1. Samuel Bowles University of Siena Santa Fe Institute

2.  Niche construction and the evolution of social institutions  Parochial altruism and its evolution  Governing a cooperative species Research Topics

3. SFI will seek to support networking among partners through ‘at large’ pre- and post- doctoral visits and shorter term recurrent visits by senior scientists associated with the TECT grant. Networking

4. Parochial Altruism and its Evolution  Many animals recognize group membership and condition their behavior on it, favoring insiders and inflicting lethal costs on outsiders.  Insider bias supports within group cooperation, but impedes mutually beneficial exchange with outsiders.  Hypothesis: parochial altruism evolved because groups in which the behavior was prevalent had a survival advantage in periods of inter-group conflict.

5. Niche Construction and the Evolution of Social Institutions  Pleistocene humans developed such reproductive leveling behaviors as information- and food-sharing, and monogamous mating systems. These involved property-rights systems that reduced intra-group conflict.  Human socialization institutions biased developmental processes towards group beneficial cooperative behaviors.  Hypothesis: under late Pleistocene and early Holocene conditions, these group level institutional niches could have co-evolved with individual social preferences through inter-demic selection in the face of military and environmental challenges.

6. Governing a Cooperative Species  An understanding of human capacities for cooperation may contribute to the design of more effective public policies, high performance firms and other institutions.  Policies and institutions that are designed to work well if individuals are entirely self-regarding will not generally be successful when a significant fraction of the population is other-regarding.  We will use behavioral experiments and models of complex social interactions to explore our hypothesis that policies designed to mobilize self-interest for the public good may crowd out social preferences, resulting in inferior outcomes.

7. Related papers  Bowles, Samuel. 2006. "Group competition, reproductive leveling and the evolution of human altruism." Science, 314, predicts South African migrant workers' remittances to their families." Nature, 434:17.  Bowles, Samuel, Jung-Kyoo Choi, and Astrid Hopfensitz. 2003. "The coevolution of individual behaviors and group level institutions." Journal of Theoretical Biology, 223:2, pp. 135-47.  Bowles, Samuel and Herbert Gintis. 2004. "The evolution of strong reciprocity: cooperation in a heterogeneous population." Theoretical Population Biology, 65, pp. 17-28.  Bowles, Samuel and Herbert Gintis. 2004. "Persistent Parochialism: The Dynamics of Trust and Exclusion in Networks." Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 55.  Bowles, Samuel. 2000. "Economic Institutions as Ecological Niches." Behavior and Brain Sciences, 23:1