Publication Date

8-1-2025

Date of Final Oral Examination (Defense)

5-10-2025

Type of Culminating Activity

Dissertation

Degree Title

Doctor of Philosophy in Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior

Department

Biological Sciences

Supervisory Committee Chair

John P. Ziker, Ph.D.

Supervisory Committee Member

Kathryn Demps, Ph.D.

Supervisory Committee Member

Nicole Herzog, Ph.D.

Abstract

Why do people who experience the same environmental and social conditions vary so much in their resource transfer behavior? This dissertation addresses that question through examination of behavioral variation in subsistence horticulturalists in the dry tropical forest bufer conservation area of Gorongosa National Park in Mozambique. In this region of moderate and acute food shortages at both household and regional levels, individuals face similar challenges of addressing social and resource uncertainty yet respond with marked behavioral variation that cannot be explained solely by diferences in wealth, kinship, or reciprocity patterns.

Using a Behavioral Reaction Norms (Dingemanse et al., 2010) (BRN) framework that employs repeated measures across social gradients, this research moves beyond the simplifying assumptions of marginal utility theorem that all individuals have identical utility curves. Instead, I propose that multiple forms of embodied wealth -in¬cluding physical dimensions, noetic wealth (cognitive capacities) -condition individual strategies for resource transfer behavior to kin and cooperators. Just as inheritance and development shape physical traits, they also shape the behavioral fexibility of resource transfer strategies across social gradients of kinship and reciprocity. The empirical foundation includes high-resolution data on kinship networks, social support data, achieved status, and household wealth collected as part of the ENDOW project in 2019 and 2024, combined with embodied and noetic wealth predictors of resource transfer behavior measured through experimental economic games conducted in 2022. This research design addresses three core questions: Do strategies for transferring resources to kin and cooperators difer within and between individuals? When sharing is measured across social gradients, how do people change their strategies? How do embodied and noetic wealth and social dominance afect sharing behavior? The focal study community of Nkozue consists primarily of Sena ethnicity residents who depend on subsistence production for household consumption and cash income, requiring cooperation within and between households to respond to resource variation. The community experienced severe regional crop failure and food shortage in 2024 and early 2025, creating an environmental disturbance that afected individual strategies for resource transfer and providing a natural experiment for understanding behavioral plasticity under stress.

This research integrates methods from human behavioral ecology, social network analysis, and biometry of individual variation to clarify relationships between sharing behavior, embodied wealth, behavioral plasticity, environmental variation, and social gradients. By connecting population-level observations of behavioral variation with constraints placed on individuals through inheritance and development, this work contributes to evolutionary anthropological theory while generating empirical observa¬tions of within and between individual variation in resource transfer strategies under conditions of environmental and social uncertainty.

Comments

Karl Mertens, ORCID: 0000-0002-2456-1262

DOI

https://doi.org/10.18122/td.2422.boisestate

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