Research

Working Papers

The Social and Cultural Effects of Markets and Capitalism: Evidence from Folklore and Ethnography. PDF

The social and cultural consequences of economic systems have long been debated by social and economic theorists. In this paper, I employ global folklore text (from the Berezkin catalogue of folklore motifs) and ethnographic text (from the eHRAF World Cultures database) as data to analyze the social and cultural effects of markets and capitalism. I construct indices for social, cultural, and economic characteristics based on the textual prevalence of relevant words and themes and apply regression analysis to these indices. The results suggest that markets and capitalism are associated with decreased ecocentrism and increased stratification and that, in folklore, markets are associated with increased moral content. Additionally, while markets are weakly associated with increased prosociality, capitalism is associated with decreased prosociality. I also estimate the markets coefficients using distance from historic trade route as an instrument, providing some support for a causal interpretation.

Social Context and the Evolution of Empathy. Forthcoming in Evolution and Human Behavior. PDF

Human societies differ in the social context of their economic interactions: whereas hunter-gatherers depend primarily on familiars for their subsistence, people in market societies depend primarily on strangers. This variation raises a critical question: How does social context influence the evolution and behavioral expression of empathy? Experimental evidence consistently shows that empathy increases with social closeness. Using evolutionary game theory, I examine how empathy evolves in various social-economic ecologies. I situate the evolutionary game on a network with distinct social and economic layers and define empathy as cooperating conditional on social proximity. The results reveal that when interactions occur among both familiars and strangers, discriminatory empathy outperforms unconditional cooperation, but when interactions occur only among strangers, empathy produces no cooperation. These findings highlight the behavioral consequences of modern human ecologies characterized by anonymity and provide insights for designing institutions and structuring human ecologies that better foster cooperation.

Works in Progress

Markets and Prosociality: A Synthesis of Literatures

A Unifying Framework for the Evolution of Cooperation

Indigeneity and Sustainable Ecological Relationships: An Evolutionary Theory

The Political Economy of Selfishness: Behavioral Consequences of the Logic of Capitalism

Identity, Stigma, and Power in Social Movements

Ephemerality and Reciprocity

Ecological Networks and Human Niches: Moving Beyond Homo Economicus