Environmental harshness is associated with lower investment in collective actions

Although humans cooperate universally, there is variability across individuals, times and cultures in the amount of resources people invest in cooperative activities. The origins of such variability are not known but recent work highlights that variations in environmental harshness may play a key role. A growing body of experimental work in evolutionary psychology suggests that humans adapt to their specific environment by calibrating their life-history strategy. In this paper, we apply structural equation models to test the association between current and childhood environmental harshness, life-history strategy and adult cooperation in two large-scale datasets (the World Values Survey and the European Values Study). The present study replicates existing research linking a harsher environment (both in adulthood and in childhood) with a modulated reproduction-maintenance trade-off and extends these findings to the domain of collective actions. Specifically, we find that a harsher environment (both in adulthood and in childhood) is associated with decreased involvement in collective action and that this association is mediated by individuals’ life-history strategy.