“‘Economic Man’ in Cross-cultural Perspective: Behavioral Experiments in 15 Small-Scale Societies” — a preprint from a multi-author study — makes some interesting observations about an aspect of cooperation studies. The Ultimatum Game has long been used as a probe for understanding the way people engage in economic transactions: two players, neither of whom has played before, are in separate rooms; neither knows who the other player is, nor can they communicate. The first player is given a significant sum such as $100 and asked to propose a split — fifty-fifty, eighty-twenty, whatever the proposer thinks is appropriate. The second player is told of the proposed split and can either accept it, in which case both players are paid and the game is over, or reject the offer, in which case neither player is paid and the game is over. The self-interested rational individual — the assumed actor in modern economic theories — should not turn down a dollar because some unknown stranger in another room gets ninety-nine. Yet that is what a significant portion of American, European, and Japanese college students did over hundreds of trials. The result implies that there might be an innate and universal sense of fairness, which is what makes this recent research so interesting: in fifteen different societies, including slash-and-burn agriculturists in South America and nomadic pastoralists in Central Asia, people in different societies reacted to the Ultimatum Game and other public goods games in wildly varying ways — suggesting that cultural institutions influence what individuals believe to be fair in an economic transaction.

(Thanks, Bill!)

Researchers from across the social sciences have found consistent deviations from the predictions of the canonical model of self-interest in hundreds of experiments from around the world. This research, however, cannot determine whether this uniformity results from universal patterns of human behavior or from the limited cultural variation available among the university students used in virtually all prior experimental work. To address this, we undertook a crosscultural study of behavior in Ultimatum, Public Goods, and Dictator Games in fifteen small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of economic and cultural conditions.

We found, first, that the canonical model‚àö‚àëbased on pure self-interest‚àö‚àëfails in all of the societies studied. Second, the data reveals substantially more behavioral variability across social groups than has been found in previous research. Third, group-level differences in economic organization and the structure of social interactions explain a substantial portion of the behavioral variation across societies: the higher the degree of market integration and the higher the payoffs to cooperation in everyday life, the greater the level of prosociality expressed in experimental games. Fourth, the available individual-level economic and demographic variables do not robustly explain game behavior, either within or across groups. Fifth, in many cases experimental play appears to reflect the common interactional patterns of everyday life.