Behavioral Ecology of the Family: Harnessing Theory to Better Understand Variation in Human Families

Behavioral Ecology of the Family: Harnessing Theory to Better Understand Variation in Human Families. Paula Sheppard, Kristin Snopkowski. Soc. Sci. 2021, 10(7), 275; Jul 19 2021. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci10070275

Abstract: Researchers across the social sciences have long been interested in families. How people make decisions such as who to marry, when to have a baby, how big or small a family to have, or whether to stay with a partner or stray are questions that continue to interest economists, sociologists, demographers, and anthropologists. Human families vary across the globe; different cultures have different marriage practices, different ideas about who raises children, and even different notions of what a family is. Human behavioral ecology is a branch of anthropology that is particularly interested in cultural variation of family systems and how these differences impact upon the people that inhabit them; the children, parents, grandparents. It draws on evolutionary theory to direct research and generate testable hypotheses to uncover how different ecologies, including social contexts, can explain diversity in families. In this Special Issue on the behavioral ecology of the family, we have collated a selection of papers that showcase just how useful this framework is for understanding cultural variation in families, which we hope will convince other social scientists interested in family research to draw upon evolutionary and ecological insight in their own work.

Keywords: human behavioral ecology; kinship; marriage systems; cross-cultural variation; family formation; cooperation and conflict; cooperative breeding; kin networks

3. Conclusions

In this Special Issue, we illustrate the benefits of applying a theoretical framework to create directed research that can complement data-driven methods so commonly used in other social sciences such as demography and quantitative sociology. Human Behavioral Ecology recognizes that the currency that people are trying to maximize is fitness5, not wealth or status, or even health, even though those things are often quite strongly associated with fitness. This insight is the grounding of all HBE hypothesis-testing and can be harnessed to explain the immense variation in human social behavior. It can also explain how apparently illogical behavior, such as life-threatening risk-taking, or not pursuing a high-education pathway, may be a logical choice for some people given their current circumstances.

Human behavioral ecology is not only useful for understanding why people do the things they do but it has policy-relevant applications too. For instance, if we recognize that teenage pregnancy is often the product of limited choices and an unknown future that young women have in high-mortality neighborhoods (Geronimus et al. 1999) policymakers can focus attention on providing ways to improve young women’s health. Similarly, policy focused on reducing poverty, such as Universal Basic Income (Nettle 2018) can remove the insecurity of the future enabling people to prioritize long-term goals over short-term risks.

Here we have gathered an array of articles that demonstrate how the rich ecologies we inhabit as a diverse species can explain the myriad different family structures, reproductive outcomes, and social networks that we see across the world. We have also demonstrated the value of conducting cross-cultural research, not only because those cultures are intrinsically interesting but also because a global perspective can provide insights about societies and behavior in the global North.