This article investigates the degree of political centralization in pre-industrial and the political competitive outcomes in 15 modern-day Sub-Sahara African countries. The authors first report that pre-colonial centralization decreases political competitiveness in modern day countries, advocating that traditional power structures play a role in modern day politics. The authors then use light-density as a proxy for regional development and test developmental outcomes based on political centralization and competitiveness. They report pre-colonial centralization positively affected regional development and suggest this could be due to more centralized institutions increasing the capacity of chiefs to mobilize voters, in turn lowering political competition and increasing the accountability of elected officials. Many controls are introduced.

This article draws from anthropology, psychology, and history to gain insight into the causes of large-scale psychological variation among humans. The authors of this study are mainly concerned with the way that weak kinship structures induced by policies of the Western Church in Europe may have resulted in the modern "WEIRD" (an acronym for "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic") psychological profiles in that same region. By correlating the amount of contact with the Western Church, rates of cross-cousin marriage (as an element of kin tightness), and degrees of individualism (as an element of WEIRD psychology), the authors are able to find support for this theory.

From 1600 to 1900, the ratio of men to women enslaved and exported in the African slave trade was roughly 181:100 – in other words, nearly two men were enslaved for every woman. It has long been theorized that this historical disparity continues to affect Africa’s cultural and political systems. In this article, the authors examine the impact of temporary gender imbalances caused by the slave trade on female political participation in modern African nation-states. They find that female political participation (measured using national voting records from 2011–2018) is higher in parts of Africa that lost a greater number of individuals to the slave trade, but only among non-patrilineal ethnic groups.

The author analyzes 440 Sub-Saharan African societies to test whether trade across ecologically diverse zones is predictive of degree of state centralization (state capacity or strength of state) in pre-colonial Africa. The author finds that diverse ecology is predictive of state capacity and that trade supports class stratification. The author also emphasizes the importance of historical contingency and ethnographic data consultation in understanding mechanisms in individual cases.

This study investigates the relationship between historical utilization of the plow and modern sex ratios. The authors argue that in societies without the plow subsistence is generally egalitarian with both men and women contributing. However, the use of the plow requires more physical strength which, they argue, leads to a preference for boys and, thus, men. Therefore, in cultures that use the plow, this is reflected in male-biased sex ratios which are negotiated by way of practices like sex-selective abortions, infanticide, and/or differential access to resources based on sex.

This study examines the explicitness of persuasion in cross-cultural communication using a corpus-based register analytical approach. The study compares 2518 speeches from 55 cultures in the East and West from 1970 to 2020 using Multi-Dimensional Analysis (MDA) to identify linguistic features related to persuasion. The results show significant differences between the East and West in terms of the overtness of persuasion, which is generally narrowing over time. The study suggests that political contexts may impact the cross-cultural gap in persuasion explicitness, and offers implications for further research on cultural styles of political persuasion.

In this paper, the author argues that moral systems evolved as a way to enforce cooperation between people outside of kin groups. Because cooperation within kin groups has apparent adaptive advantages, it is argued that these moral systems will be less important for societies with tight kin groups and conversely more important for those with looser kin groups. In order to test this theory, the author creates an original model that incorporates both ethnographic data and data from contemporary countries. Thus, it is postulated that historical kinship practices will influence contemporary systems. The paper concludes that there is sufficient historical evidence for this theory.

Following the research question "How much people tend to value their own versus their family’s well-being?", this study compares cultures across 49 countries to see how much they might differ in their emphasis on the pursuit of happiness. The authors explore the idealization of happiness rather than actual happiness and have a focus on the correlation between 'ideal happiness' and 'relational mobility'. The results show that the preference's strength of family's well-being over personal happiness is small; however, it is shown in 98% of the countries surveyed. In addition, cultures with high relational mobility show a relatively minimal preference for family over personal happiness, while cultures with low relational mobility show a moderate level. This supports the idea that there is a negative correlation between relational mobility and preference for family happiness. There is no strong support for traditional theories in cross-cultural psychology that link collectivism to a greater emphasis on family over the individual.

Authors suggest that in a majority of studied societies, kin of the deceased tend to engage ritually in risky prolonged and intimate preparation behaviors with corpses. This occurs namely in visual exposure and tactile interaction. Authors hypothesize that this extended contact not only allows true confirmation of death (through exposure to many cues), but also facilitates acceleration of a grieving process that returns the bereaved to a normal state of social functioning.

The author compares three scales of social complexity (Naroll's Social Development Index, Freeman's Scale, and Marsh's Index of Differentiation) and determine whether they tend to measure the same developmental variable. The author's statistical comparisons illustrate that each scale applies the same standard in ranking societies