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Supporting Online Material for Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment
Joseph Henrich,Jean Ensminger,Richard McElreath,Abigail Barr,Clark Barrett,Alexander Bolyanatz,Juan Camilo Cárdenas,Michael Gurven,Edwins Gwako,Natalie Smith Henrich,Carolyn Lesorogol,Frank W. Marlowe,David P. Tracer,John P. Ziker +13 more
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TLDR
Fairness is measured in thousands of individuals from 15 contemporary, small-scale societies to gain an understanding of the evolution of trustworthy exchange among human societies and shows that market integration positively covaries with fairness while community size positively covary with punishment.Abstract:
A Fair Society Many of the social interactions of everyday life, especially those involving economic exchange, take place between individuals who are unrelated to each other and often do not know each other. Countless laboratory experiments have documented the propensity of subjects to behave fairly in these interactions and to punish those participants deemed to have behaved unfairly. Henrich et al. (p. 1480, see the Perspective by Hoff) measured fairness in thousands of individuals from 15 contemporary, small-scale societies to gain an understanding of the evolution of trustworthy exchange among human societies. Fairness was quantitated using three economic games. Various societal parameters, such as the extent to which food was purchased versus produced, were also collected. Institutions, as represented by markets, community size, and adherence to a world religion all predict a greater exercise of fairness in social exchange. The origins of modern social norms and behaviors may be found in the evolution of institutions. Large-scale societies in which strangers regularly engage in mutually beneficial transactions are puzzling. The evolutionary mechanisms associated with kinship and reciprocity, which underpin much of primate sociality, do not readily extend to large unrelated groups. Theory suggests that the evolution of such societies may have required norms and institutions that sustain fairness in ephemeral exchanges. If that is true, then engagement in larger-scale institutions, such as markets and world religions, should be associated with greater fairness, and larger communities should punish unfairness more. Using three behavioral experiments administered across 15 diverse populations, we show that market integration (measured as the percentage of purchased calories) positively covaries with fairness while community size positively covaries with punishment. Participation in a world religion is associated with fairness, although not across all measures. These results suggest that modern prosociality is not solely the product of an innate psychology, but also reflects norms and institutions that have emerged over the course of human history.read more
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Evidence supporting a cultural evolutionary theory of prosocial religions in contemporary workplace safety data
TL;DR: This paper found that the proportion of a community adhering to a religion correlates negatively with rates of workplace injury in its private-sector establishments, thus echoing evidence that religiously inspired prosocial behavior mainly occurs absent "earthly" sanctioning authorities.
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To what reference point do people calibrate cost-free, third-party punishment?
Bryan L. Koenig,Crystal M. Riley +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, the authors introduce a method that allows direct comparison of preferred punishments (and compensations) to victim loss and perpetrator gain, and find that a substantial number of participants preferred relatively large punishments (i.e., greater than the outcome differential).
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Altruistic punishment in modern intentional communities
TL;DR: In this article, context-specific patterns of punishment in 46 American intentional communities that cast doubt on the prediction that people are predisposed to punish free-riders in naturalistic interactions.
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