This commentary supports the shift from outcome-based to process-based understandings of egalitarianism. However, it argues that focusing on intragroup mechanisms alone is insufficient. Drawing on social identity theory, cultural orientation, and structural inequality, it suggests that intergroup dynamics and broader power structures constrain egalitarian outcomes, helping explain why processes that regulate inequality rarely produce equality in more complex societies.

This commentary argues that the process-based account of egalitarianism overlooks a central component: norms. Norms are socially enforced and morally grounded behavioral standards that enable and regulate egalitarian processes. I show that many processes discussed by the authors rely on underlying norms, and argue that incorporating norms as a distinct category clarifies individual motivation and the relational flexibility of egalitarian systems.

Egalitarian societies are defined as those of near-equals, yet some have confused the concept to be analogous with equality and used the absence of evidence of truly equal societies to reject the concept altogether. Stibbard-Hawkes and von Rueden seek to correct course, highlighting that egalitarian societies, properly defined, do exist and that by focusing on process, we can come to learn about the factors that influence variation in social organization. Their synthesis provides a nuanced image of egalitarian societies and offers direction for future research focused on examining the emergence of egalitarian relations out of the interactions between individual decisions and local environmental and social contexts. Such a program has and will continue to illuminate the diversity of ways societies organize, identify general processes, and provide insights into factors that promote opportunities for individuals to live among near-equals.

Stibbard-Hawkes and von Rueden called for further cross-cultural and quantitative research to understand the mechanisms under their egalitarianism framework. Studying the socio-ecological factors that favour egalitarian processes or inequality and slavery maps the same spectrum of individual autonomy from two ends. Including slavery in the analysis’ scope is consistent with their paradigm and complements their approach.

Stibbard-Hawkes and von Rueden’s process-based account of egalitarianism provides a powerful framework for understanding how egalitarian systems coexist with inequality. Extending this perspective to modern organizations, we argue that such processes may inadvertently legitimize gender disparities. Equality initiatives that rely on moral signaling alone are insufficient; effective interventions must counterbalance the self-interested dynamics through which status and opportunity are allocated.

Stibbard-Hawkes and von Rueden provide a valuable account of inequality across nominally egalitarian societies, but their attempt to salvage the egalitarian concept is less convincing. The processes they identify as maintaing relative equality are oriented around hunter-gatherer socioecology, while a different selection could categorize almost any human society as “egalitarian” in some domain. Gender-based coercion poses a strong challenge to the framework’s emphasis on individual autonomy.

While definitions based on outcomes should not be abandoned, this novel framework usefully reveals the plural processes underlying relative equality. The authors are right to argue that egalitarian societies do not require preferences for equity, but should perhaps also consider how ideologies of egalitarianism can obscure inequalities.

Many traditional subsistence groups have been described as ‘egalitarian societies’. Here we demonstrate, empirically, that nominally egalitarian societies are often unequal across seven interconnected domains. We also highlight evidence that individuals in nominally egalitarian societies do not unfailingly adhere to strong equality preferences. We propose a different operational framework for understanding egalitarianism, highlighting individuals’ social status, resource access, and autonomy motives. This framework clarifies the plural processes (demand-sharing, risk-pooling, status-levelling, prosocial reputation-building, consensus-based collective decision-making, and residential mobility) by which relative equality is maintained. We finish with suggestions for better operationalizing egalitarianism in future research.

Our commentators have broadly welcomed the notion of social tinkering, while also offering a range of suggestions, refinements, and potential challenges. In our response, we clarify the concept of social tinkering, sharpen our account of the six stages of cultural evolution, consider whether additional mechanisms are needed to explain the emergence of cultural complexity, and explore a range of possible extensions to the social tinkering framework. We conclude by discussing broader implications and future directions for this research program, including a reconsideration of Rogers’ paradox.

Chater and Christiansen propose a 6-stage sequence through which social tinkering drives cultural evolution and cultural complexity. We highlight that people’s selectivity of information uptake from social others and top-down social changes results in variations in social tinkering. We argue that the process of cultural evolution and the path to cultural complexity is less linear than proposed.

Chater and Christensen propose a short-sighted tinkerer’s local adjustments are repurposed to support the spontaneous organization of complex cultures. We commend their conceptualization of innovation by recombination but challenge the tinkerer’s myopic focus, which contrasts with humans’ rich capacity for prospective thought. We suggest humans’ farsightedness facilitates their remarkable capacity for complex and diverse cultures.

Although we agree with the view of cultural evolution as mainly a gradual process, we show that rapid evolution is also supported by the same criteria. Abrupt cultural changes take place through coercion, leadership, institutional interventions, or mass contagion, and these are assisted by the unique cognitive equipment of humans, especially in our globalized era that boosts fast spread.

The social-tinkering account describes how cultural complexity emerges from directed innovation and social transmission but leaves the cognitive mechanisms underspecified. We highlight how individual innovation can be decomposed into a coordinated set of cognitive processes that leverage structured representations of the environment. These shared representations also turn observation into inference, supporting both richer transmission and richer learning from others. The synergy between directed innovation and social transmission paves the way for broader social tinkering.

Stage 2 of Chater and Christiansen’s (henceforth CC) model involves the ability to copy. Our comment concerns not the order of copying in CC’s model, but their time estimate of its origins. CC treat copying as present in apes and implied by early stone tools, and hence (presumably) had by the last common ancestor. Here we argue for a later onset.

The social tinkering model convincingly explains how local coordination processes give rise to shared practices and conventions. However, it remains unclear whether such mechanisms suffice to account for normativity in the strong sense. Using contemporary language models as a comparative case, coordination alone does not appear sufficient to generate normatively binding standards. The transition to normativity likely requires additional conditions – such as public accountability, sanctions, and stable social roles – that merit more explicit integration within the framework.

Chater & Christiansen argue that cultural complexity emerges from incremental “social tinkering.” We extend this by proposing that collective social niche construction – the self-organized modification of social environments – provides the necessary substrate for such tinkering. By examining adaptive social networks in animal societies, we show how structural complexity can accumulate through feedback loops before explicit rules or linguistic conventions emerge.

Anthropologists have noted, time and again, that cultural norms and institutions often (1) are “functional,” providing context-relevant benefits, (2) convergently evolve, and (3) benefit certain individuals over others. In this commentary, I consider inequality, self-interest, and coercion in complex cultural institutions. I extend Chater and Christiansen’s theory of social tinkering, taking cues from Mercier and Sperber’s argumentative theory of human reason and Singh et al.’s self-interested enforcement hypothesis, to argue that humans are well-adapted “cultural lobbyists.”

The concept of social tinkering is useful, but insufficient to explain the evolution of human cultural complexity due to its overemphasis on cooperative interactions. The importance of conflict, violence, and inequality in the evolution of complex cultures complicates the social tinkering hypothesis. Who gets to tinker, and what determines which products of that tinkering are selected?

We are sympathetic to the target article’s emphasis on directed innovation and coordinated problem-solving as the microfoundations of emergent social order. Nevertheless, the authors’ framing of social tinkering as a middle ground between extremes of deliberate design and selection on random variation risks caricaturing reasonable scientific positions and obscuring the question of which processes (one-shot innovation, incremental tinkering, and additional processes like cultural group selection) contribute most to complex cooperative institutions.

Chater & Christiansen’s social tinkering thesis compellingly explains how cultural complexity emerges from local innovations. However, it underspecifies the role of the arts, treating them as outputs rather than inputs to tinkering. We argue the arts serve three crucial, underappreciated functions: generating variation for recombination, providing consequence-free experimentation spaces, and building the cognitive and social skills that enable sophisticated tinkering.