New research offers measurable criteria for classifying social organizations throughout human history, along with potential factors that can be observed in fields such as anthropology, history, and archaeology. This information comes from a study published on September 3, 2024, in the open-access journal PLOS Complex Systems, conducted by Kenji Itao and Kunihiko Kaneko from the University of Tokyo, Japan, Copenhagen University, Denmark, and the RIKEN Center for Brain Science, Japan.
Recent studies offer measurable standards for categorizing social organizations across human history, alongside possible factors that can be observed empirically in anthropology, history, and archaeology. This research was published on September 3, 2024, in the open-access journal PLOS Complex Systems by Kenji Itao and Kunihiko Kaneko from the University of Tokyo, Japan, Copenhagen University, Denmark (Kaneko), and the RIKEN Center for Brain Science, Japan (Itao).
Human societies have shifted among various types of organizations like bands, tribes, chiefdoms, and kingdoms. However, the exact quantitative descriptions of these types and their transition processes are still underdeveloped. Anthropologists have noted that gift giving is a common practice in traditional societies and that it plays a role in enhancing social status by creating reciprocal obligations.
In their recent research, Itao and Kaneko introduce a straightforward model of competitive gift giving, illustrating how gifts provide benefits to the recipients while bestowing honor upon the donors, thus facilitating social change. They found that such competitive gift giving leads to socioeconomic inequalities marked by power law distributions of wealth and social standing.
Through numerical simulations, the researchers identified four distinct phases associated with varying distribution patterns of wealth and social status. These phases include: the band, which lacks economic or social inequalities; the tribe, which has economic differences but not social ones; the chiefdom, marked by both types of inequalities; and the kingdom, characterized by economic disparity and minimal social inequality, apart from the monarch’s unique status. The development of significant disparities followed a power law distribution and was linked to a rich-get-richer phenomenon, whereas the lack of this process resulted in exponential distributions due to random variations. Furthermore, the phases were influenced by factors related to the frequency and scale of gift exchanges.
Essentially, the different stages of social organizations can be quantitatively defined by the distribution patterns of wealth and reputation scores. In the band phase, both types of distributions follow an exponential pattern. In the tribe phase, only the wealth distribution aligns with a power law. The chiefdom phase sees both distributions reflecting power law characteristics, while in the kingdom phase, the score distribution remains exponential for all individuals except for the monarch.
Overall, the findings illustrate the development of four social organization phases, differentiated by varying levels of economic and social disparities. The research also supports previous empirical observations that band societies experience less economic inequality compared to the other classifications, that social inequality serves as a distinguishing factor between chiefdoms and kingdoms, and that monarchs occupy an exceptional position in the distribution. According to the authors, their constructive model, informed by social science theories, offers fundamental mechanistic insights into social evolution and integrates diverse social science theories.
The authors conclude: “Interactions involving gift giving are fundamental to social transformations. The frequency and scope of these interactions shape the structures of social organization.”
