Social structure and the evolutionary ecology of inequality

From rising disparities in income to limited socio-political representation for minority groups, inequality is a topic of perennial interest for contemporary society. Research in the evolutionary sciences has started to investigate how social structure allows in-equality to evolve, but is developing in silo from existing work in the social and cog-nitive sciences. I synthesise these literatures to present a theoretical framework of how and why cultural and ecological conditions can create social structure that ei-ther produces or constrains inequality. According to this framework, such conditions dictate the costs and benefits of cooperation that shape individuals' social prefer-ences and resulting behaviours. These behaviours aggregate to produce distinct structures of a society's social networks, which generate different levels of inequality observed across societies.