CiteULike: cwmccabe's library [10 articles]

Winners don/'t punish

Anna Dreber — 2008-03-19T21:27:06-00:00

Nature, Vol. 452, No. 7185. (20 March 2008), pp. 348-351.

Human behaviour: Punisher pays

Manfred Milinski — 2008-03-21T04:33:21-00:00

Nature, Vol. 452, No. 7185. (19 March 2008), pp. 297-298.

The Theory of Institutional Design

Robert Goodin — 2008-03-20T00:11:36-00:00

(1996)

This volume illustrates and synthesizes new theories of institutional design recently developed by scholars across a range of disciplines.

“Economic man” in cross-cultural perspective: Behavioral experiments in 15 small-scale societies

Joseph Henrich — 2008-03-19T21:24:35-00:00

Behavioral and Brain Sciences, No. 28. (2005), pp. 795-855.

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 the 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 cross-cultural study of behavior in ultimatum, public goods, and dictator games in a range of small-scale societies exhibiting a wide variety of economic and cultural conditions. We found, first, that the canonical model – based on self-interest – fails in all of the societies studied. Second, our data reveal 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 consistently explain game behavior, either within or across groups. Fifth, in many cases experimental play appears to reflect the common interactional patterns of everyday life.

Culture, evolution and the puzzle of human cooperation

Joseph Henrich — 2008-03-19T21:10:46-00:00

Cognitive Systems Research, Vol. 7, No. 2-3. (June 2006), pp. 220-245.

Synthesizing existing work from diverse disciplines, this paper introduces a culture-gene coevolutionary approach to human behavior and psychology, and applies it to the evolution of cooperation. After a general discussion of cooperation in humans, this paper summarizes Dual Inheritance Theory and shows how cultural transmission can be brought under the Darwinian umbrella in order to analyze how culture and genes coevolve and jointly influence human behavior and psychology. We then present a generally applicable mathematical characterization of the problem of cooperation. From a Dual Inheritance perspective, we review and discuss work on kinship, reciprocity, reputation, social norms, and ethnicity, and their application to solving the problem of cooperation.

Emotions and cooperation in economic games.

MP Haselhuhn — 2007-06-08T14:47:26-00:00

Brain Res Cogn Brain Res, Vol. 23, No. 1. (April 2005), pp. 24-33.

In this paper, we examine decisions to cooperate in economic games. We investigate which payoffs give players the greatest pleasure and whether the pleasure they feel about payoffs predicts their decisions to cooperate. To do this, we modify the ultimatum and dictator games by asking players to consider a fixed set of offers and report their preferences over all offers. Players also report the pleasure they imagine feeling from each possible payoff. Results show that players differ in the extent to which they derive pleasure from fairness or greediness. They also differ in the extent to which their choices depend on what we call "strategic" and "non-strategic" pleasure. Strategic pleasure is the expected pleasure of offers, whereas non-strategic pleasure is the pleasure of accepted payoffs. Players whose pleasure primarily depends on larger payoffs tend to make fair offers in the ultimatum game and selfish offers in the dictator game. They maximize strategic pleasure in the ultimatum game and non-strategic pleasure in the dictator game. Players who derive greater pleasure from fairness tend to act fairly in both games. These players maximize non-strategic pleasure. Brain imaging studies should address the question of whether the observed differences in pleasure and preference are systematically linked to differences in neurological activation.

Cultural group selection, coevolutionary processes and large-scale cooperation

Joseph Henrich — 2007-04-05T14:33:14-00:00

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Vol. 53, No. 1. (January 2004), pp. 3-35.

In constructing improved models of human behavior, both experimental and behavioral economists have increasingly turned to evolutionary theory for insights into human psychology and preferences. Unfortunately, the existing genetic evolutionary approaches can explain neither the degree of prosociality (altruism and altruistic punishment) observed in humans, nor the patterns of variation in these behaviors across different behavioral domains and social groups. Ongoing misunderstandings about why certain models work, what they predict, and what the place is of "group selection" in evolutionary theory have hampered the use of insights from biology and anthropology. This paper clarifies some of these issues and proposes an approach to the evolution of prosociality rooted in the interaction between cultural and genetic transmission. I explain how, in contrast to non-cultural species, the details of our evolved cultural learning capacities (e.g., imitative abilities) create the conditions for the cultural evolution of prosociality. By producing multiple behavioral equilibria, including group-beneficial equilibria, cultural evolution endogenously generates a mechanism of equilibrium selection that can favor prosociality. Finally, in the novel social environments left in the wake of these cultural evolutionary processes, natural selection is likely to favor prosocial genes that would not be expected in a purely genetic approach.

BEHAVIORAL SCIENCE: The In-Group Rules

Heineman — 2008-03-18T02:46:24-00:00

Science, Vol. 319, No. 5865. (15 February 2008), pp. 904-905.

10.1126/science.1153415

SOCIAL SCIENCE: Enhanced: Cooperation, Punishment, and the Evolution of Human Institutions

Joseph Henrich — 2006-04-11T20:21:59-00:00

Science, Vol. 312, No. 5770. (7 April 2006), pp. 60-61.

10.1126/science.1126398

Antisocial Punishment Across Societies

Benedikt Herrmann — 2008-03-07T17:54:27-00:00

Science, Vol. 319, No. 5868. (7 March 2008), pp. 1362-1367.

We document the widespread existence of antisocial punishment, that is, the sanctioning of people who behave prosocially. Our evidence comes from public goods experiments that we conducted in 16 comparable participant pools around the world. However, there is a huge cross-societal variation. Some participant pools punished the high contributors as much as they punished the low contributors, whereas in others people only punished low contributors. In some participant pools, antisocial punishment was strong enough to remove the cooperation-enhancing effect of punishment. We also show that weak norms of civic cooperation and the weakness of the rule of law in a country are significant predictors of antisocial punishment. Our results show that punishment opportunities are socially beneficial only if complemented by strong social norms of cooperation. 10.1126/science.1153808