"[Boehm] argues that while humans do have an instinctual tendency to engage in dominance submissive behaviour, no doubt inherited from our simian ancestors, what makes societies distinctively human is our ability to make the conscious decision not to act that way. Carefully working through ethnographic accounts of existing egalitarian foraging bands in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, Boehm identifies a whole panoply of tactics collectively employed to bring would-be braggarts and bullies down to earth — ridicule, shame, shunning (and in the case of inveterate sociopaths, sometimes even outright assassination) — none of which have any parallel among other primates."