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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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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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Formal institutions and social capital in value chains: The case of the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore whether the creation of the Ethiopian Commodity Exchange and its formal monitoring and enforcement institutions has affected social capital and trust in the Ethiopian segment of the sesame value chain.
Journal ArticleDOI
Group size in social-ecological systems.
TL;DR: The evidence indicates that factors related to social interactions had a significant role in determining group size, in contrast to a general increase in the regional population.
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The Evolution of Human Co-operation: Ritual and Social Complexity in Stateless Societies
TL;DR: In this paper, Stanish shows how people living in small groups without money, markets, police and rigid social classes develop norms of economic and social cooperation that are sustainable over time.
Posted Content
Harnessing Reciprocity to Promote Cooperation and the Provisioning of Public Goods
TL;DR: This article showed that when others know that you have helped them, or acted to benefit the greater good, they are often more likely to reciprocate and help you in turn, and that people will pay more attention to how effective their actions are when efficacy is also observable.
Journal ArticleDOI
Enhanced Market Practices
Kevin McKague,Christine Oliver +1 more
TL;DR: In this article, a study of market-based poverty alleviation initiatives for small-holder farmers by a non-governmental organization in a least developed economy is presented, which suggests that meaningful improvements in income can be explained by the enhancement of market practices that redistribute social control toward poor producers and reduce the constraining effects of market failures.
References
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TL;DR: Douglass C. North as discussed by the authors developed an analytical framework for explaining the ways in which institutions and institutional change affect the performance of economies, both at a given time and over time.
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TL;DR: In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Emile Durkheim set himself the task of discovering the enduring source of human social identity as discussed by the authors, and investigated what he considered to be the simplest form of documented religion - totemism among the Aborigines of Australia.
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Behavioral Game Theory: Experiments in Strategic Interaction
TL;DR: The first substantial and authoritative effort to close this gap was made by Camerer, who used psychological principles and hundreds of experiments to develop mathematical theories of reciprocity, limited strategizing, and learning, which help predict what real people and companies do in strategic situations as discussed by the authors.
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