The present research investigates food sharing and labor sharing practices of 98 nonindustrial societies. The aims are to: 1) document the frequency and scope of sharing, and 2) test the theory that greater sharing is adaptive in societies subject to more resource stress (including natural hazards).

The second and third parts of this book classify the economic systems of foraging and agricultural societies in the SCCS based on correlations between their institutions of property an distribution. These economic types are then examined for relationships with other social, political, demographic, and environmental factors in order to draw tentative conclusions regarding the origins of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions. The fourth part of the book uses cross-national data to examine similar associations in industrial/service economies, and is not included here.

This article examines the relationship between early food gratification, emotional predispositions to share food with others, and community systems. Results suggest that gratification of food needs varies with community type, and young children who receive food whenever they cry or ask are more likely to share food in adulthood. In broader terms, the need to receive from others is gratified differently under different sociological conditions, and these differences influence individuals toward divergent socially patterned behaviors in adulthood.

Using multilevel modeling and society-level regressions as well as mediational path modeling, the authors test two alternative models that consider how resource stress, religious beliefs, and beyond-household food and labor sharing may be related. The resource stress model suggests that high resource stress has two consequences: 1) that such stress may lead to beliefs that gods and spirits are associated with weather and 2) that resource stress leads to more sharing. Furthermore, this model suggests that the relationship between resource stress and sharing is not mediated by god beliefs. The alternative model considered, the moralizing high god model, suggests that resource stress will lead to more sharing but it is mediated by moralizing high gods. Before testing the path models, the authors first consider the relationships between resource stress and beliefs about high gods, superior gods, and minor spirits involvement with weather. Since the results were strongest for high gods, the path models focused on high gods. The results largely support the resource stress model rather than the high god moralizing model.

This paper presents a series of predictions that are derived from the assumption that kin selection an altruism are evolved components of human social behavior. Several examples from the anthropological literature that pertain to these predictions are discussed. Data presented are mostly consistent with the predictions.

This paper seeks to understand how the conflict resolution strategies of indigenous and non-indigenous groups differ in their efficacy. The authors suggest that indigenous methods of conflict resolution are more effective than non-indigenous methods by demonstrating that subjects from the Outline of Cultural Materials (OCM) associated with indigenous conflict management (ICM) will co-occur less frequently with OCM terms related to conflict than subjects related to non-ICM. They tested this by selecting OCM subjects that they felt best represented ICM, non-ICM, and instances of conflict and using chi-square tests to show how often these subjects co-occurred. They subsequently split up the "conflict" variable into four forms of conflict in order to show whether any of these forms might be more frequently found associated with ICM or non-ICM subjects. The results showed that conflict subjects were more likely to co-occur with non-ICM subjects, and that sociocultural/interpersonal conflicts were more likely to be associated with ICM subjects, whereas political conflicts were more likely to be associated with non-ICM subjects.

Researchers tested the popular identity fusion theory, which states that while maintaining one’s own individual identity, a deep affinity with one’s group can contribute to sacrifice for that group, in conjunction with their own hypotheses, using a behavior economic experiment. The experiment looked at whether after rolling a die to determine which cup a coin was placed into, participants actually followed the rules, or favored themselves (by putting the coin into their own cups at a disproportionate rate). The findings state that while on average, the individual participants did indeed favor themselves, those with higher ingroup fusion were more likely to sacrifice coins to other members of their ‘ingroup.' The experiments were conducted in 8 culturally diverse field sites.

"This paper presents an exploratory attempt to solve the problem of how to infer traits for which no direct material evidence remains." The author suggests that the archeologically defined community pattern can predict several sociocultural traits. Results support this hypothesis.

This paper seeks to identify how different practices of food sharing are related to one another, and the degree to which societies in North and South America may share practices with one another. The authors attempt this by using ethnographic literature to break sharing activities down into their constituent, multi-stage parts, and then comparing the prevalence of these parts and their relationships to one another. The study finds that the presence or absence of a distributor in a sharing activity, and who that distributor is, has a significant effect on how sharing is carried out. On the other hand, linguistic relationships between groups seem to have little impact on their sharing practices, and geographic proximity between groups only seems to have a significant effect on sharing practices in North America.

Considerable disagreement exists in regard to the origin and distribution of economic phenomena such as money, slavery, markets, exchange, and imbalanced transfers. Here the author utilizes a worldwide cross-cultural sample of 60 pre-industrial "societies" to empirically test many economic hypotheses, with a focus on distributional mechanisms and institutions.