John Patton: California State University Fullerton Department of Anthropology

The search for solutions to the conundrum of altruism is a central focus of evolutionary approaches to the study of human behavior. The focus of this talk is to present data on cooperation collected among horticultural foragers in the Ecuadorian Amazon to argue that a better understanding of the conundrum of altruism, and its constraints, can be gained by examining human cooperation as an aspect of an evolved coalitional psychology. Coalitional psychology is that aspect of human nature designed to construct mental representations of coalitional structures, to triangulate oneself and others within coalitional structures, to reason about and pursue behavioral strategies within
coalitional contexts, and to evoke emotional states that led to actions that result from or create coalitional consequences. Apart from
explicit or implicit attempts to detect group boundaries (ethnic, spatial, or political) and the collection of basic demographic data,
evolutionary ethnographers do not routinely collect data on coalitional structures. Without such data it is difficult to assess the influences
of coalitional thinking on cooperation which predicts that people will weigh the costs and benefits of cooperating differently depending on
their position within their coalitional. Even in egalitarian societies some people are more equal than others. In this talk I will integrate
data on coalitional structure derived from network analysis techniques, with data on behavior within three separate domains of cooperation
(status allocation, meat sharing, and experimental economic games) to illustrate influences of an evolved coalitional psychology on patterns of human cooperation.