This study investigates the thwarting disorientation theory of suicide, suggesting that the rate of suicide in a society can be predicted from thwarting disorientation traits such as men’s divorce freedom and defiant homicide.

This book examines population growth rate and its correlates by testing 274 hypotheses (derived from multiple theories) with an 18-society sample. Forty-one of these hypotheses were significant at the .05 level, leading the author to accept these relationships as reflective of the real world. The 274 hypotheses are grouped into 51 broader hypotheses, and marked by (*) where relationships are significant as designated by the author or by significance p < 0.05.

This book chapter builds on Horton's 1943 psychoanalytical study of drunkenness. The author tests an overall theory that drunkenness, which facilitates personal and uninhibited interactions, is more acceptable, and therefore prevalent, in societies with loose, rather than rigid, social relationships. Indicators of social rigidity, such as strict socialization or male dominance through patrilocality, are tested for relationships to drunkenness.

The relationships of aggression and crime to variables of childhood experience, adult behavior, and social structure are cross-culturally analyzed.

This chapter examines the variables that are associated with the evil eye belief cross-culturally. Results suggest that the evil eye belief is significantly associated with various socioeconomic and demographic variables. All hypotheses are supported.

This study tests a broad "risk response" hypothesis: environmental risk can reduce parents' involvement and care which, through its effects on children's behavioral strategies later in life, ultimately produces a larger cultural model favoring risky behavior. Examinations of extramarital sex, aggression, theft, and witchcraft support this hypothesis, leading the authors to suggest that child development is the underpinning of cultural adaptation in the face of environmental change.

This chapter examines how sorcery, sin, and the superego function in societies to uphold taboos and other forms of social control. The author also explores the child-rearing conditions that are necessary to produce and maintain these cultural mechanisms. Several hypotheses are tested and all are supported.

This study examines the influence of the "child-adult" conflict on the frequency of drunkenness in a culture. In particular, the author examines the socio-psychological factors that can induce a child-adult conflict, claiming that this conflict may be more common when mothers are the primary dispensers of rewards.

This book chapter tests new and pre-existing theories (Horton, Field, Bacon et al.) for the cause of variation in drinking across cultures. Folktale content is used to test psychological variables more directly than has been done previously. Folktale content is analyzed programmatically with an acknowledged error level of up to one-third. Results lend support to Field's 1962 theory that loose social organization facilitates drinking.

This study tests a broad hypothesis that alcohol is employed to relieve anxiety and feelings of powerlessness. Frequency of drunkenness and drunken brawling were associated with several variables, including supernatural beliefs, political systems, settlement patterns, and division of labor.