Cooperation in the field with Kris Smith
2026-06-09 12:00:00.000 +00:00

This is Evolutionary Psychology the Podcast. Actual Evolutionary Psychology by Actual Evolutionary Psychologists. David, today we are talking to Chris Smith. Chris Smith with a K. That's right. Um, and we had a really fun conversation with Chris. Uh we talked all about uh his fieldwork with both uh the Hadza and another another community he was working with with and and Pizer. We spoke to our previous episode. Both are in Tanzania um yes, and I don't I I couldn't pr pronounce correctly. You'll have to listen to the episode to hear the correct pronunciation. That's a nice incentive for you to listen. Uh so that you can get the the name of of this uh fishing community. But yeah, we talked about partner choice, cooperation, um norms,

the uh the methodological difficulties of doing anthropological field work, the collision of theory with reality. It was a really fun conversation. Did I did I miss anything there, Dave? Uh mosquitoes and um I think mosquitoes. Oh and climate change we talked about. Yeah how yeah how communities are adapting to climate change. Um yeah it was it was super fun and interesting. Chris is always a great hang. Yeah. And uh it's really nice to have uh anthropologists on and you uh thanked him for his service several times as is appropriate. That's true. And if you are an anthropologist listening, thank you for your service. Uh wonderful. So uh without further ado, here is Chris Smith, David and I talking about um what Chris has

learned in the field and uh what it might mean for for all of us. Yep, enjoy. Chris, thank you for being here. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. Thank you for having me. Uh happy to chat with you all and uh yeah. All right, great. Um we just saw you in person at HBus. Um we were all talking before we started about um how some of us uh fell ill and some of us didn't and maybe we'll get to illness um in in later in the conversation. You do um field work. Um can you tell us a little bit about where you do your field work? I feel like we we had a long stretch of anthropologists on. We've lately had psychologists and we're we psychologists are boring folks because you know we don't do fieldwork.

So can you tell us a little bit about where you have done or currently do field work? Um and maybe that'll start us off. And if not, you could just talk about the wonderful drawing behind you. Yeah. Uh well it's funny because I I straddle psychology and anthropology, right? Uh exactly. Yeah. I think of you, yes. I think of you um uh I I'm a psychologist, so I think it's great to be a psychologist. So for better or worse, I think of you as a psychologist too. So yes, exactly. Uh well, I try to tell my department I'm an anthropologist now. Okay. Uh well I said out. Well, I said two, so it's both. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so I work uh in East Africa. So I started working in 2016 in Tanzania, working with Hadza

hunter-gatherers. Um, I moved towards the coast of Tanzania in 2021 on a more recent project working with uh fishermen and fishing villages along the coast of Tanzania. And most recently I started working in Kenya, collaborating with some veterinarians and epidemiologists, um, primarily in northern Kenya and Marsebit, working with uh pastoralists, so Gabra and Rendile. Um, so I've uh had a chance to really explore quite a bit of East Africa now over the years. Wow. And was are those locations especially for us psychologists, um, or those of us who don't do any of any of this, uh, how does one get a field site or how what's the how do you get there and then why do you go to a different one? Is it convenience?

Is it that the question you're asking is well suited to being answered in in that place? Is it you know people, all the above? Yeah, so I think I think you'd like to say, well, it's you know, new research questions, and this was you know uh intentionally chosen for this reason. Uh I think the reality for many of us, including me, is that it's often sort of convenience and happenstance. So I started working with uh Hadza um because my one of my advisors, Kirin Apicella, she's an anthropologist in uh psychology at Penn. Um She worked with Hadza with her advisor, Frank Marlowe. And so at one point we were collaborating on a project and she sent me out there to start collecting data. And so, you know, the first field experience, there's there's some stories there, but

started going back out and sort of building, you know, importantly, linguistic skills and sort of knowing how to navigate the country and its uh all its administrative and bureaucratic stuff. And so after um during COVID, uh my postdoc at Penn was running out, and this opportunity came up to work with Ann Paiser, who was at Washington State, is now at uh Penn State, uh, looking at between community cooperation um among fisheries uh along the coast. And so I was hired to do that um in part again because I had that experience in Tanzania working um with Hadza, uh knew my Key Swahili. Um, and then it just sort of starts, you know, the the Kenya site came up from a collaboration. So here at uh WSU in our School for Global Health, we have an NGO situated in

Kenya with a lot of infrastructure. They have like permanent staff. And so collaborating with them to access some of the communities that they've worked with, you know, they have this huge like surveillance project for like MERS uh and camels up there. And so, you know, part of it's like said, sort of happenstance. Some of it, you know, is the question makes more sense in these communities. You know, the challenge, I don't think, is starting up the field site. I mean, you know, connections help. It's often maintaining the field site. So I wouldn't be working at all these different field sites if I didn't have collaborators who are helping maintain these relationships. So I haven't been back to Hadza Land since 2019, but I still collaborate with folks like

Duncan Stibbard Hawks. Right. And so he's actively working there. My colleagues in vetmed working with uh populations in Kenya makes it easier for me to have you know these different opportunities. Um, but right now I'm hoping, anyways, my main focus will be the the fishery communities uh in Tanzania. Cool. Well, thank you for your service. Um exactly. Thank you for yeah. Um for me, I feel like your your research has um changed my mind about a few things in the evolutionary psychology of cooperation. And I feel like that's one of the virtues of doing fieldwork is that you know we have our our abstract theories and then we try to see if they work in the real world uh in a real setting that you know hopefully resembles some aspect of our uh evolutionary history or the

ancestral environment. And our theories just kind of collide with reality and and we are forced to rethink things. So what are some of the things that you have had to rethink uh as a result of your work with with the Hadza and and with with other communities? Yeah, I that's a great question. So, you know, originally I wanted to be a pretty standard experimental psychologist. I was running my uh experiments in the lab, surveys online. Um, and this opportunity to work with uh Hadza came up from uh, you know, Corinne and I collaborating on a project together. Um and I thought, you know, I should do this. I'll uh I I didn't think I would do it forever or make it a core part, but I thought, you know, I gotta take this opportunity.

Um and what ended up changing my mind was some of the findings from that. So I was working on we have this finding, Corinne has this finding uh in one of her classic papers where if you play a public goods game with Hadza Hunter Gatherers, that is um you give them some honey sticks, they can contribute some to uh a public good, and that's tripled and then shared with everyone that's living with them in their camp. Um, right, classic game to measure cooperation. Uh, in two different uh years, she got this finding where uh camps, uh, there are significant differences in how much camps cooperated. So if you uh look at like how it clusters within camps, some camps are cooperating more, some are cooperating less.

Um, these camps move different locations and different times, they're different people are also living these camps. These aren't permanent social units. And so it doesn't seem like that's easily explained by ecology because it varied from year to year or from people. And so sort of the thing we wanted to investigate was what explains this clustering. And so there's a couple of mechanisms you can think about. You could think like reputation and partner choice or people selecting to live with people who are more cooperative. And that's why you get that clustering in camps. Or is it something like norms and punishment, right? People, uh, some camps have stronger norms, and so you have more uh sharing in these games.

And I very much went in expecting partner choice to be like the really important mechanism here. And um, from the games, that doesn't seem to be the case. Uh, we didn't find any sort of uh stable willingness to cooperate across the years when we played this game with multiple uh multiple years with the same people. Uh, we didn't see people were ending up in more cooperative camps that they were previously more cooperative. And then we did this task where we asked people to rank their campmates. So we go in, we take Polaroid photos of each member of the camp. And then privately we we put out all the photos in front of them. We ask who's the most generous big person. And they repeat this until they rank everyone.

We do this for things like generosity, uh, productivity. So how good of a hunter you are, um, and who do you want to live with, right? And so choosing who you want to live with is choosing who you're cooperating with in these camps where you have these strong uh inset uh norms to share food, right? So we use this as a measure of partner choice. And what we found, what I found that first year was that they didn't really care about who jet how generous the people they were living with were. Instead, they cared about, you know, who were good hunters, who were good gatherers. Um, and so that sort of, I I will say that I really did not like my first field season. I swore I would never do it again.

But like digging through that data and having to sort of adjust, you know, what I thought was driving cooperation in this population uh really made me excited for it, right? In a way that I didn't get from lab experiments. So to your point, yeah, that that experience of theories meeting reality. Um and you know, doing the field work, you're right there to see it happen, right? It's it's sort of happening in real time for you. Yeah. Uh makes the field work fun and and exciting. Wow. So interesting. So I I want kind of wanna unpack this this result in these findings. So um people members of the Hadza are more interested in hunting and foraging ability more than uh generosity. So really, do you have the skills uh is more important that question is more important than

are you willing to share the fruits of your labor? Uh do you think what might be going on there is that there's just kind of sharing by default? And so individual variation in sharing willingness just isn't a factor. It isn't really important because you're going to get some of the kill uh regardless. Or is it or is something else going on? Yeah, so that that's a really great way to put put it, right? So Hadza, like uh almost every hunter-gatherer that we have data from, really strong food sharing norms, especially with meat. Any meat that they bring back to camp is something they're expected to share. Now they do try to get around it. There's some famous stories of Hadza like asking uh researchers to hide like a kill

underneath their uh truck and come back later for it. So it it's not automatic, but in that context where most things are going to be shared anyways, then yeah, it makes sense to focus on foraging ability instead, right? What what are you going to bring back to the camp? And if you look at partner choice models, you see this more formally, right, that the variance of traits matter. So if there's very little variance on a trait, then the marginal benefit of choosing someone higher on that trait is lower. And so one thing we find actually is that this effects uh reversed when I came back in 2019. So in 2019, they did place more of an emphasis on generosity than productivity. And what we found was that this was really driven by people who had more experience outside

of Hazeland. So if they had worked jobs for cash, if they had uh lived in a village at some point. And so now what we find, and Duncan, uh my Duncan Stibbard Hawks has data on this as well. A lot of HODs are now moving between uh the bush and villages. And when they're in the village, there's less uh sharing norms, there's less uh incentive and pressure to share as much. Um, in fact, uh, Duncan has pictures, they they have houses that they just store all their grain and they don't share any of their grain with anyone. Um, and so now when we're asking people who do you want to live with, the reality is their social world includes all these people who are also living in villages without these norms.

And so what's happening is that, at least what we think, I never was able to follow up on this, is that the variance in sharing, willingness to share, is increasing as they have more experience moving between these two different social worlds. And so once you have more variance there, now that becomes more important when choosing a cooperative partner. Interesting. So could it be that when you earn wealth outside of Hadza Land, that wealth is easier to conceal from your fellow groupmates? And whether or not the groupmates get some of that depends more on the person's generosity because they can they can hide what whatever they gain, they can hide their cash, they can hide their grain. Uh and it really depends on how nice or generous that person is.

Um whereas if you hunt a a a a zebra, it's gonna be pretty hard to hide that zebra from the rest of the people in your group and they're gonna uh, you know, pressure you uh to get some of that. And so could it be that it's the concealability of the resource that might be driving this? I I I think uh most likely that's part of it. It's easier to to your point, it's easier to hide what you have in terms of wealth, uh, you're more able to uh accumulate wealth to begin with, right? So if you're in these mobile camps, it's really hard to have a lot of property if you have to move every few weeks. Um, and then of course, uh again, what what we see is that when they're in these villages, they're relying a lot more on grain.

They they rely on grain in the camps now too. Um, but they're relying more on grain, which is also easier to store than meat. So I think it's a a combination of these different sort of ecological factors that changing how they're able to store food and changing sort of the sharing norms, right? And so I think that's sort of the mediating. Like we could measure their uh sort of perceived norms. I imagine they differ between the camps and the villages. And like that would be the mediating factor, is that they're tracking, you know, how how much variance is there out in the world in generosity, and that's impacting how much they at least emphasis on generosity versus productivity when choosing cooperative partners.

Yeah. One question is so we've been talking about it as sort of the emphasis on productivity as opposed to generosity. And we've been think talking about it from the perspective of why is generosity not being used. I'd like to invert it because that's been very interesting, but I'd also like to invert it and say, what is it in the um you sorry use the word village and then what's the other term? Bush. Bush. Okay. Yeah. So when they're in the bush, or people to the extent that in the prior calibration of being in the bush, you're going on productivity. It that is that is also in is that the only other positive attribute, or is that actually interesting in the sense of that is a sensical, rational allocation

of resources, what does that mean in the context of the bush? And then what does it mean that it's not happening in the village? Like, for example, is it that um you're not you're you're abandoning what had previously been uh a dimension of status, or is it is that reading too much into it? That I I I um that might be reading a little too much into it. Dun Duncan has done the work of actually visiting. I didn't get a chance to visit the villages. It was a planned follow-up before COVID. Um and so he he would know more, but my understanding is that they're still hunting there. Um and so so another way to look at it right here is that the benefits you get from a cooperative partner is both their willingness to actually help you and their their ability,

right? Someone who's a total klutz but is really generous is as helpful as someone who's really selfish and and really effective, right? You need kind of both. The question is, you know, how much emphasis to place. And so uh another possibility is that there's also less variance in productivity or competence in the uh villages than the camps. Hunting's a really uh high risk uh activity. I think they have like a 3% uh hunting uh success rate, is the classic statistic. So, you know, being a little bit better can have a massive effect on productivity there in the villages where they're hunting a little bit, but they're also farming a little and keeping gardens. There might be less variance in um competence there or productivity.

Gathering's another example where there's still skills involved in gathering and an ability to uh endure, but probably less so than um what we find with hunters. And there was some kind of a suggestive effect that women placed a little less emphasis on other women's uh productivity. So that that would also be consistent. That again, what they're trying to track is really what's the benefit of switching to a new partner here. And really there's got to be enough variance for that to really make sense because there's costs and moving and and you know trying out new uh cooperative partners. Yeah. The the variance point is really uh deep. And I think we've talked about David and I have talked about that a bunch.

That, you know, because as you said, Chris, lots of things are skill dependent. I mean, even walking is skill dependent, but there's not much variance in that. And so I think for a lot of status things, what I'm hearing you say is that for dimensions of status, the variance, especially within a market, uh competitive market of uh who you're gonna choose as a partner, partner choice, um, variance is really important. Yeah, I think so. And to your point, right, if you then start thinking about different domains and where where that variance is, that's gonna impact it. And I think folks like Adar uh Eisenberg has some modeling work trying to show how that impacts the evolution of cooperation, having these different domains and how much they

correlate across uh these different domains as well. Yeah. That's super interesting stuff. I mean, uh in some ways it suggests a more nuanced picture of how people are choosing cooperative partners. And they're not just saying, oh, uh, I I want the the kindest, most uh competent partners. It's I'm tracking the variation in these trait attributes. And I am strategically uh being choosy on the on the traits that vary in my local ecology. And the traits that don't vary as much, I'm going to be less choosy about those traits. And that suggests a uh a more sensitive uh uh mind that is uh really picking up on these cues of how variable different traits are. Um and and also in the in the aspects of the resources themselves, whether they can be

stored or concealed, or whether they're conspicuous and out in the open. All of these factors that you know the mind is sensitive to. And I think that's really cool. I I want to go back to this uh finding you mentioned about differences in um cooperation in a public goods game. So you have different sorry, was it different camps that had different cooperation rates? Yeah. So uh we play the game within the the camp and they're making these decisions in private. But yeah. Right. And so basically they're deciding um whether to uh put a resource, and so in this case a honey stick, into the pot to be multiplied and distributed uh among the group. So it's basically acting for the good of the group.

Right. Um and with this game, there is the classic free rider problem where everyone is better off if everyone else contributes to the pot, but I selfishly free ride off of everyone's effort. But if everyone thinks that way, then everyone free rides and there's no there's nothing in the pot. Um and so what you're seeing is in some camps, uh people are contributing uh a lot to the pot, and in some they're not contributing much of anything at all. And it seems like ecology can't really explain this because there's so much variation in the ecology from season to season, from year to year. Uh and people are, you know, it's a fission-fusion society, so people are, you know, ending up in constantly sort of wandering around to different places.

So it seems like ecology is not really going to explain this difference. So do you have any thoughts about what is explaining this? I mean you mentioned norms, but I feel like that just begs the question of why do these norms differ. Yeah, it's a really good question. And, you know, we tried uh to rule out as much as we could things like ecology or had they just eaten. So I think in one year uh we had asked, you know, when was the last time someone brought in a kill or something? And uh we couldn't find anything that could explain um these differences in cooperation, how much like can you have, or um things like that didn't seem to really predict how much people were cooperating. It just uh the only reliable predictor was how much everyone else is giving.

And so the the question rises, you know, I I think to your point, it's easy to invoke norms here. And so sort of what we kind of suspect happens is that someone moves in and I remember those classic uh there's a classic psychology study of the autokinetic effect, uh, where you that you shine a light in a dark uh room and it looks like it's moving. And so they have a group of people and they shine this light and they ask them, and someone says, Oh, it's two inches to the right, and everyone else in the group answers that. And then if you take each person out of that group one by one and add a new person in, even once there's an entirely new group, they s they're still answering the same uh uh biased

answer that was originally answered, right? They're sort of adopting the norm as they come in. We think that's probably something that's happening here is that as they move into this camp and they see how much people are sort of uh willing to give uh in day-to-day life, how much you know, how hard is it to get them to actually share, that this is uh impacting sort of what they believe everyone else's behavior will be, um, and that this is carrying over to the game. That's the assumption we're looking for. We did try to measure those normative expectations. So we did try to ask people, this was with Christina Biggier. So we tried to ask, you know, what do you think everyone else in your camp will do?

And what do you think everyone else in your camp thinks other people should do? But we couldn't we couldn't get the the method to work. It was it's too complex for they couldn't just wrap they couldn't wrap their head around the question. They couldn't wrap their head around their question the question. And even when you do those questions with like US undergrads, it can actually often be challenging. So that it's kind of a hard question to ask. So we'd expect norms, you'd expect there would be some sort of punishment to reinforce those norms. That's usually the model. There's very few examples in the ethnographic literature of any sort of physical punishment between the Hadza. You'll see scolding.

And, you know, we often assume scolding has reputational costs that uh influence punishment. But, you know, my concern there is that there's such strong sharing norms, anyways, that even if, you know, there's one guy I was talking with who everyone knew he had murdered his wife, like this was common knowledge, no one disputed it. But people would still share with him. And they would say, like, that's that's what it is to be Hadza is. You share with other Hadza. And so it's not clear if those scoldings and the reputation actually, you know, translate into any real costs. So honestly it's a shoulder shrug at like what's actually maintaining this still. Uh again, the went in thinking it'd be partner choice and reputation.

Um and now not so sure about that. Wow. I love that that anecdote of the guy who everyone knows that he murdered his wife and everyone knows that everyone knows that. And yet he's still a a member of the community in good standing who gets an equal share of the spoils or of the resources. Um that is a very alien idea to to to my Western mind, you know, where you know if someone murders their wife, they they get imprisoned for life. In some cases they'll get sentenced to death. And yet in this case they're still a member of the group in in good standing. Yeah, I I mean s we think that he was excluded from some camps uh initially. He was in uh a couple of years after that, he was in some smaller camps.

Though that could also just be a personal choice of his. It's it's hard to tell. Um but by the time I was working with him in 2016 and then especially twenty nineteen, so that would been I I think it happened in twenty thirteen, so it was like five or six years later. The aunt of the woman he killed uh was in that camp and really disliked him. But everyone else was again, they would talk about it, but they were still willing to share with him and still also emphasized his good traits as well, that he was a good hunter, um, that he was a funny guy. So, you know, uh it it doesn't necessarily mean the stor what I take away from that story is that again, reputational costs, we have to be careful and actually see

what what do those costs really translate to, because there's other mechanisms that could be interfering with how that translates into you know real costs for the actors. Yeah. What does it mean to not share in that community. Like, what are the consequences? If somebody doesn't share with me, do I die? Like, what what are the consequences? Yeah. If someone doesn't share with you or if you don't share with someone. So let's uh if if somebody doesn't share with me. So like if everybody decided for this guy we weren't gonna share with him, what would happen to him? Um that's a good question. I I I mean again, so the hunting success rates are really low for Hadza. So a single hunter will bring in a kill once a month, about um, and that's probably not

enough calories. Um could probably get by on and this guy was a particularly good hunter, so maybe he would have been somewhat fine. I think eventually you would he would probably have to move from the bush to maybe one of the villages. But again, he might actually do better in that village ultimately, right? Like we're not even sure if banishment or excluding would necessarily be costly. Because another thing that would happen is that he would be expected to share less as well, right? So he might actually benefit from not having those obligations. So again, I I I m the thing I took away from this is that we want to be we don't want to assume reputation necessarily has a cost without actually Yeah.

I mean what what I'm hearing you say, maybe one interpretation is the making a living in a particular ecology really sets up like costs and benefits that are have a lot of momentum. Um and like the variability between people, it's important, but you you know, you really have to understand the um the the way of making a living and if sharing is really important. I mean I mean it sounds like in this particular case, like yeah, the guy would probably have been fine or better. But like if it was like, you know, a mom whose partner died or a kid, you know, like they would probably die. You know, I don't know. Maybe I'm putting words in your mouth, but like yeah, it's it's it's the if thinking about

all the phenotypes that would be affected by this blanket policy, it sounds like some of them it would be a really bad situation. Yeah. Yeah. I I think that's the the right way to put it. So we can think about like between populations, what's the variation in ecology, subsistence, and norms and institutions that fit that particular an environment. But then also to your point, variation within those populations, right? That some people are going to be more affected or less affected. Um and so tending to that variation. And and really that's what I've come to love about field work is understanding that variation. So, you know, I think the first time I started working with Hadza, I I I did emphasize,

like, oh, sort of the ancestral relevance that you know they're hunter-gatherers. Now I've sort of moved away from that. And uh many anthropologists where I I think the emphasis instead is like this is one way humans have lived. There are other ways, and we need to understand that that full variation rather than necessarily assuming you know, hunter-gatherers are some sort of you know stand-in for ancestral hunter-gatherers. Right. Right. Yeah, no, I think that's an increasingly important insight that anthropologists have made that we're in some ways we are overstating the importance of the few remaining hunter-gatherer populations that still exist as a window into the ancestral past. In all likelihood, the ancestral past was extremely variable with extremely many different

ways of making a living, many different ecologies. And it's it's important not to, you know, overgeneralize from a particular culture or a particular ecology to humanity in general. And to see this as one of many possible ways that humans can live. Yeah. Yeah. And I think one way to put it is it's just like you would treat an undergrad population, which is any outcome is a result of contingency in the phenotype. And so even for a hunter-gatherer community or sample, you don't want to say, well, then this is just the essence of humanity, right? Like this level of conflict or this level of extra pair uh copulations or anything, you know, like that's that's humanity, like that's essentializing, right?

I think the point is any sample of any human behavior is the result of the evolved phenotype interacting with the local circumstances. And so you you have to think about like this: what's the design underlying this outcome, not just that this outcome is sort of the essence of human nature? Yeah, I I couldn't put it better. Uh I totally agree with that, right? Thinking again about how those mechanisms are interacting. We know, right, on the surface of it, you just look around and we know humans vary, right? We can look from different countries, even within countries, we see all this variation uh in human phenotype, which I always point out to my bioanthro students is amazing because when we compare genetic diversity, we're leaf less genetically diverse than all the other

great apes, right? Um and so thinking about how do we build a human science that accounts for that variation and essentializing uh in any aspect is probably gonna be the wrong way, right? Instead of thinking about those interacting mechanisms between mind, culture, and ecology. Yeah, I love Brett Beheim had uh in his in our long format episode with him, had a great saying it was that um genes are smooth, culture's crunchy. Oh, like the variability, yeah, exactly. Yeah, exactly. It's like a nice slogan for exactly that point that we're genetically so similar, uh, but we're just so different. And you just you it an alien looking at us would be like, oh yeah, no, no, like the effect of culture is very big.

Um, even very close by people are acting differently, as you're finding even in different uh um collectives, basically in the bush. You know. Yeah, exactly. So I'm I'm curious, have you witnessed any kind of social cost being inflicted on someone in in your field work, whether it's punishment or exclusion or ostracism or collective um I I I I know you know Richard Rangham has work arguing that you know occasionally people will gang up on someone and and kill them in you know a a small scale society. Um have you witnessed any kind of social costs being inflicted on anyone for any reason? Not with the Hadza really. Uh part of that is is how I was doing my field work with them, going you know, going to a

bunch of different camps means you're not staying there for a long time and and getting into you know the meat of it. Yeah. You know, they have a guess they're gonna be on better behavior, right? Um I have in some of the villages, in the fishing villages, uh I've worked with where I I would spend more time in each village. And so you get more into like the thread of the the fabric of the community. And you know, you'll see things, uh I I think probably the biggest blow up I saw was a woman, really really a girl refusing to marry a particular older man. Um, and there was some conflict between uh, you know, the parents wanted her to marry him, she didn't want to, and so there was and this comes up in like uh Zach and Manveer

and Leo have talked about like really don't see a lot of punishment, which you see is mediation. And so they got the imam involved, uh the village executive officer, and they weren't trying to punish the but they were trying to sort of negotiate, try to convince her, or you know, try try to smooth over the situation. Um I, you know, I suspect imposing social costs are costly, and so the mediation is probably easier and the the more desired outcome usually. So I think I I I haven't seen a lot of like just clear cut cases of here here's a social cost being imposed. But again, that that just might be how I'm doing my field work. Interesting. I mean, could it be that, you know, each member of the community is so valuable and they're

so interdependent with each other? So such that, you know, excluding anyone really inflicts a huge cost on the rest of us. Because if we have like a 3% hunting return, having an extra hunter in the group who's a good hunter is like a huge benefit to all of us. And excluding that person is a huge cost to all of us. And so it may be that the you know each member is just so integral to the community and so interdependent that the costs of inflicting any kind of exclusion or punishment on a person that could put you know break up the community or break up a cooperative relationship, that that's just too too big of a cost to experience. Could that be part of what's going on? Yeah, I I think that's uh that's a perfectly reasonable thing to think about as as you

mentioned and an idea that he he was a good hunter, right? So uh losing him could be particularly costly. And we talk about this in like partner choice models all the time, right? Like the value, your value that you're bringing to the table uh predicts like your willingness to leave relationships, right? So if uh it's less costly to end a relationship because there are other options available, because um, you know, you're a high-value partner and you'll have access to those options, then it's easier to cut that relationship off. But yeah, maybe if it's so small that there's not enough other folks, or this person's particularly valuable because he's a good hunter, then it's just it's even costlier to

impose those costs. And so again, maybe you try to negotiate uh through other means ways for them to improve their behavior so you can still get the benefits that they're bringing to the group. Interesting. I mean it it suggests, you know, a possible explanation for the extreme differences we see between Western societies uh and the Hadza, for example. So in a Western society, we live in these huge, massive populations, and we have these huge social networks, so many people we could potentially form cooperative relationships with. And the cost of excluding someone from my social network to me is extremely low. I could easily replace them with someone else. There's a huge social marketplace and many different people for me for me to choose from.

And it doesn't hurt me at all if I, you know, say goodbye to a friend or a colleague or whatever. So in that case, if someone say murders their wife, I could say fine, put them away in prison forever. What do I care? You know, like I'll I'll find someone else to cooperate with. But in the Hadza, that's gonna be a much costlier thing to do. And so do you buy this this kind of relational mobility, the size of the social marketplace, that this might be an important factor regulating to what extent different transgressions are punished? Yeah, I I I think it definitely matters. I think the story gets complicated if you look at so there's uh you mentioned relational mobility, right? So there's ecological psychologists who have sort of their different uh measurements have

sort of uh calculated for each country sort of their relational mobility level. And there's some cross-cultural analyses. Um I but I think when you dig into that literature, there's some contradictions where sometimes having more relational mobility increases cooperation because you have to compete more because people can leave you, but other times it seems to decrease cooperation because uh uh there's less incentive to. And so I I'm a little skeptical of some of those analyses. And there's folks who have redone the analyses trying to you know control for uh distance and and other uh confounds, and you know these effects seem to be um It's sort of difficult to wrap your head around, I think. Um, but uh more generally the idea that like uh yeah, who's in your network, how large your

network is, uh, I think matters also what other institutions you have. I mean, the reality is if I need help, I don't usually go to a friend, right? I might go to my bank, my credit card, insurance, right? We have all these other institutions that also reduce our interdependence in some ways. And so we can think about what impacts that might also have, though, on our, you know, friendship uh psychologies um you know having these other uh institutions to buffer risk. Right. It seems like everyone is very replaceable in in the Western world. Whereas in the in the in the Hadza, you know, basically everyone is irreplaceable. Um or maybe I'm I'm I'm oversimplifying there, but I that seems to be one difference that

might might matter. Yeah, I I think that's that's that's a good way to put it. Yeah. The people are are more replaceable here. Um and so that's gonna impact how we cooperate with one another. Does that I mean just could we'll and we'll move on, but I'm just curious like per interpersonally or anecdotally, when you go to Hadza Land or you have that impression, and that's a big difference between your your here here meaning like where you are right now and when you're there. Uh, do you notice uh what effect that has um on life? That the replaceable I mean, obviously there's other there's many other confounding things, but I'm just curious like if you have some anecdotal impression of that difference or yeah,

I I mean the the the other surface differences are so big that it would be hard. But I think David Lawson put this in a nice way. Um struggle new student new anthropology students sometimes have in the the first time they're in the field uh is that they don't do enough. So when you're in the field, you have to also be cooperating. So whether that's contributing by like cleaning dishes or whatever, and it be it becomes really clear how important it is to contribute in that situation. Um where even even, you know, if I'm paying research assistants where, you know, here in the US, if I'm paying you, you know, that means that's your job. I'm not supposed to to help. Um you know, if I did that, that that wouldn't work, right?

That would that would start fraying relationships. Um and so you feel it doing the actual work. It's like, oh, I have to be a member of this community and I have to really make sure that I'm contributing, that I'm I'm not replaceable. So that's how that's how I would say I I'd feel uh that difference really um you know it's it's never I I don't want to paint a picture of like a utopia. I mean Hadza have a very hard life. Um, you know, there's lots of dangers. Um, so it it's not like again a social utopia and there's all sorts of conflicts still that pop up, but uh there's definitely a difference in how you approach those relationships. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. I wonder, well, yeah, that's another I'll I'll leave it at that.

It's just it's curious, it's an interesting thing to uh because uh obviously there's like a lot of advertising or sort of cultural um uh history of sort of uh you don't have to do the manual labor because you're higher class, right? Um and I think I even even sort of from working class to like working to uh white collar, that's a there's a difference there as well. Um and there's even ethnographies um like of just social class that sound very similar even within the West. So it's just an interesting it's interesting to kind of think about that similarity even if you even within the West. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I agree. Yeah. Um I wanna there's another thing that that stuck with me that you mentioned, which is that

people's cooperation levels um aren't really stable and that I might cooperate in one context, but not another context. And there's not like enduring character traits that you might have otherwise expected. You know, in the Western world, we really care a lot about character and like whether someone is a good person or not. And we view that as kind of an essence that's internal to that person and endures over time. And and what you're what you seem to be finding among the Hadza is that that's not really the case, that there aren't these enduring differences in in cooperativeness. Is that is that an oversimplification or is there more to it than that? It it gets a little more complicated. So uh with a public good game, we find no correlation across time.

We do find a a moderate one when we play like a dictator game. So in that game, we've discovered that later. Um so it it part depends on how you measure. I mean, these are one-shot games, so there's al always a question like, what are they really measuring? We've also asked, so like when we rank people on, ask people to rank each other on something like generosity, you can also look at the agreement between judges. And so this is a method from personality psychology that if you get more agreement between people, that means they're behaving consistently across situations. And so we get really low consensus as well. So that that at least sort of triangulates that we do think that um cooperation, at least

how they perceive it, might not be very stable. And so I did run a study, because you can think about interesting questions that that might raise, that if you don't have this belief that character is essential, how that might impact things. I mean, maybe punishment doesn't make sense, right? If you think uh people behave relative to the situation. And maybe some of the things again, like what Man Vier and Leo are arguing about uh sort of third party compensation and and uh sort of uh uh right reconciliation rather than punishment. Um and so I did run a study uh wanted to follow this up, where we asked folks, we gave them a situation, so something like um someone has a uh pot of honey and they walk away because they had to go take care of something.

And when they come back, their honey's gone, and it's either two people took the honey. It was someone who's never stolen before but is really hungry, or someone who has stolen before but is very satiated. And we also had uh a flip side of like someone dropped, you know, gave he was really hungry, someone gave him honey and was someone who shared before. Um, you know, so we we sort of crossed that. And what we found was that for positive traits, so things like sharing, helping out, people did seem to have essentialist beliefs. So if we asked them who did it, they would say it was the person who has previously been helpful. For the negative behaviors, uh, it flips where people were more willing to attribute it to

the situation. They were more likely to say it was this person who hasn't stolen before but is very hungry. Um, so it's sort of interesting that it really depends on, you know, sort of the polarity that you're asking about. Um, and and always wanted to follow that up to see, you know, what are the downstream effects of that on sort of willingness to punish or or willing to, you know, reconciliate with folks. That's that's really cool because I mean because I'm doing the free will stuff right now, going through the literature. And in a Western uh context, um it's the it's the opposite, right? Where um if somebody does something negative, it's it's attributed to their personality. And I mean, I I would view all of this the the underlying consistency is it's all about

intervention and the practicality of intervention, right? So, like if you can, as David said, everybody's replaceable, you can like sort of leverage costs to be like, David, you really should do that differently. I can't change the circumstances, but if you can't do that, um, or if the b better way to change the situation is the the kind of context in which they were in, um, then that would be the the other pattern. Right. Right. So I I thought about those classic like the fundamental attribution uh misattribution error, right? Or uh right, uh it's the flip. People are attribute uh bad behaviors to to the personality. I wonder if you could do something like a cross-cultural study with relational mobility

where maybe you can see the strength of that ref effect or the whether it reverses based on how replaceable folks are using that relational mobility measure. Yeah, or just any cost benefit. I mean, it's a little bit hand wavy, but I mean I would think that the argument would be that there's in the ecology, there's sort of every agent is doing this cost benefit analysis of say, if somebody cheats, what are the costs and benefits of doing something about that by trying to recalibrate them and saying, You're a bad person, you should have you should do differently in the future, versus in this situation, this person did this. The thing that needs to change is the situation. Um, you know, like and I think yeah, I think that's even true for us too.

Like there's just certain situations where you look at somebody and you're like, I'm not gonna be able to change that person's decision. we're gonna have to change the context versus we're gonna change the con, you know, so um, or I can change their their mind. And I think there's just costs and benefits uh cross-culturally, cross uh with the across people, like even in our lives. There's probably people you're like, Well, I'm not gonna change their mind, I'm gonna change the situation, you know, even for us. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it makes me think of some of the anger work, right? Uh, the idea that like the more uh the the higher expected WTR rate uh you have that you expect people to treat you better, you get angrier when you don't.

I do wonder if that also means you'll get differences in like expressions of anger, right? If people have different methods to calibrate in different ecologies based on replaceability, then you might see differences in how anger is expressed towards these things as well, because you know, they're not going to recalibrate by imposing costs, but by doing something else. And so you might see differences even in how anger is expressed. But again, via these sort of universal mechanisms, right? That uh are just interacting with their local ecology. Yeah, that's super interesting. It's a great, yeah, it's a great example of the contingency point, right? Yeah. Right. I mean, uh, it's interesting. I I interpreted this um slightly differently, I mean this probably comes from my

background, but um there's there's a lot of literature showing that people have attributional biases uh contingent on group membership or or alliances. So um if a fellow group member or ally uh does something bad, I'm going to attribute it to the situation. But if an outgroup or a rival does something bad, I'm going to attribute it to their personality, right? And you could see that as a kind of strategic bias where I want to, you know, mobilize opposition to my enemies and support for my allies. And it could be that in a tight knit community like the Hadza, everyone views uh every other member as a kind of, you know, crucial ally or at least highly interdependent. And that might cause these strategic biases to come into play where they're willing to

discount or um uh minimize the transgression. At least that's that's where my mind went in in in hearing about this stuff. It would be interesting to see if they have similar attributional biases about, say, um a an outgroup or or a view that they've a group that they view negatively. I don't know if that exists on in in Hadza land, but it would be an interesting question to ask. Yeah, uh I I think that's a good point, right? And you can think of sort of the different mediating mechanisms here, right? So like first comes like group uh membership and identification and then you're making making your uh attributions that way. And and to your point, like I think all Hadza see all other Hadza as in group members, even

if they're in different camps. These aren't really important social groupings, but maybe some of their neighboring populations, we could we could test that, right? And see if they're uh switching those biases, which would be super fascinating. Yeah, for sure. You also mentioned the WTR, the the this idea of the welfare trade-off ratio where the amount of costs I'm willing to inflict on you to get a benefit for myself is this this variable, and anger is a response to a low welfare trade-off ratio where you inflict a really big cost on me to get a really small benefit for you, like say I have a really fancy tie uh uh and you take my tie and you wipe the ketchup off your face with it. Like you're getting a really small benefit for yourself and you're ruining my tie.

I would get really pissed off, right? Um at least that's my favorite example of of a of an anger-inducing situation. Um but i has anyone tried to measure uh welfare trade-off ratios in uh either either you know the Hadza or small scale society or any any place outside the Western world? Because I know this method has become increasingly common in evolutionary psychology of measuring these WTRs. Has anyone l tried to extend this to to different cultures and ecologies? I think Andy Delton has a paper with um I think it's among the Schwar. He's it's an anthropologist that works. It's in the 2020 uh weird special issue of EHB. Oh you I've also seen it. It's not, you know, it that uh task. So usually the the task used to measure welfare trade off ratio, right, is to ask like,

would you rather have X amount of dollars yourself or Y amount of dollars for this other person? You know, that's also known as other things in the literature, so like social discounting. So, like Dan Harushka has done social discounting, I know, in Bangladesh. Um, and I remember he had challenges adapting that protocol. He has a couple of papers talking about that that challenge of adapting the protocol um and how people were understanding it. And I think he doesn't find the usual effect. So usually what you find is that people have the highest welfare trade-off ratios for people that they feel closest to. Um, I think he doesn't actually find that. I think need uh overrides the effect in those communities.

So people are more willing to help those. And so again, I think the way to think about that is that the method, the measurement is interacting with the ecology as well. And has some of this too with some of the parochial altruism stuff, finding that in some communities, because there are the stereotypes of some uh communities being more or less uh high higher or lower SES or more need, that you'll get people sharing more cross-group boundaries, but really what's driving it is this perception of of need. Um so yeah, again, thinking that there's a lot of care that has to go into adapting these methods to make sure that they're understood the same way we think they're understanding it. Yeah. Why does why do things have to be so complicated?

Well that that's what makes humans so interesting, right? I know. I know. Yeah, no, I mean it makes sense. pretty easy to think about, you know, I'm going to give up some money for my friend to get some money. Whereas if you're living at subsistence, you know, and you're talking about a critical resource, uh, the the game is is just totally different, right? Yeah, well I I think if there's there's even more to that even within so one of my first research research experiences was working with Dan Harushka on this social discounting task and he wanted to test it in community members uh in Phoenix and Tempe uh as sort of just to get a feel for it. So I'd go out to do these surveys where you give them these welfare trade-off ratio tasks.

So they they rank who they feel like first, second, fifth, and tenth closest, I think, maybe went out further. They do this welfare trade-off ratio task. And I remember interviewing one woman who was pregnant and she had a young child with her as well. The person she felt closest to was her fetus, which makes total sense. She's like literally physically closest to this person. Um, and of course, she gives nothing to the fetus because that would be silly and ridiculous to do. Um, and so she doesn't have she didn't have this really clean social discounting line because uh, you know, she's considering other variables here. I remember one uh guy I interviewed, he ranked his cat as the twentieth closest person.

Um it's very specific. Well, I I and and you know, I I thought about it and I was like, I'd probably put my pets around there too, maybe maybe even a little closer. And again, he gave nothing to his cat because that would be. Yeah, what's the cat gonna do with the money? Yeah. Yeah. Um opposable, no opposable thumbs. Uh uh, maybe you could operate the keyboard and order something off Amazon, but uh right, right. So even you don't have to go to another culture, even when we, you know, we're so used, I think, to interacting with undergraduates and participants online who in some ways are professional participants who are used to doing all these tasks. Um, that I think it impacts how they're interpreting that.

And I again taking the time to see how are people understanding that task, even when you're working within your own cultures, I I think really key. Yeah. I mean, do you think it's uh has something to do with the level of abstraction and hypotheticality that we're accustomed to in in the Western world, where we have this education system that we're put through where we're we're forced to sort of decouple things from their concrete reality and think about, you know, abstractions and hypothetical arrangements of different things, And all of our questionnaires sort of rely on this to like entertain this hypothetical situation that may not ever happen in in real life and to sort of uh extrapolate, you know, what you would do in this hypothetical situation.

And when you try to bring that into the Hadza land, they they're they're thinking about the concrete realities that they have to deal with. And you know if you ask them, you know, how much money are you going to give to your fetus? They're like, what are you talking about? Like my fetus, you can't spend any money. Like, whereas in the Western world, be like, oh yeah, in a hypothetical world, I would give the most to my fetus. But no, like they're thinking about you know their concrete realities and taking the the measures that you're giving them at face value and taking them literally. Um could that you know um explain potentially some of these difficulties and and just the the the level of comfort with these kind of abstract hypothetical

questions? Yeah, or or putting numbers to fillings, which I think is actually really weird and we do it all the time. Uh yeah, I I think there are folks who are working on this problem of like how education is impacting cog obviously there are people working on that, but I think there's evolutionary anthropologists who are trying to think about like what what does this really mean? What what does the impact of schooling have? I'll say that it is so easy to know who has had some schooling in Hadza Land and who doesn't based on how they interact with the tasks. And some of it's not just abstraction, it's the very idea of sitting down to do a task that doesn't have any real impact uh you know in their lives.

Um so I I definitely think that's that's part of it. Uh I've heard I've heard stories from so many folks uh in the field when they've tried to do tasks and they totally get an unexpected result because they they just understood it differently or they were thinking about a very specific context um from you know folks who are asked to give money to like friends. Uh and this was another interview at ASU where uh two people came in, they they and one person was completely selfish. But then immediately after, like we overheard him saying, like, Oh, I'm gonna pay for your lunch. Uh let's let's go grab lunch together. And it it's, you know, is I I think a lot of evolutionary psychologists are like, well,

there's some status signaling, right? They want to be able to like control where those those resources are going. But also it does seem kind of generous, uh, on the other hand. So uh interesting. Yeah, again, I I just rather than giving the money to his friend directly, he took it for himself and then took his friend out to lunch. Exactly. Yeah. Interesting. Um which, you know, again, probably, you know, you get some control over what food you get, you get some of the reputation benefit you might not get. But um yeah, just that that people are are complicated, right? Uh as they think about these tasks. And um I I find it fun to hear these stories and think about how people are thinking about these different uh you know experiments that they're doing.

Yeah, for sure. As if people, yeah, as if the the challenge of understanding complicated humans weren't challenging enough. We also have this problem of measurement and like how we measure the things that we're actually trying to measure, uh, particularly in a very different culture that isn't used to being uh to sitting down and doing a task that doesn't have any immediate practical benefit. Um it's it's a huge challenge. It's amazing that you know we've we've gotten stuff done at all and we've learned anything at all. Like it's uh it's a real credit to the to the work that you and others have have been doing. Yeah, and I think it's a benefit of taking an evolutionary approach and doing anthropology

too. I mean, that's just to follow up on what David is saying is that I think there's a lot of areas in psychology where the measure becomes the data, becomes the theory. And so you just sort of you just say, like this number as a result of this method is the psychology. Um, and if you don't have an idea of, well, we're trying to figure out the evolved psychology, or you don't have this idea of I'm gonna go to the field and see, you know, I can't just assign this a number, like the kids gotta eat, the person's gotta live, they gotta move. Um, you know, like what are the what does the measure actually mean? Um, it kind of keeps you honest. Um and yeah, I think a lot of the history of psychology has been codifying

measures as uh as like real things as opposed to um, you know, guesses or clues about the underlying psychology. And it's really bad just to like just to just to like because a lot of times people will will operationalize. I operationalize a construct of like selfishness with like, do they cooperate in this like prisoner's dilemma? And then they'll report the studies like people are more selfish here than this, and then that's what people pick up on, as opposed to no, it's that in this game among these participants. So, like, even just like the the the labels or the inference, it's like a game of telephone. Yeah. Uh and to your point. And right, we'll cite it later, like, oh, people cooperate X and then as you go through the

citations and then you go back and read it and you're like, oh, that this was not like and maybe you don't even think it's a measurement of cooperation now where the theory's taken us. And and yeah, to your point, I I I think that's important. Um I I'm less interested in theory development right now myself compared to where I was in grad school, but it's still really important in thinking about this research, uh, because you could also easily get lost in the field, right? If you have all these different observations, still having a strong theoretical background, especially in evolution. I guess we're preaching to the choir here, um, is really important for helping to organize that. Um, you know, I still want to be open to discovery while I'm doing field work.

And, you know, I I've had have this chapter in the Oxford handbook where I make the case that we don't want to have theory blind us and not just realize that there might be domains of psychology that we're just not even thinking about because we're only thinking about undergrads and and hunter-gatherers. Um, but uh still keeping in mind that, you know, psychology is functional. It has a very particular kind of function, and thinking about what that function is is is still helpful for organizing all those different observations. Yeah, I like that a lot. I also would put it as like there's a difference between theory as tradition versus theory as the ability to say, hey, hang on, we haven't looked at X or Y or Z.

And I think that those are very different uh kinds of theorizing. And I think especially psychology has not done a good job of accepting speculation or like people saying, look, we haven't accounted for X, Y, or Z because there's no data for it, right? Right. There's no fancy data. And so this is another one of my soapboxes, which is that if theory is the stuff that has data and lots of evidence, then you're never going to actually look at the missing pieces. Yeah. Yeah. I I think there's formal modeling work in like philosophy of science trying to show like it's it's um uh streetlight effect, right? Like exactly your theory, your theory. Yeah, that's great. I actually knew after this episode, you have to like please send me that reference because

uh uh yeah, that would be great. Yeah, of course. Yeah. Um it it's that old joke like uh the the drunk looking for their keys under the streetlight, right? So if theory focuses too quickly, then you're not uh open to sort of the possibilities about other observations. Exactly. And so to your point, is like if you're in the field and you're like, look, our theories are blinding us to this whole other thing. I would argue like that's a kind of theory, but it's a very different kind of theory than the theory that was blinding you. Right. Right. Yeah, I think that's a good way to put it. Right. And uh the similar problem with, you know, we're only looking at the stuff that is easy to measure or convenient to measure rather than the full range of stuff that we're interested

in. You know, we're looking at the stuff that we can put a number on. Um, but not everything of interest uh is that easily measurable. And the stuff that we have, you know, well-tested measures for is not the full range of of stuff that exists in the world. So yeah, I think to that point, like I think just the value of just straight-up ethnography, just people living in a community and just writing qualitatively about their experiences and reporting on anecdotes like the anecdotes that you shared with us. I think that is uh tremendously valuable and underrated, I think. Yeah, it's it's definitely uh something I I'm trying to push in that chapter I mentioned that we should ha be more open to uh ethnographic approaches in cross-cultural

psychology, especially cross-cultural evolutionary psychology. And again, you don't want to fall into the trap of cultural anthropologists who will only do thick description, right? You still want to eventually move this to a frame, a generalizable theoretical framework. But yeah, I mean, I've I've got a couple of projects in the pipeline right now that are it's crazy for me to think about this that are just completely qualitative, that it was interviews and focus groups. Um, especially as someone who like has prided himself on some of my statistics. Uh, it's really weird to be writing these papers where, because again, to your point, like sometimes you can't get an accurate measurement, and sometimes the observation itself can

be a value and you know maybe we'll develop that measurement later maybe you know uh whatever but uh at least having those observations out there uh in the first place can be really helpful. Yeah I feel like I've learned more from just the anecdotes that anthropologists have told me about you know life in the field and with these people. I've just learned more and and developed better intuitions about it than with any particular data point. Not to say the data isn't valuable, but I think it ought to be balanced with, you know, real life experience as well. Yeah. Well, I've I've had the experience uh on the fisheries work. I visited, I did, I think like 200 interviews down south in Tanzania as like pilot work.

And then we did like 1400 surveys and another 200 interviews. And what we were testing was whether or not having more friendships in villages that access the same fisheries, if you're more likely to participate in fishery management. The idea being that you create stake both in your friend and in the resource you share. And so you're more willing to protect it was the basic idea. And I remember we did all these interviews, and I wasn't surprised when the survey came back supporting that view because it it came out in the interviews all the time. Now, you know, the careful measurement means we we were able to compare different effect sizes. There's other things that are really important. We got some specificity that it's not all friends.

It is specifically friends in these other communities. Um there's benefit to that. But even again, it was just weird that the the surveys felt like, oh, I have to do this to prove it to other people, but the interviews I I was already uh fairly convinced it was was gonna pop up and and that happens a lot. Yeah. No, that that's the best kind of work. That's you know, you have you have the data for there who for for people who are, you know, picky and skeptical, but you know, just it it's it's built on the foundation of actually talking to people and and listening to their experiences and so that you know that it's the data aren't, you spurious or a result of some bad measurement, like you actually have you

know a real connection to the people and understand what's going on at the ground level as well. So yeah. I blame uh having to have deliverables to funding agencies. We should say, I don't know what I'm gonna do. Uh um and if I have an agenda, uh you should be suspicious of me. Yeah. Uh I I mean th this comes up a lot in training anthropology students. Uh I I've had conversations with students who who feel that way who also want to do like community engaged work. And so in anthropology, there's a real push to like actually work with the community to identify research questions that matter to them as well as your own research questions. And so a lot of students are like, well, how do I go to the granting agencies without a

plan. And it's the reality is you still do have a plan, right? Uh um and so trying to train students that like the the plan has to be, you know, morph and and and adjustable, but you need a plan going in. Um if you you really can't just go out there into the community and just sit there and learn. Like the you need some direction. But uh to your point though, I think uh outside of anthropology granting agencies, they want a bit more specificity in like what hypotheses you're testing and things of that nature. Yes. Cool. Uh so there's um So the the wife murderer uh keeps keeps sticking in my head. Maybe I'm just like obsessed with true crime. I think the when we had the Brenda Bowser episode, I could start.

Oh, the death by Phantasm. Yeah, that was great. Any any story of of murder in in one of these communities always just sticks with me. Um, but uh I I remember you mentioned, you know, work with um uh Leo Fatucci and Man Versing on compensation and conflict mediation as an alternative to punishment. And especially in a community where everyone is really interdependent and vital, it's much more important to repair uh the the cooperation between the two disputants than it is to punish or exclude one of the disputants because that, you know, uh excludes a really valuable partner. And so it's much more important to restore cooperation, mediate the conflict, bring people together, uh, than it is to inflict costs, which is what we're so used to in the Western

world where we just send people off to prison or or whatever, so we don't have to deal with them. Um so back to the wife murderer. Did did his did did the um did the per the wife who was murdered did was there any compensation given to the family? Um was there any kind of conflict mediation as a result of this, or do you not remember the details? I'm not aware of the details. So I didn't ask too many questions about this. I wasn't sure if it was appropriate or not. And so a lot of this is hearing from other folks. Like I said, the aunt of the mother of the woman who was murdered was very upset. Like she in the interview was like, this guy's terrible. The uncle actually did not have strong feelings.

Funny enough, was the aunt specifically. And that was a genetic relationship with the aunt. Yeah, I I'm not sure is the answer. Yeah. Because yeah, it's one might expect that, you know, perhaps the family was compensated in some way and there was some kind of mediation thing that that resolved it, or I I don't know. I I haven't heard of that before, and I I think the challenge with the Hadza is that they don't accumulate wealth really easily. Again, that might be changing. Um, but they don't accumulate a lot of wealth, so it would be hard. I mean, so the classic example actually is from Polly Wiesner's work on Papu Nugini, where they have these elaborate courts and they're giving like livestock uh to harm to victims

and stuff. So I I think you would need at least some sort of sense of property or accumulation of wealth that would work for compensation or or maybe forms of labor. There's other right uh societies that do uh labor exchanges. But with the Hodza, I I'm not sure what that would look like. But I I I want to be careful here because uh someone else might have more experience that and would be able to talk about that more. For sure. Yeah I guess it's just a perfect storm of of you know factors that would cause you know a murderer to be continued, you know, to be a member of the community and that they can't really compensate the victim's family. Uh they're integral to the community and they can't really be excluded.

And so this is just what happens as a result. Yeah, I I I I think that's the right way to put it, yeah. Cool. Um so we've been dwelling a lot on on the Hadza and and less so on the the fishing communities and the work that you're doing with and uh Pizer. Are there any uh interesting differences you've noted between your field work and the Hadza versus your work in these fishing communities? Um what what are you uh observing there that that is particularly exciting you or interesting you? Yeah, so uh like I said that the one interesting thing about this project to begin with is that it's a bit more applied. So one thing I wanted I've and been moving more in my work is thinking about like how can

we translate these theories to application or at least test them in ways that is adjacent where maybe we could do something. So part of this work is collaborating with an NGO that uh is helping fisheries management in the area. And like I said, so the the motivating question is that you have all these uh villages, like if you imagine a bay, you'll have like four or five villages around it, and they're all accessing the reef in the middle for the fisheries. And so classically, you'll get these community based uh institutions. This is from like Eleanor Ostrom's work, where the community works together to like create rules and enforce them. But the issue here, of course, is that it's four different villages, right?

These communities have to work together. Um, and really it's uh a collective action problem where you need individuals in each village who are willing to report legal fishing, help clean the beach, develop landing sites, things like that. And so we're interested in whether or not these relationships between these villages could help drive participation in here. And again, the idea here is that there's some involved stake here. So one thing we find is that these what we're calling long-distance relationships between villages are really important for accessing loans for like new boats. And the only way you're going to get that loan back is if they're able to keep fishing, right? And so once you have this sort of stake in other people in other communities accessing the

fishery, this creates, you know, this is more benefit for you in participation. So sort of classic cooperation problem, right? Um, and so we find that long distance friends encourage participation in these fisheries management. We replicated that effect. So we did this in 2022 and 2023. Uh so that was really nice. And again, we also replicated that it was specifically these long distance friends. So it wasn't how many friends or family you have in your village with you and wasn't f uh family in other villages. So very specifically these long distance friends. What we just we have a preprint out now where we find uh even interest in having more long distance friends, independent of having these uh friendships realized, also predicts

participation. So we created this measurement uh we're calling long distance orientation or LDO. So basically asking people do you like hearing about uh people's lives in other villages. Do you like visiting people in other villages? And in the US, we tested this. This is distinct from things like extroversion or openness to new experiences. They correlate, but we can distinctly measure them. And interestingly enough, uh LDO positively predicts having more long distance friends. And once that's in the model, extroversion negatively predicts having more long distance friends or predicts fewer long distance friends. So there does seem to be some distinctiveness here. And so we find in these fishing villages that people with higher LDO are more

willing to participate in these fisheries management. And the idea here is that if you want to, if you're interested in building more long-distance friends, you have to be a good cooperative partner yourself. And so we think this is a partner choice mechanism where uh interest in long-distance relationships is sort of upregulating cooperation in these long-distance settings and situations. So that pretty excited about that because it's a nice mix of some of my psychology background and anthropology and really bring them together in an interesting way. That's interesting, especially the when you add LDO and extroversion to the model, extroversion predicts it negatively. I mean, could it be that what's going on there is that extroversion is um predicting

sort of uh indiscriminate socializing to independent of the community. And so you're gonna socialize more with the people in your in your group who are close and also potentially um outsiders, whereas LDO is a disproportionate interest in outsiders relative to insiders. And so once you control for that, um extroversion is going to be predicting this uh interest in uh insiders and that's going to negatively predict uh uh could something like that be going on i i i feel like i should have more conversations with you about my research because you you put it uh so well um but yeah i i think that's that's one way to think about it um is that uh extroversion you want to hang out with people more generally

um and so that's probably gonna be people closer to you and LDO and I without it in the model, I think uh extroversion like weekly positively predicts long distance friends. Um, in the and this is only in the US sample. We weren't able to adapt the big five uh to the Tanzanian setting. Um the other thing it could be this going back to again measurement sort of reifying theory. If you look at the questions for extroversion, there are often things like I like to go to parties uh with lots of friends, or I like to a lot of it's very close, uh immediate socializing. And so it could be the psychology that that's tapping might actually be more specific or or less specific, but the way it's being asked, I think is in part sort of uh pushing it to

where it negatively predicts, right? So in the US, like when we look at like some of the comments from the surveys, a lot of people are talking about meeting long distance friends like online and stuff. And so you're probably probably also picking up a difference there where, you know, people who are a bit more introverted are more willing to in interact online and are picking up long distance friends. But the more interesting one is the one you said where like maybe there's a real difference in that psychology, but can't rule out, you know, it's something about the the measurement itself in this case. That's cool. Um I'm asking you to speculate here, but um, do you think this is a kind of personality trait where like some people are just inherently more interested in

socializing with distant community members and some people aren't? Or is is there a different story at play, like where maybe people who are more anxious about resource shortfalls really are more motivated to form these long distance connections to buffer themselves against risk and that is what's driving it. So what what do you think is is going on here with this this variation in interest and and long distance ties? We Ann and I went back and forth on whether we call this a personality trait, an internal regulatory variable, um, or you know, something else. I'm I'm less interested in that sort of taxonomy to be honest. What I this is speculation. What we think it's probably a fairly consistent trait, but one that can

move as you adjust situations. So, you know, one thing that will probably impact this is like cost and convenience of long distance traveling. So uh, you know, I live in Pullman. This is eight miles from the town of Moscow. There's no bus between the two. So if you only have a bike in Pullman, then Moscow feels like a really long distance. That's a trip you have to plan for. But once you buy a car, then maybe you know your idea of distance now changes, right? And so this would be related to like some of the psychological distance literature where you find that, you know, people's perceptions of like time and space are all sort of wrapped together. And so we kind of suspected some of that. So as the costs and benefits of uh traveling, of maintaining these relationships, as you

said, like if there's more need for risk buffering, um, then that could help. So again, in our society, we usually rely on financial institutions for a lot of our risk buffering, right? More so, I think, than uh friends, especially people here in uh a higher uh SES. Uh, but in Tanzania, right, they are relying on their friends a lot for help. And so one interesting thing is that they used to, before phone scams became a problem, favorite activity would be uh calling like their number neighbors and like uh interacting with someone far away and maintaining relationships. And it could be that because they don't have these other risk-buffering institutions, um, that they're more interested in uh relationships in general and maybe long distance

relationships in particular to help with those sort of community-wide uh shocks. Yeah. Um so so I again I think I think it's another great way to put my research. Cool. I mean fascinating stuff. Um so I mean we're uh approaching you know an hour and a half now, and I want to make sure that we've covered the topics that that you are personally most excited about. Is there anything that we haven't covered that you're particularly interested in? Uh uh new new directions, new ideas that that are stewing in you? own. Early enough on tenure track, I should have a lot of uh new ideas, right? Uh one project I didn't talk about that I'm thinking about how to follow up on. It was uh one of the casualties of some of the grant cancellations.

Uh, but this was my uh work in collaboration with some of the uh epidemiologists in our vet med school here. So we're interested in uh climate sensitive diseases, right? So diseases, um, especially vector-borne diseases, so those that are carried by mosquitoes, ticks, sandflies, et cetera, as the climate changes, right, their ecology changes. And so their range and behavior will change. And so there's a lot of diseases that have been identified that as climate's changing, the epidemiology of these diseases are expected to change. So we're looking here at Rift Valley Fever. It's a hemorrhagic fever that primarily impacts livestock, but can uh jump over to humans either by directly interacting with uh blood from the uh animal or from mosquito

bites. And so historically, what you used to find is that you'd get Rift Valley Fever epidemics in this area in northern Kenya with the El Nino southern oscillation. There would be massive rainstorms that would flood these dry lands that would then create breeding grounds for mosquitoes, and they you'd get epidemics following the uh the mosquito storms. What we found is that as the precipitation is changing, so you can actually track precipitation change over several decades and temperature change. What we're finding in the area is you're getting more extreme flooding. So you get more rain on average, but fewer rainy days. So it's coming more extreme. And so what we're finding now is that there's more outbreaks happening between the

southern, between the El Nino southern oscillation. And so we were interested in well, how are people adapting to these changes, right? So what climate change adaptations are people developing in these communities? And this was an interesting project. So what we found was that they're really not. What's happening is that they have so many different threats posed by climate change. So they have to deal with, you know, decreased precipitation and increased droughts. They have to deal with more conflict with these other communities in response to that drought. That, you know, what they used to do to avoid their animals getting sick would be to move away from the floods where the mosquitoes were.

But now they're sort of more sedentary, they're settling around these permanent boreholes, they can't move to new regions. And so what we're finding is that these different threats posed by climate change are really impacting people's to adapt to it. And so what I'm hoping to follow up with this is really look at how people are sort of uh representing and conceptualizing this sort of threat landscape of climate change and how how are they able to respond to it? Like, can they see past the near future of say uh a drought and look into the long term about like, okay, how can we actually adapt to these different challenges? Um, and so I'm really excited about following up on that work. Um, again, in part because it really has some real-world implications for the folks we're

working with, and um, you know, that excites me quite a bit. That's fascinating. Well, what what things are you are you looking to measure with with regard to people's ability to adapt to a changing climate and potentially a changing pathogen environment? What are some of the variables that you're that you're interested in in looking at? So we try to measure perceived climate change. So we'd ask people how much you think climate's changing. And it turns out this is a really hard question to ask. Other people have reported having challenges where people have a hard time seeing past seasonal variability. And the other thing that's happening is that, you know, there's a ton of NGOs that are working in this area.

And so they'll come and talk to them about climate change. And so even when we translate it, we have to be careful if we use the same language the NGOs use, then it sort of triggers like, oh, I know I'm supposed to talk about how difficult this is. So we're trying to measure like um, you know, and and part of this still goes back to long distance relationships and sort of buffering against these community wide shocks. right? So if you think the climate's changing, maybe you'll make more intergroup relationships, for example. Um, so we're trying to measure uh originally sort of different aspects of climate variability. So um if you look, you can uh in actual weather data, you can break out different kinds

of variation, trying to see if people psychologically match that. Our first go-around didn't seem to work well, so we'll have to get around it. But also sort of mapping out like these different kinds of threats. So do they see uh these changes in climate associated with changes in predators and changes in conflict and changes in pathogens, and see do they have a couple model in their head of this connection between climate change and you know you would think that'd be sort of the necessary first step in thinking about how they would adapt to these, right? Is how do they actually map out these threats? Um something I'm I'm thinking about about how how can we measure this um in these communities.

So the first step is just seeing if they're aware that the stuff is going on and aware of the different ecological changes. And then once you have that nailed down you could potentially see if awareness of these ecological changes is affecting other variables like uh perhaps um cooperation with um long-distance uh people in other in other communities. Yeah, exactly. And like you said, this was we had a grant from a subgrant through these centers for research in emerging infectious disease. This was a uh IH NIAD-funded um uh network of research centers. It was canceled in part um with a lot of the other cancellations, and so wasn't able to follow up on that yet. So still thinking about how I'll get back out there and follow up.

And you know, this is the reality of doing maybe not even just field work, but science in general, right? Is that very often we uh outside circumstances push us in one direction or another. But um you know to the to the extent that I the will to research what I want, um, would would love to follow up on this. Yeah. Yeah. When we were in Morocco, you told me that the mosquitoes there we wouldn't need to worry about. You were saying you were you have expertise in mosquito uh taxonomizing for for good reason. Yeah, yeah. Um and I remember when we got the grant proposal uh feedback. That was the only feedback we got was that someone was really upset we didn't talk more about mosquitoes. And I thought, oh, that's silly.

And then actually reading up on the different uh genus of mosquitoes and what they spread. And so, like Riff Valley fever. So most uh diseases they're going to be spread by one specific genus or another. Um, and you you can tell there are pretty visible differences. Uh Riff Alley fever spread by just about everything, really. We found uh all three genus of mosquitoes that spread it, um ticks have been known to spread it, sand flies, and so it's been kind of crazy diving into this virus literature and like realizing how scary it can be when you have a disease like this that can spread through all these different kinds of vectors. Yeah. Which oh good. Yeah, no, I I was just curious, um in terms of how these communities are conceptualizing

these changes. Cause, you know, we obviously think about it in terms of meteorological changes in the germ theory of disease, but they might not be exposed to those ideas or or are they? I don't know. I mean, do they have a different way of conceptualizing these changes? They do have some exposure to the germ theory of disease. Um, and it it varied between uh a couple of different villages we visited, how much they bought into it. Uh one community was very insistent. This is like uh a response to us abandoning our traditional ways. Like it was very much not germ theory of disease. Interesting. Sort of being punished by a supernatural agent for true in the US too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean we we certainly get some of that as well as well.

That's like exactly true here. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um but it to your point, right? It matters how they think what's causing this because if you did want to design an intervention, you know it's it's going to impact how they they buy into it. If, you know, now they they interact with a lot of like vet techs. The govern Kenyan government does do vaccine um campaigns. So they have some exposure and for some diseases, they like like malaria, you know, they they don't know the details, but they're pretty certain that's spread by mosquitoes and that they're they buy that there's some sort of parasite. So it depends on the specifics. For Rift Valley fever, um that one they tended to buy more into the germ theory of

disease for a lot of those explanations. Um yeah. Cool. Do they have any awareness of um industry being behind climate change or uh is that has that not gotten around? They tend to blame local changes. Um so they would talk about their own tree cutting, and and it's hard to tell, you know, do they think this is having a larger impact on the climate versus like you can see the effect of cutting trees meant there's massive dust storms because there's nothing catching the dust. And so people would complain about that that. Um you know, and and this is sort of a challenge of doing sort of more applied work in these settings, is that the reality is that they're gonna be the most impacted by climate

change, but have done the least to contribute. But you do get like NGO scolds who'll be like, well, you need to, you know, sequester more carbon or however they would put it. And it's like these guys did not cause the problem. Like, you know, um, so it's trying to balance that that line. Yeah. Fascinating. All right. Well, um I think you know, we we would done an hour and a half. I think that's pretty good. Yeah, Chris. This is a really fun conversation. Thanks for uh chatting with us, Chris. Yeah, appreciate it. Really uh enjoyed talking, especially about things like methods and and measurements and you know, how can we do that better cross-culturally? Uh this was a really fun conversation. Yeah.

I hope that you uh get all your funding back and uh and that you uh how do you avoid mosquitoes in the field? Uh not well. Uh uh you know, uh repellent uh if you can get a mosquito net. Um, but like I was staying at one guest house. The mosquito net was clearly not treated, bunch of holes. I woke up the next morning with literally dozens of mosquitoes in my net, and you know, I was killing them, and it's just like splotches of my blood, and I'm you know, very upset about it. Um It was it's a mosquito net that just keeps your mosquitoes with you, is really the way it works. That that's what ended up happening. Yeah. So um fortunately I haven't gotten anything fun or exciting in terms of diseases.

Uh so hopefully that will continue. But yeah, thank you for your service, Chris. Yes, thank you for your service and and Godspeed. Hope I hope you don't get any fun and interesting diseases. Yeah, thank you so much. Your diseases stay very very boring. As as do we all. Uh yeah, thank you so much. David, you are still here. I'm still here, and you the listener are still listening. You might not be. Uh but you're not hearing us. Although at the very least, our yeah, I mean it could be is that someone left their phone and when and they're not actually listening, but it's just it kept playing. Well, somebody uh might have listened and then stopped listening. So in that never mind, it's okay. Or they could just be spacing out, you think?

Well, I was thinking about somebody who listens to the episode but then stops at the outro because they know that what's gonna happen in the outro is not is missable, is missable, yeah. Yeah. And so are they a listener? They're not listening, but it doesn't matter. It's really, really yeah. I I I I might cut this out myself. Anyway, uh, you're here, David. The listener is here. Uh yeah. We could give our song and dance routine of supporting us, Patreon, social media, leave us a kind review, but we usually we've been doing kind of banter in in the outros instead, right? Uh I think so. Do you have any banter? I think I just did it. That's all I have at the end. You just did it? That was the banter?

Yeah. I'm st honest, I'm still not a hundred percent from HBus. Yeah, I know. You're still cup recovering from the sickness, whatever it is. So David, thank you for carrying this episode today. Yeah, no, absolutely. Um, sickness is a is a real thing. Lastitude's a real thing. Uh stay tuned for for Josh. Oh, there you go, David. There you go. That's why they pay you the big bucks. I'm drinking coffee to just sort of perk myself up, but that was a great segue into Josh Schnodgrass is going to be our upcoming guest. So this is a um a teaser for Josh Schnodgrass about the the emotion of of being sick and how it depletes you and it even depletes your banter ability apparently. Yes. I think that and that was one of the first previews we've done.

So but um yeah. Yeah. Should we do a trailer for the next one at the end? Uh I can do I can do my trailer voice. I want to hear your trailer voice. No words. Please do it. One man dares to ask the questions to a scholar. Well uh is that pretty good? That's really good. Um is it Will Arnett? Is that who's uh the guy who does a lot of um he's not rust rust? No, it's not Will Arnett, although he has a verse. No, Will Arnett. No, but Will Arnett does uh voiceovers. He does, but he doesn't think he does like Oh, he doesn't do when in a world though, yeah. Who does that? I forget his name. I think his name is like Don something. Okay. Anyway. Um in a world. They don't do those kinds of movie trailers anymore.

I miss them. They don't have a voiceover actor doing the trailers. Don LaFontaine. Yeah, Don Lafontaine. That's the guy. Yeah. Maybe we can get him to do our intros and that'd be really fun. That would be great. Yeah. Is he still I mean he probably he's he hasn't gotten a lot of work. You know, there he they don't do voiceovers anymore for trailers. There's um I miss them. Yeah. He's still alive. I feel like that that's one the that's one of um the things that I miss from the 90s and early 2000s is the movie trailer voice. And the other thing I miss is film scores that have a damn melody. Everything is just drones and completely devoid of melody these days. I miss the John Williams memorable melody that's that stays with you after the movie and

gets it. Jurassic Park, I I still listen to Jurassic Park, you know, it's gorgeous pie that soundtrack is really gorgeous piece of music. And you know, film scores just don't do that anymore. They're just drones. It's really disappointing. Yeah, we've regressed as a crossing. Drones and green screens, yeah. Yeah. Drones, green screens, yeah, electronic screens. Yeah, I mean, I don't you know, don't get me wrong, I like a good drone as much as the next guy, but also you gotta have a melody, you know? You preach, David. Yeah, all right, all right. So all of you folks who are doing um s uh Hollywood um composition. Yeah. Take notice. Take notice and uh, you know, enjoy some some John Williams. Yeah, enjoy the melody on the way out here, too.

Yeah. Yeah. David. Jurassic Park, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, whatever does it for you. Listen to it, get it in your head, it'll provide a nice soundtrack to your life. Are we allowed to play Jurassic Park as our outro for this episode? Um, I think we might have to get them the rights. But I I no one's gonna sue us, so I'll probably do it. We'll call Sam Neil. That that would be hilarious if somebody sued us. Well, uh we probably won't get to it, but imagine Jurassic Park uh for it. I could just hum the theme to Jurassic Park. David, you're on you don't need any would that be the new that that yeah. Can you work on that? Can you do a mashup of Manafort and Jurassic Park? Oh, that's a good idea.

Okay. I'll work on it. All right. You're two. We can slightly modify the um intro and outro. So all right. Uh everybody, thank you for listening for all three of you who who've stick stuck through it this long. Um I'll see you. We'll see you next week. Thank you for your service, listener. Yeah. Exactly. Bye, David. See you next week. That was great. Take it easy. All right, bye.