As a thought experiment, if this was done in the US with $10k, and the other subject offered me $3000 I would take it. I would not walk away from $3000 to punish him for being unfair. If he offered me $100 I would probably walk away. So I would be more tolerant of unfairness if I was getting a large enough payout.<p>This is precisely how contracting shops work in the IT industry in the US. They keep the bulk of the money and pay the contractor just enough that he does not walk away from the deal.
> Among the Machiguenga, word quickly spread of the young, square-jawed visitor from America giving away money.<p>I get the sense they tested the game with (for the local economy) large amounts of money in small towns, where participants probably already knew each other.<p>That's a very different scenario than most American iterations I've known of the game, with college students who probably don't know each other playing for relatively small amounts of money.<p>Nickle-and-diming your random classmate out of 10 cents is very different from taking a week's pay that could have gone to your neighbor.
Full text of the paper that launched the investigation into whether psychological research relies too much on people from just one kind of cultural background:<p>Henrich, J., Heine, S. J., & Norenzayan, A. (2010). The weirdest people in the world. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 33(2-3), 61-83.<p><a href="http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Weird_People_BBS_final02.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www2.psych.ubc.ca/~henrich/pdfs/Weird_People_BBS_fina...</a>
This article is amazing. I haven't finished reading it completely but as a person who spend significant parts of my childhood in multiple countries, there are parts of it which chime with me so well.<p>E.g.
> Recent research has shown that people in “tight” cultures, those with strong norms and low tolerance for deviant behavior (think India, Malaysia, and Pakistan), develop higher impulse control and more self-monitoring abilities than those from other places.<p>I remember living in India as a teenager and being confused by how rarely if ever kids in my school would display emotion on the spot when something happened. The response would come up later and it was as immature as teenagers everywhere but on the spot responses were polite.
If testing psych students was smelly - this experiment is smellier.<p>Large amounts of cash = take whatever is offered.<p>Repeat experiment with a billion dollars. I offer you say 50 million, leaving 950 million to myself. Your move. You honestly going to reject 50 million?<p>It's actually quite rational that they took the money. Now, what would actually be interesting is that if they rejected the large amounts of cash.
You see this pattern of over generalizing in business when expanding internationally service or product offerings. 'It works here so lets just sell it there' has caused a few blunders. Cultural differences can mean colour has different interpretations and that alone can make or break your sales. Some form of product modification is necessary so that you don't get lost in the trap of generalizing.
Here's another ungated Henrich paper on ultimatum games across societies, if you're interested in the research:
<a href="http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/InSearchHomoEconomicus2001.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/InSearchHomoEconomicus2001...</a><p>His book "Why Humans Cooperate" is worth a trip to the library, too. It combines some formal models, experiments, and an interesting study on the Chaldean community in Detroit (a less-WEIRD ethnic group in the middle of our WEIRD society).<p>The implications of this research are even more radical (and controversial) than the article suggests. The idea that culture shapes the way we think and act is interesting enough, but then the big question becomes "where does culture come from?"<p>Henrich (and others[1]) suggest that culture evolves through Darwinian processes of transmission and replication, and that biological and cultural evolution are coupled. Social Darwinism and sociobiology gave this idea a bad reputation, and the idea that our social norms have evolved from kin selection all the way up to impersonal market exchange is still a hard sell for economists and anthropologists alike. But it's a fascinating idea, and it's completely changed the way I think about economic behavior and human cooperation.<p>[1] "Not By Genes Alone" by Boyd and Richerson is another great book on this subject: <a href="http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo3615170.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo361...</a>
I wonder in A/B testing you might see different results for landing page conversions with different nationalities ...<p>it is said for example that the dutch are more price conscious and the french more relations/support minded ...
"Compared to Yucatec Maya communities in Mexico, however, Western urban children appear to be developmentally delayed in this regard. Children who grow up constantly interacting with the natural world are much less likely to anthropomorphize other living things into late childhood."<p>I didn't find the word "anthropomorphize" in the other document; and the section I found in the original document didn't seem to go into what was said in the associated article. It's a rather long article, and I'll need to read it when I get home; however, the above section doesn't connect with me.<p>What does "anthropomorphize" mean in this context? I understand the term to mean "to give perceptually human characteristics to". There are only two routes I can follow with this:<p>1) they mean a human thinking that a smiling animal is a happy animal. And that animals laugh, and grin; and have all the same facial expressions as humans, like one would see in Disney movies.<p>2) they're suggesting that people in the United States believe that animals continue to have emotions that they can express and other sentient thought, have a sense of desire for certain outcomes to be had, and for genuine fear and happiness.<p>The second possibility isn't something that only people from the US do, at all. Long before the United States was the apparent urban environment with lost connection with nature (alluded to in the article in some places), Native Americans ascribed many emotions and intentions and ideas to the animals around them, even calling coyotes tricksters; and in Biblical times, calling someone a "fox" had a particular meaning.<p>In short, where is this article getting the idea that humans don't anthropomorphize animals at all stages of life? That word is VERY confusing to me in this sentence; and to claim that they're using a very limited definition of anthropomorphize, where it's just human facial expressions is to be unfair to the word itself.
The experiment is flawed. $100 means a lot more in Peru than in the US. If the experiment was conducted in Peru with $1 would the subjects there be more inclined to be fair? Another factor is that college students who are the usual subjects in the US are not as concerned about money as subsistence farmers.
> urban children appear to be developmentally delayed in this regard. Children who grow up constantly interacting with the natural world are much less likely to anthropomorphize other living things into late childhood.<p>I can tell this is true from personal experience. I spent my early childhood (before starting school at 6) mostly in the countryside, interacting a lot with animals and nature and when I used to interact with other children who've spent all their life so far in the urban environment I experienced a lot the "are they retard or what?!" feeling about their anthropomorphizing interactions with animals, dolls and even plastic toys, that I distinctively remember even now. I imagine that they probably felt the corollary about my competitive-social skills because, as I child, I was never good at "playing for winning" and using winning at a game to establish a higher social status.
Why these results are described as something shockingly unexpected? It is a natural outcome of short-term outlook on the game. Of course, most Americans, having been raised in Western culture with specific set of values and behaviors, have more long-term outlooks on interactions with fellow members of the society, since they know they'd have to live in this society for their whole life and our culture encourages such way of thinking. On the other hand, Machiguenga saw Henrich and the game for the first and probably last time in their lives, no wonder they took short-term approach to it. It is a long known idea that one-time game and many-time game have different strategies with such games.
>"People are not “plug and play,” as he puts it, and you cannot expect to drop a Western court system or form of government into another culture and expect it to work as it does back home"<p>This conclusion comes a decade or more too late, I suppose, to affect U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East for the better. After doing my undergradate work in Near Eastern Culture (or, rather, about 3 credits in) it became apparent that the 'Western ideal' of justice does not translate whole-sale; that certain adaptations are necesssary to improve the human rights situation, as is a great deal of 'soul searching' to determine precisely what would constitute 'improvement.'
<i>"If religion was necessary in the development of large-scale societies, can large-scale societies survive without religion? Norenzayan points to parts of Scandinavia with atheist majorities that seem to be doing just fine"</i><p>For the moment.<p>The situation in Europe is very interesting. There is a strong atheist movement, yet catholics seem to be on a comeback lately, and the mostly muslim immigrant population growing too - and at an even faster pace.<p>If religion says "go forth and populate the earth", and if atheist have less than 2.1 children, how long until they get outnumber and forced to chance their allegiance by the religous - at gunpoint if necessary? [nobody expects the spanish inquisition :-)]<p>So I would not base any conclusion on a punctual observation when you have partial derivative pointing to different conclusion in a longer timeframe.<p>Counter example : if large-scale societies survive fine without religion, how come there are so few of them ? Why do they have a tendency disappear in history, and be replaced by religious societies?<p>Also, the method of the prisoner game is questionable. The article says the amount was not insubstantial - around several days of work, but does not explain how it was chosen or how it was tested.<p>I would be very interested to know about the price elasticity of the acceptance rate and the price elascticity of the percentage offered.<p>I mean, do people in this group have a constant acceptance (fully inelastic - they always accept) or can you get to a point where they refuse because they think it's unfair?<p>Here's a quick example - go to any fast food join, eat normally, then when you have to leave, prepare the exact amount of cash in one side, and the tip in the other side of the table, and say to server the food was not to your taste, therefore you are leaving only a one cent tip (or a dime)<p>See if they take the free money, or if they feel so insulted that they refuse. Rince and repeat until you figure the amount they will accept without feeling insulted.<p>So I really wonder if there could be a cash amount where the remote people from this tribe would react just the same as all of us - which would just point to a calibration problem.
I think my basic problem with this is economics. I'd be happy with a days pay, even if it meant the other guy got a weeks pay. But I might squabble about 10 cents when the guy got 90 cents.<p>I say squabble because I don't mean fight or be offended. I might argue for the fun of the argument, not the actual value of the money. I wouldn't accept the 10 cents, knowing that we both then got nothing because $1 doesn't mean that much to me.
<i>Generous financial offers were turned down because people’s minds had been shaped by a cultural norm that taught them that the acceptance of generous gifts brought burdensome obligations.</i><p>More on this from an English anthropologist in <i>Debt: The First 5000 Years</i>, a history of money and currency that is exceedingly timely given the current emergence of Bitcoin and Ripple, and the strange survival of the Swiss WIR.
If we look at the history of science, most things that we held as fact many years ago are now considered either totally false or at least marred by misunderstanding or lack of data.<p>Extrapolated that means that almost all of our current scientific beliefs will be "proven" false or at least considered marred by misunderstanding or lack of data at some point in the future.<p>Humans <i>can not</i> understand everything, and they never will.
It is an interesting experiment but I don't think that it necessarily implies there is a huge difference in human psychology - if you did the experiment with a poor (i.e. homeless) American, I am pretty sure they would accept any amount of money. To add to this, I think there was probably some confusion when explaining the rules of the game to the subjects.
As a western-born programmer who has spent much time in East Asia, I found the linked paper <i>Culture and Systems of Thought: Holistic vs. Analytic Cognition</i> even more interesting. <a href="http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nisbett/images/cultureThought.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nisbett/images/cultureThought...</a>
Slightly OT, but the second image in that article is bogus. It's a photo of Fijian women on a Fijian mat (woven pandanus leaves). It's not Peruvian as claimed by the caption.