Why Humans Cooperate: A Cultural and Evolutionary Explanation

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Oxford University Press, Jun 27, 2007 - Science - 272 pages
Cooperation among humans is one of the keys to our great evolutionary success. Natalie and Joseph Henrich examine this phenomena with a unique fusion of theoretical work on the evolution of cooperation, ethnographic descriptions of social behavior, and a range of other experimental results. Their experimental and ethnographic data come from a small, insular group of middle-class Iraqi Christians called Chaldeans, living in metro Detroit, whom the Henrichs use as an example to show how kinship relations, ethnicity, and culturally transmitted traditions provide the key to explaining the evolution of cooperation over multiple generations.

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Contents

1 Evolution Culture Cooperation and the Chaldeans
3
The Evolution of Cultural Capacities and Cultural Evolution
7
3 Evolutionary Theory and the Social Psychology of Human Cooperation
35
History and the Community Today
75
Kinship Explains Most Cooperative Behavior
89
6 Cooperation through Reciprocity and Reputation
109
7 Social Norms and Prosociality
133
8 Culturally Evolved Social Norms Lead to ContextSpecific Cooperation
157
10 Cooperative Dilemmas in the World Today
205
The Underlying Structure of Cooperation
215
Ethnographic Research Methods and Challenges
219
Constructing the Ethnicity and Cooperation Indices
225
Notes
229
References
241
Index
255
Copyright

InGroup Preferences and Cooperation
175

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About the author (2007)

Natalie Henrich is Assistant Professor at University of British Columbia, Department of Medicine/BCCDC (BC Center for Disease Control) Joseph Henrich is Canada Research Chair in Culture, Cognition, & Evolution and Associate Professor of Psychology and Economics at the University of British Columbia.

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