Social substitutability across features of human socioecology

Abstract

In many societies, third parties may be held liable to punishment even though they did not take part in the original offence. These retributive practices, commonly referred to under the label of social substitutability, are frequently documented in the historical and ethnographic records. While previous cross-cultural research has focused on blood feuds and retributive collective violence, less attention has focused on explaining why and when third parties would be punished for offences they did not commit. We review research on social substitutability, attempt at clarifying the hypothesis space to account for its cognitive and ecological underpinnings, and offer a preliminary account for its cross-cultural variation. We integrate existing society-level measures from cross-cultural data to investigate the socioecological covariates of social substitutability. Our results suggest that systematic enforcement of social substitutability is more likely to be documented in kinship intensive societies, yet shows no substantial variation across subsistence types and continental regions. Moreover, we fail to find clear evidence that residence patterns facilitating the emergence of fraternal interest groups favor the emergence of social substitutability. Taken together, our review and results suggest that a closer understanding of local social networks and organizations may be a fruitful way to unravel cross-cultural variability in the propension to punish uninvolved third parties.