Abstract
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’.
Highlights
In comparison to other species, human societies are characterized by the fact that they create rules about what individuals are supposed to do in different situations
We argue that an evolutionary framework that integrates insights and approaches from the evolutionary human sciences, and various more traditional social science and humanities disciplines can be valuable in addressing questions about how institutions function and how they evolve
We have discussed the logic behind the evolutionary function of institutions, the processes involved in shaping some of the broad patterns we see in institutional evolution, and illustrated how we might model the evolution of institutions based on interactions between individuals
Summary
In comparison to other species, human societies are characterized by the fact that they create rules about what individuals are supposed to do in different situations. Institutions may play a role in understanding how cooperation or collective behaviour is achieved [2,3] yet institutions are not an alternative to evolutionary explanations Rather they provide the specific means by which general principles that are commonly invoked in models of the evolution of cooperation such as repeated interactions, positive assortment, or punishment [6,22,28] can be implemented. There are various ways in which this might occur in human societies, often involving some form of institutional mechanism itself (i.e. there are rules about how rules are made—what can be thought of as a ‘constitutional’ process [30,31]) This connects to the fact that institutions may be interrelated, and may interact with, or rely on, other non-institutional aspects of culture which connects to the idea of institutions-as-equilibria [32]. We discuss the opportunities and challenges of both kinds of analyses and finish by considering promising areas of future research
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