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Definition
Nepotism is the favoring of kin over nonkin in resource allocation, nurturing, or attention.
Introduction
At first sight, nepotism is quite obviously a product of evolutionary processes, by virtue of being an extension of genetic self-interest. As Forbes (2005, p. 83) puts it, paraphrasing Richard Dawkins: “Children are the vehicles that carry a parent’s genetic immortality.” The evolutionary origins of the word are visible in its ontogeny, a linguistic route from the mid-seventeenth century: nipote “nephew.” The Popes bestowed privileges on their “nephews” who in reality were more often than not their illegitimate sons. This perfectly illustrates the contemporary meaning in social life: patronage in public life on the basis of family relatedness. Some definitions include the favoring of friends, which shall be treated as a special case later in this entry.
Issues and Dilemmas
Yet there are potential conflicts of interest in nepotism, the primary one being the question of why should one bother being nepotistic when you can be purely selfish which is less uncertain in its benefits and less diluted by the genetic interests of other contributors to your progeny’s inheritance. The answer, of course, is that the nepotistic bias is essential for genes to persist – self-interest in one’s own fitness does not ensure the perpetuation of inheritance (Dawkins 1976). This is captured by the evolutionary concept of reproductive fitness, which W. D Hamilton demonstrated was embodied kin selection, the means by which we do this in infra-species interaction (Hamilton 1964). He extended the insight with the idea of inclusive fitness with which it is sometimes erroneously used synonymously. The nuanced difference between them is that kin selection denotes how your genetic interests are advanced by favoring your kin, while inclusive fitness spreads the web of interests more broadly over distant kin.
On the former topic, Hamilton predicted the degree to which we will favor kin by Hamilton’s Rule, br – c > 0 – where b is the beneficial on the fitness of the recipient of any social act, c is the cost to the benefactor, and r is the coefficient of the genetic relatedness of two parties. This codifies an earlier mathematical formulation by Haldane and Fisher, which J.B.S. Haldane humorously captured by replying to the question, would you give your life to save a drowning brother, by saying he would save two brothers or eight cousins: the genetic break-even exchange.
In human tribal communities, scholars have documented numerous socially evolved adaptive norms and practice strategies that are sustained by the weak genetic ties that embrace the whole clan, by linking the strong ties prevailing among the tribe’s constituent immediate kinship groups (Cronk and Gerkey 2007; Low 2007). These weak ties are reproduced by the near-universal norm of female-exogamy – young women marry out of their immediate kinship group into other clans, while young men remain importing daughters from other kinship groups. Thus, such generous practices toward nonkin as food-sharing and alloparenting (caring for others’ offspring) are commonplace strategies that raise the fitness of the entire tribe (Hrdy 2009). This is reinforced by the human inability to detect relatedness instinctively and unerringly, unlike some other social species such as rodents that can do so by smell. Uncertainty about paternity is further reinforced by (a) the moderately polygynous instincts of our species and (b) the absence of manifest signaling of female estrus (Strassmann 1981). Male parental investment is especially necessary for neonatal survival during the early years of human life, hence uncertainty about paternity serves the group interest by supporting generous habits of social care in inclusive communities where individuals are at mainly related to each other only distantly (Buss 1996).
Hamilton’s notable revision of evolutionary theory lies in framing inclusive fitness as the idea that one’s genetic self-interest can be advanced without being a reproductive agent oneself. At a stroke this explains many puzzling phenomena, such as alloparenting, infanticide (selective investment in the most viable relatives), cannibalism (raising fitness), and homosexuality (able to foster fitness of kin by nonreproductive means). These phenomena are visible throughout the natural world; most extremely manifest in what are called insect superorganisms. Among termites and wasp colonies, the queen fertilizing her own eggs to determine their sex results in very high degrees of genetic interrelatedness, such that nonreproducing members of the colony have the nepotistic incentive to engage in various self-sacrificial contributions to support the reproductive fitness of the superorganism, that is, the colony (Gillooly et al. 2010).
Nepotism in Human Society
Inclusive fitness strategies vary across societies. The phenomena discussed earlier – infanticide, adoption, homosexuality – have variously been discouraged or encouraged by cultural rules and norms (Faulkner and Schaller 2007). A multilevel selection view – sometimes crudely referred to as group selection – explains that such norms coevolve with changing material conditions and interests – what we may call the landscape of local ecology (Henrich 2004). This can be multilayered nested strata of a society, so that one can talk of a family, an organization, a social class, or ethnic community, to a nation state, as each having established ways or regulating their interactions to maximize collective fitness benefits. Within these, as the writer has argued elsewhere, much collaborative behavior with unrelated strangers operates on an “as if” principle (Nicholson 2000). We relate to strangers differentially and treat many of them with more trust than is rational. We treat strangers “as if” they were kin from our primal expectation that there is a correlation between relatedness, liking, familiarity, and similarity. This is an adaptive heuristic for the tribe in loosely related kinship groups where we have a common fate regardless of our degree of relatedness to individual members but leaves us vulnerable to being unpredictably cheated in the amorphous, transient, and uncertain networks of modern society.
However, we are highly interested in relatedness and act on the basis of our assumptions and knowledge of kinship. This shows that nepotism is moderated by cognition and judgment (Neyer and Lang 2003). To this we can add the phenomenon, also present throughout many other species of birds and social animals, of favoritism. Parents especially enter into a calculus that leads them to favor the progeny whose fitness can be raised to the highest levels. Human mothers have been observed subconsciously give more nurturance to the most robust of preterm twins. There is also a substantial literature on how the risks of violent abuse by parents are many thousands of times raised when the victims are step-children (Daly and Wilson 1985).
Nepotism is fuel within the engine of families as political institutions (Bellow 2003), where there are continual contests of interests, shared and divided, including the incipient conflicts between parents and offspring and between siblings (Trivers 1974). Nowhere is this more visible than in the world of family business, where the politics of relatedness, favor, and divided interests continually threaten the stability of the governance of the business (Collin and Ahlberg 2012). Families regularly destroy businesses and vice versa. Yet, paradoxically, family firms frequently outperform their nonfamily counterparts, usually by virtue of their unique cultural strengths. Love is the emotional accompaniment of nepotism, and it hold families together and enables them to achieve superior forms of cooperation, innovation, flexibility, and problem-solving (Dyer 2006). To this extent, family firms could be said to succeed because they capitalize on their status as evolutionary primal forms of working and living together (Nicholson 2015).
Conclusion
Nepotism clearly plays a central role in adaptive evolution. In contemporary discourse about human societies, it is widely seen as pernicious by those who seek a rational rather than an emotional order to govern the ties of association and decision-making, yet we know (a) that the separation of reason and feeling is delusional ideal in human affairs and (b) that bonds of affinity and affection are the glue that hold families, communities, and societies together. If we recognize, absent of moralizing overtones, that nepotistic impulses are an integral aspect of our common humanity, then it is possible and necessary to create the rational frameworks that ensure they do not corrupt those decisions in our societies that it is believed should be made by other criteria.
References
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Nicholson, N. (2016). Nepotism. In: Weekes-Shackelford, V., Shackelford, T., Weekes-Shackelford, V. (eds) Encyclopedia of Evolutionary Psychological Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-16999-6_3083-1
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