Culture and social behavior

•There is immense variation in social behavior across human societies.•Institutions related to markets, religion, marriage and kinship appear to be important in explaining much of this variation.•Cultural evolutionary theory supplies important tools and approaches for building theories to explain human social behavior.

Comparative research from diverse societies shows that human social behavior varies immensely across a broad range of domains, including cooperation, fairness, trust, punishment, aggressiveness, morality and competitiveness. Efforts to explain this global variation have increasingly pointed to the importance of packages of social norms, or institutions. This work suggests that institutions related to anonymous markets, moralizing religions, monogamous marriage and complex kinship systems fundamentally shape human psychology and behavior. To better tackle this, work on cultural evolution and culture-gene coevolution delivers the tools and approaches to develop theories to explain these psychological and behavioral patterns, and to understand their relationship to culture and human nature.