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The sense of obligation is culturally modulated

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2020

Andrea Bender Open the ORCID record for Andrea Bender [Opens in a new window]
Andrea Bender*
Affiliation:
Department of Psychosocial Science & SFF Centre for Early Sapiens Behaviour, University of Bergen, N-5020Bergen, Norway. [email protected]://www.uib.no/en/persons/Andrea.Bender
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Abstract

Tomasello argues in the target article that, in generalizing the concrete obligations originating from interdependent collaboration to one's entire cultural group, humans become “ultra-cooperators.” But are all human populations cooperative in similar ways? Based on cross-cultural studies and my own fieldwork in Polynesia, I argue that cooperation varies along several dimensions, and that the underlying sense of obligation is culturally modulated.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 43 , 2020 , e61
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press

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