Critical problems in Barthes et al.’s article include: (1) tenuous empirical support for the tenets of their hypothesis, raising doubt about its plausibility and the real-world applicability of their mathematical model, and (2) conceptual and methodological flaws associated with the ethnological analysis that limit confidence in their claim that the presence of MHP is associated with greater social stratification.
Recommended citation: Doug P. VanderLaan, Zachary H. Garfield, Melissa J. Garfield, Jean-Baptiste Leca, Paul L. Vasey, and Raymond B. Hames. (2014). "The ‘female fertility–social stratification–hypergyny’ hypothesis of male homosexual preference: Factual, conceptual and methodological errors in Barthes et al. [Commentary]." Evolution and Human Behavior. 35(5). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2014.06.002
Published in Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2017
The dominance model adopted from ethology and animal social hierarchies has been incredibly influential within the social sciences investigating leadership, status competition, and social influence.
Published in Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2017
Across the life span, women are adjusting their individual strategies for pursuing positions of social influence. Women tend to use prosocial investments and communally focused behavior to increase their social rank and attain positions of influence within the group.
Recommended citation: Zachary H. Garfield and Melissa J. Garfield (2017). "Women’s prosocial dominant acts." Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_2613-1
Published in Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science, 2017
Over the course of human evolution, there have been strong selection pressures shaping and reinforcing status competition among males, building on the primate and mammalian systems of dominance hierarchies.
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Suicidal behavior by younger, healthy adults in the context of fitness threats, such as forced or thwarted marriages, physical or sexual abuse, or loss of a mate; social conflict, such as severe disagreements with parents and other authority figures; and powerlessness to improve one's situation, is ubiquitous in the ethnographic record.
Recommended citation: Kristen L. Syme, Zachary H. Garfield, and Edward H. Hagen. (2016). "Testing the bargaining vs. inclusive fitness models of suicidal behavior against the ethnographic record." Evolution and Human Behavior. 37(3). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2015.10.005
Published in Social Learning and Innovation in Contemporary Hunter-Gatherers, 2016
We provide greater external validity to observational research and theoretical literature highlighting the importance of teaching across a wide range of cultures and cultural domains while also supporting the finding that vertical transmission is dominant early in life with various forms of oblique transmission being more important throughout life in hunting and gathering societies.
Recommended citation: Zachary H. Garfield, Melissa J. Garfield, and Barry S. Hewlett. (2016). "A cross-cultural analysis of hunter-gatherer social learning." Social Learning and Innovation in Contemporary Hunter-Gatherers. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-4-431-55997-9_2
Our results show that male same sex behavior as well as male androphilia is much more common than previously estimated in the SCCS. With our findings, we make an argument that male androphilia is a context-dependent cross-cultural universal.
Recommended citation: Raymond B. Hames, Zachary H. Garfield, and Melissa J. Garfield. (2017). "Is male androphilia a context-dependent cross-cultural universal?" Archives of sexual behavior. 46(1). https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-016-0855-7
For the study of leadership, we see tremendous benefits to integrating diverse sources of evidence from studies of animal behavior, paleoanthropology, ethnography, psychology, political science, and other social sciences. The challenge will be to identify and explain universal patterns of human leadership systems while still doing justice to their diversity.
Recommended citation: Zachary H. Garfield, Christopher Von Rueden, and Edward H. Hagen. (2019). "The evolutionary anthropology of political leadership." The Leadership Quarterly. 30(1). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2018.09.001
We found that improving collective actions, having expertise, providing counsel, and being respected, having high neural capital, and being polygynous are common properties of leaders, which warrants a synthesis of the collective action, prestige, and neural capital and reproductive skew models. We sketch one such synthesis involving high-quality decision-making and other computational services.
Recommended citation: Zachary H. Garfield, Robert H. Hubbard, and Edward H. Hagen. (2019). "Evolutionary models of leadership: Tests and synthesis." Human Nature. 30(1). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12110-019-09338-4
The high colinearity of the diverse traits measured here suggests that each of the domains of leadership traits that we investigated — cognition, sociality, productivity, reproduction, and dominance — are potentially important in understanding variation between leaders and non‐leaders. To systematically overlook any of these domains may be a severe methodological limitation and this strong positive covariation of most leadership traits warrants further investigation.
Recommended citation: Zachary H. Garfield and Edward H. Hagen (2020). "Investigating evolutionary models of leadership among recently settled Ethiopian hunter-gatherers." The Leadership Quarterly. 31(2). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.leaqua.2019.03.005
Leaders across cultures rely on a range of individual competencies, including cognitive, supernatural, material, social, and physical endowments, to organize group members, implement strategic actions, provide prosocial services to the group, and impose costs, all while conforming to cultural norms. Currently, no single theoretical perspective has yet captured the ethnographic reality of human leadership.
Recommended citation: Zachary H. Garfield, Kristen L. Syme, and Edward H. Hagen. (2020). "Universal and variable leadership dimensions across human societies." Evolution and Human Behavior. 41(5). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2020.07.012
Interpersonal skills and fairness were the only leader qualities predictive of conflict resolution. This supports links between effective conflict resolution and moral evaluations of social justice, suggesting that individuals who conform to and embody such traits are preferred as mediators. Effective mediators of conflict then are not necessarily leaders who can be conceptualised as particularly prestigious or dominant but are more likely to be individuals who effectively identify overlapping interests between individuals with distinct priorities fairly, consistent with emerging views on leadership and followership focused on the process and outcomes over individual trait.
Recommended citation: Zachary H. Garfield (2021). "Correlates of conflict resolution across cultures." Evolutionary Human Sciences. 3(E45). https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2021.41
Published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2021
We hypothesize reputations for cultural group unity will be a context-independent universal, likely to manifest in all human societies, whereas reputations for social and material success, neural capital, and dominance are more likely to be context-dependent universals, promoted or suppressed by socio-ecological or cultural evolutionary processes.
Recommended citation: Zachary H. Garfield, Ryan Schacht, Emily R. Post, Dominique Ingram, Andrea Uehling, and Shane J. Macfarlan (2021). "The content and structure of reputation domains across human societies: a view from the evolutionary social sciences." Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. 376(1838). https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2020.0296
Henrich's view of religions as distinct, formal social institutions represents only some of the evidence on “religions” across cultures. Knowledge specialists who help clients are widespread in the ethnographic record. Their practical services can be misconstrued as religious rituals, and their abstract explanations as doctrinal beliefs in the supernatural..
Recommended citation: Aaron D. Lightner, Zachary H. Garfield & Edward H. Hagen (2022). "Religion: the WEIRDest concept in the world?" Religion, Brain & Behavior. 12(3), 290-298. https://doi.org/10.1080/2153599X.2021.1991460
By analyzing eleven Eastern African populations, we find evidence for divergent demographic trajectories among hunter-gatherer-descendant groups. Our results illustrate that although foragers respond to encroaching agriculture and pastoralism with multiple strategies, including cultural adoption of agropastoralism, gene flow, and economic specialization, they often face population decline.
Recommended citation: Shyamalika Gopalan, Richard E.W. Berl, Justin W. Myrick, Zachary H. Garfield, Austin W. Reynolds, Barnabas K. Bafens, Gillian Belbin, Mira Mastoras, Cole Williams, Michelle Daya, Akmel N. Negash, Marcus W. Feldman, Barry S. Hewlett, and Brenna M. Henn (2022). "Hunter-gatherer genomes reveal diverse demographic trajectories during the rise of farming in Eastern Africa." Current Biology. 32. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960982222003141
We found no evidence that third parties directly punished transgressors, such as by demanding that transgressors pay tulou or seizing resources from them after they refused to pay. Several researchers have argued that, even if third parties do not directly punish violations, they engage in second-order or indirect enforce- ment, such as by avoiding non-punishers as social partners. We did not find evidence of such higher-order or indirect sanctions.
Recommended citation: Manvir Singh and Zachary H. Garfield (2022). "Evidence for third-party mediation but not punishment in Mentawai justice." Nature Human Behavior. 6. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01341-7
Accounting for the phylogenetic relationships among our cross-cultural sample, as well as correlations between evidence for punishment types, we found that egalitarianism (i.e. absence of social stratification) strongly predicted evidence for reputational punishments, whereas the presence of social stratification moderately predicted evidence for execution punishments.
Recommended citation: Zachary H. Garfield, Erik J. Ringen, William Buckner, Dithapelo Medupe, Richard W. Wrangham, and Luke Glowacki (2023). "Norm violations and punishments across human societies." Evolutionary Human Sciences. 5. https://doi.org/10.1017/ehs.2023.7
Undergraduate anthropology courses, Washington State University, Department of Anthropology, 2012
Teaching assistant for ANTH 316 Gender in Cross Cultural Perspective/ANTH 405 Medical Anthropology, Fall 2015; ANTH 203 Peoples of the World, Fall 2013; ANTH 203 Peoples of the World/ANTH 309 Cultural Ecology, Fall 2012. Responsibilities included assisting with course content development, designing evaluation metrics, lecturing, and grading student writing.
Lab section, Washington State University, Department of Anthropology, 2013
I was the lab instructor for the Introduction to Physical Anthropology course at WSU for five semesters, which involved two three-hour lab sessions per week. I independently designed a unique lab focused on collaboratively conducting novel biocultural research. This lab included training in scientific methods, research ethics, theory evaluation, statistical analyses in R, and scientific writing. I regularly lectured on specific scientific theories as well as the scientific process. The students and I conducted two novel research projects each semester, which required hands-on, collaborative work.
Undergraduate course, Washington State University, Department of Anthropology, 2016
Instructor for ANTH 130 Great Discoveries in Archaeology. I independently designed and taught a novel introductory anthropology course on archaeology. The course covered basic concepts in the field, prehistory and human origins, and major archeological periods including the Upper Paleolithic. We also discussed major archaeological cultures and features, such as megaliths and complex societies, with a special focus on social structural underpinnings and implications for human cultural evolution.
