Matthew Gwynfryn Thomas

British Red Cross · Insight and Improvement

Dwelling fires are attributable to the high public health burden of injury and mortality in England. The statistic shows that from 2010 to 2019, over 5,000 injuries and 200 deaths annually are caused by dwelling fires which accounts for around three-fourths of the total fire-related casualties. Therefore, it is necessary to explore the social risk...

Aim System leadership is the requirement for a leader of a single organisation to operate on behalf of a wider system, rather than their individual organisation. The current policy landscape does not incentivise system leadership, as many national structures emphasise a focus on individual organisations. This study aims to understand how chief exec...

Aim: System leadership is the requirement for a leader of a single organisation to operate on behalf of a wider system, rather than their individual organisation. It is not clear to what extent the current policy landscape supports leaders in managing misalignment between the needs of their organisation and the wider system, as many national struct...

Human children are frequently cared for by non-parental caregivers (alloparents), yet few studies have conducted systematic alternative hypothesis tests of why alloparents help. Here we explore whether predictions from kin selection, reciprocity, learning-to-mother and costly signalling hypotheses explain non-parental childcare among Agta hunter-ga...

Pastoralists rely on networks of cooperating households containing relatives and others to help with production and various other daily activities. To understand how socioecological differences and commonalities affect different social networks, we compared cooperative decision-making using gift games for 755 people working in herding groups across...

The relative importance of social evolution theories such as kin selection, direct reciprocity and need-based transfers in explaining real-world cooperation is the source of much debate. Previous field studies of cooperation in human communities have revealed variability in the extent to which each of these theories explains human sociality in diff...

Cooperation evolves on social networks and is shaped, in part, by norms: beliefs and expectations about the behaviour of others or of oneself. Networks of cooperative social partners and associated norms are vital for pastoralists, such as Saami reindeer herders in northern Norway. However, little is known quantitatively about how norms structure p...

Supplementary Information for ‘The narrow gap between norms and cooperative behaviour in a reindeer herding community‘

Anthropologists have long argued that fear of victimization through witchcraft accusations promotes cooperation in small-scale societies1. Others have argued that witchcraft beliefs undermine trust and therefore reduce social cohesion2. However, there are very few, if any, quantified empirical examples demonstrating how witchcraft labels can struct...

Many social interactions create a tension between individual and collective interests, known as social dilemmas. Pastoralists, whose livelihoods depend on cooperation within and between herding groups, face a range of social dilemmas in their daily lives. Evolutionary theory predicts that social dilemmas will be solved (i.e. individuals will cooper...

Cooperative behaviors evolve by ultimately increasing the inclusive fitness of performers as well as recipients of those behaviors. Such increases can occur via direct or indirect fitness benefits, theoretically explained by reciprocal altruism and kin selection, respectively. However, humans are known for cooperating with individuals who are not n...

Human reproductive patterns have been well studied but the mechanisms by which physiology, ecology and existing kin interact to affect the life history need quantification. Here, we create a model to investigate how age-specific interbirth intervals adapt to environmental and intrinsic mortality, and how birth patterns can be shaped by competition...

Cooperative behaviours must ultimately increase the inclusive fitness of actors as well as recipients in order to evolve. At the proximate level, mechanisms for encouraging and maintaining cooperation include kin discrimination, limited dispersal as well as direct and indirect reciprocity, among others. Here, we aim to quantify the relative importa...

Humans lengthen their birth intervals with age and stop reproducing halfway through life. Despite this, human populations have rapidly expanded, even in high-mortality environments. Using a state-dependent dynamic model, we investigated how reproductive schedules adapt to mortality risk. Optimal pace of reproduction slows as siblings intensify comp...

Across all cultures, people marry, disperse and reproduce. When these behaviours occur is, in part, determined by social norms and local ecological conditions. Which sex tends to leave their natal group and which sex stays emerges in a similar fashion. A consequence of sex-biased dispersal is that relatedness to one’s local group changes over time....