Stibbard-Hawkes and von Rueden’s target article is a valuable contribution and should help productively orient studies of egalitarianism in human societies. While I have no substantive disagreements with their argument, my commentary asserts that we cannot ignore the role of cultural transmission and evolution in the maintenance and transformation of the socio-ecological processes supporting egalitarian behavior. How culture defines the cost/benefit structure informing individual decisions is evident from research on children’s social learning and inter-group interaction.

To begin, I agree that “egalitarianism is most usefully defined in terms of the social processes which redistribute status, resources and political power,” and that egalitarian societies are those “where socio-ecological circumstances enable most individuals to successfully secure their own resource access, status, and autonomy” through these processes. Additionally, the six processes they propose are a coherent set and should help bring critical nuance to our understanding of the individual motivations that are behind egalitarian behavior across groups and social contexts. However, while a common human psychology may guide decision-making, in any one place and time each of the proposed processes are manifest and reproduced through culturally-mediated cognition and behavior.

For our part, my coauthors and I have referred to egalitarianism, alongside respect for individual autonomy and sharing, as a foundational cultural schema among “mobile hunter-gatherers” or “foragers” (Boyette & Hewlett, Reference Boyette and Hewlett2017; Boyette, Reference Boyette2019; Boyette & Lew-Levy, Reference Boyette and Lew-Levy2021; Hewlett et al., Reference Hewlett, Fouts, Boyette and Hewlett2011, Reference Hewlett, Boyette, Lew-Levy, Gallois and Dira2024) – a sub-group of the “egalitarian societies” referred to in the target article. Putting aside the additional problems with categorizing peoples by subsistence practices, by referring to egalitarianism in terms of schemas, we follow cognitive anthropologists who see culture as shaping motivation (D’Andrade & Strauss, Reference D’Andrade and Strauss1992; Shore, Reference Shore1996), thereby placing culture and cultural transmission processes as intervening factors in the emergence and maintenance of egalitarianism. For these groups, egalitarianism is a foundational schema because it is internalized through regular experiences beginning early in life and it comes to shape motivation across many domains – although, as Stibbard-Hawkes and von Rueden rightly point out, not in every domain in any one specific cultural context. Thus, I agree that it is “no coincidence” that many unrelated small-scale groups are egalitarian, but my co-authors and I have emphasized that this is because similar socio-ecologies tend to more readily support the emergence and stabilization of culturally learned traits – norms, practices, values, beliefs – that promote egalitarian behavior, most particularly through shaping the learning experiences of children (Boyette, Reference Boyette and Charbonneau2024; Hewlett et al., Reference Hewlett, Hudson, Boyette, Fouts, Friesem and Lavi2019).

As such, I contend that Congo Basin forager children become adults that vigorously defend their autonomy because their autonomy has been respected since infancy (Hewlett et al., Reference Hewlett, Lamb, Shannon, Leyendecker and Schölmerich1998; Hewlett & Lamb, Reference Hewlett, Lamb, Keller, Poortinga and Schölmerich2002), continually enacted throughout childhood (Boyette & Lew-Levy, Reference Boyette and Lew-Levy2021), and their rights to autonomy regularly legitimated by observations of their fellow community members acting consistent with this value (Boyette, Reference Boyette2025). Similarly, the relatively equal distribution of food and communal ownership over most material goods that is normative among the BaYaka is transmitted via practices that involve children in redistributions (Boyette, Reference Boyette2019; Boyette & Lew-Levy, Reference Boyette and Lew-Levy2021). Similar socialization practices that emphasize sharing as a fundamental aspect of inter-personal relations are found among other groups with similar dimensions of egalitarianism (e.g., Guemple, Reference Guemple, Ingold, Riches and Woodburn1988; Wiessner, Reference Wiessner1977). Children among the Aka, Mbendjele and Mbuti also – often playfully – call out others’ violations of egalitarian expectations, demonstrating early norm learning and enforcement (Boyette, Reference Boyette2019; Lewis, Reference Lewis and Hewlett2014; Turnbull, Reference Turnbull and Montagu1978). In these contexts, dense, open social relations with many cultural models cumulatively facilitate the internalization of expectations of egalitarianism, autonomy, and sharing (Hewlett et al., Reference Hewlett, Boyette, Lew-Levy, Gallois and Dira2024).

As they serve to stabilize cultural norms, and thereby coordination in groups (McElreath, Boyd, & Richerson, Reference McElreath, Boyd and Richerson2003), foundational schema can be resistant to change. However, children may encounter cultural variants that are incompatible with their foundational schemas in culturally diverse contexts. In these contexts, socially learned cultural identities orient with whom one can expect egalitarian behavior and in which domains (Smaldino, Reference Smaldino2019). Inter-group dynamics, such as may precipitate “subsistence transitions,” can re-orient identities and lead to shifts in norms among young people in a community (Lew-Levy et al., Reference Lew-Levy, Kandza, Jang, Kiabiya Ntamboudila, Bihoundou Mouketou, Siassia Vindou, Ngalekandza, Koubemba, Lendzingoud, Goulou, Visine, Boyette and Gettler2025). Alternatively, they can have no effect, or even reinforce existing identities. Congo Basin forager identity is in part defined in opposition to neighboring “inegalitarian” farming groups (Bahuchet, Reference Bahuchet2012; Lewis, Reference Lewis, Widlock and Tadesse2005; Takeuchi, Reference Takeuchi and Hewlett2014; Turnbull, Reference Turnbull1965). While these relations are varied and dynamic, they have also persisted at the population level for hundreds if not thousands of years (Boyette et al., Reference Boyette, Lew-Levy, Jang and Kandza2022). Economic-game and ethnographic evidence suggests children from both groups know each other’s contrasting sharing norms and learn them in parallel (Lew-Levy et al., Reference Lew-Levy, Maurits, Boyette, Ellis-Davies, Haun, Vieira, Dzabatou, Mbongo, Kiabiya Ntamboudila, Ndenguele, Over, House and Pope-Caldwell2026), and evidence from elsewhere demonstrates that such inter-group cultural transmission, alongside valuing one’s cultural identity, can help such groups maintain their norms even when they are the minority (Bunce, Reference Bunce2021; Bunce & McElreath, Reference Bunce and McElreath2018). Moreover, the negotiation of inter-group cooperative norms can also help maintain egalitarianism despite in-group-biased motivations by both groups, as in shotgun hunting exchanges in the Congo Basin (Kandza et al., Reference Kandza, Jang, Ntamboudila, Lew-Levy and Boyette2023).

Such cultural dynamics may explain why some groups maintain egalitarian behavior despite increases in sedentarization and market integration. However, to set the stakes in terms of contemporary global problems, they may also partly explain why forager children in particular find formal schooling challenging if not entirely oppressive: School as it is widely practiced is incompatible with egalitarianism and autonomy, and with the subsistence practices supported by these foundational schemas, leading to poor schooling outcomes and discrimination (Hays, Reference Hays2026).

In sum, I agree that focusing on process over outcome, using mixed-method comparative research, and leveraging contemporary changes as natural experiments will help unpack the complex linkages between subsistence and egalitarianism. Yet, it is critical to acknowledge that all societies are culturally dynamic as a general principle and never exist within a vacuum. To ensure we do not over-attribute causation to socio-ecology alone, we might consider that the cognition behind each of the plural processes identified by Stibbard-Hawkes and von Rueden is necessarily calibrated by cultural transmission processes during development to orient and motivate egalitarian behavior.