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Angarika Deb

Central European University, Cognitive Science, Graduate Student

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I am a PhD student at Central European University, Budapest, working with the Departments of Cognitive Science and Social Anthropology, under an interdisciplinary fellowship. I have worked in various fields, ranging from Evolutionary Biology and Human Behavioural Ecology to Cognitive Linguistics, Cultural Evolution and Anthropology. My current research interests lie in studying the cognitive mechanisms that underlie social behaviour and the role of social and cultural norms in evolution of behavioural traits

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Daniel D. Hutto

University of Wollongong

Robert Lickliter

Florida International University

Universidade Nova de Lisboa

National University of "Kyiv-Mohyla Academy"

Cristina Bicchieri

University of Pennsylvania

University College Cork

Kristen J Gremillion

Ohio State University

Central European University

Kansas State University

Armando Marques-Guedes

UNL - New University of Lisbon

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Papers by Angarika Deb

Title: Perpetuation of Gender Inequalities in Households: From Culture to Cognition

Though labor-force participation of women has considerably increased in industrialized societies ... more Though labor-force participation of women has considerably increased in industrialized societies and many households are now dual-earner, the gender imbalance in household division of labor persists. Moreover, the consensus amongst men and women is that such distributions are fair, resulting in normalization and further perpetuation of inequalities. We provide a multidisciplinary explanation, focusing on the economic, cultural and cognitive processes underlying the perpetuation of inequalities within households. The article begins with a broad, economic approach that details the role of outside options and how they impact available decisions across different subsistence communities. We then discuss the role of cultural narratives and norms in shaping internalized structures of inequality. Finally, we unify these perspectives by focusing on the cognitive mechanisms that underpin self-perception and motivated assessments of fairness within households. We end with a brief discussion on the policy significance and avenues of future work.

Varikin: A global collection of kinship terminology

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), Oct 18, 2022

Gender Egalitarianism in Hunter-Gatherers

Bargaining between the sexes: outside options and leisure time in hunter-gatherer households

We discuss gendered division of labour in nuclear households as a bargaining problem, where male ... more We discuss gendered division of labour in nuclear households as a bargaining problem, where male and female partners bargain over labour inputs and resulting leisure time. We hypothesize that outside options-an individual's fallback options for welfare outside their household, such as kin support-affects this bargaining process, providing those with greater outside options more leverage to bargain for leisure time. In two hunter-gatherer populations, the BaYaka and Agta, we take social capital as the determinant of outside options, using a generative model of the Nash bargaining problem and Bayesian multilevel logistic regression to test our hypothesis. We find no evidence for an association between social capital and division of leisure in either population. Instead, we find remarkable equality in the division of leisure time within households. We suggest the potential role of sex-egalitarian norms, non-substitutability of subsistence labour, bilocality and behaviors which maintain gender equality in immediate-return hunter-gatherers.

Problem of Altruism

Springer eBooks, 2019

Gender Egalitarianism in Hunter-Gatherers

Immediate-return hunter-gatherers have long provided knowledge about human sociality in the absen... more Immediate-return hunter-gatherers have long provided knowledge about human sociality in the absence of material storage and agriculture. These groups, unlike most large-scale societies, are known to avoid hierarchical relationships between men and women and maintain a life of individual autonomy and egalitarianism. In this entry, I illustrate their prevalent ethos of egalitarianism by reviewing practices of subsistence, gendered division of labor, marriage and postmarital residence patterns, childcare practices, norms of ownership, and the social and political status of men and women. These norms and practices have been studied by anthropologists across decades, to establish the particular social fabric of gender egalitarianism. Finally, I draw a brief comparison with agricultural, horticultural, and industrialized societies to emphasize the uniqueness of these groups and the importance of studying them via preexisting ethnographic records.

Problem of Altruism

Springer eBooks, 2021

Markets, Religion, Community Size and the Evolution of Fairness? Not really

An influential theory of human fairness has suggested that norms of equity evolved as community s... more An influential theory of human fairness has suggested that norms of equity evolved as community sizes grew, markets and institutions stabilized and world religions came about. The theory assumes that humans predominantly interacted with kin in the evolutionary past, lived in genetically related groups and did not have formal norms of cooperation. In this article I present anthropological evidence to the contrary. Contemporary hunter-gatherer societies from around the globe live in nomadic camps with fluid membership and low genetic relatedness; cooperate extensively based on principles of need, equity and reciprocity; have high prevalence of food sharing, cooperative hunting and alloparenting; and demonstrate formal norms of redistribution for essential goods. This directly contradicts the claim that fairness is a recently evolved disposition for market-integrated societies.

Perpetuation of Gender Inequalities in Households: From Culture to Cognition

Though labor-force participation of women has considerably increased in industrialized societies ... more Though labor-force participation of women has considerably increased in industrialized societies and many households are now dual-earner, the gender imbalance in household division of labor persists. Moreover, the consensus amongst men and women is that such distributions are fair, resulting in normalization and further perpetuation of inequalities. We provide a
multidisciplinary explanation, focusing on the economic, cultural and cognitive processes underlying the perpetuation of inequalities within households. The article begins with a broad, economic approach that details the role of outside options and how they impact available decisions across different subsistence communities. We then discuss the role of cultural narratives and norms in shaping internalized structures of inequality. Finally, we unify these perspectives by focusing on the cognitive mechanisms that underpin self-perception and motivated assessments of fairness within households. We end with a brief discussion on the policy significance and avenues of future work.

Kinbank: A global database of kinship terminology

PLOS ONE

For a single species, human kinship organization is both remarkably diverse and strikingly organi... more For a single species, human kinship organization is both remarkably diverse and strikingly organized. Kinship terminology is the structured vocabulary used to classify, refer to, and address relatives and family. Diversity in kinship terminology has been analyzed by anthropologists for over 150 years, although recurrent patterning across cultures remains incompletely explained. Despite the wealth of kinship data in the anthropological record, comparative studies of kinship terminology are hindered by data accessibility. Here we present Kinbank, a new database of 210,903 kinterms from a global sample of 1,229 spoken languages. Using open-access and transparent data provenance, Kinbank offers an extensible resource for kinship terminology, enabling researchers to explore the rich diversity of human family organization and to test longstanding hypotheses about the origins and drivers of recurrent patterns. We illustrate our contribution with two examples. We demonstrate strong gender b...

Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment

Science, 2010

A Fair Society Many of the social interactions of everyday life, especially those involving econo... more A Fair Society Many of the social interactions of everyday life, especially those involving economic exchange, take place between individuals who are unrelated to each other and often do not know each other. Countless laboratory experiments have documented the propensity of subjects to behave fairly in these interactions and to punish those participants deemed to have behaved unfairly. Henrich et al. (p. 1480 , see the Perspective by Hoff ) measured fairness in thousands of individuals from 15 contemporary, small-scale societies to gain an understanding of the evolution of trustworthy exchange among human societies. Fairness was quantitated using three economic games. Various societal parameters, such as the extent to which food was purchased versus produced, were also collected. Institutions, as represented by markets, community size, and adherence to a world religion all predict a greater exercise of fairness in social exchange.

Effects of societal situations on redistribution, expected moral behavior, and preference for authoritarian governance

Registration for replication study in India

Cortical Recycling Hypothesis applied to money

The cultural cortical hypothesis states that neural mechanisms, which were used in evolutionarily... more

Anxiety (Randolph Nesse)

Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2021

From an evolutionary perspective, anxiety can be considered as a psychological hazard-detection s... more From an evolutionary perspective, anxiety can be considered as a psychological hazard-detection system. In uncertain environments, the costs of responding to false cues of danger are often miniscule as compared to those resulting from undetected threats. Therefore, the anxiety response has evolved a bias toward false alarms under conditions of uncertainty. We discuss general and specific types of anxiety responses, underlining how the nature of these are often determined by the particular types of threats in the environment.

Language and Economic Cooperation

Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2021

Language and linguistic features have long been speculated to affect various aspects of human beh... more Language and linguistic features have long been speculated to affect various aspects of human behaviour. Being intricately linked with cultural systems, linguistic features can encode and make salient specific cultural values, which are then reflected in behaviour. Here we talk about two significant linguistic features, pronouns and terms of address, which are hypothesised to have an influence on cooperative behaviour. Such effects are said to be mediated by the encoding of social hierarchical structures and contextualisation (or decontextualization) of speaker and addressee in speech.

Problem of Altruism

We define two ‘problems of altruism’. The first is the classic problem of altruism, defined as th... more We define two ‘problems of altruism’. The first is the classic problem of altruism, defined as the issue of how a behavior which decreases an individual’s lifetime reproductive success, while helping another individual (or individuals) increase their lifetime reproductive success, can evolve. We also define a ‘second-order problem of altruism’, where different authors have different conceptions of what does, and does not, constitute ‘altruism’, including approaches based on kin selection, multi-level selection theory, short-term altruism and psychological altruism.

Towards Methodological Pluralism in Psychological Sciences

by Angarika Deb and Aleksandra Knežević

Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2021

An overreliance on experimental methods in psychology comes with its problems of low context sens... more An overreliance on experimental methods in psychology comes with its problems of low context sensitivity, ecological invalidity, and limited scope of study. A move towards interdisciplinarity and methodological pluralism, along with an increased attention to the cultural context of behavior, can give greater validity to its findings, making psychology a more robust science.

Individualism, collectivism and acculturation -A cognitive analysis of preference

CHIELD: Causal hypotheses in evolutionary linguistics database

by Angarika Deb and Kit (Christopher) Opie

Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (Evolang12)

Towards Methodological Pluralism in Psychological Sciences

by Angarika Deb and Aleksandra Knežević

An overreliance on experimental methods in psychology comes with its problems of low context sens... more An overreliance on experimental methods in psychology comes with its problems of low context sensitivity, ecological invalidity, and limited scope of study. A move towards interdisciplinarity and methodological pluralism, along with an increased attention to the cultural context of behavior, can give greater validity to its findings, making psychology a more robust science.

Title: Perpetuation of Gender Inequalities in Households: From Culture to Cognition

Though labor-force participation of women has considerably increased in industrialized societies ... more Though labor-force participation of women has considerably increased in industrialized societies and many households are now dual-earner, the gender imbalance in household division of labor persists. Moreover, the consensus amongst men and women is that such distributions are fair, resulting in normalization and further perpetuation of inequalities. We provide a multidisciplinary explanation, focusing on the economic, cultural and cognitive processes underlying the perpetuation of inequalities within households. The article begins with a broad, economic approach that details the role of outside options and how they impact available decisions across different subsistence communities. We then discuss the role of cultural narratives and norms in shaping internalized structures of inequality. Finally, we unify these perspectives by focusing on the cognitive mechanisms that underpin self-perception and motivated assessments of fairness within households. We end with a brief discussion on the policy significance and avenues of future work.

Varikin: A global collection of kinship terminology

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research), Oct 18, 2022

Gender Egalitarianism in Hunter-Gatherers

Bargaining between the sexes: outside options and leisure time in hunter-gatherer households

We discuss gendered division of labour in nuclear households as a bargaining problem, where male ... more We discuss gendered division of labour in nuclear households as a bargaining problem, where male and female partners bargain over labour inputs and resulting leisure time. We hypothesize that outside options-an individual's fallback options for welfare outside their household, such as kin support-affects this bargaining process, providing those with greater outside options more leverage to bargain for leisure time. In two hunter-gatherer populations, the BaYaka and Agta, we take social capital as the determinant of outside options, using a generative model of the Nash bargaining problem and Bayesian multilevel logistic regression to test our hypothesis. We find no evidence for an association between social capital and division of leisure in either population. Instead, we find remarkable equality in the division of leisure time within households. We suggest the potential role of sex-egalitarian norms, non-substitutability of subsistence labour, bilocality and behaviors which maintain gender equality in immediate-return hunter-gatherers.

Problem of Altruism

Springer eBooks, 2019

Gender Egalitarianism in Hunter-Gatherers

Immediate-return hunter-gatherers have long provided knowledge about human sociality in the absen... more Immediate-return hunter-gatherers have long provided knowledge about human sociality in the absence of material storage and agriculture. These groups, unlike most large-scale societies, are known to avoid hierarchical relationships between men and women and maintain a life of individual autonomy and egalitarianism. In this entry, I illustrate their prevalent ethos of egalitarianism by reviewing practices of subsistence, gendered division of labor, marriage and postmarital residence patterns, childcare practices, norms of ownership, and the social and political status of men and women. These norms and practices have been studied by anthropologists across decades, to establish the particular social fabric of gender egalitarianism. Finally, I draw a brief comparison with agricultural, horticultural, and industrialized societies to emphasize the uniqueness of these groups and the importance of studying them via preexisting ethnographic records.

Problem of Altruism

Springer eBooks, 2021

Markets, Religion, Community Size and the Evolution of Fairness? Not really

An influential theory of human fairness has suggested that norms of equity evolved as community s... more An influential theory of human fairness has suggested that norms of equity evolved as community sizes grew, markets and institutions stabilized and world religions came about. The theory assumes that humans predominantly interacted with kin in the evolutionary past, lived in genetically related groups and did not have formal norms of cooperation. In this article I present anthropological evidence to the contrary. Contemporary hunter-gatherer societies from around the globe live in nomadic camps with fluid membership and low genetic relatedness; cooperate extensively based on principles of need, equity and reciprocity; have high prevalence of food sharing, cooperative hunting and alloparenting; and demonstrate formal norms of redistribution for essential goods. This directly contradicts the claim that fairness is a recently evolved disposition for market-integrated societies.

Perpetuation of Gender Inequalities in Households: From Culture to Cognition

Though labor-force participation of women has considerably increased in industrialized societies ... more Though labor-force participation of women has considerably increased in industrialized societies and many households are now dual-earner, the gender imbalance in household division of labor persists. Moreover, the consensus amongst men and women is that such distributions are fair, resulting in normalization and further perpetuation of inequalities. We provide a
multidisciplinary explanation, focusing on the economic, cultural and cognitive processes underlying the perpetuation of inequalities within households. The article begins with a broad, economic approach that details the role of outside options and how they impact available decisions across different subsistence communities. We then discuss the role of cultural narratives and norms in shaping internalized structures of inequality. Finally, we unify these perspectives by focusing on the cognitive mechanisms that underpin self-perception and motivated assessments of fairness within households. We end with a brief discussion on the policy significance and avenues of future work.

Kinbank: A global database of kinship terminology

PLOS ONE

For a single species, human kinship organization is both remarkably diverse and strikingly organi... more For a single species, human kinship organization is both remarkably diverse and strikingly organized. Kinship terminology is the structured vocabulary used to classify, refer to, and address relatives and family. Diversity in kinship terminology has been analyzed by anthropologists for over 150 years, although recurrent patterning across cultures remains incompletely explained. Despite the wealth of kinship data in the anthropological record, comparative studies of kinship terminology are hindered by data accessibility. Here we present Kinbank, a new database of 210,903 kinterms from a global sample of 1,229 spoken languages. Using open-access and transparent data provenance, Kinbank offers an extensible resource for kinship terminology, enabling researchers to explore the rich diversity of human family organization and to test longstanding hypotheses about the origins and drivers of recurrent patterns. We illustrate our contribution with two examples. We demonstrate strong gender b...

Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment

Science, 2010

A Fair Society Many of the social interactions of everyday life, especially those involving econo... more A Fair Society Many of the social interactions of everyday life, especially those involving economic exchange, take place between individuals who are unrelated to each other and often do not know each other. Countless laboratory experiments have documented the propensity of subjects to behave fairly in these interactions and to punish those participants deemed to have behaved unfairly. Henrich et al. (p. 1480 , see the Perspective by Hoff ) measured fairness in thousands of individuals from 15 contemporary, small-scale societies to gain an understanding of the evolution of trustworthy exchange among human societies. Fairness was quantitated using three economic games. Various societal parameters, such as the extent to which food was purchased versus produced, were also collected. Institutions, as represented by markets, community size, and adherence to a world religion all predict a greater exercise of fairness in social exchange.

Effects of societal situations on redistribution, expected moral behavior, and preference for authoritarian governance

Registration for replication study in India

Cortical Recycling Hypothesis applied to money

The cultural cortical hypothesis states that neural mechanisms, which were used in evolutionarily... more

Anxiety (Randolph Nesse)

Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2021

From an evolutionary perspective, anxiety can be considered as a psychological hazard-detection s... more From an evolutionary perspective, anxiety can be considered as a psychological hazard-detection system. In uncertain environments, the costs of responding to false cues of danger are often miniscule as compared to those resulting from undetected threats. Therefore, the anxiety response has evolved a bias toward false alarms under conditions of uncertainty. We discuss general and specific types of anxiety responses, underlining how the nature of these are often determined by the particular types of threats in the environment.

Language and Economic Cooperation

Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2021

Language and linguistic features have long been speculated to affect various aspects of human beh... more Language and linguistic features have long been speculated to affect various aspects of human behaviour. Being intricately linked with cultural systems, linguistic features can encode and make salient specific cultural values, which are then reflected in behaviour. Here we talk about two significant linguistic features, pronouns and terms of address, which are hypothesised to have an influence on cooperative behaviour. Such effects are said to be mediated by the encoding of social hierarchical structures and contextualisation (or decontextualization) of speaker and addressee in speech.

Problem of Altruism

We define two ‘problems of altruism’. The first is the classic problem of altruism, defined as th... more We define two ‘problems of altruism’. The first is the classic problem of altruism, defined as the issue of how a behavior which decreases an individual’s lifetime reproductive success, while helping another individual (or individuals) increase their lifetime reproductive success, can evolve. We also define a ‘second-order problem of altruism’, where different authors have different conceptions of what does, and does not, constitute ‘altruism’, including approaches based on kin selection, multi-level selection theory, short-term altruism and psychological altruism.

Towards Methodological Pluralism in Psychological Sciences

by Angarika Deb and Aleksandra Knežević

Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2021

An overreliance on experimental methods in psychology comes with its problems of low context sens... more An overreliance on experimental methods in psychology comes with its problems of low context sensitivity, ecological invalidity, and limited scope of study. A move towards interdisciplinarity and methodological pluralism, along with an increased attention to the cultural context of behavior, can give greater validity to its findings, making psychology a more robust science.

Individualism, collectivism and acculturation -A cognitive analysis of preference

CHIELD: Causal hypotheses in evolutionary linguistics database

by Angarika Deb and Kit (Christopher) Opie

Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (Evolang12)

Towards Methodological Pluralism in Psychological Sciences

by Angarika Deb and Aleksandra Knežević

An overreliance on experimental methods in psychology comes with its problems of low context sens... more An overreliance on experimental methods in psychology comes with its problems of low context sensitivity, ecological invalidity, and limited scope of study. A move towards interdisciplinarity and methodological pluralism, along with an increased attention to the cultural context of behavior, can give greater validity to its findings, making psychology a more robust science.

Social outside options and repartitioning leisure time in households of Mbendjele BaYaka