Key points

Reputations are a universal feature of social life, but what we value in others can vary across cultures.

Across more than 100 nonindustrial societies, reputations for group-oriented traits appear frequently.

Evolution shaped our nervous systems to treat social evaluation as a threat.

In small-scale societies, reputations can determine everything from economic success to marriage prospects.

As a first-year graduate student, I attended a regional evolutionary social science conference. One of the speakers was Kristen Hawkes , a foundational scholar in evolutionary anthropology. I had read her work as an undergrad, debated the grandmother and show-off hypotheses in seminars, and thought deeply about her ideas on grandmaternal investment versus paternal provisioning. Now I w

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