Benjamin Enke — The coevolution of kinship systems, cooperation, and culture

Daily life requires us to cooperate with a large number of – potentially unrelated – people. This column argues that cultural variation in the ways people cooperate with each other are empirically associated with fundamentally different religious beliefs, moral values, emotions of shame and guilt, social norms, and institutions. This suggests that various psychological, biological, and institutional mechanisms co-evolved to support specific social cooperation systems.

Harmonizing personal freedom of choice and action with social responsibility and the self-discipline this entails is a key issue in anthology, sociology, political science, and economics. This problem is fundamentally an ethical one involving norms, in addition to being a behavioral one involving motivation and also a psychological one involving both disposition and learning. Even physically identical twins are not identical in disposition, for example, which results in different preferences and habit structure. Similarly, cultures are diverse and the the result is a diversity of customs and institutions.

Even sub-human forms of life have normative standards even though they are not specifically expressed as norms or values. Since nature doesn't make jumps it is reasonable to infer that ethics develops rationally from pre-rational behaviors, as custom preceded law, for instance. At the human level, culture and institutions are as formative in behavior as choice based on individual preferences. As Aristotle observed, humans are social animals (rather than loners).

This clearly has strong implications for economics, calling into question the assumption  of methodological individualism. While human do makes some economic decisions individually without influence, this is a special case rather than a general one. Making it a general methodological assumption falls under the fallacy of hasty generalization.

The post implies that liberalism and the centrality of individuals it presupposes is not natural biologically, as assumed, but rather it is an artifact of a particular type of society that is a loose kinship society in terms of the post. This would accord with the failure of liberalism to spread widely if it is natural. Rather, many if not most societies are close kinship societies with more rigid structures.

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The coevolution of kinship systems, cooperation, and culture
Benjamin Enke | Assistant Professor of Economics, Harvard University