Researchers sampled 106 Austronesian societies from the Pulotu database to study the way political complexity evolves in relation to religious beliefs and practices. Specifically, they attempt to test the causal theory that supernatural punishment played a causal role in the emergence of large, complex societies. They use phylogenetic models to control for Galton's Problem in testing the supernatural punishment hypothesis in an effort to demonstrate the effectiveness of utilizing cross-cultural datasets in evaluating evolutionary change in human social organization.

The social control hypothesis suggests that ritual human sacrifice may have played an important role in the evolution of social stratification, functioning to legitimize class-based power distinctions by pairing displays of ultimate authority with supernatural justifications. Authors test this hypothesis about human sacrifice with a phylogenetic analysis of 93 Austronesian cultures.

This article employs cross-national and cross-cultural methods to investigate whether pathogen stress is a direct determinant of authoritarianism. The study controls on other factors such as famine, warfare, and malnutrition and evaluates alternative causal models.

Authors investigate the prevalence of male homosexual preference (MHP) cross-culturally. They employ four models to test the link between level of social stratification and the probability of observing male homosexual preference (MHP). Authors believe that this link supports the hypergyny hypothesis, which proposes that increased social stratification allows for some sort of factor that improves functional female fertility, perhaps through marriage to men of higher social classes. This would thereby allow more access to resources and consequently the ability to support a greater number of more reproductively-successful offspring. Authors do not make a causal link, however; rather, social stratification may be associated with a yet-undetermined pleiotropic factor that is somehow positive despite its cost on functional male fertility.

In this article, the authors seek to understand dog-human coevolution by considering predictors of different aspects of dog-human relationships across cultures. In order to measure dog-human relationships, the researchers created three indexes: dogs' utility for humans (DUH), humans' utility for dogs (HUD), and the personhood of dogs (PD). Each of these indexes were tested against various pre-coded variables that were empirically and theoretically relevant to this subject.

The present study examines 70 Austronesian cultures to test whether political hierarchy, population size, and social inequality have been influential in the conversion of populations to Christianity. Cultural isolation and year of missionary arrival are control variables. Using phylogenetic generalized least squares (PGLS), the researchers test the effect of the three predictor variables on conversion to Christianity and also conduct a multivariate analysis with all variables. The results do not offer support for what is expected by top-down and bottom-up theories of conversion but instead for the general dynamics of cultural transmission.

This article is a quantitative analysis of 592 participants from 8 societies. The study examines a number of theories about what predicts moralistic religions, including life history theory. Findings suggest that there is no evident relationship between these life history predictions and the religious beliefs regarding moralism.

The authors investigate whether moralizing high gods and, more generally, supernatural punishment precede, sustain, or follow political complexity. The cultural traits at hand are mapped onto phylogenetic trees representing the descent and relatedness of 96 Austronesian cultures.

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.

Researchers looked at the meaning of various emotion concepts, 'emotion semantics' in an attempt to determine the patterns and processes behind meaning cross-culturally. They used maps of colexification patterns (where semantically related concepts are named with the same word), adjusted Rand indices (ARIs) which indicated the similarities of two community's network structures, and various psychophysiological dimensions to test relationships and patterns of variability /structure in emotion semantics. These methods shed light on the underlying mechanisms behind emotions, both their words and their meanings in languages across the world. Their findings show substantial difference in language families and relationships between geographic proximity of language families and subsequent variation in emotion colexification tied to an evolutionary relationship, while also finding cultural universals in emotion colexification networks with languages primarily differentiating emotions on the basis of valence and activation.