“Humanity is facing an existential crisis. To survive, we must understand how our societies work and where we come from.”
oxford santiago helsinki kiel
evolutionary behaviour science
Multi-disciplinary
anthropology
economics
biology
psychology
demography
multi-question
human evolution
social networks
inequality
friendship
mate-choice
kinship
religion
collective action
Tamás Dávid-Barrett is a behavioural scientist, who asks what traits allow humans to live in large and culturally complex societies. His work focuses on the Structural Microfoundations Theory about how the structure of social networks change during falling fertility, urbanisation, and migration; as well as, how social networks vary over the human life-course. Tamás’s current projects include the origins of inequality regulation; why the behavioural rules between women and men vary so much across cultures; and the evolutionary foundations of sharing behaviour.
Tamás teaches Trinity College, University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, and is affiliated with the Population Studies Research Institute in Helsinki, Finland. He is a fellow of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Parallel to his Oxford existence, previously Tamás was also a professor at UDD in Chile, and a visiting scientist at the Kiel Institute in Germany. Before becoming an academic, he ran a macroeconomic analyst company, and did research in 35 countries all around the world.
Latest
Portrait of Tamás by Paul Benney. Oil and resin on board.
Human Group Size Puzzle: Why It Is Odd That We Live in Large Societies
Download the paper: Royal Society Open Science 2023
Clustering drives cooperation on reputation networks, all else fixed
Download the paper: Royal Society Open Science 2023
Paper abstract:
Human groups tend to be much larger than those of non-human primates. This is a puzzle. When ecological factors do not limit primate group size, the problem of coordination creates an upper threshold even when cooperation is guaranteed. This paper offers a model of group coordination towards behavioural synchrony to spell out the mechanics of group size limits, and thus shows why it is odd that humans live in large societies. The findings suggest that many of our species' evolved social behaviours and culturally maintained social technologies emerged as solutions to this problem.
Paper abstract:
Reputation-based cooperation on social networks offers a causal mechanism between graph properties and social trust. Using a simple model, this paper demonstrates the underlying mechanism in a way that is accessible to scientists not specializing in networks or mathematics. The paper shows that when the size and degree of the network is fixed (i.e. all graphs have the same number of agents, who all have the same number of connections), it is the clustering coefficient that drives differences in how cooperative social networks are.
papers
Social networks: structure
Network Ecology of Marriage
arxiv 2023
Collaboration Conundrum: Synchrony-Cooperation Trade-off
Arxiv 2023
Unbiased Library of k-regular, n-sized, Connected, Small Graphs
Arxiv 2023. Graph library: here.
Human Group Size Puzzle: Why It Is Odd That We Live in Large Societies
Royal Society Open ScienCe 2023
In A Society of Strangers, Kin Is Still Key: Identified Family Relations in Large-Scale Mobile Phone Data
ARXIV 2023
Clustering Drives Cooperation on Reputation Networks, All Else Fixed
Royal Society Open Science 2023
World-wide Evidence for Gender Difference in Sociality
arxiv 2022
Herding Friends in Similarity-Based Architecture of Social Networks
Nature Scientific Reports 2020
Network Effects of Demographic Transition
Nature Scientific Reports 2019
Social Network Complexity in Mozart’s Figaro
Chapter in the book Evolution and Popular Narrative with James Carney, Anna Rotkirch, and Isabel Behncke
Fertility, Kinship, and Evolution of Mass Ideologies
Journal of Theoretical biology 2017 with robin dunbar
Communication with family and friends across the life course
PLOS ONE 2016 with J. Kertesz, A. Rotkirch, A. Ghosh, K. Bhattarcharya, D. Monsivais, K. Kaski
Life Course Similarities on Social Network Sites
Advances in Life Course Research 2016 with I. Behncke Izquierdo, J. Carney, K. Nowak, J. Launay, A. Rotkirch
Women Favour Dyadic Relationships, but Men Prefer Clubs: Cross-Cultural Evidence from Social Networking
PLOS ONE 2015 with A. Rotkirch, J. Carney, I. Behncke, J. Krems, D. Townley, E. McDaniell, A. Byrn-Smith, R.I.M. Dunbar
Mating Strategies In Mozart’s Figaro
Human Ethology Bulletin 2015 with J. Carney, I. Behncke Izquierdo, A. Rotkirch
Human evolution: cognition
Fictional Narrative as a Variational Bayesian Method for Estimating Social Dispositions in Large Groups
Journal of Mathematical PSychology 2019 with James Carney and Cole Robertson
Language As A Coordination Tool Evolves Slowly
Royal Society Open Science 2016 with Robin Dunbar
Processing Power Limits Social Group Size: Computational Evidence for the Cognitive Costs of Sociality
Proceedings of the Royal Society 2016 with Robin Dunbar
Human evolution: the body
Bipedality and Hair-loss Revisited: The Impact of Altitude and Activity Scheduling
Journal of Human Evolution 2016 with Robin Dunbar
Human evolution: religiosity
The Deification Of Historical Figures And The Emergence Of Priesthoods As A Solution To A Network Coordination Problem
Religion, Brain and Behavior 2015 with James Carney
Social Psychology and the Comic-Book Superhero: A Darwinian Approach
Journal of Philosophy and Literature 2014 with Carney, J, R.I.M. Dunbar, A. Machin, M.S. Junior
Social networks: inequality
Social Elites Can Emerge Naturally When Interaction In Networks Is Restricted
Behavioral Ecology 2014 with Robin Dunbar
Cooperation, Behavioural Synchrony and Status in Social Networks
Journal of Theoretical Biology 2012 with Robin Dunbar
Focus
Levelling
Institutions regulating inequality
Like every other primate society, human societies, too, have a tendency towards inequality. Our societies, independent of size, recognise merit, which leads to status variation within the group. Once status is attributed, the fact that the social interaction is limited in our species, as in: you can’t be true friends with everyone, results in social network stratification. Stratified networks have a propensity for their elite to be delineated, detached from the rest. The stratification and elite delineation processes both amplify the initial merit inequality.
This chain of societal reactions results in a tricky situation: if merit is not recognised, the society is not going to be efficient in using the resources around it. However, as merit recognition leads to stratification and elite delineation, the efficiency of the society to coordinate collective action falls. Thus neither eliminating all tendencies towards inequality, nor completely ignoring these is efficient for the society.
This means that all societies that have successfully survived in the past must have figured out the way to allow some merit to show without inequality rising to its “natural” level. Recognising this, Tamas started the Institutions Regulating Inequality project, which is a catalogue of different societies’ solution to this problem.
Matriocracy
The origins of gender rules
All human societies, without exception, regulate the relationship between women and men. These rules form a norm system that varies as much across cultures as any other behaviour. Why is this variation in intersex rules so big? If all human societies have women and men, a biological fact, and so much of the one-on-one relationship is inherited genetically, like falling in love and making babies, why is the variation about their roles in society so strikingly high? A fact that is true not only across current day societies, but also through time. Why do the behaviour rules between women and men vary so much?
The Matriocracy project is looking for an answer to this question within an evolutionary behavioural science framework. The answer the project has found so far lies in four environmental factors, and two societal ones. These six factors together determine the set of rules societies apply to regulate the relationship between women and men.
Using the framework set out by these six factors, the Matriocracy project explains why forager, hunter-gatherer cultures were gender equal, why this changed during the Neolithic to the predominantly patriarchal setup of agriculturalists, and why human societies are switching back to an egalitarian version the past hundred years or so. The future is gender equal, perhaps with a hint of female advantage. In today’s societies, this return to the origins takes place within a democratic framework. Hence the term: matriocracy.
Share
A natural history of the most human behaviour
It is good to give, people often observe in English, with most languages having some wisdom expressing the same sentiment. What we mean when we point this fact out, is not that giving is good in general, but rather that giving a meaningful gift feels good. It is not only the person who is the recipient of the gift who has warm, positive feelings, but also the one who is the actor of the gift: the giver.
Sometimes, we can see people’s faces “shine” after they give a truly meaningful gift to someone else. The person is radiating, we might say. In fact, what is happening is an oxytocin release triggered by the successful act of giving.
Our species is not alone with this behaviour. Humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos all have been shown to go through such an oxytocin release when they give a gift. This is amazing: it goes entirely agains the foundations of economics, and much of rational choice theory. For giving a costly gift should, in the framework of economics, be painful for the giver, and a good feeling for the recipient. In fact, both can feel good. This behaviour goes to the evolutionary foundations of food sharing, linking mother-child bonding to that of lovers, to the hormonal mechanism of making friends, all the way to food sharing ceremonies, and even complex religious rituals involving thousands of people.
