in a setting.…Suggestive rather than conclusive, but interesting nevertheless.
Evonomics
A New Theory That Explains Economic Individualism and Collectivism
Daniel Hruschka | Associate Professor of Anthropology at Arizona State University
8 comments:
So the harsh weather in Nordic countries or lack of resources in China require more cooperation than a Greek Isle or New Yorker and boom we get socialism. Or vice versa with a-plenty. I don't know.
Simple organisms employee similar patterns of behavior and adaptation as humans but it is important to recognize, they are mostly one or two trick ponies unlike humans. If their one or two strategies don't work, the organism dies, entire populations die. Modern humans are rarely faced with such black and white, live or die decisions. Humans are successful in a range of environments because their brains are good at anticipating and avoiding pain and risk while always on the lookout to capture resources and stealing/borrowing/sharing from/with neighbors in millions of ways. There is a reason that there are billions of humans yet only a handful of deadly viruses. There are only a few Rhinos but millions of hunters looking for trophies to hang in their dental offices in Minneapolis. What is new and unique among humans is the deceit, the current game, played by Dems is to keep lots for yourself, while claiming shortages exist to deny resources to everyone that do not follow arbitrary social rules designed to keep elite dems rolling in it. Biological systems can illustrate strategies but are poor analogues to human systems which are not easily constrained by rules. Try and find a bio-system that has as devious strategy as Ted Cruz or Al Gore.
That's because if you look at anthropologists they spend their time studying chimps and amoebas not humans....
Collective action can be a response to injustice, whether real or imagined.
Peacocks and wolves exhibit behavior comparable to politicians. You just have to peel away the monkey suit and cufflinks.
You cannot predict the behavior of a gas molecule, but you can predict the behavior of a number of molecules behaving "randomly".
The difficulty does not lie within the theoretical lack of predictability of individual behavior (which is most of the time, fairly predictable with enough context and information, I'm afraid to blow up here the myth of the uniqueness of humans, which is nor more or less unique than those of chimps or amoebas), but the difficulty of predicting complex systems characterized by their openness and degree of external inputs. That is, chaotic systems.
Put a group of persons in a controlled environment and with some context and information (their personality traits, strengths, weakness etc.) you will be able to predict what will happen very close to what it actually will happen. This is not different with other social animals, and as interesting to watch.
In fact we develop this during childhood, how do you think society runs if not? We form theories about behavior of other people all the time, and our mind is doing this 16/7. The ability to read others with enough input and collectively act on that is not something extraordinary. The difficulty comes when the system openness is increased and the uncontrollability of the environment increases exponentially, which is exactly what you got with >7000 mill people spread around the globe and reacting to an open environment, therefor making it unpredictable.
"16/7"
Good point! Consider that one stolen!
"You cannot predict the behavior of a gas molecule, but you can predict the behavior of a number of molecules behaving "randomly"."
But not one where the 'molecules' learn and adapt to their inputs and stimulus.
One of the problem I have with equating mass human movements to gases, liquids or even ants.
It doesn't take into account intelligence.
What I find amusing is that all these tricks were applied to Finance around the turn of the millennium in the search for 'mechanical investing' techniques. The lack of multi-billionaires from that approach should really scupper the techniques.
Intelligence behavior is predictable because is mechanical, as it's about optimization and maximization, it can be reduced to a formal logic given the right axioms. Is the lack of information, and if anything the lack of intelligent behavior, what makes it impossible to formalize such systems.
The problem is not the behavior, but the information entropy. Those systems fail because they fail to understand the irresolvable problems presented by entropy. If anyone tries such approach is bounded to fail, and if he tries is because they fail to understand what entropy implies.
All behavior is deterministic, there is no randomness, is just an illusion of complexity. Intelligence or not there is no difference IMO, all has a causal chain, the forest does not let us see the tree (the complexity is the forest and the individual is the tree). "Reflexivity" or however you want to name changing behavior to inputs and adaptation is not a particularity of intelligent organisms, is a generalization of a universal principle that appears different because the emergence of complex networks.
But the essence and rules are the same, the problem is not conscious or seemingly intelligent behavior, but the number of interconnected moving parts in the system and the "openness" of it.
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