About

Anne Pisor is an integrative scientific anthropologist who studies how people manage risk. She is known for her work on the evolution of cooperation in humans, especially social relationships that span communities and group boundaries, often referred to as long-distance relationships, which are key to risk management. Her research has inspired federally funded projects on climate change adaptation and natural resource management, involving interdisciplinary collaborations across anthropology, public health, epidemiology, development, climate science, and public policy. Anne Pisor was recently named a Rising Star by the Human Behavior and Evolution Society as an early-career researcher whose innovative work has already advanced the field. She mentors entrepreneurs at Penn State, particularly undergraduate and graduate students, helping them translate their skills to do social good. Her work emphasizes understanding climate variability and the science of culture in the context of climate change adaptation and natural resource management.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Psychology
• Machine Learning
• Geography
• Computer Science
• Social Science
• Business
• Epistemology
• Engineering ethics
• Environmental ethics
• Environmental science
• Biology
• Environmental resource management
• Law
• Mathematics
• Environmental planning
• Microeconomics
• Social psychology
• Economics
• Criminology
• Demography
• Econometrics
• Ecology

Selected publications

• Monetary transfers are related to patterning in climate events, not just single extreme events

  2025-07-25

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  It is well-documented that households respond to climate events with climate adaptations, risk-management strategies like livelihood diversification, migration, or remittances – sending money and goods across distances. However, the focus is largely on responses to single climate events, while suggestive evidence indicates that temporal and spatial patterns across multiple events – including event frequency, clustering, and spatial extent – may predict which climate adaptations households use. Here, we assess whether households that have experienced not just more severe droughts, but more frequent, temporally autocorrelated, or spatially extensive droughts across recent years, are more likely to have received a remittance over the last 12 months. We analyze remittance data from 2009 from 11,776 households across six sub-Saharan African countries, matching it to satellite and weather station data on precipitation and evapotranspiration (1981-2009). We find that in the majority of countries, average severity of drought over a five-year window is associated with receiving a remittance; these effects are largely driven by remittances from household migrants, especially those who moved more than five years ago. Spatial extent is associated with receiving remittances in Nigeria but is slightly or significantly negative in other countries, while results for frequency vary by country. In short, patterning may predict what adaptations households will use in the face of climate events like drought, with strategies potentially varying by country. We suggest that researchers should investigate not just single events, but patterning across events. Doing so could help us better anticipate and support adaptations like remittances given future climate projections.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Reproductive inequality in humans and other mammals

  London School of Economics and Political Science Research Online (London School of Economics and Political Science) · 2025-03-19

  articleOpen access

  To address claims of human exceptionalism, we determine where humans fit within the greater mammalian distribution of reproductive inequality. We show that humans exhibit lower reproductive skew (i.e., inequality in the number of surviving offspring) among males and smaller sex differences in reproductive skew than most other mammals, while nevertheless falling within the mammalian range. Additionally, female reproductive skew is higher in polygynous human populations than in polygynous nonhumans mammals on average. This patterning of skew can be attributed in part to the prevalence of monogamy in humans compared to the predominance of polygyny in nonhuman mammals, to the limited degree of polygyny in the human societies that practice it, and to the importance of unequally held rival resources to women's fitness. The muted reproductive inequality observed in humans appears to be linked to several unusual characteristics of our species-including high levels of cooperation among males, high dependence on unequally held rival resources, complementarities between maternal and paternal investment, as well as social and legal institutions that enforce monogamous norms.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• A transdisciplinary approach to growing an applied science of cultural evolution for a sustainable future

  Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences · 2025-12-04 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access

  Addressing sustainability challenges requires an integrative approach that bridges scientific research with practical application. The field of cultural evolution (CE) offers a perspective that may guide transitions and cultural transformations for a sustainable future. However, there have been few efforts to apply this field to sustainability challenges. This study explores how CE can inform sustainability practices through mechanisms of social learning, processes of cultural adaptation and conditions that promote cooperative governance. Through a two-phase research design-comprising online discussions with professionals from six domains, and an international workshop-we examined the perceived benefits, challenges and opportunities for applying CE in real-world contexts. Our findings indicate that professionals recognize CE's potential to enhance knowledge dissemination, foster adaptation to social-ecological changes, improve governance structures and generate cooperation. However, barriers such as complex terminology, unfamiliarity with CE, the lack of clear, context-specific evidence of added value and competition with existing frameworks hinder its application. To overcome these challenges, we propose simplifying CE concepts, demonstrating its unique contributions, and continuing to foster co-production with practitioners to refine its applicability. This study is an initial step in building an applied science of CE that can support sustainability transformations across diverse domains. This article is part of the theme issue 'Transforming cultural evolution research and its application to global futures'.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Perceived inequality and variability in the expression of parochial altruism

  Evolutionary Human Sciences · 2025-01-01 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Abstract It is commonly argued that humans have generalised predispositions for within-group favouritism and between-group animus (i.e. that humans are parochially altruistic ), leading to higher levels of internal conflict in societies with greater diversity. Other research, however, has questioned both the ubiquity of parochial altruism and the role of diversity per se in causing social discord. Here, we use ethnographic, social network and experimental economic game data to explore this topic in two multi-ethnic Colombian communities. We examine the extent to which Afrocolombian and Emberá residents express parochial altruism, finding appreciable variability between communities, and across individuals within communities. When present, parochial altruism appears to be driven by divergent perceptions of group-based economic need, not group identity per se . Our results suggest that diversity may be less likely to cause social discord than past work has suggested, as long as group-based inequalities in wealth, well-being and representation – that can destabilise positive inter-group relationships – are minimised.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Is ownership a human universal?

  Open Science Framework · 2025-01-01

  otherOpen accessSenior author

  [This is the text of our pre-registration; for an easier-to-read version that includes our Directed Acyclic Graph, see Supplemental Files] Preregistration: Is Ownership a Human Universal? H. Clark Barrett, Anne Pisor, Alexander Bolyanatz, Alyssa N. Crittenden, Helen Davis, Daniel M. T. Fessler, Ori Friedman, Michael Gurven, Joseph Henrich, Barry S. Hewlett, Jordan Kiper, Michelle A. Kline, Geoff Kushnick, Cristina Moya, Karen R. Neary, Brooke A. Scelza, Ayse K. Üskul, and Stephen Laurence 24 July 2025 INTRODUCTION Ownership is a ubiquitous feature of life in contemporary industrial societies. As members of such societies, during our lives each of us will typically come to own a vast number of things large and small. We normally simply take it for granted that individuals can own goods, but in the history of anthropology, philosophy, economics, and the law, the origins of human ownership have been the subject of considerable theoretical controversy and much speculation. The most fundamental question at issue here is the extent to which ownership is a human universal, as opposed to a culturally-specific feature of large-scale industrial societies. If ownership norms are grounded in a universal ownership psychology associated with human nature which, by default, associates certain basic rights and privileges with ownership, then we should expect ownership norms to be highly similar even across very diverse cultures. This view has, however, been a minority view among theorists. For many theorists, the notion that individuals can own goods or property has not been seen as a universal tied to human nature, but instead as the product of historically particular cultural norms confined to a subset of contemporary human societies. On such views, individual ownership, and each of the various distinctive rights and privileges associated with it in contemporary industrial societies, are the culturally local products of particular cultural traditions, such as capitalism, industrialism, and social stratification. If that is true, other societies might have very different ownership norms—for example, collective ownership norms, or norms that associate different rights or privileges with individual ownership—or they may even fail to recognize ownership rights at all. Ownership norms may in principle vary along numerous parameters. For example, they may vary in relation to what may be owned—for example, real property (e.g., land), tangible goods (e.g., tools), or intellectual property (e.g., healing rituals). They may vary in relation to who can own which kinds of things. And, crucially, they may vary in what kinds of rights and obligations ownership confers. Among other things, such rights and obligations may affect what factors establish and maintain ownership rights, who can use an owned object, under what conditions they may use it, and what types of use they can make of it (what they can do with or to it). In this study our focus is on ownership in relation to tangible goods. To assess the extent to which there is a shared underlying psychology underpinning ownership of tangible goods, we examined ownership norms for a single typical human-made artifact that is familiar in all of the societies in our study. Focusing on a single category of tangible goods allowed us to manipulate a number of different factors that might influence ownership judgments. STUDY RATIONALE AND DESIGN We used a structured survey methodology to examine intuitions about ownership in a sample of 490 people across 12 cultural groups. We examined ownership norms for tangible goods using vignettes about a single human-made artifact that was familiar in all of the societies in our study: an axe. We examined a range of conditions designed to illuminate the rights and privileges associated with ownership (if any) across the 12 populations studied. These societies varied along many dimensions. Many were smaller-scale, rural or Indigenous societies with low population densities and disparate social norms, including many norms that diverge from those in large-scale industrial societies. These groups varied in their degree of market integration, with nine of the groups sampled relying primarily on subsistence food production at the time of the study. We presented each participant (n=490) with one of two conditions with five related hypothetical scenarios (vignettes). In one condition, one individual takes and uses an item without permission from another individual who had purchased it. In the other condition, the other individual had received the item as a gift. Participants were asked a series of questions regarding whether taking and using the item as specified in the scenario was acceptable or not, and whether or not anything should happen to the individual who took the item (e.g., should they be punished?). The two sets of scenarios were otherwise identical and each set included the following five types of scenario: (1) the item is taken by a community member, despite prior prohibition from the individual who had purchased it or received the item as a gift, (2) the item is taken by a community member where there was no explicit prior prohibition from the individual who had purchased it or received the item as a gift, (3) the item is taken from the individual who had purchased it or received the item as a gift by a community member, without permission, who permanently modifies it, (4) the item is taken by someone outside the community where there was no explicit prior prohibition from the individual who had purchased it or received the item as a gift, (5) the item is taken by a community member for use in an emergency despite prior prohibition from the individual who had purchased it or received the item as a gift. These five scenarios allowed us to address (1) the extent to which participants across diverse societies agree in their judgements regarding the rights and privileges conferred by either purchasing or receiving an item as a gift in relation to granting permission for use or modification of that item, (2) whether community members have rights for use or modification that are distinct from those of non-community members, and (3) whether judgments vary depending on whether the item was purchased or received as a gift. HYPOTHESES If ownership norms reflect a universal ownership psychology grounded in human nature, then the psychological underpinnings for ownership practices and norms should be very similar across societies, leading to comparable acceptability judgements across diverse cultural groups, including rural and Indigenous communities that have collectivist social norms. Conversely, in the absence of such a universal ownership psychology, we should expect to find substantial cross-cultural variation in ownership norms, particularly comparing large-scale industrial societies with rural and Indigenous communities that have collectivist social norms – which some theories would predict should be associated with divergence from ownership norms in modern large-scale industrial societies. We designed our study to test the following six hypotheses: (1) Across cultures, individuals will be seen as able to have ownership rights to goods, and as a default, it will be impermissible to make use of items that others own without permission (except in special circumstances; see hypothesis H5 below). While such default impermissibility of use is simply taken for granted in large-scale industrial societies, it is not at all self-evident that it should hold universally. In the absence of a shared underlying psychology of ownership, it is not clear that ownership should exist or that it should entail a default impermissibility of use without permission. (2) The impermissibility norm in H1 will hold regardless of whether the owner has or has not explicitly forbidden use of the owned item. When use is explicitly forbidden, the explicit prohibition itself could lead to judgments of impermissibility to use the item, independent of any norms of ownership. H2 extends H1 to cover cases where there is no explicit prohibition. (3) Across cultures, permanent modifications to items that others own will typically be seen as requiring permission, even when such modification has not been explicitly prohibited. Hypothesis (3) involves an independent ownership norm that could hold even if Hypotheses (1) and (2) are not supported. (4) Across cultures, the requirement for permission for use will not be restricted to strangers. The use of artifacts that others own will be seen cross-culturally as normally requiring permission, by strangers and community members alike, even when such use has not been explicitly prohibited. Hypothesis (4) involves a strong reading of the universalist hypothesis on use (Hypothesis 1), such that the default is that permission is a universal requirement for use, regardless of whether the person who uses the item is a member of the community or a stranger. A weaker reading would only take permission to be a default requirement in the case of strangers, especially in collectivist societies. Of course, in either case, an owner might consider this requirement to be waived for certain individuals or take it to be modulated by other considerations. But on this hypothesis it should nonetheless be seen as the default. (5) Across cultures, the requirement for permission for use will not simply be a function of how the item was obtained. Hypothesis (5) concerns the concept that ownership confers rights that are independent of how the item was obtained, as long as it is viewed as having been obtained legitimately. Anthropologists have speculated that gifts may have a special status in some societies that may affect how those items circulate, and rights and duties attached to the items (e.g., Mauss, 1954). Gifts from individuals with whom one has a special relationship may also be seen as having a different status than purchase

  PublisherDOI

• Long-distance friends and collective action in fisheries management

  2024-03-12

  preprintOpen access

  Much received wisdom in the conservation literature is that individual connections across community boundaries undercut natural resource management. However, when multiple communities access the same resource, these long-distance relationships could generate interdependence and trust to motivate engagement in collective action to manage the resource. To test this, we interviewed 1317 people in 28 fishing villages in Tanzania about their participation in managing open-access fisheries and their social relationships in each village accessing the fishery. People with more friends in other villages trusted more people in those villages and were more likely to participate in collective action to manage the shared fishery, such as reporting others for destructive fishing practices. These results show that long-distance relationships may be a useful foundation upon which to build conservation efforts that cross community boundaries and bolster sustainable resource use.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The evolution of (intergroup) peace hinges on how we define groups and peace

  2024-01-31

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Glowacki defines peace as harmonious relationships between groups maintained without the threat of violence, where groups can be anything from families to nation states. However, defining such contentious concepts like “peace” and “groups” is a difficult task, and we discuss the implications of Glowacki’s definitions for understanding intergroup relationships and their evolutionary history.

  PublisherDOI

• Long‐distance Friends and Collective Action in Fisheries Management

  Conservation Letters · 2024-12-05

  articleOpen accessCorresponding

  ABSTRACT Much received wisdom in the conservation literature is that individual connections across community boundaries undercut natural resource management. However, when multiple communities access the same resource, these long‐distance relationships could generate interdependence and trust to motivate engagement in collective action to manage the resource. To test this, we interviewed 1317 people in 28 fishing villages in Tanzania about their participation in managing open‐access fisheries and their social relationships in each village accessing the fishery. People with more friends in other villages trusted more people in those villages and were more likely to participate in collective action to manage the shared fishery, such as reporting others for destructive fishing practices. These results show that long‐distance relationships may be a useful foundation upon which to build conservation efforts that cross community boundaries and bolster sustainable resource use.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The evolution of (intergroup) peace hinges on how we define groups and peace

  2024-02-14

  preprintOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Glowacki defines peace as harmonious relationships between groups maintained without the threat of violence, where groups can be anything from families to nation states. However, defining such contentious concepts like “peace” and “groups” is a difficult task, and we discuss the implications of Glowacki’s definitions for understanding intergroup relationships and their evolutionary history.

  PublisherDOI

• The evolution of (intergroup) peace hinges on how we define groups and peace

  Behavioral and Brain Sciences · 2024-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Glowacki defines peace as harmonious relationships between groups maintained without the threat of violence, where groups can be anything from families to nation states. However, defining such contentious concepts like "peace" and "groups" is a difficult task, and we discuss the implications of Glowacki's definitions for understanding intergroup relationships and their evolutionary history.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Predictors of Successful Between-Community Cooperation in Effective Resource Management

  NSF · $425k · 2021–2024

Frequent coauthors

• Monique Borgerhoff Mulder

  University of California, Davis

  33 shared

• James H. Jones

  University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

  23 shared

• Benjamin Grant Purzycki

  Aarhus University

  21 shared

• Cody T. Ross

  Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology

  21 shared

• Martin Surbeck

  Harvard University

  18 shared

• Kristopher M Smith

  17 shared

• Matthew M. Gervais

  Brunel University of London

  15 shared

• Danielle Touma

  The University of Texas at Austin

  14 shared

Labs

• Center for Human Evolution and DiversityPI

Awards & honors

• Named a Rising Star by the Human Behavior and Evolution Soci…