This article explores the following questions: What environmental and cultural factors might explain variation in prejudice across cultures? Do these factors explain the intention to vote for nationalist politicians? The authors perform seven studies, focusing on the link between cultural tightness and the rise of prejudice in cultures. They theorize that cultural tightness is positively correlated with the rise of prejudice against people perceived as disrupting the social order. From this theory, they suggest three hypotheses: 1) cultural variation in tightness is related to cultural variation in prejudice, 2) cultural tightness is related to the support for nationalist politicians, and 3) cultural tightness is a link between ecological threats and prejudice. The results support these hypotheses, offering a cultural evolutionary perspective on prejudice.

While it is widely accepted that there are a multitude of variables that contribute to a society’s level of democracy, the authors of this study argue that the prevalence of consanguinity is one that is often overlooked. Using a sample of 70 nations, they tested the relationship between consanguinity (defined as marriage and subsequent mating between second cousins or closer relatives) and level of democracy (defined by both the Polity IV scale and the EIU Index) and found a significant negative relationship. Similarly, when controlled for a host of different variables in multiple regression analysis, the significant relationship between consanguinity and level of democracy held true.

Using HRAF's ethnographic reports from 11 immigrant groups to North America (1959-1989), the author asks: what social structural factors account for these patterns of language loss and retention? While focusing on the second and third generations, this study assesses the impact of residence, religion, school, festivals, homeland, marriage, and labor on language retention. The author suggests that residential closeness and the continued practice of religious rituals from the country of origin are the main factors influencing mother tongue maintenance into the third generation, while participation in community festivals is a marginal predictor.

This article builds on previous cross-country and cross-state research into Tightness-Looseness (TL) theory, which proposes relationships between the incidence of ecological threat and cultural tightness, as well as tightness’ downstream effects on belief in a moralizing high god, inter-group contact and authoritarian leadership. To evaluate the generalizability of TL theory beyond complex cultures, the authors test these relationships among 86 nonindustrial societies from the ethnographic record. A structural equation model is presented of the results for nonindustrial societies; it is generally in accord with previous findings from more complex societies. Because the nonindustrial sample is more variable, they also look at relationships between societal complexity and kinship heterogeneity, aspects that vary in nonindustrial societies.

Dozens of reasons have been proposed for the emergence of professional religious specialists in human history with little general consensus. Creating a global dataset of hunter-gatherers and using a novel method of exploratory phylogenetic path analysis, this study systematically identifies factors associated with the emergence of religious specialists. Results regarding existential insecurity were generally not supported. This study emphasizes the role of food storage as one of the only significant factors despite that it has been largely overlooked in the literature and theories. The results also highlight the need for more in-depth directional dependencies to better illustrate this evolution.

Textor summarizes cross-cultural findings on societies where subsistence is primarily by 'food gathering' which includes hunting, fishing, and gathering.

Textor summarizes cross-cultural findings on premarital sexual relations pertaining to cultural, environmental, psychological, and social phenomena.

An earlier study (Minturn & Lambert 1964) found a nonsignificant association between multifamily households and social permisiveness. This article re-tests that association using Barry et al.'s ratings for child socialization practices, finding that having several families in one house tends to decrease socialization pressure on children.

This article examines attitudes toward salt as a cultural mechanism to regulate salt consumption, finding that meat-eating societies (associated with higher salt consumption) have more negative proverbs and other forms of cultural expression associated with salt, and societies with plant-based diets (associated with lower salt consumption) have more positive cultural expressions.

Authors investigate the prevalence of male homosexual preference (MHP) cross-culturally. They employ four models to test the link between level of social stratification and the probability of observing male homosexual preference (MHP). Authors believe that this link supports the hypergyny hypothesis, which proposes that increased social stratification allows for some sort of factor that improves functional female fertility, perhaps through marriage to men of higher social classes. This would thereby allow more access to resources and consequently the ability to support a greater number of more reproductively-successful offspring. Authors do not make a causal link, however; rather, social stratification may be associated with a yet-undetermined pleiotropic factor that is somehow positive despite its cost on functional male fertility.