Smaller Saami Herding Groups Cooperate More in a Public Goods Experiment

Group living often entails a balance between individual self-interest and benefits to the group as a whole. Situations in which an individual’s vested interests conflict with collective interests are known as social dilemmas (Kollock 1998). More formally, a theoretical game becomes a social dilemma when an equilibrium of dominant strategies leads to worse outcomes for all players compared to a more cooperative but non-equilibrium strategy (Zelmer 2003; Cardenas and Carpenter 2008). For example, arms races, climate change, the Cold War, credit markets, eBay, exploitation of fisheries, irrigation scheduling, overpopulation, pollution, price wars, voting, water supply and welfare states all give rise to social dilemmas (Kollock 1998; Wydick 2008). Researchers have identified various mutually inclusive routes to solving social dilemmas, including interacting with kin and/or cooperative individuals, communication, coordination, exclusion, institutions, leadership, legislation, mobility, monitoring, parcelling out cooperation or access to resources, partner choice, partner control, policing, punishment, repeated reciprocal interactions, rewards, sanctions, and social norms (Trivers 2005; West et al.2007; Levin 2014; Raihani and Bshary 2015). Social dilemmas pervade the pastoralist way of life. Individual herders must balance their interests (e.g., generating income and managing the inherent risks of pastoralism) with the interests of their herding group and the wider community facing similar challenges (Næss et al.2012; Næss and Bårdsen 2015). Pastoralists such as Saami reindeer herders in Norway face social dilemmas across a range of scales and have a variety of individual and collective strategies for solving them

Saami reindeer herders cooperate with social group members and genetic kin

Cooperative behaviors evolve by ultimately increasing the inclusive fitness of performers as well as recipients of those behaviors. Such increases can occur via direct or indirect fitness benefits, theoretically explained by reciprocal altruism and kin selection, respectively. However, humans are known for cooperating with individuals who are not necessarily genetic relatives, which seemingly precludes kin selection as an explanation. Here, we aim to quantify the relative importance of kinship and social group membership as mediators of cooperative behavior. Using an experimental gift game, we test whether indigenous Saami reindeer herders in Norway give gifts to genetic relatives or to members of their cooperative herding group (the “siida”) or both. Membership of the same siida strongly increased the odds of gift giving. Kinship had a smaller, albeit positive, effect. Gifts were not preferentially given to younger family members, contrary to predictions relating to intergenerational resource transfers as a form of parental investment. These patterns suggest that social grouping can be at least as important as genetic factors in mediating cooperative behavior in this population. This is likely to reflect the importance of herding groups in day-to-day subsistence

The education effect: higher educational qualifications are robustly associated with beneficial personal and socio-political outcomes

Level of education is a predictor of a range of important outcomes, such as political interest and cynicism, social trust, health, well-being, and intergroup attitudes. We address a gap in the literature by analyzing the strength and stability of the education effect associated with this diverse range of outcomes across three surveys covering the period 1986–2011, including novel latent growth analyses of the stability of the education effect within the same individuals over time. Our analyses of the British Social Attitudes Survey, British Household Panel Survey, and International Social Survey Programme indicated that the education effect was robust across these outcomes and relatively stable over time, with higher education levels being associated with higher trust and political interest, better health and well-being, and with less political cynicism and less negative intergroup attitudes. The education effect was strongest when associated with political outcomes and attitudes towards immigrants, whereas it was weakest when associated with health and well-being. Most of the education effect appears to be due to the beneficial consequences of having a university education. Our results demonstrate that this beneficial education effect is also manifested in within-individual changes, with the education effect tending to become stronger as individuals age

Comparison of social complexity in two independent pastoralist societies

Pastoralists rely on networks of cooperating households containing relatives and others to help with production and various other daily activities. To understand how socioecological differences and commonalities affect different social networks, we compared cooperative decision-making using gift games for 755 people working in herding groups across six sites in two countries (Saami areas in Norway and Tibetan areas in China). We found that members of the same herding group received more gifts from each other. Most variance in gift-giving between study sites was due to differences in the effects of relatedness. Tibetan herders were more likely than Saami herders to give gifts to closer relatives belonging to geographically distant herding groups. Also, stated reasons of giving gifts were different in the two societies: kin and wealth (measured by herd size) were more important among Tibetan pastoralists, while reciprocity was more important among Saami. Social ties within and beyond the family as well as the centrality of herding groups within social networks are general patterns of social organization favoring cooperation among pastoralis

Islands in the stream: revisiting methodological nationalism under conditions of globalization

Reference to the sovereign nation-state has traditionally been held to lie at the heart of the conceptualisation of inter-state relations in social scientific discourse. Recent debates have sought to problematise the centrality of this concept, particularly under the banner of globalisation. Specifically, it has been argued that contemporary practices have weakened national boundaries thereby undermining the effectiveness of state actors and the relevance and explanatory value of the national. In this paper we examine the maritime industry as a ‘critical case’, and demonstrate how in an extensively globalised context the national understood as legitimate authority, grounded in territory, is still necessary to understand certain key processes. We present a series of cases in which the normal, smooth operation of shipping is disturbed, in order to reveal operative practice. Our claim is that methodological nationalism continues to be a legitimate perspective even in an extensively globalised context