Human Behaviour and Cultural Evolution Group, Centre for Ecology and Conservation, University of Exeter, Penryn Campus, TR10 9FE, UK.
Tegemeo Institute of Agricultural Policy and Development, Egerton University, Nairobi, Kenya.
Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci. 2021 Jul 5;376(1828):20200047. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2020.0047. Epub 2021 May 17.
Human societies are structured by what we refer to as 'institutions', which are socially created and culturally inherited proscriptions on behaviour that define roles and set expectations about social interactions. The study of institutions in several social science fields has provided many important insights that have not been fully appreciated in the evolutionary human sciences. However, such research has often lacked a shared understanding of general processes of change that shape institutional diversity across space and time. We argue that evolutionary theory can provide a useful framework for synthesizing information from different disciplines to address issues such as how and why institutions change over time, how institutional rules co-evolve with other culturally inherited traits, and the role that ecological factors might play in shaping institutional diversity. We argue that we can gain important insights by applying cultural evolutionary thinking to the study of institutions, but that we also need to expand and adapt our approaches to better handle the ways that institutions work, and how they might change over time. In this paper, we illustrate our approach by describing macro-scale empirical comparative analyses that demonstrate how evolutionary theory can be used to generate and test hypotheses about the processes that have shaped some of the major patterns we see in institutional diversity over time and across the world today. We then go on to discuss how we might usefully develop micro-scale models of institutional change by adapting concepts from game theory and agent-based modelling. We end by considering current challenges and areas for future research, and the potential implications for other areas of study and real-world applications. This article is part of the theme issue 'Foundations of cultural evolution'.
人类社会是由我们称之为“制度”的东西构成的，这些制度是社会创造和文化传承的对行为的规定，它们定义了角色，并对社会互动设定了期望。在几个社会科学领域对制度的研究提供了许多重要的见解，但这些见解在进化人类科学中并没有得到充分的重视。然而，这类研究往往缺乏对塑造跨时空制度多样性的一般变化过程的共同理解。我们认为，进化理论可以为综合不同学科的信息提供一个有用的框架，以解决制度随时间变化的方式和原因、制度规则如何与其他文化传承特征共同进化以及生态因素在塑造制度多样性方面可能发挥的作用等问题。我们认为，通过将文化进化的思维应用于制度研究，我们可以获得重要的见解，但我们也需要扩展和调整我们的方法，以更好地处理制度的运作方式以及它们随时间变化的方式。在本文中，我们通过描述宏观尺度的实证比较分析来说明我们的方法，这些分析表明了进化理论如何能够用来生成和检验关于塑造我们今天在制度多样性中看到的一些主要模式的过程的假设。然后，我们继续讨论如何通过从博弈论和基于主体的建模中借鉴概念，来有效地开发微观尺度的制度变化模型。最后，我们考虑了当前的挑战和未来的研究领域，以及对其他研究领域和现实世界应用的潜在影响。本文是“文化进化基础”主题问题的一部分。
