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Supporting Online Material for Markets, Religion, Community Size, and the Evolution of Fairness and Punishment

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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.

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References
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Book

Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance

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.

疟原虫var基因转换速率变化导致抗原变异[英]/Paul H, Robert P, Christodoulou Z, et al//Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A

宁北芳, +1 more
TL;DR: PfPMP1)与感染红细胞、树突状组胞以及胎盘的单个或多个受体作用,在黏附及免疫逃避中起关键的作�ly.
Journal ArticleDOI

The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.

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.
Book

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.
Trending Questions (1)
What is the cause of a fair society?

The cause of a fair society is the evolution of norms and institutions, such as markets, community size, and adherence to a world religion.