Maybe in given culture the idea of not stealing from your spouse is so counter-intuitive that...
most people don’t even get the idea, ever;
those who do, find it extremely difficult to convince their spouses that it is a good idea;
even those who agree, usually succumb to the temptation, because they have spent their entire life building an opposite habit.
In other words, cooperation is actually so hard, that it is almost impossible even for two people to cooperate unless their culture has already provided them some basic training in this skill.
Yeah, this sounds much more like the kind of thing that I’d expect to be the cause, as opposed to mutual theft being somehow a beneficial/adaptive response to poverty.
One of the consequences of being in stressful circumstances is that it makes you less open to trying out new things—understandably, given that if resources are sparse, it makes sense for the brain to stick to tried and true behaviors for extracting those resources rather than risk trying a novel behavior that might extract nothing. (And in a village where you’ve grown up treating all social interactions as more or less adversarial, someone suggesting something new is probably just trying to trick you somehow.) So once a culture hits this kind of a situation, it may become stuck there and be incapable of evolving anything better unless the material situation gets somehow drastically better.
Maybe in given culture the idea of not stealing from your spouse is so counter-intuitive that...
most people don’t even get the idea, ever;
those who do, find it extremely difficult to convince their spouses that it is a good idea;
even those who agree, usually succumb to the temptation, because they have spent their entire life building an opposite habit.
In other words, cooperation is actually so hard, that it is almost impossible even for two people to cooperate unless their culture has already provided them some basic training in this skill.
Yeah, this sounds much more like the kind of thing that I’d expect to be the cause, as opposed to mutual theft being somehow a beneficial/adaptive response to poverty.
One of the consequences of being in stressful circumstances is that it makes you less open to trying out new things—understandably, given that if resources are sparse, it makes sense for the brain to stick to tried and true behaviors for extracting those resources rather than risk trying a novel behavior that might extract nothing. (And in a village where you’ve grown up treating all social interactions as more or less adversarial, someone suggesting something new is probably just trying to trick you somehow.) So once a culture hits this kind of a situation, it may become stuck there and be incapable of evolving anything better unless the material situation gets somehow drastically better.