Papers by Timothy M Waring
Royal Society Open Science
Social change in any society entails changes in both behaviours and institutions. We model a grou... more Social change in any society entails changes in both behaviours and institutions. We model a group-structured society in which the transmission of individual behaviour occurs in parallel with the selection of group-level institutions. We consider a cooperative behaviour that generates collective benefits for groups but does not spread between individuals on its own. Groups exhibit institutions that increase the diffusion of the behaviour within the group, but also incur a group cost. Groups adopt institutions in proportion to their fitness. Finally, the behaviour may also spread globally. We find that behaviour and institutions can be mutually reinforcing. But the model also generates behavioural source-sink dynamics when behaviour generated in institutionalized groups spreads to non-institutionalized groups and boosts their fitness. Consequently, the global diffusion of group-beneficial behaviour creates a pattern of institutional free-riding that limits the evolution of group-bene...
arXiv (Cornell University), Sep 16, 2021
Societies change through time, entailing changes in behaviors and institutions. We ask how social... more Societies change through time, entailing changes in behaviors and institutions. We ask how social change occurs when behaviors and institutions are interdependent. We model a group-structured society in which the transmission of individual behavior occurs in parallel with the selection of group-level institutions. We consider a cooperative behavior that generates collective benefits for groups but does not spread between individuals on its own. Groups exhibit institutions that increase the diffusion of the behavior within the group, but also incur a group cost. Groups adopt institutions in proportion to their fitness. Finally, cooperative behavior may also spread globally. As expected, we find that cooperation and institutions are mutually reinforcing. But the model also generates behavioral source-sink dynamics when cooperation generated in institutional groups spreads to non-institutional groups, boosting their fitness. Consequently, the global diffusion of cooperation creates a pattern of institutional free-riding that limits the evolution of group-beneficial institutions. Our model suggests that, in a group-structured society, large-scale change in behavior and institutions (i.e. social change) can be best achieved when the two remain correlated, such as through the spread successful pilot programs.
Cliodynamics: The Journal of Quantitative History and Cultural Evolution, 2013
If you had three wishes to change the world, what would they be? Perhaps you would like to put an... more If you had three wishes to change the world, what would they be? Perhaps you would like to put an end to war? Reverse global warming? Or eliminate extreme poverty?
Evolutionary scientists argue that cooperation in collective action situations is central to huma... more Evolutionary scientists argue that cooperation in collective action situations is central to human ecological success. Theoretical models, and behavioral experiments have found that human cooperation is conditional and context dependent, that individuals vary in their propensity to cooperate, and that cooperation can be stabilized by reciprocity within groups. Outside of behavioral experiments, these findings haven't been validated with observations in natural settings, especially in industrial societies, cash economies, and structured organizational contexts. Here, we report in situ observations of collective action where reciprocity supports cooperation in organizations embedded in a cash economy. We study small consumer 'food clubs' where members share bulk food purchases and are considered to be heavily dependent on cooperation. We take advantage of a high-resolution dataset of all economic interactions for 1,528 individuals across 35 clubs over a combined total of 107 years of club purchasing data. We develop a network method to detect economic reciprocity, categorize economic behavior as directly reciprocal, indirectly reciprocal, or non-reciprocal, and statistically classify individual behavioral types (reciprocator, helper, and beneficiary). Our results provide some of the first observational evidence of economic reciprocity and cooperation, solidifying the findings of the behavioral study of cooperation and open the door for greater study and application of cooperation.
Teaching is a sophisticated form of cultural transmission believed to increase transmission fidel... more Teaching is a sophisticated form of cultural transmission believed to increase transmission fidelity over less formal or less intentional modes of transmission. As such, teaching may have contributed to the build-up and maintenance of cultural complexity in human societies. However, teaching is also a strategic and dynamic behavior that likely evolves in response to both the type of knowledge taught and the social context. We explore this possibility through an evolutionary analysis of teaching fidelity, or the fidelity of knowledge transmission during teaching. For our analysis we developed two models, a two-trait model and a quantitative trait model to explore how selection on teaching fidelity varies across different types of knowledge. In our two-trait model we use exoteric and esoteric knowledge categories and specify them mathematically to ask how they may affect the evolutionarily-favored level of teaching fidelity. We show that the evolutionarily-stable transmission fidelity...
Maine Policy Review
View current & previous issues of MPR at: mcspolicycenter.umaine.edu/?q=MPR "Wicked problems" are... more View current & previous issues of MPR at: mcspolicycenter.umaine.edu/?q=MPR "Wicked problems" are urgent, high-stake socioeconomic-environmental challenges that often involve ideological conflict and have no "best solutions." Using examples from Maine's Sustainability Solutions Initiative projects, Tim Waring describes how scientific models can be used to address these kinds of problems.
Engaged research emphasizes researcher-stakeholder collaborations as means of improving the relev... more Engaged research emphasizes researcher-stakeholder collaborations as means of improving the relevance of research outcomes and the chances for science-based decision-making. Sustainability science, as a form of engaged research, depends on the collaborative abilities and cooperative tendencies of researchers. We use an economic experiment to measure cooperation between university faculty, local citizens, and faculty engaged in a large sustainability science project to test a set of hypotheses: (1) faculty on the sustainability project will cooperate more with local residents than non-affiliated faculty, (2) sustainability faculty will have the highest level of internal cooperation of any group, and (3) that cooperation may vary due to academic training and culture in different departments amongst sustainability faculty. Our results demonstrate that affiliation with the sustainability project is not associated with differences in cooperation with local citizens or with in-group peers, but that disciplinary differences amongst sustainability faculty do correlate with cooperative tendencies within our sample. We also find that non-affiliated faculty cooperated less with each other than with faculty affiliated with the sustainability project. We conclude that economic experiments can be useful in discovering patterns of prosociality within institutional settings, and list challenges for further applications.
Evolutionary Studies in Imaginative Culture, 2020
Empirical research has identified a number of resource management institutions that improve resou... more Empirical research has identified a number of resource management institutions that improve resource longevity by supporting individual conservation behavior. However, the mechanisms by which these institutions emerge or stabilize have not been established. We speculate that cooperative resource conservation and supporting institutions may emerge via a process of cultural group selection amongst social-ecological systems. We develop multilevel selection model of resource management institutions with endogenous group dynamics. This approach permits us to measure the changes in the strength of selection for traits at the individual and group level simultaneously. We measure selection for costly resource conservation and norms of property and production that support conservation. We show that (1) under a board set of conditions the evolution of sustainable resource use is enhanced by between-group selection, that (2) private property regimes are the most evolutionarily stable, but emer...
This paper presents a study of the emergence of environmental management institutions in Maine’s ... more This paper presents a study of the emergence of environmental management institutions in Maine’s blueberry industry. We follow a cultural evolutionary approach to understand the factors that influenced the emergence of these institutions in environmental collective action problems. Specifically, we use a cultural multilevel selection framework to explore the prediction that collective action and institutions of environmental management emerge when cultural selection is strongest among social groups positioned to solve a given collective action problem. To do this, we construct an evidence typology suited for an historical evolutionary analysis. We find that the scale of cultural adaptation responded to scale of the most pressing adaptive problem. The case study provides support for the group-level selection theory of institutional evolution, and displays patterns of institutional adaptation that respond to changing conditions over time. We argue that the dominant level of selection ...
The importance of ethnic diversity in determining social outcomes and reducing generalized cooper... more The importance of ethnic diversity in determining social outcomes and reducing generalized cooperation is increasingly well documented. Theory suggests that cooperation in human groups may depend on reciprocal altruism and frequency of contact, yet these factors have not been linked with ethnic diversity. This study explores how fine-scale components of cooperation—social exclusivity and reciprocity—relate to broad-scale social conditions—ethnic diversity and ethnic stratification—in villages in Tamil Nadu’s Palani hills. Both ethnic diversity and ethnic stratification are associated with declines in indirect reciprocity, although stratification has a larger effect. In addition, stratification is linked to increased social exclusivity. Moreover, measures of direct reciprocity in the form of agricultural labor exchanges are uncorrelated with both diversity and stratification. These results imply (1) that ethnic stratification is more detrimental to cooperation than is ethnic diversit...
Uchiyama, Spicer, and Muthukrishna reveal how group-structured cultural variation influences meas... more Uchiyama, Spicer, and Muthukrishna reveal how group-structured cultural variation influences measurements of trait heritability. We argue that understanding culture’s influence on phenotypic heritability can clarify the impact of culture on genetic inheritance, which has implications for long-term gene-culture coevolution. Their analysis may provide guidance for testing our hypothesis that cultural adaptation is superseding genetic adaptation in the long term.
Frontiers in Psychology, 2021
In large, complex societies, assorting with others with similar social norms or behaviors can fac... more In large, complex societies, assorting with others with similar social norms or behaviors can facilitate successful coordination and cooperation. The ability to recognize others with shared norms or behaviors is thus assumed to be under selection. As a medium of communication, human art might reflect fitness-relevant information on shared norms and behaviors of other individuals thus facilitating successful coordination and cooperation. Distinctive styles or patterns of artistic design could signify migration history, different groups with a shared interaction history due to spatial proximity, as well as individual-level expertise and preferences. In addition, cultural boundaries may be even more pronounced in a highly diverse and socially stratified society. In the current study, we focus on a large corpus of an artistic tradition called kolam that is produced by women from Tamil Nadu in South India (N = 3, 139 kolam drawings from 192 women) to test whether stylistic variations in ...
Ecology and Society, 2020
The emerging field of socio-hydrology is a special case of social-ecological systems research tha... more The emerging field of socio-hydrology is a special case of social-ecological systems research that focuses on coupled human-water systems, exploring how the hydrologic cycle and human cultural traits coevolve and how such coevolutions lead to phenomena of relevance to water security and sustainability. As such, most problems tackled by socio-hydrology involve some aspects of engineering design, such as large-scale water infrastructure, and self-organization in a broad context, such as cultural change at the population level and the hydrologic shift at the river basin or aquifer level. However, within the field of socio-hydrology, it has been difficult to find general theories that assist our understanding of the dynamics emerging from the interplay between design and selforganization, hindering generalization of phenomena between cases. We address this gap by developing insights on how the theoretical frameworks of robustness-fragility trade-off and cultural multilevel selection can inform our understanding in this regard. We apply the two theories to two cases in the Ganges Brahmaputra Delta in Bangladesh and the Kissimmee River Basin in Florida, illustrating how the two theories may provide general insights into causal mechanisms shaping the socio-hydrological phenomena observed in the two cases. Specifically, we use the two theories to address (1) the transference of system fragility across different domains due to design choices and (2) the multilevel social processes in the nested organizational hierarchy that lead to the formation or collapse of shared cultural traits. We show that these two theories, separately or taken together, can provide richer theoretical grounding for understanding socio-hydrological phenomena.
Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 2021
Conservation Science and Practice, 2021
In the sustainability and conservation sciences, “social learning” is defined as a group process ... more In the sustainability and conservation sciences, “social learning” is defined as a group process which depends on trust and social capital and tends to boost conservation outcomes. We term this “collaborative social learning.” Meanwhile, the behavioral sciences define social learning as the individual use of socially acquired information and seek to explain how individuals employ social learning as part of adaptive behavior. We term this “behavioral social learning.” However, the influence of behavioral social learning on ecological outcomes is poorly understood. We conducted a study of behavioral social learning among fishers in seven communities in Chile's Region V to probe its connections with ecological outcomes and collaborative social learning. We develop and employ a novel behavioral measure of individual social learning in a simple fishing game in which fishers may pay a portion of their game earnings to observe and learn from other fishers in the game. We explore the internal and external validity of the instrument. The self‐consistency of game play, learning, and participant reflections reveals strong internal validity of the learning game. Additionally, game behavior is correlated with factors such as migration history, and the perceived availability of peers from whom to learn, suggesting the method also holds external validity. We then test whether factors associated with collaborative social learning, such as social capital, are related to social learning behavior as measured by the experiment. Interestingly, many correlates of ‘collaborative social learning’ are not strongly correlated with ‘behavioral social learning’ in our sample. We argue that this disconnect can help improve our understanding of the emergence of community‐based conservation and positive ecological outcomes as well as ‘collaborative social learning’ itself. Finally, we provide guidance on how behavioral measures of social learning could benefit community‐based natural resource management and conservation.
Journal of Evolutionary Economics, 2021
The ‘co-operative principles’ are a set of operating and aspirational guidelines for co-operative... more The ‘co-operative principles’ are a set of operating and aspirational guidelines for co-operative businesses that originated in England in the 1840s and are used worldwide today. We evaluate alternative explanations for their emergence and spread. One hypothesis is that the co-operative principles constitute institutional adaptations helping co-operatives survive and spread. Alternatively, the principles might be adaptively neutral but spread fad-like between co-operatives, or they may spread even while hampering co-operative survival, constituting a maladaptation. We use established empirical rubrics to identify the preconditions and signatures of adaptive evolution in the co-operative principles in their 170-year historical record. Historical analysis provides compelling evidence of the variation, transmission and selection of the co-operative principles in various periods and environments. We document that the principles arose and have been modified via intentional innovation, that they sometimes work to facilitate cooperation among the members of a co-operative, and that in some cases they have spread due to their beneficial effects on the co-operatives which adopt them. We also report macro-evolutionary patterns which suggest adaptive evolution may have occurred, including patterns of descent with modification and the adaptive radiation of the principles into worker co-operatives. The patchwork evidence is consistent with a mix of evolutionary processes varying over time, and some principles may have been selected against. We conclude that the co-operative principles likely constituted institutional adaptations as a whole in 1840s England and 1950s Spain but may have only been adaptive in a piecemeal fashion otherwise. We conclude by proposing that the co-operative principles can be revised and improved scientifically.
Cooperatives as can be presumed to rely on the economic cooperation of their members. However, ga... more Cooperatives as can be presumed to rely on the economic cooperation of their members. However, game-theoretic and institutional models suggest that cooperatives may be inherently fragile due to the individual costs of cooperation. Because of this it is widely believed that organizations which rely less on cooperation may be more stable, while organizations that require cooperation may be at higher risk of folding. Therefore, if cooperatively owned or managed businesses do in fact require higher levels of prosocial and cooperative behavior than hierarchically managed firms, they must attract and maintain cooperation among participants in order to function. We hypothesized that successful consumer food cooperatives will exhibit greater generalized cooperation than conventional grocery stores. We employed an experimental dictator game to measure altruistic cooperation among consumers at a food cooperative and a comparable conventional grocery. Cooperative customers exhibit a higher bas...
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Papers by Timothy M Waring