The “culture of honor” hypothesis holds that subsistence strategies relying more heavily on pastoralism tend to encourage the development of moral frameworks centered on honor and revenge. This study uses ethnographic data from the Ethnographic Atlas and other sources to investigate morality among the descendants of pastoralists, who may have been raised in similar cultural settings but have not necessarily experienced the material realities of pastoralism firsthand. It finds that descendants of pastoralists continue to exhibit a high emphasis on retaliation and revenge in civil and non-civil conflicts, and in their historical folklore.

This article is a global comparative review of the archaeological and ethnographic literature on evidence for inter-group warfare throughout human history, starting with the emergence of the genus Homo in Africa during the Pleistocene (ca. 2.5 million years ago) and continuing through to the present day. Historically, the discussion around warfare in anthropology has been framed as a debate between a Hobbesian, “deep roots” vision of humanity, wherein the earliest humans inherited a biological instinct for war from their evolutionary ancestors, and a Rousseauian “shallow roots” framework, wherein war is a modern phenomenon, linked to the spread of agriculture and sedentism during the Holocene. However, upon reviewing a large bibliography of published bioarchaeological data, the author concludes that the truth lies somewhere in between these two extremes.

This study uses Bayesian phylogenetic regression modelling across 131 largely non-industrial societies to test how variation of punishment is impacted by social, economic, and political organization. The authors focus on the presence of norm violations and types of punishments, and explores their relationships. The norm violations include adultery, rape, religious violations, food violations, and war cowardice. While the types of punishment are reputational, material, physical, or education. This study suggests a hypothesis for each type of punishment in relation to socioecological variables.

Research sampled 143 societies from the Standard Cross Cultural Sample to test the relationship between honor culture, social rewards for warriors, and intergroup conflicts. Using mediation analysis based on multiple regression, and structural equation modeling, the research supported the theory that honor culture was positively associated with intergroup conflict, and that this relationship was mediated by social rewards for warriors.

The author tests Straus' model of wifebeating that suggests that socialization through violence (by encouraging aggression, corporal punishment and by observing violence) increases the likelihood of wifebeating. The relationship between socialization of children using violent techniques and wifebeating is tested using the Probability Sample Files.

This article investigates how superordinate justice (whereby officials can arbitrate disputes involving homicide) and superordinate punishment (whereby officials can punish perpetrators of homicide) affect the level of internal violence in preindustrial societies. Results suggest that these two types of superordinate power do deter violent fatalities but that overall, “in order to increase violence substantively, arbitration authority over killings must be backed up by the power to penalize” (395).

This article studied the effects of common law in Sub-Saharan Africa on property rights of women and its relationship to intimate partner violence. The authors first compared intimate partner violence (IPV) in 593 ethnic groups with a separate marital property regime against groups with a community marital property regime. Then, the authors examined the correlation between women who justify IPV and the presence of a separate marital property regime. They found that separate marital property both increased the likelihood of intimate partner violence and the justification of IPV when compared to a community property regime. The authors use these findings to advocate for marital property rights reform to help reduce partner violence cases.

This paper seeks to understand how the conflict resolution strategies of indigenous and non-indigenous groups differ in their efficacy. The authors suggest that indigenous methods of conflict resolution are more effective than non-indigenous methods by demonstrating that subjects from the Outline of Cultural Materials (OCM) associated with indigenous conflict management (ICM) will co-occur less frequently with OCM terms related to conflict than subjects related to non-ICM. They tested this by selecting OCM subjects that they felt best represented ICM, non-ICM, and instances of conflict and using chi-square tests to show how often these subjects co-occurred. They subsequently split up the "conflict" variable into four forms of conflict in order to show whether any of these forms might be more frequently found associated with ICM or non-ICM subjects. The results showed that conflict subjects were more likely to co-occur with non-ICM subjects, and that sociocultural/interpersonal conflicts were more likely to be associated with ICM subjects, whereas political conflicts were more likely to be associated with non-ICM subjects.

This study examines two theories concerning the prevalence of rape: deterrence theory and fraternal interest group theory. Results indicate that both punishment and fraternal interest groups influence the frequency of rape, though neither variable is a necessary cause. The effects of marital residence and polygyny are also considered.

This study investigates the strategic mode of competition in both games of strategy and folk talkes. Various significant relationships between games of strategy, folktales, social complexity, and child rearing variables are observed.