This book discusses the characteristics of adolescence cross-culturally and examines the differences in the adolescent experience for males and females. Several relationships are tested in order to gain an understanding of cross-cultural patterns in adolescence.

Reputations are an important aspect of human social interactions and cooperation, but much of the research on reputations has focused on a narrow range of domains such as prosociality and aggressiveness. This study aims to provide an empirical view of reputation domains across different cultures by analyzing ethnographic texts on reputations from 153 cultures. The findings suggest that reputational domains vary across cultures, with reputations for cultural conformity, prosociality, social status, and neural capital being widespread. Reputation domains are more variable for males than females, and certain reputation domains are interrelated. The study highlights the need for future research on the evolution of cooperation and human sociality to consider a wider range of reputation domains and their variability across different social and ecological contexts and genders.

This article uses factor analysis to identify the key variables underlying the many cross-cultural associations reported by Textor (1967). Twelve factors are identified.

This paper seeks to understand the roles played by children and adolescents in hunter-gatherer societies in relation to their social and ecological context. The authors set out to investigate how environmental factors, ecological risk, and the energetic contributions of adult men and women to food production may have influenced children/adolescent allocation of time to child care, domestic work, food production, and play. In order to carry out this study, the authors logged the behaviors of 690 children and adolescents from twelve hunter-gatherer and mixed-subsistence societies (Agta, Aka, Baka, BaYaka, Dukha, Hadza, Matsi-genka, Maya, Mayangna, Mikea, Pume, and Tsimane), totaling 85,597 unique observations. The study found that harsh environmental factors were not associated with child/adolescent time allocation, but that local ecological risk such as dangerous animals and lack of water availability predicted decreased time allocation to child care and domestic work, and that increased adult female participation in food production was associated with less time invested in child care among boys. It also found that all gendered differences in time allocation among children were stronger when men made greater contributions to food production than women. The authors interpret these results to signify that parents may play a role in preparing their children for environmental and ecological difficulty in order to help them develop skills that will help them become useful community members as adults.

This study examines the relationship betweeen family type and forms of social stratification. Findings refute current theories (that the independent family is associated with complex social stratification) and suggest that the lineal family is positively associated with complex social stratification.

In this study, the authors inspect the relationship between religion, morality, and cooperation by examining the extent to which people associate their deities with moral concern. Using data from 2,228 individuals in 15 different field sites, they find that on average, people tend to ascribe at least some moral concern to their deities, and this effect is stable even after controlling for the influence of explicitly moralistic deities that these societies also worship. The authors also find that ratings of moral concern are not necessarily very high, even for deities that are typically considered to be moralistic, and that there is individual-level variation in the degree of moral concern attributed to deities. In addition, there is an individual-level correlation between how morally interested two selected deities are conceived to be and that being male or more educated decreases the likelihood of associating deities with moral concern. These findings challenge the longstanding belief that belief in moralistic deities is unique to certain societies or religions and instead suggest that the association between deities and moral concern is more widespread and variable, and suggest that the moral character of gods may be tied to cooperation within societies.

The authors assess and compare preferred interpersonal distances over 42 countries. Environmental and sociopsychological factors are tested in order to explain variability in interpersonal distance across cultures. The authors seek to go beyond previous studies and better understand cultural differences and similarities in proxemic behaviors.

Why do humans have long childhoods and slow physical growth rates compared to nonhuman primates? The embodied capital theory (ECT) posits that the hard-to-extract, energy-packed resources sought by humans require more complex cognitive and physical skills, which are acquired during a longer development period. The authors of this article test this theory through a comparative analysis of different forms of resource types and skill level by age in 28 different societies. Their findings support ECT, suggesting that long childhoods evolved as a period to develop the skills required for extracting complex resources in foraging societies.

This book examines population growth rate and its correlates by testing 274 hypotheses (derived from multiple theories) with an 18-society sample. Forty-one of these hypotheses were significant at the .05 level, leading the author to accept these relationships as reflective of the real world. The 274 hypotheses are grouped into 51 broader hypotheses, and marked by (*) where relationships are significant as designated by the author or by significance p < 0.05.

How do men and women cooperate with others? Previous research has claimed that men and women cooperate in different manners. However, using a meta-analytic approach, the authors of this article find that men and women actually cooperate to a similar extent. They consider differences in cooperation to be a response to specific societal situations and contexts.