Complex societies: The evolutionary origins of a crude superorganism
Abstract
The complexity of human societies of the past few thousand years rivals that of social insect societies. We hypothesize that two sets of social "instincts" underpin and constrain the evolution of complex societies. One set is ancient and shared with other social primate species, and one is derived and unique to our lineage. The latter evolved by the late Pleistocene, and led to the evolution of institutions of intermediate complexity in acephalous societies. The institutions of complex societies often conflict with our social instincts. The complex societies of the past few thousand years can function only because cultural evolution has created effective "work-arounds" to manage such instincts. We describe a series of work-arounds and use the data on the relative effectiveness of WWII armies to test the work-around hypothesis.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Other practices may result in benefits for individuals at the top of a cultural group's hierarchy, but may harm other members of the cultural group.
“Other practices may result in benefits for individuals at the top of a cultural group's hierarchy, but may harm other members of the cultural group (Richerson & Boyd, 1999).”
From Implications of an Emerging Integration of Universal and Culturally Specific Psychologies (2006) · cites this paper as Richerson & Boyd, 1999
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
References 115 · Cited by 227
- Authors
- Richerson, P. J., & Boyd, R.
- Affiliations
- University of California, Davis (US)
- University of California, Los Angeles (US)
- Corresponding author
- Richerson, Peter J.
- Venue
- Human Nature
- Published
- 1999-09
- Volume
- 10
- Issue
- 3
- Pages
- 253-289
- ISSN
- 1045-6767 (ISSN-L)
- 1936-4776
- OpenAlex
- W1995688517
- Cited by
- 227
- References
- 115
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 10 · 2022: 11 · 2021: 9 · 2020: 8 · 2019: 6 · 2018: 6 · 2017: 6 · 2016: 8 · 2015: 9 · 2014: 13 · 2013: 7 · 2012: 13
- FWCI
- 168.75
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Licence
- www.springer.com/tdm (tdm)
- Locations
- Human Nature (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Cultural Studies › Language and cultural evolution
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
- Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation
- Keywords
- complex societies, social instinct, primate social behavior, cultural evolution, institutions, acephalous societies, workarounds, human evolution, Late Pleistocene, social complexity
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
