Justine Lane and I have just published a chapter titled “Social cohesion in psychological and sociological perspective,” in P. Kosnac and H. Gloss (eds.) Social Cohesion in Slovakia: What Holds the Country Together and What Tears it Apart? It was published by the DEKK Institute in Bratislava.

From the Introduction:

“The ability to form stable social groups is a hallmark of many species, but humans appear to be unique because stable human groups have given rise to levels of cooperation that have resulted in a reshaping of our world (for better and for worse). Over the past few millennia, humans have cooperated with one another to form cohesive social groups in a way that has completely changed the ecology of the planet. On the one hand, this has provided stable shelter and—particularly in the last century with the rise of modern capitalism—more resources such as food, and access to potable water. On the other hand, it has seemingly endangered some environments through overextraction, which may result in threats to the human social groups that inhabit those environments. In a few thousand years, only a blink of an eye on an evolutionary time scale, humans have gone from small bands of hunter-gatherers to civilizations comprising hundreds of millions of people. While we know a great deal about when these groups began to form, we know relatively little about the mechanisms by which they were sustained and grew in size over time. What “social glue” has held together groups of human beings while also providing enough flexibility for structural changes enabling exponential growth in group size? In this chapter we explore some of the most important evolutionary psychological and historical sociological approaches to answering this question. These perspectives inevitably overlap, and so we present some of the dominant theories in these fields in the context of addressing a variety of questions before concluding with summary comments and implications for social cohesion policy analysis and evaluation.”