ArticleNature communications2025
Teaching is associated with the transmission of opaque culture and leadership across 23 egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies.
Article in Nature communications, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed.
- A population threshold for dedicated teaching.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2026Article
- Parental perspectives on children's social learning in four cultures.Frontiers in psychology · 2026Article
- The social learning and development of intra- and inter-ethnic sharing norms in the Congo Basin.PloS one · 2026Article
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Despite extensive work on the evolution of cooperation, the roles of teaching and leadership in transmitting opaque cultural norms-foundations of cooperative behaviors-are underexplored. Similarly, while teaching is well-studied in the evolution of instrumental culture, little attention is given to its role in transmitting opaque culture, such as social values and norms. Transmitting opaque culture often requires teaching, and group leaders are well-positioned to facilitate this process. Using comparative ethnographic data, we explore teaching, leadership, and instrumental versus opaque culture by examining whether opaque culture is primarily transmitted via teaching, which age groups tend to learn these norms, and whether leaders are disproportionately involved in teaching. Drawing on ethnographic data from 23 egalitarian foraging societies, we find teaching is more strongly associated with transmitting cultural values and kinship knowledge than subsistence skills and is closely linked to opaque culture and leadership. Leader-directed teaching may drive cooperation, suggesting new research avenues.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the Socratic graph.