Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-fbnjt Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T16:39:57.506Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The sense of obligation is culturally modulated

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2020

Andrea Bender Open the ORCID record for Andrea Bender [Opens in a new window]
Andrea Bender*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychosocial Science & SFF Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour, University of Bergen, N-5020Bergen, Norway. [email protected]://www.uib.no/en/persons/Andrea.Bender
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Tomasello argues in the target article that, in generalizing the concrete obligations originating from interdependent collaboration to one's entire cultural group, humans become “ultra-cooperators.” But are all human populations cooperative in similar ways? Based on cross-cultural studies and my own fieldwork in Polynesia, I argue that cooperation varies along several dimensions, and that the underlying sense of obligation is culturally modulated.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 43 , 2020 , e61
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Beller, S. (2008) Deontic norms, deontic reasoning, and deontic conditionals. Thinking and Reasoning 14:305–41.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beller, S. (2010) Deontic reasoning reviewed: psychological questions, empirical findings, and current theories. Cognitive Processing 11:123–32.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Beller, S. (2012) Human deontic reasoning in the deontic square. In: The square of opposition: A general framework for cognition, ed. Beziau, J.-Y. & Payette, G., pp. 471–84. Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Beller, S., Bender, A. & Kuhnmünch, G. (2005) Understanding conditional promises and threats. Thinking and Reasoning 11:209–38.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beller, S., Bender, A. & Song, J. (2009) Conditional promises and threats in Germany, China, and Tonga: Cognition and emotion. Journal of Cognition and Culture 9:115–39.Google Scholar
Bender, A. (2007) Changes in social orientation: Threats to a cultural institution in marine resource exploitation in Tonga. Human Organization 66:11–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bender, A. & Beller, S. (2019) The cultural fabric of human causal cognition. Perspectives on Psychological Science 14:922–40.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Bender, A., Kägi, W. & Mohr, E. (2002) Informal insurance and sustainable management of common-pool marine resources in Ha'apai, Tonga. Economic Development and Cultural Change 50:427–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hage, P. & Harary, F. (1996) Island networks: Communication, kinship, and classification structures in Oceania. Cambridge University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Henrich, J., Boyd, R., Bowles, S., Camerer, C., Fehr, E., Gintis, H., McElreath, R., Alvard, M., Barr, A., Ensminger, J., Henrich, N. S., Hill, K., Gil-White, F., Gurven, M., Marlowe, F. W., Patton, J. Q. & Tracer, D. (2005) “Economic man” in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 28:795–855.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Henrich, J., Ensminger, J., McElreath, R., Barr, A., Barrett, C., Bolyanatz, A., Cardenas, J. C., Gurven, M., Gwako, E., Henrich, N., Lesorogol, C., Marlowe, F., Tracer, D. & Ziker, J. (2010) Markets, religion, community size, and the evolution of fairness and punishment. Science 327(5972):1480–84. doi:10.1126/science.1182238.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Petersen, G. (2000) Indigenous island empires: Yap and Tonga considered. Journal of Pacific History 35:5–27.CrossRefGoogle Scholar