In this paper, the author examines the effects of recent pension policies in Indonesia and Ghana on the practice of matri- or patrilocality. She also explores the relationships between these policies, marital residence, education, and elderly support. Her findings show that both matri/patrilocality and the investment parents make in their children have declined since the implementation of the pension plans.

This book discusses the role of women cross-culturally. The authors use a cross-cultural sample to examine the differences between men and women in contribution to subsistence as well as the social juxtaposition of the sexes in foraging, horticultural, agricultural, pastoral, and industrial societies.

The sustainability of a society depends on the transmission of cultural knowledge between generations. This study examines how that transmission occurs in 23 egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, where leaders tend to lack coercive power. Specifically, the study examines differences between the transmission of so-called “instrumental culture” (which includes skills such as how to do subsistence tasks) and what the authors call “opaque culture”, meaning abstract societal values and norms (e.g. rules of sharing and symbolic culture, such as religious beliefs). Using ethnographic data, the study finds that opaque culture is almost always conveyed through explicit teaching (rather than observation or imitation), often during middle childhood (ages 8 – 12). Among the 23 egalitarian societies in the sample in particular, adult community leaders, or other socially influential adult individuals, were most likely to be the ones engaging in teaching.

The authors assess and compare preferred interpersonal distances over 42 countries. Environmental and sociopsychological factors are tested in order to explain variability in interpersonal distance across cultures. The authors seek to go beyond previous studies and better understand cultural differences and similarities in proxemic behaviors.

In the present study, Peregrine tests two perspectives regarding social resilience to climate-related disasters: 1) that societies with more inclusive and participatory political structures (corporate political strategies) are more resilient to climate-related disasters, and 2) that societies with tighter adherence to social norms are more resilient to climate-related disasters. Results support the notion that societies with greater political participation are more socially resilient to catastrophic climate-related disasters. Because these results are justifiably generalizable across multiple historical and cultural contexts, Peregrine's findings are a useful contribution to aid in disaster response policy decision making.

This paper seeks to understand the roles played by children and adolescents in hunter-gatherer societies in relation to their social and ecological context. The authors set out to investigate how environmental factors, ecological risk, and the energetic contributions of adult men and women to food production may have influenced children/adolescent allocation of time to child care, domestic work, food production, and play. In order to carry out this study, the authors logged the behaviors of 690 children and adolescents from twelve hunter-gatherer and mixed-subsistence societies (Agta, Aka, Baka, BaYaka, Dukha, Hadza, Matsi-genka, Maya, Mayangna, Mikea, Pume, and Tsimane), totaling 85,597 unique observations. The study found that harsh environmental factors were not associated with child/adolescent time allocation, but that local ecological risk such as dangerous animals and lack of water availability predicted decreased time allocation to child care and domestic work, and that increased adult female participation in food production was associated with less time invested in child care among boys. It also found that all gendered differences in time allocation among children were stronger when men made greater contributions to food production than women. The authors interpret these results to signify that parents may play a role in preparing their children for environmental and ecological difficulty in order to help them develop skills that will help them become useful community members as adults.

This paper proposes that the socio-cultural values of countries may be associated with increased mortality due to COVID-19. Using results from the World Values survey, the author assessed which values had the strongest association with a change in COVID-19 mortality in datasets consisting of all countries, upper-middle and high income economies, upper-middle income economies, high income economies, and advanced economies. The author also sought to determine whether the WVS values that were associated with COVID-19 mortality were also associated with general life expectancy. The results showed that COVID-19 mortality was increased in countries that placed a higher value on freedom of speech, political participation, religion, technocracy, post-materialism, social tolerance, law and order, and acceptance of authority. On the other hand, mortality was decreased in countries with high trust in major companies and institutions and that endorsed maintenance of order as a goal for a country. The author also found that values related to COVID-19 mortality did not predict general health outcomes, and that some values that predicted increased COVID-19 mortality actually predicted decreased mortality from other outcomes.

Although research has been conducted on individual social and psychological factors on suicide rates, there has yet to be any exploration into the role of civil society participation. This article investigates whether civil society participation influences suicide rates cross-nationally. The study hypothesizes that both political and non-political participation can reduce suicide rates by providing social and psychological benefits. Using data from 2000 to 2019 across 156 countries, as well as controlling standard variables and endogeneity, they find that both political and non-political civil society participation have a negative and statistically significant effect on suicide rates. The conclusion is that engagement in civil society, whether political or non-political, may help lower suicide rates nationally.

This paper seeks to identify how different practices of food sharing are related to one another, and the degree to which societies in North and South America may share practices with one another. The authors attempt this by using ethnographic literature to break sharing activities down into their constituent, multi-stage parts, and then comparing the prevalence of these parts and their relationships to one another. The study finds that the presence or absence of a distributor in a sharing activity, and who that distributor is, has a significant effect on how sharing is carried out. On the other hand, linguistic relationships between groups seem to have little impact on their sharing practices, and geographic proximity between groups only seems to have a significant effect on sharing practices in North America.

This paper seeks to understand why hunter-gatherer settlements become less dense as their populations increase, as opposed to the tendency of sedentary settlements to become denser with increasing population. They propose that settlement density is dependent on mitigating proximity costs at low settlement sizes, and movement costs at larger settlement sizes, and that these proximity costs act strongly upon hunter-gatherer groups, as they do not have the social structures or material technologies to alleviate them, thereby creating less dense settlements. The authors construct a model based upon this theory, and then test it using a cross-cultural database of 1,760 hunter-gatherer camps from 112 different cultural groups. They find that hunter-gatherer groups become less dense as settlement size increases, but as movement costs become more important than proximity costs, the rate at which they become less dense diminishes. They also find that settlements begin to become denser when there is food security and proximity costs are mitigated, indicating that domestic food production is not necessarily requisite for settlement densification and that densification may have emerged in tandem with the advent of agriculture, as opposed to as a result of it.